has his meals cooked and served by the woman; his general cleaning and mending done by her; she is his servant. This condition accompanies marriage, be it observed, and precedes maternity. It has no relation whatever to motherhood. If there are no children the woman remains the house-servant of the man. If she has many, their care must not prevent the service of his meals. In America today, in one family out of sixteen, the man is able to hire other women to wait upon him; but his wife is merely raised to the position of a sort of "section-boss;" she still manages the service of the house for him. This woman-service has no relation to the family in any vital sense; it is a relic of the period of woman-slavery in the patriarchal time; it exhibits not the evolution of a true monogamy, but merely the ancient industrial polygamous group shorn down to one lingering female slave. Under this head of wife-service, we must place all the confused activities of the modern home. Reduced and simplified as these are, they still involve several undeveloped trades and their enforced practice by nearly all women keeps down the normal social tendency to specialization. While all men, speaking generally, have specialized in some form of social activities, have become masons, smiths, farmers, sailors, carpenters, doctors, merchants, and the like; all women, speaking generally, have remained at the low industrial level of domestic servants. The limitation is clear and sharp, and is held to be an essential, if not the essential, condition of home life; the woman, being married, must work in the home for the man. We are so absolutely accustomed to this relation, that a statement of it produces no more result than if one solemnly announces that fire is hot and ice cold.

To visualize it let us reverse the position. Let us suppose that the conditions of home life required every man upon marriage to become his wife's butler, footman, coachman, cook; every man, all men, necessarily following the profession of domestic servants. This is an abhorrent, an incredible idea. So is the other. That an entire sex should be the domestic servants of the other sex is abhorrent and incredible.

Under this same head we may place all the prominent but

little understood evils of the "servant question.' The position is simple. The home must be served by women. If the wife is unable to perform the service other women must be engaged. These must not be married women, for no married man wishes his private servant to serve another man. When the coachman marries the cook, he prefers to segregate her in the rooms over the stables, to cook for him alone. Therefore our women servants form an endless procession of apprentices, untrained young persons learning of the housewife mainly her personal preferences and limitations. Therefore is the grade of household services necessarily and permanently low; and household service means most of the world's feeding, cleaning, and the care of children. The third essential home condition is:

C. The economic dependence of women.-This is the natural corollary of the other two. If a man keeps a servant he must feed him, or her. The economic dependence of the woman follows upon her servitude. The family with the male head has assumed that the male shall serve society and the female shall serve him. This opens up an immense field of consequences, reacting most violently upon the family, among which we will select here two most typical and conspicuous. Suppose that the man's social service is of small value as we measure and reward our laborers. His return is small. His wages we will roughly estimate at $600 a year, a sum the purchasing power of which is variable. In our present conditions $600 is little enough for one person. For two it allows but $300 each. For six, if they have four children, it is $100 a year apiece-less than $2.00 a week for each, to pay for food, clothes, shelter, everything. This visibly spells poverty. While one man's production is worth to society but so much, and while that one man's production is forced to meet the consumption of six; so long, even without any other cause, the resultant is general poverty—a persistent condition in the majority of homes. To segregate half the productive energy of the world and use it in private service of the crudest sort is economic waste. To force the low-grade man to maintain an entire family is to force a constant large supply of low-grade men.

The second of these consequences is the unnatural phenomenon of the idle woman. The man, whose sex-relation spurs him to industry, and whose exceptional powers meet special reward, then proceeds to shower gifts and pleasures upon the woman he loves. That man shall be "a good provider" is frankly held to be his end of the family duty, a most essential condition of home life. This result, as we so frequently and sadly see, is the development of a kind of woman who performs no industrial service, produces nothing, and consumes everything; and a kind of man who subordinates every social and moral claim to this widely accredited "first duty;" to provide, without limit, for his wife and children.

These two home conditions: the enormous tax upon the father, if he is poor, together with the heavy toil of the mother, and the opposite one of the rich man maintaining a beautiful parasite, have visible and serious results upon the family.

