The effect of the system on women was worse in some respects than on men. As no industrial employer would employ a woman if he could get a man for the same money, women who wished to get any industrial employment could do so only by offering to do it for less than men. This was possible, because even when the man’s wage was a starvation wage it was the starvation wage of a family, not of a single person. Out of it the man had to pay for the subsistence of his wife and children, without whom the Capitalist system would soon have come to an end for want of any young workers to replace the old ones. Therefore even when the men’s wages were down to the lowest point at which their wives and children could be kept alive, a single woman could take less without being any worse off than her married neighbors and their children. In this way it became a matter of course that women should be paid less than men; and when any female rebel claimed to be paid as much as a man for the same work (“Equal wages for equal work”), the employer shut her up with two arguments: first, “If you dont take the lower wage there are plenty of others who will”, and, second, “If I have to pay a man’s wages I will get a man to do the work”. The most important and indispensable work of women, that of bearing and rearing children, and keeping house for them, was never paid for directly to the woman but always through the man; and so many foolish people came to forget that it was work at all, and spoke of Man as The Breadwinner. This was nonsense. From first to last the woman’s work in the home was vitally necessary to the existence of society, whilst millions of men were engaged in wasteful or positively michievous work, the only excuse for which was that it enabled them to support their useful and necessary wives. But the men, partly through conceit, partly through thoughtlessness, and very largely because they were afraid that their wives might, if their value were recognized, become unruly and claim to be the heads of the household, set up a convention that women earned nothing and men everything, and refused to give their wives any legal claim on the housekeeping money. By law everything a woman possessed became the property of her husband when she married: a state of things that led to such monstrous abuses that the propertied class set up an elaborate legal system of marriage settlements, the effect of which was to hand over the woman’s property to some person or persons yet unborn before her marriage; so that though she could have an income from the property during her life, it was no longer her property, and therefore her husband could not make ducks and drakes of it. Later on the middle classes made Parliament protect their women by The Married Women’s Property Acts under which we still live; and these Acts, owing to the confusion of people’s minds on the subject, overshot the mark and produced a good deal of injustice to men. That, however, is another