married woman who writes novels or designs
fashion-plates. There is no condemnation of any kind of labour, in the
home or outside it, if the condition be complied with, that it does not
prejudice the inalienable first charge upon the mother's time and
energy. Her children are that first charge. It may perfectly well be,
and often is, chiefly though not exclusively in the more fortunate
classes, that the mother may earn money by other work without prejudice
to her motherhood. Such cases do not concern us, but we are urgently
concerned with married women's labour in the ordinary sense of the term,
which means that the mother goes out to tend some lifeless machine,
whilst her children are left at home to be cared far anyhow or not at
all. No student of infant mortality or the conditions of child life and
child survival in general has any choice but to condemn this whole
practice as evil, root and branch. And from the national and economic
point of view it may be said that whatever the mother makes in the
factory is of less value than the children who consequently die at home.
The culture of the racial life is the vital industry of any people, and
any industry that involves its destruction and needs the conditions
which make up that destruction, is one which the country cannot afford,
whatever its merely monetary balance-sheet. A complete balance-sheet,
with its record of children slain, would only too readily demonstrate
this.

Our right attitude toward married women's labour must depend upon a
right understanding of the social meaning of marriage. This was a
question which had to be dealt with at length in a previous volume and I
can only state here in a word, what was the conclusion come to. It was
that marriage is a device for supporting and buttressing motherhood by
fatherhood. Its mark is that it provides for _common parental care of
offspring_. A more prosaic way of stating the case would be that
marriage is a device for making the father responsible. If we go far
back in the history of the animal world, we find mating but not
marriage. The father's function is purely physiological, transient and
wholly irresponsible. The whole burden of caring for offspring, when
first there comes to be need for that care, in the history of organic
progress, falls upon the mother. But even amongst the fishes we find
that sometimes, as in the case of the stickleback, the father helps the
mother to build a sort of nest, and does "sen