The modern woman who before her marriage was independent, owing to her work, abhors the thought of a request for money—this most painful moment even in the happiest marriages—to so great a degree that this aversion determines the wife in some cases to keep up her own work. If on the contrary she has given this up, the consciousness of her earlier independence makes her often so sensitive that she feels herself injured by a protest however delicate in regard to the expenditure of money. More than one man has regretted, in consequence of the unreasonable demands of his wife, that he ever begged her to give up her own work. There are women, on the other hand, who continue their work and thereby only increase the incapability of a good-for-nothing man. In such cases, it avails little that in many countries the law now allows the wife free disposal of the income from her labour. Notwithstanding this, the assertion is ridiculous that “if the man drinks up the money of his wife it is with her consent,” and “it is therefore of no avail to alter the law.” For it makes a significant difference in the relative position of the man and wife whether the law gives him the _right_ to it, or whether he takes it by force. But in this as in other cases, the woman movement obviously cannot free women so long as they are impelled by unconscious forces from within to actions and sacrifices at variance with their conscious personality. The one thing which the woman movement has already achieved and can continue to achieve, is that the undue encroachment of the men ceases to have legal protection. It is undeniable, on the other hand, that the unmarried woman’s personal and economic independence fashions wives who in marriage show themselves in a high degree egotistic, but who yet incessantly scold about man’s egotism, wives who themselves exhibit very little devotion and fine feeling, but place very great importance upon consideration. These wives were the ones whom fifty years ago men called “graters.” But the lack of amiability, which in certain women was usually due to childbirth, has nevertheless in modern woman, at least during the freedom of her girlhood, been unrestrained habit. Her firm—and just—decision not to be “subservient” to her husband has resulted in, first, an armed peace, later, a war, in which the wife’s work is one of the projectiles. “I have my work, why should I stay here to be used up and tormented?” she asks herself. And when such questions begin, there is usually but one answer.