Up to the beginning of this chapter, our Utopian speculations, like
many Acts of Parliament, have ignored the difference of sex. "He"
indeed is to be read as "He and She" in all that goes before. But
we may now come to the sexual aspects of the modern ideal of
a constitution of society in which, for all purposes of the
individual, women are to be as free as men. This will certainly be
realised in the Modern Utopia, if it can be realised at all--not
only for woman's sake, but for man's.
But women may be free in theory and not in practice, and as long as
they suffer from their economic inferiority, from the inability to
produce as much value as a man for the same amount of work--and
there can be no doubt of this inferiority--so long will their legal
and technical equality be a mockery. It is a fact that almost
every point in which a woman differs from a man is an economic
disadvantage to her, her incapacity for great stresses of exertion,
her frequent liability to slight illnesses, her weaker initiative,
her inferior invention and resourcefulness, her relative incapacity
for organisation and combination, and the possibilities of emotional
complications whenever she is in economic dependence on men. So long
as women are compared economically with men and boys they will be
inferior in precisely the measure in which they differ from men. All
that constitutes this difference they are supposed not to trade upon
except in one way, and that is by winning or luring a man to marry,
selling themselves in an almost irrevocable bargain, and then
following and sharing his fortunes for "better or worse."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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