The carrying out of this arrangement need not cause any dislocation of existing conditions. The wife would continue to manage the domestic funds to which each would contribute according to agreement, but she would probably be better able to solve the problem of making them suffice for their joint expenses. She would be perfectly free to forego her allowance, as her husband would be to increase it according to need and ability. The direct economical appreciation of her domestic work would transform her own and her husband’s respect for it and thus give wives, on the one hand, a sense of independence which even the conscientious are now without, on the other, a sense of duty which in the case of the less conscientious is doubtless in need of strengthening; for the existing arrangement favours not only domestic tyranny on the part of the husbands, but also inefficiency on the part of certain wives. But the fact that a small number of women of the upper class now do no work at all in the home, or that a number of others do it badly, must not obscure the truth that innumerable women are constantly expending in their homes great sums of working power, without being able legally to claim any corresponding income of their own. This applies not only to the wives but also to the daughters of the house, who often work from morning till night, but are nevertheless obliged to accept as gifts from their parents all that they personally need, and thus also have to do without anything that their parents consider unnecessary. The same is true of the wife in relation to her husband. When unmarried—whether she was in private or public service, a factory hand or a clerk—she had the chance of in some measure providing for her own interests. When married, every present she gives, every contribution she makes for a public purpose, every book she buys, every amusement she allows herself, has to be taken from her husband’s money. The wife who, in a farmer’s home perhaps, saves thousands—both by economy and by the direct contribution of her labour—frequently has not a silver piece at her disposal. This dependence, as we have said, now drives wives and daughters from their homes to earn a livelihood, which often does not by any means compensate economically for the loss of their work at home. But they simply cannot endure to be without the personal income, which to them has become a more and more important value, according as their general freedom of movement and their needs in other directions have increased—above all, through increase of education and social interests. Woman’s present unpaid position in domestic work is an obsolete survival from earlier conditions of housekeeping and production, as from the ecclesiastical doctrine that woman was created to be man’s helpmate and he to be her head. Women have thus often received worse heads than nature gave them—and thereby man has had less valuable help than life intended for him.