barter. Men, as a sex, are buyers of, or barterers for, this commodity. The general attitude on this question of sex may be, and in fact usually is, wholly unconscious; but the fact remains that men and women meet each other, in the capitalist system, as buyers and sellers of, or barterers for, a commodity.
Scarcely anybody recognizes this fact, and those who sense it fail to understand the inevitable result upon society and upon women themselves. There is no office or saloon scrub-woman so displeasing and decrepit, no stenographer so old and so unattractive, no dish-washer so sodden, that she does not know, tucked far away in her inner consciousness, perhaps, that, if the very worst comes and she loses her job, there is the truck driver or the office clerk, the shaky-legged bar patron on the road to early locomotor ataxia, or the squint-eyed out-of-town salesman, who can be counted on to tide
