ing to their age, sex, and ability, and all pooled their products and shared the results. Very little ready money was in circulation, and the male head of the family had relatively small chance to rob his dependents while living, although he might distribute his estate very unjustly after he was dead. When the family gradually ceased to be an industrial unit, the minor children began to control their own earnings as soon as they left home, and the husband sold the products of the farm or the business for money. But the women of the household, no longer economically important as manufacturers of raw material, were not in a position to sell their services in the public market. They were still producers, but only secondary producers, so to speak, by so much as a cooked egg is better than a raw one, and a clean sheet than a dirty one; and they were in consequence reduced to a position of quasi-peonage. Just as the serf of medieval times was at the mercy of his master-employer because he could not leave the land for another and better-paid job, so mothers and daughters became dependent upon the goodwill of the master of their household.

Nor did the fact that, unlike the peon, many a woman might receive more than the value of her service, alter her economic dependence. Greedy, idle, seductive females practised the arts of their kind to wring from industrious men a luxurious

living to which they were not entitled; while the majority of hard-working, devoted wives were left without recourse against their particular supporter's notion of what they had earned.

How this situation worked out occasionally is illustrated by the following story, told by a lawyer about an old farmer's wife down on Cape Cod. The farmer died without a will, and his greedy heirs, grudging her the life-use of one-third of the estate, which the law gave her, managed to prove that the farmer had imposed upon her by an illegal ceremony of marriage, and that she, therefore, was not entitled to any of the estate. The Judge, thereupon, advised the old woman to bring in a bill for her services, for if she had not been his wife, the farmer was not entitled to have her do his housework for nothing. Accordingly, she brought in a bill at the current rate of wage for a domestic servant, which the Court allowed, and it took the whole of the estate to pay it. Of course, she had been "supported" all that time, but with the discovery that she was not the man's wife, it was also discovered that her support alone was not a full equivalent for her labor.

The same principle was put in a slightly different way by Higginson, when he wrote:

"A farmer works himself to death in the hay field, and his wife works herself wholly to death in the dairy.

The neighbors come in to sympathize after her demise; and during the few months' interval before his second marriage, they say approvingly: 'He always was a generous man to his folks! He was a good provider!' But where was the room for generosity any more than the member of any other firm is to be called generous, when he keeps the books, receipts the bills, and divides the money?"

The economic disintegration of the PuritanColonial family in the last century resulted in taking away from the housewife one of the chief incentives of any labor, i.e., definite money compensation. Marriage, though nominally a partnership, left the second partner in the position of putting in her property and her labor, and then being obliged to trust the first partner to give her as much or as little of the increase as he chose. Stripped of its sentimental aspects, such a bargain was a much greater risk for the woman than for the man, and equally unjust, whether the wife got more or less.

The reaction of an occupation pursued through a lifetime is so tremendous upon the physique and the mental and moral development of men, that its effects are easily recognized everywhere. But in a country where a man is comparatively free to choose or to drift into the occupation to which he is suited, the affinity between a man and his calling would naturally reinforce his stronger

characteristics, and become an element of general social progress. Men do better that which they are fitted for, and they are apt to like what they can do well. Now, the peculiar misfortune of women has been that, while the original field of domestic production was rapidly narrowed, social convention, during at least two generations, prevented them from engaging in any substitute for it outside the home. Although their primitive sphere was constantly shrinking they were not yet freed to find another. The theory of mankind and of the Church was still: all women must be domestic, whether married or single; whether by temperament maternal or celibate; whether adapted to domestic detail or not. The vocation manacled the woman, the woman could. not choose what she liked, or what she was fitted to do.

The effect of this social coercion was to suppress initiative and originality to a degree beyond imagination. For it was inevitably the women of most active minds and of largest administrative capacity who found the limitations of housekeeping most irksome. Suppose every man in the world had to be a farmer, and could never break away into law or science or art or engineering or even literature, without paying a penalty in social ostracism, and-worst of all— in the sacrifice of a family and a home; suppose

that he never received any wages directly, but was just "supported," and now and then accepted what his senior partner chose to give. Indeed, we need not suppose, for this was the state of a large class of men in the Middle Ages. But the historian calls them the "dark ages," and explains carefully that under such limitations the development of great men and great ideas was not to be expected. No more was it probable that domesticated women, inheriting an environment and a tradition of smallness, would show, even when the doors of opportunity were opened a little way, a high degree of talent in untried fields. It is only by some such analogy as this that we can realize the effect of housewifery in stunting women of exceptional ability who, conscientiously pinching themselves to fit their sphere, were unhappy or ill-tempered; or, if they had the courage to break through that domestic inclosure, found themselves pariahs, doomed to isolation, if not to failure, in the unfriendly métier for which they had no preparation.

When, toward the end of the last century, women first began to organize themselves into clubs for self-culture and social activity, they were ridiculed for their lack of ability to do teamwork. Their critics seemed to have forgotten that there had never been incentive or oppor tunity for coöperation toward larger ends, except