In my introductory chapter I cited three extremely grave and significant facts which confront modern civilization.  The first was the fact of women’s growing economic freedom, their emancipation from domestic slavery.  I believe that women would not wish to be economically free if their instinct gave them any warning that freedom for them meant danger to their children.  But no observer of social conditions can have failed to observe the oceans of misery endured by women and children because of their economic dependence on the fortunes of husbands and fathers.

Whatever may be the solution of poverty, whatever be the future status of the family, it seems certain to me that some way will be devised whereby motherhood will cease to be a privately supported profession.  In some way society will pay its own account.  If producing citizens to the State be the greatest service a woman citizen can perform, the State will ultimately recognize the right of the woman citizen to protection during her time of service.  The first step towards solving the problem is for women to learn to support themselves before the time comes for them to serve the State.  Through the educating process of productive labor the woman mind may devise a means of protecting the future mothers of the race.

The second fact, the growing prevalence of divorce, on the face of it seems to menace the security of the home and of children.  So deeply overlain with prejudice, conventionalities, and theological traditions is the average woman as well as the average man that it is difficult to argue in favor of a temporary tolerance of divorce that a permanent high standard of marriage may be established.  But to my mind any state of affairs, even a Reno state of affairs, looks more encouraging than the old conditions under which innocent girls married to rakes and drunkards were forbidden to escape their chains.  It is not for the good of children to be born of disease and misery and hatred.  It is not for their good to be brought up in an atmosphere of hopeless inharmony.  What is happening in this country is not a weakening of the marriage bond, but a strengthening of it.  For soon there will grow up in the American man’s mind a desire for a marriage which will be at least as equitable as a business partnership; as fair to one party as to the other.  He will cease to regard marriage as a state of bondage for the wife and a state of license for the husband.  He will not venture to suggest to a bright woman that cooking in his kitchen is a more honorable career than teaching, or painting, or writing, or manufacturing.  Marriage will not mean extinction to any woman.  It will mean to the well-to-do wife freedom to do community service.  It will mean to the industrial woman an economic burden shared.  When that time comes there will be no divorce problem.  There will be no longer a class of women who avoid the risk of divorce by refusing to marry.

The third fact, the increasing popularity of woman suffrage, I disposed of in the preceding chapter.  Nothing that the women who vote have ever done indicates, in the remotest degree, that they are not just as mindful of children’s interests at the polls as other women are in their nurseries and kitchens.