"
Surely this is special pleading and not very plausible at that. It may
be replied, "Is not the labourer worthy of his hire?"--however noble the
labour. If we choose to call society's or a husband's support of
motherhood "a form of commercial exchange," it is indeed "revolting" so
to see it; let us then look at the case as it is. We applaud the "cares
and duties of the mother, her travail and her love"; but the more
assiduous her maternity, and the more admirable, the more certainly will
she require to be fed. If she cannot simultaneously feed her child and
forage for herself, somebody must forage for her; and to say that
therefore the cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love,
become commodities to be exchanged for bread, is simply to cloud a clear
case with question-begging epithets. Always, everywhere, if motherhood
is to be performed at its highest, the mother must be supported. It is
not a question of commercial exchange, but of obvious natural necessity.
The foregoing chapter with its argument for the rights of mothers as a
great and neglected social principle, may be unsound throughout, but it
will certainly not be refuted by sentences such as these.
Briefly, Mrs. Gilman proposes to "do away with the family kitchen and
dining-room, to transform all domestic service from the incapable,
hand-to-mouth standard of untrained amateurs to that of professional
experts, to raise the work of child nursing and rearing to a scientific
and skilled basis, to secure the self-support of the wife and mother
through skilled labour, so that she may be economically independent of
her husband.
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