Page:Marriage as a Trade.djvu/213

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MARRIAGE AS A TRADE
205

anly woman"; now, from the "womanly woman" economic pressure and the law of self-preservation are producing a new type. It is no use for a bland and fatuous conservatism to repeat the parrot cry anent the sphere of woman being the home; we could not listen to its chirpings even if we would. For our stomachs are more insistent than any parrot cry, and they inform us that the sphere of woman, like the sphere of man, is the place where daily bread can be obtained.

There was a certain amount of truth in the formula once, in days when our social and industrial system was run on more primitive lines, when the factory was not, and the home was a place of trade and business as well as a place to live in. But the modern civilized home is, as a rule, and to all intents and purposes, only the shell of what it was before that revolution in industrial methods which began about the middle of the eighteenth century.

The alteration in the status and scope of the home is best and most clearly typified by the divided life led by the modern trader, manufacturer or man of business; who, in the morn-