This is merely parasitism.[295] The basis of economic independence ensures a more real freedom.  Even in societies which by law and custom hold women in strict subordination, the woman who happens to be placed in possession of property enjoys a high degree alike of independence and of responsibility.[296] The growth of a high civilization seems indeed to be so closely identified with the economic freedom and independence of women that it is difficult to say which is cause and which effect.  Herodotus, in his fascinating account of Egypt, a land which he regarded as admirable beyond all other lands, noted with surprise that, totally unlike the fashion of Greece, women left the men at home to the management of the loom and went to market to transact the business of commerce.[297] It is the economic factor in social life which secures the moral responsibility of women and which chiefly determines the position of the wife in relation to her husband.[298] In this respect in its late stages civilization returns to the same point it had occupied at the beginning, when, as has already been noted, we find greater equality with men and at the same time greater economic independence.[299]

In all the leading modern civilized countries, for a century past, custom and law have combined to give an ever greater economic independence to women.  In some respects England took the lead by inaugurating the great industrial movement which slowly swept women into its ranks,[300] and made inevitable the legal changes which, by 1882, insured to a married woman the possession of her own earnings.  The same movement, with its same consequences, is going on elsewhere.  In the United States, just as in England, there is a vast army of five million women, rapidly increasing, who earn their own living, and their position in relation to men workers is even better than in England.  In France from twenty-five to seventy-five per cent. of the workers in most of the chief industries—­the liberal professions, commerce, agriculture, factory industries—­are women, and in some of the very largest, such as home industries and textile industries, more women are employed than men.  In Japan, it is said, three-fifths of the factory workers are women, and all the textile industries are in the hands of women.[301] This movement is the outward expression of the modern conception of personal rights, personal moral worth, and personal responsibility, which, as Hobhouse has remarked, has compelled women to take their lives into their own hands, and has at the same time rendered the ancient marriage laws an anachronism, and the ancient ideals of feminine innocence shrouded from the world a mere piece of false sentiment.[302]