Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/73

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DEMOCRACY
49

for a man to look on life with a woman's eyes. To begin with, as long as he insists on being absolute master, there is the unbridgeable gulf between those who command and those who obey, and the tendency of this "division of labour" (as the reactionaries humorously call it) to result in making men conceive it is theirs to think and act and woman's to feel. "Men must work and women must weep" is perhaps the most fatuous expression in all literature of this attitude. Men are rich and women are poor. Men are employers and women are employed. Wage-earning men think mainly of wages, women are more concerned with prices. Men enjoy fighting for its own sake, women only suffer from fighting. Men's part in parentage involves only the satisfaction of passion and appetite; women's part may involve these, but it also involves much suffering and long care. It follows from the apportionment of men's and women's work and interests that in the main men will be more concerned for property and women more concerned for the person, and our laws and administration amply bear this out. It follows also that men will spend money upon the things they care most about, and starve the things they care less about. We see millions lavished on war and destruction, on monuments of stone and iron, on pomp and circumstance: we see health wasted, human creatures neglected, education slighted. The titles and the honours go to those who make money and take life. "Things are