When wives speak of the humiliation of being kept by their husbands—since they have more and more frequently been self-supporting before marriage—their husbands always become profoundly idealistic. They use fine words about the wife’s important mission, the adapting power of love, until one asks some particular man: whether any love could make it pleasant _for him_, instead of drawing his own income, to be obliged to ask his wife for what she considered necessary for their joint expenditure or for his own. In spite of the consciousness of having herself brought wealth, or in spite of the knowledge of constantly making important contributions of work in the home, the necessity of asking for money is the wife’s unbearable torment. For the husband in his heart has often the same feeling as she; that work nowadays means earning money outside, since the management of an income—in spite of its immense importance to the strength, health, and comfort of the workers and thus indirectly to the whole national economy—is more and more overlooked. In part this idea of the husband is due to the very fact that women have not acquired the new kind of domesticity which is necessary for the efficient conduct of expenditure, and that the husband is, therefore, often right in thinking that his wife neither works nor saves, but only wastes. However touchingly idealistic a girl may be in this question before marriage; however confidingly she allows her husband to handle her fortune, after a few years of married life experience will turn her into a complete realist. However happy she has otherwise been, she will, nevertheless, remember more than one occasion when she has bitterly regretted the absence of the freedom of action a separate income gives; when, for instance, her husband has refused to allow her to use—for some ideal purpose or other—the means which in many cases she herself brought him, and how perhaps this for the first time really made a division between them. The dependence of woman can only be abolished through the _economic appreciation of her domestic work_. This appreciation is an easy matter when she has left a salaried employment for her domestic duties, for the performance of the latter must be regarded as worth at least as much as her occupation formerly brought her. Where there is no such measure of value, she ought to receive the same amount as a stranger in corresponding circumstances would receive in salary and cost of keep. The wife would thus be able to meet her personal expenditure, her share in the joint housekeeping and in the maintenance of the children, when the subsidy for this purpose came to an end but the couple were agreed that the wife’s work at home was of such value that she ought rather to continue it than to try to earn money outside.