The old way of looking at the patriarchal family was, from one point of thought, perfectly right and reasonable as long as every woman was ensured the protection of, and maintenance by, some man. Nor do I think there was any unhappiness or degradation involved to women in this co-operation of the old days, where the man went out to work and the woman stayed to do work at least equally valuable in the home. It was, as a rule, a co-operation of love, and in any case it was an equal partnership in work. But what was true once is not true now. We are living in a continually changing development and modification of the old tradition of the relationship of woman and man.... The women of one class have been forced into labor by the sharp driving of hunger. Among the women of the other class have arisen a great number who have turned to seek occupation from an entirely different cause, the no less bitter driving of an unstimulating and ineffective existence, a kind of boiling-over of women's energy wasted, causing a revolt of the woman-soul against a life of confused purposes, achieving by accident what is achieved at all. Between the women who have the finest opportunities and the women who have none there is this common kinship--the wastage not so much of woman as of womanhood. She considers "the women who have been forced into the cheating, damning struggle for life," and urges that "the life-blood of women, that should be given to the race, is being stitched into our ready-made clothes; washed and ironed into our linen; poured into our adulterated foods"; and so on. But her reasoning in this chapter is not very clear. Women, to avoid parasitism, must work, and only a relatively small proportion of them can now find in their homes work enough to keep them self-sustaining. Protest against the sweating of women is not only philanthropic--it is perfectly sound political economy. Women workers not only should be protected against long hours, unnecessary risks, insanitary surroundings, merciless nerve tension, and the computation of their wages on a basis of their assured ability to live partly by their labor and partly by the legitimatized or unlegitimatized sale of their sex; but this _can_, and _must_, be done. Yet, when all this has been accomplished, will Mrs. Gallichan feel satisfied that the struggle for life is not "cheating, damning," if owing to conditions we cannot regulate that struggle fails also to comprehend the struggle to give life, to reproduce? It is because we are the mothers of men that we claim to be free. This is the keynote of her book. But she is by no means clear in her mind as to how the mothers of men are to maintain themselves in a freedom which shall be real, not merely conceded; nor as to how the millions of women who, under our monogamous societies, cannot be permanently mated, are to justify their struggle for existence by becoming "mothers of men."