The uncompromising and rather brutal attitude which man has consistently adopted towards the spinster is, to my mind, a confirmation of this theory. (The corresponding attitude of the married woman towards her unmarried sister I take to be merely servile and imitative.) It was not only that the creature was chaste and therefore inhuman. That would have justified neglect and contempt on his part, but not the active dislike he always appears to have entertained for her. That active and somewhat savage dislike must have had its origin in the consciousness that the perpetual virgin was a witness, however reluctantly, to the unpalatable fact that sexual intercourse was not for every woman an absolute necessity; and this uneasy consciousness on his part accounts for the systematic manner in which he placed the spinster outside the pale of a chivalry, upon which, from her unprotected position, one would have expected her to have an especial claim.
If it be granted that marriage is, as I have called it, essentially a trade on the part of woman—the exchange of her person for the means of subsistence—it is legitimate to inquire into the manner in which that trade is carried on, and to compare the position of the worker in the matrimonial with the position of the worker in any other market. Which brings us at once to the fact—arising from the compulsory nature of the profession—that it is carried on under disadvantages unknown and unfelt by those who earn their living by other methods. For the regulations governing compulsory service—the institution of slavery and the like—are always framed, not in the interests of the worker, but in the interests of those who impose his work upon him. The regulations governing exchange and barter in the marriage market, therefore, are necessarily framed in the interests of the employer—the male.
The position is this. Marriage, with its accompaniments and consequences—the ordering of a man’s house, the bearing and rearing of his children—has, by the long consent of ages, been established as practically the only means whereby woman, with honesty and honour, shall earn her daily bread. Her every attempt to enter any other profession has been greeted at first with scorn and opposition; her sole outlook was to be dependence upon man. Yet the one trade to which she is destined, the one means of earning her bread to which she is confined, she may not openly profess. No other worker stands on the same footing. The man who has his bread to earn, with hands, or brains, or tools, goes out to seek for the work to which he is trained; his livelihood depending on it, he offers his skill and services without shame or thought of reproach. But with woman it is not so; she is expected to express unwillingness for the very work for which she has been taught and trained. She has been brought up in the belief that her profession is marriage and motherhood; yet though poverty may be pressing upon her—though she may be faced with actual lack of the necessities of life—she must not openly express her desire to enter that profession, and earn her bread in the only way for which she is fitted. She must stand aside and wait—indefinitely; and attain to her destined livelihood by appearing to despise it.