Marriage is a business as well as a sentimental partnership.  But a business partnership brings grave practical responsibilities, and this, under our present system, the girl is rarely trained to face.  She becomes a partner in an undertaking where her function is spending.  The probability is she does not know a credit from a debit, has to learn to make out a check correctly, and has no conscience about the fundamental matter of living within the allowance which can be set aside for the family expenses.  When this is true of her, she at once puts herself into the rank of an incompetent—­she becomes an economic dependent.  She has laid the foundation for becoming an Uneasy Woman.

It is common enough to hear women arguing that this close grappling with household economy is narrowing, not worthy of them.  Why keeping track of the cost of eggs and butter and calculating how much your income will allow you to buy is any more narrowing than keeping track of the cost and quality of cotton or wool or iron and calculating how much a mill requires, it is hard to see.  It is the same kind of a problem.  Moreover, it has the added interest of being always an independent personal problem.  Most men work under the deadening effect of impersonal routine.  They do that which others have planned and for results in which they have no permanent share.

But the woman argues that her task has no relation to the state.  Her failure to see that relation costs this country heavily.  Her concern is with retail prices.  If she does her work intelligently, she follows and studies every fluctuation of price in standards.  She also knows whether she is receiving the proper quality and quantity; and yet so poorly have women discharged these obligations that dealers for years have been able to manipulate prices practically to please themselves, and as for quality and quantity we have the scandal of American woolen goods, of food adulteration, of false weights and measures.  No one of these things could have come about in this country if woman had taken her business as a consumer with anything like the seriousness with which man takes his as a producer.

Her ignorance in handling the products of industry has helped the monopolistically inclined trust enormously.  I can remember the day when the Beef Trust invaded a certain Middle Western town.  The war on the old-time butchers of the village was open.  “Buy of us,” was the order, “or we’ll fill the storage house so full that the legs of the steers will hang out of the windows, and we’ll give away the meat.”  The women of the town had a prosperous club which might have resisted the tyranny which the members all deplored, but the club was busy that winter with the study of the Greek drama!  They deplored the tyranny, but they bought the cut-rate meat—­the old butchers fought to a finish, and the housekeepers are now paying higher prices for poorer meat and railing at the impotency of man in breaking up the Beef Trust!