“The mother,” she says, “as a social servant instead of a house servant, will not lack in true mother duty. She will love her child as well, perhaps better, when she is not in hourly contact with it, when she goes from its life to her own life, and back from her own life to its life, with ever new delight and power. She can keep the deep thrilling joy of motherhood far fresher in her heart, far more vivid and open in voice and eyes and tender hands, when the hours of individual work give her mind another channel for her own part of the day. From her work, loved and honoured though it is, she will return to the home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and friction and weariness that so mar it now.” This all sounds very beautiful, but is it true? This is not the frame of mind in which men generally return from their work, but perhaps that is because they are only fathers. Nor am I acquainted with any well-paid work that one can love and honour all day long; at best it is physically exhausting, and when it is not it is generally routine drudgery. Again, children have a way of choosing their own times for being affectionate, and the half hour or so their mother has to spare before it is their time to go to bed may be considered by them an inopportune time for endearments. The hardened babies who have found the day attractive enough without anybody’s hugs and kisses may perhaps find their sentimental mother’s embraces an irritating nuisance. I see no reason for believing that either wife, husband, or children will be anything but worse off if the wife goes outside the home to earn a living; nor do I know of any skilled work for educated women, requiring daily assiduous attention for the whole day, in which maternity, or the possibility of maternity, would not be a drawback in the eyes of an experienced employer. It is conceivable that a married woman with capital might be successful as an employer herself, with the power to delegate her business supervision to others when necessary; but I doubt whether she has ever done so with much success, except in cases, as in France, where the wife has generally been the assistant of her husband, or assisted by him. But the real value of Mrs. Stetson’s argument is that by its absurdity it brings home to us with striking force a fact of which most middle-class people have only a sub-conscious knowledge--that, unfortunately, in England at any rate, what Mrs. Stetson calls the economic independence of the wife is in too many cases not an ideal, but a reality. Mrs. Stetson says that economic independence among human beings means that the individual pays for what he gets, works for what he gets, gives to the other an equivalent for what the other gives him. “As long as what I get is obtained by what I give,” says Mrs. Stetson, “I am economically independent.”