So it is not housework that so many women are revolting from. It is largely the horrible conditions under which so much housework has to be done. But it is also this: that it is not wise to put all women under one harrow, and particularly it is foolish to insist on mixing up the notions of motherhood and housewifery into an inextricable tangle. Because, in individual homes in the past the woman who bore the children had to cook and clean and housekeep, it does not follow at all that this must always be so for ever and ever. Some women who are by no means clever at child nurture, and who detest housewifery, are capable of bearing excellent children, beautiful and strong. It would be to impoverish the race to say such women should not have children (and they and the men who love them would laugh at you if you did). It would be stupid to sacrifice the welfare of the children to the incompetent rearing of such women, and one can only pity the men who have to eat the dinners they cook. Why not admit frankly that women differ, and always will differ? Why try to press them all into the same mould? If a woman has been a highly trained and very competent class-teacher before her marriage, is it wisdom or economy to declare that, after her marriage, she must abandon all her special training, her natural and acquired gifts, and black her husband’s boots and cook his dinner? Even if she has babies, is that any reason why she should become a general servant? Slowly, very slowly, because everything to do with women is so hedged round with fears and tabus of all kinds, there is arising the possibility of co-operative housekeeping and co-operative nurseries. To some intensely individualistic women these will be a terror; they would rather slave themselves to death than have a common kitchen or a common dining-room; and some would not for the world miss one cry of the baby, one clutch of its little grasping hands. Let these women have their babes and their households to themselves; why not? But why should the other women not also have what they want, and do what they can? No one, looking round the world of men and women, can honestly say that men do as a matter of fact choose their wives from the girls who love baby-minding, cooking and cleaning beyond all things. Young men are not thinking about such things at all when courting, and they go for nothing in the sex-attraction a girl possesses. We women, if we have lived a good while, have all known scores of girls left unwed who would have made better mothers and better housekeepers than those who have married, and in some cases “could have married a dozen times” as the saying goes. The fact is that the perfect wife, mother, nurse, teacher and housekeeper is very rarely one person.