intained religious exercises in the
village, provided the church with a carpet by methods of indirection and
kept the church clean. She upheld a moral standard toward which men only
weakly struggled; hunted down and drove away all other women who refused
equal service to their lords; ministered to the neighboring sick; and
doled out alms in winter-time. Her home was a social and industrial
microcosm which she conducted as a feudal holding under the protection
of her lord. It would be an interesting study to work out the rules of
this feudal relation between husband and wife in any agricultural
community. They would be found as varied, as unjust and arbitrary, and
as generous, as those of the old regime in France.

A woman in a home is supposed to furnish three kinds of service. She
must be a housekeeper, a wife and a mother. As housekeeper, her services
can be estimated in current values running from three to twenty-five
dollars a week with board and lodging. The other two kinds of service
have never been reduced to monetary values.

As a wife, a woman is supposed to give her love, her person, her
sympathy and inspiration; the personal care of a husband, including his
clothes, attention to his relations and friends and general management
of his social position and reputation. If she fills this position well,
she is mistress, valet, confidential adviser and public entertainer.
Possibly these services can be rated except the first, and even here the
divorce courts scale alienated affections all the way from five hundred
to twenty-five thousand dollars, according to the appearance of the
woman and the skill of contending lawyers.

As a mother, the woman is supposed to give children a good heritage,
nurse them, care for them, doctor them and train them. We have
established values for these services as wet-nurse, nurse-maid,
governess, doctor and teacher, but who can estimate a woman's value in
giving a child a good heritage?

It is no wonder that such a difficult problem has remained thus far
unsolved. Here and there a man gives his wife a household allowance,
from the money they earn in common, and she struggles to save from it
some fragments for her individual needs; others put their wives on a
salary; and some others divide the income on a fractional basis. But the
slightest study of existing conditions must convince any one that women
are everywhere deeply dissatisfied with their economic relations to the
family. On