The reality of the change which has been effected in the position of wife and mother is shown by a letter to _The Gentleman’s Magazine_ in 1834 criticising proposed alterations in the Poor Law. The writer defends the system then in use of giving allowances from the rates to labourers according to the number of their children. He says that the people who animadvert on the allowance system “never observe the cause from which it proceeds. There are, we will say, twenty able single labourers in a parish; twenty equally able married, with large families. One class wants 12s. a week, one 20s. The farmer, who has his choice of course takes the single.” The allowance system equalises the position of married and single. Formerly this inequality did not exist “_because it was of no importance to the farmer whether he employed the single or married labourer, inasmuch as the labourer’s wife and family could provide for themselves_. They are now dependent on the man’s labour, or nearly so; except in particular cases, as when women go out to wash, to nurse, or take in needlework, and so on. The machinery and manufactures have destroyed cottage labour—spinning, the only resource formerly of the female poor, who thus were earning their bread at home, while their fathers and husbands were earning theirs abroad.... In agricultural parishes the men, the labourers, are not too numerous or more than are wanted; but the families hang as a dead weight upon the rates for want of employment. The girls are now not brought up to _spin_—none of them know the art. They all handle when required, the hoe, and their business is weeding. Our partial remedy for this great and growing evil is allotments of land, which are to afford the occupation that the distaff formerly did; and so the wife and daughters can be cultivating small portions of ground and raising potatoes and esculents, etc., the while the labourer is at his work.”[2] Footnote 2: _Gentleman’s Magazine_, 1834, Vol. I., p. 531. _A Letter to Lord Althorp on the Poor Laws_, by Equitas. These far-reaching changes coincided with the triumph of capitalistic organisation but they may not have been a necessary consequence of that triumph. They may have arisen from some deep-lying cause, some tendency in human evolution which was merely hastened by the economic cataclysm. The fact that the evolution of women’s position in the professions followed a course closely resembling that which was taking place in industry suggests the existence of an ultimate cause influencing the direction in each case. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II CAPITALISTS