In the past, the partnership of marriage has been incomplete on the property side; why not complete it?  Why not reorganize our laws and our public opinion so that two people who establish a family, putting into it all they have, should pay out of the income the necessary family expenses and divide all else equally between the parties?  Property acquired before marriage, and all inherited property, might well be held in individual right since it should never be a prize for prostitution, not even when it is euphemistically termed “a good home.”

Under equal suffrage Idaho has passed such a law, and all property gained after marriage belongs equally to husband and wife.  If the wife dies, her heirs, in absence of a will, inherit half of the family property.  If the two separate, the court, in absence of an outside agreement, settles the property as it does the children.  The judge may order that it be divided equally, or he may give it all to either party, according to conditions; but the woman has identical rights with the man.  Surely some such solution is demanded by our present unrest.  No one will ever be economically independent; but husband and wife should be economically equal.

VI

Women in Industry

In all the animal world one can hardly find a place where orderly effort, planned to secure some future advantage, does not appear.  Getting food, defending life, and caring for offspring have all combined to drive not only the descendants of Adam, but his ancestors as well, to sweat-producing effort.  Of course this is not definitely planned; getting food often waits on appetite; defense is sometimes merely running away; and the young are frequently left to feed themselves or die.  But the fact remains that in digging burrows, building nests, laying up honey and nuts, and in protecting and providing for the young, a vast deal of effort is put forth in forest and field which is not immediately productive of pleasure.

This work is seldom equally shared by all the members of the group.  With bees, the drones and the queen are alike exempt from work, and an asexual group has been developed to feed and protect them.  Some ants compel others to do their work; and everywhere there seem to be individuals who are constitutionally lazy and others who, because of strength or sex attractiveness, are able to get more than their share of food and protection with less than their share of effort.

From the first, some division of work between male and female grows almost inevitably out of their different relations to reproduction.  Following conception, the male can always run away and leave the female to feed and fight for herself and her offspring, and he is very prone to do so.  Even when he stays by and shares in the joy of the newly born he generally leaves the female to get ready the nest, and largely she protects and provisions it.