Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/111

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ECONOMIC PROBLEM : THE MOTHER
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millions of cases where the man's total earnings are inadequate. Many men, even now, give, not a proportion, but practically the whole of their wages to the wife to administer. A fixed proportion of one wage may be enough, and the same proportion of another too little, and a small family may easily be brought up on what would be penury for a large one.

What is urgently needed is, that the problem should be dealt with by men and women not in the spirit of bargaining, or endeavouring each to best the other, but with a single endeavour to do right by one another and by the child. Nature has so arranged matters that the women cannot evade a considerable portion of the burden of parentage. Men can, and not infrequently do, evade the whole of the burden of parentage. Together all good men and women should so contrive their body politic that every child shall have the care and nurture it requires. Hitherto man's outlook as regards marriage has been personal rather than racial. When the inequality of the marriage law with regard to infidelity is objected to, he has, for ages past, explained that he has made infidelity a more serious fault in a woman than in a man, because the result of it in a woman might be that her husband would have to support another man's child. This is so, of course, but it is generally a far less serious injury to the race than the results of a man's infidelity are. It seems to be a law of nature that some of the present must always be sacrificed for