The fact that, under a voluntary system of marriage, he would have to pay, either in money or some equivalent of money, for work which he now gets done for nothing—and despises accordingly—would also bring with it a compensatory advantage. Woman’s work in the home is often enough inefficient simply because it is sweated; there is a point at which cheap labour tends to become inefficient, and therefore the reverse of cheap; and that point appears to have been reached in a good many existing homes.
There is, it seems to me, another respect in which man, as well as woman, would eventually be the gainer by the recognition of woman’s right to humanity on her own account. The custom of regarding one half of the race as sent into the world to excite desire in the other half does not appear to be of real advantage to either moiety, in that it has produced the over-sexed man and the over-sexed woman, the attitude of mind which sneers at self-control. Such an attitude the establishment of marriage for woman upon a purely voluntary basis ought to go far to correct; since it is hardly conceivable that women, who have other careers open to them and by whom ignorance is no longer esteemed as a merit, will consent to run quite unnecessary risks from which their unmarried sisters are exempt. When the intending wife and mother no longer considers it her duty to be innocent and complacent, the intending husband and father will learn, from sheer necessity, to see more virtue in self-restraint. With results beneficial to the race—and incidentally to himself. Humanity would seem to have paid rather a heavy price for the feminine habit of turning a blind eye to evil which it dignifies by the name of innocence.
I have sufficient faith in my brethren to be in no wise alarmed by dismal prophecies of their rapid moral deterioration when our helplessness and general silliness no longer make a pathetic appeal to their sense of pity and authority. No doubt the consciousness of superiority is favourable to the cultivation of certain virtues—the virtues of the patron; just as the consciousness of inferiority is favourable to the cultivation of certain other virtues—the virtues of the patronized. But I will not do my brother the injustice of believing that the virtues of the patron are the only ones he possesses; on the contrary, I have found him to be possessed of many others, have seen him just to an equal, courteous and considerate to those whom he had no reason to pity or despise. When the ordinary man and the ordinary wife no longer stand towards each other in the attitude of patron and patronized the virtues of both will need overhauling—that is all.