The supposedly essential basic relations, the ownership of woman, the servitude of woman, and the economic dependence of woman, with their resultants, give rise to the visible material conditions with which we are familiar. The predominant concerns of the kitchen and dining-room, involving the entire service of the working housewife, rigidly measure the limitations of such families; while the added freedom of the woman whose housework is done vicariously seldom tends to a nobler life. Our insanitary households, our false and shallow taste, our low standard of knowledge in food values and nutrition, the various prosaic limitations within which we are born and reared are in the main traceable to the arrested development of the woman, owing to the above major conditions of home life.

Let us now show the reaction of the conditions above stated upon the family in modern society, in the order given, as they affect (a) marriage. (b) maternity, (c) child-culture, (d) the individual and society.

We are much concerned in the smooth and rapid development of a higher type of marriage, yet fail to see that our home conditions militate against such development. The effect of the modern home, even with its present degree of segregation of women, with

its inadequate, confused, laborious industrial processes, and with its overwhelming expenses, is to postpone and often prevent marriage, to degrade marriage when accomplished through the servile and dependent position of the wife, and also to precipitate unwise and premature marriage on the part of young women because of their bitter dissatisfaction with the conditions of their previous home. This last gives an advantage in reproduction to the poorer types. The wiser woman, preferring the ills she has to those she foresees only too clearly, hesitates long, delays, often refuses altogether; not from an aversion to marriage, or to motherhood, but from a steadily growing objection to the position of a servant.

The man, seeing about him the fretful inefficiency of so many misplaced women, hearing ad nauseam the reiterant uniform complaints on "the servant question," knowing the weight of the increasing burden for which the man must "pay, pay, pay," waits longer and longer before he can "afford to marry;" with a resultant increase in immorality.

This paradoxical position must be faced fully and squarely. The industrial conditions of the modern home are such as to delay and often prevent marriage. Since "the home" is supposed to arise only from marriage, it looks as though the situation were frankly suicidal. So far, not seeing these things, we have merely followed our world-old habit of blaming the woman. She used to be content with these conditions we say-she ought to be now-back to nature! The woman refuses to go back, the home refuses to go forward, and marriage waits. The initial condition of ownership, even without service, reacts unfavorably upon the kind of marriage most desired. A woman slave is not a wife. The more absolutely the woman is her own mistress, in accepting her husband and in her life with him, the higher is the grade of love and companionship open to them. Again the economic dependence of the woman militates against a true marriage, in that the element of economic profit degrades and commercializes love and so injures the family. It may be said that the family with the male head cannot exist in a pure form without its original concomitants of absolute personal

ownership and exploitation of woman. When the ownership is no longer that of true slavery but enters the contract stage, when marriage becomes an economic relation, then indeed is it degraded. Polygyny is a low form of marriage; but, as modern polygynists have held, it at least tends to preclude prostitution. The higher marriage toward which we are tending requires a full-grown woman, no one's property or servant, self-supporting and proudly independent. Such marriage will find expression in a very different home."

Next comes the reaction upon motherhood, the most vital fact in the whole institution. Our home conditions affect motherhood injuriously in many ways. The ownership of the woman by the man has developed a false code of morals and manners, under which girls are not reared in understanding of the privileges, rights, and pre-eminent duties of motherhood. We make the duty to the man first, the duty to the child second-an artificial and mischievous relation. There is no more important personal function than motherhood, and every item of arrangement in the family, in the home, should subtend its overmastering interests.

Ownership of women first interferes with the power of selection so essential to right motherhood, and, second, enforces motherhood undesired- a grave physiological evil. The ensuant condition of female servitude is an injury in demanding labor incompatible with right maternity, and in lowering the average of heredity through the arrest of social development in the mother. It is not good for the race that the majority of its female parents should be unskilled laborers, plus a few unskilled idlers.

In poverty the overworked woman dreads maternity, and avoids it if she can. If she cannot, her unwelcome and too frequent children are not what is needed to build up our people. In wealth, the woman becomes a perpetual child, greedy and irresponsible, dreads maternity, and avoids it if she can. Her children are few and often frail. Neither the conditions of the poor home nor of the rich tend to a joyous and competent maternity.