The problem of marriage will remain acute—and, indeed, ultimately insoluble—until the contracting parties enter it upon the basis of an equal partnership. The conception of marriage as a “career” for women has done much to destroy the only conditions under which marriage can ever be successful. The freedom and spontaneity of the relation between men and women is made impossible by those calculations of position and wealth which the career theory of marriage requires. While it is nominally the case that no woman is compelled to marry, it is actually the fact that many women—in the _bourgeois_ classes, most women—are so brought up that marriage becomes their only escape from indigence. The fact of woman’s independence should be made concrete and real by requiring that every woman shall be self-supporting, that is to say, that she shall share in the necessary industrial processes of the community or do some work of acknowledged social worth. Naturally the latter category includes the bearing and upbringing of children; for than this there is no work more fundamental or of greater social worth. This requires the economic independence of the mother; and since the social reconstruction postulated in these pages, involves in some form or other the establishment of an universal minimum standard, the mother will not only be economically independent but will also be released from the harassing task of bringing up a growing family upon a stationary income. It will be argued against such proposals as these that they endanger the sanctity of the family. But this criticism possesses neither grace nor force in a generation which has permitted industrial conditions to prevail which have virtually destroyed the home-life of the working-classes. The only assumption on which it is safe to proceed in dealing with this question is that anything entitled to be called a “home life” is quite exceptional among large masses of the population. Both the physical setting of the home—the house—and the economic condition of its members rob the home of that quality of sanctuary and base which is of the essence of a genuine _home_. Our problem is to recreate the home, the setting of that social group of man, woman and child, which we call the family, and which is the natural nucleus of the commonwealth, and the moral gymnasium where the young should best learn the arts of fellowship. The housing question has its own importance in the problem; but of infinitely more importance to the recovery of home life is the establishment of the economic independence of the woman. So long as custom and necessity place her in a position of dependence on the man, so long will she be denied the freedom which is essential to perfect comradeship. Her present status denies the equality which is necessary to fellowship; and much of the unhappiness of modern marriage is due to the intelligible chafing of women against the conditions which dependence and inferiority of status impose upon her.