Those who ask such a question should remember that the facts of life,
social and economic, all make the upsetting of the man in his work
seldom a safe or a happy solution. In the first place, the position of
a man who even temporarily depends upon his wife's vocational success
and relinquishes his own economic position, is far more difficult than
that of a woman who sacrifices her own professional standing to go
with her husband to a new centre. Any woman asks more of a man in the
way of sacrifice, both of his standing as a man and his chances as a
worker, if she demands that he take her income as the basic economic
element in the joint family treasury (when such demand entails a
change of residence and a giving up of assured income on his part)
than any man asks of a woman when the conditions proposed are the
reverse. No woman loses "caste" who depends upon her husband in an
economic sense. Perhaps the time will come when it will cost a woman
the loss of social prestige and of the best chance for work outside
the home (as it now does a man) when the choice is made to follow the
larger income from one locality to another. Now, however, it means
that a woman can adjust herself to such change far better than a man,
and hence that equal right to demand sacrifice and equal duty to
mutually help each other demand that where such acute problems arise
the woman shall give the man's relation to his work right of way.
Moreover, even those who, like Doctor Patten, believe that women
should continue vocational work after marriage place the chief
economic burden of the family permanently upon the husband and father.
The wife may earn outside the home if both agree and the opportunity
offers in the place where the man's work already is; but the
maintenance of the economic standing and the improvement of social
condition remain, as of old, with the man. And for the obvious reason
that if the woman has children they may take a large portion of her
interest and of her strength and energy and, in any case, the married
woman, if she really makes a home, must mix her vocational work with a
more or less extended devotion to that home-making. Also, although a
woman at marriage may be in receipt of a larger income from vocational
service than is the man she wishes to marry, he will be more likely,
if worth-while, to gain steadily toward a much larger compensation.
The positions which women fill are for the most part self-limited.
They are fast developing high qualities for routine work in the
professions, like school doctor and hospital clinician and workers for
legal aid and other like salaried employments. These are not highly
paid, but have manifest advantages for women in that they give a fixed
income, if small, and in that they allow for regulation of hours of
service that may easily be made half-time work in case of divided
effort. Hence, although at a given point in earlier life (when the
usual greater precocity of women give some women the advantage in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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