Page:Marriage as a Trade.djvu/258

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XXI

AND the husband and father? What does he stand to gain or lose by that gradual readjustment of the conditions inside the home which must inevitably follow on the improvement of woman's position outside the home, the recognition of her right to an alternative career and the consequent discovery that she can be put to other uses than sexual attraction and maternity? How will he be affected by the fact that marriage has become a voluntary trade?

So far as one can see, he stands to lose something of his comfortable pride in his sex, his aristocratic pleasure in the accident of his birth, his aristocratic consciousness that deference is due to him merely because he was born in the masculine purple. The woman who has established her claim to humanity will no longer submit herself to the law of imposed stupidity; so

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