SOCIAL SUSTENANCE. 621 



help it on. This may be done by future inventions of machinery, or 

 by the specialization of man's work to a point where much of it can 

 be done by women. The dream of European economists, that through 

 the conveyance of power by electricity the factory system is to give 

 way to home-industry, may be realized, and woman's opportunities for 

 sharing in a great variety of masculine tasks enormously increased. 

 The public schools may some time be devoted more to sense and less 

 to nonsense. Even though she must follow two or three hundred years 

 behind man in her progress toward simplicity of dress, some of us may 

 live to see her devoting a portion of the time now lost in that way to 

 the cultivation, as an amateur if not otherwise, of some specialty hith- 

 erto monopolized by man. What she pursues as an amateur, her 

 daughter, inheriting the aptitude, may find it convenient to follow for 

 a livelihood. 



Meantime, the calmness of our judgment will not be warped, though 

 we indulge in sad contemplation of the fate yet in store for the millions 

 of women who must be sacrificed to the good of the race, whose lives 

 must be narrowed, whose natures dwarfed, whose care-worn minds 

 cushed to insanity or suicide by the slowly-relaxing grip of an enslav- 

 ing biological heritage. We may partially console ourselves by say- 

 ing, as we did in the case of the negro, that she is born and bred to it, 

 and can not realize how much better freedom is than enchainment. 

 True as this may be in general, most of us do hear some complaint 

 from the enchained. We like to hear it, because we despise the human 

 being who has no aspiration to rise to higher things. The disagree- 

 able feature of it is, that in the deplorable lack of economic training 

 which woman shares with almost every man, she, like him, is disposed 

 to attribute her troubles to the conscious intrigue or innate meanness 

 of some class of human beings. It may be worth while to hint to her 

 that, however irresponsible she may be, man is not responsible for her 

 adoption of a style of dress which she would find very much in her 

 way if she undertook to engage in some of the labors that he is free to 

 follow. As to the willingness of her enchainment, that is a partial re- 

 lief to her, but it is an obstacle to those who would break the chains. 

 It is always harder to free a willing slave. But, when he has tasted 

 liberty, he is very apt to like it. His callousness does not excuse the 

 inactivity of those who have power to free him, whether or not they 

 are responsible for his bondage. Woman's bondage is not to a per- 

 son, nor to a class, so much as it is to a race to an apparently neces- 

 sary, but let us hope transitory, condition of the highest development 

 of that race. 



Turning with a sigh of relief to the economics of the sex which has 

 hitherto monopolized the attention of the science, we find specializa- 

 tion hindered here, too, by circumstances over which nobody has con- 

 trol, or even very much influence. A large class of men, a full half of 

 them in many countries, are in a case approaching that of woman. 



