Happiness and dignity, as well as the future salvation of humanity, equally demanded that woman should be delivered from the dishonourable necessity of seeing in her husband a provider, in marriage the only refuge from material need. But neither should woman be consigned to common labour. This would be in equal measure prejudicial both to the happiness of the living and to the character and vigour of future generations. It is as useless as it is injurious to wish to establish the equality of woman by allowing her to compete with man in earning her bread--useless, because such a permission, of which advantage could be taken only in exceptional cases, would afford no help to the female sex as a whole; injurious, because woman cannot compete with man and yet be true to her nobler and tenderer duties. And those duties do not lie in the kitchen and the wardrobe, but in the cultivation of the beautiful in the adult generation on the one hand, and of the intellectual and physical development of the young on the other. Therefore, in the interests not only of herself, but also of man, and in particular of the future race, woman must be altogether withdrawn from the struggle for the necessaries of life; she must be no wheel in the bread-earning machinery, she must be a jewel in the heart of humanity. Only one kind of 'work' is appropriate to woman--that of the education of children and, at most, the care of the sick and infirm. In the school and by the sick-bed can womanly tenderness and care find a suitable apprenticeship for the duties of the future home, and in such work may the single woman earn wages so far as she wishes to do so. At the same time, our principles secured perfect liberty to woman. She was not forbidden to engage in any occupation, and isolated instances have occurred of women doing so, particularly in intellectual callings, but public opinion in Freeland approved of this only in exceptional cases--that is, when special gifts justified such action; and it was our women chiefly who upheld this public opinion. The fact that the maintenance allowance for women was fixed at one-fourth less than that for men--and the constituent assembly confirmed not only the principle, but the proposed ratio of the different maintenance allowances--was not the expression of any lower estimate of the _claim_ of woman, but was due simply to the consideration that the _requirements_ of woman are less than those of man. We acted upon the calculation that a woman with her thirty per cent. of the average labour-earnings of a Freeland producer was as well provided for as a maintenance-receiving man with his forty per cent.; and experience fully verified this calculation.