ld them that back of all their exalted mummeries, they desired to
see their daughters barter their sex for the highest and most enduring
stake rather than to see them selling their labor or brain power for
wages, or selling their sex on the installment, or retail plan, to the
chance purchaser. Yet these are the facts.

And it is this hope of bartering their sex privileges for permanent
support and the title of "wife" that keeps the girls of the working
class in the same category as the small shop-keeper. Nearly every
ordinary woman under ninety hopes some day to find a man who will marry
her and support her for the rest of her days. Instead of fitting herself
for a trade or a profession, young women, and old women, devote their
time to schemes for prevailing upon some man, to pay the ultimate price
and marry them.

And so women, not every individual, but as a =sex=, are ever
individualistic, ever competing among themselves, ever displaying their
wares, ever looking for a possible purchaser of the commodity they have
to sell, ever endeavoring to keep the purchaser satisfied and willing to
pay more.

Human beings are human =animals= however much we may pretend to the
contrary. In the rest of the animal world the fact of the mating season
is frankly acknowledged. It has never been recognized among humankind
within the period of written history. Is it possible that when women are
released from economic and social coercion, this periodic mating
instinct in the woman of the species may assert, or reassert, itself?

Wives and mistresses often submit to their husbands or lovers only
through fear of losing economic security to the ever alert competitor.
It is certain that when all men and all women have gained individual
economic opportunity and security, social institutions will change also.
May it not be possible that the jealousies now prevalent, because of the
economic import or the social standing that the private claim on the
individual brings, may vanish also?

WHICH IS SUPERIOR?

But do not imagine for a single moment that women are inferior to men.
Biology has long since proven that daughters inherit the same natural
tendencies from their fathers and their grandfathers, their mothers and
their grandmothers that sons do. In the case of the girls it is only as
it would be if the sons in a family all inherited a share in the
monopoly of a commodity that half the human race requires.

The son of your butcher may h