Our entire
civilization -- that is whatever is good in it -- is based on the
home." The "home" is the household with a male head. This view,
but commonly expressed even more chastely, is the prevailing view
of the woman's status, not only among the common run of the men
of civilized communities, but among the women as well. Women have
a very alert sense of what the scheme of proprieties requires,
and while it is true that many of them are ill at ease under the
details which the code imposes, there are few who do not
recognize that the existing moral order, of necessity and by the
divine right of prescription, places the woman in a position
ancillary to the man. In the last analysis, according to her own
sense of what is good and beautiful, the woman's life is, and in
theory must be, an expression of the man's life at the second
remove.
But in spite of this pervading sense of what is the good and
natural place for the woman, there is also perceptible an
incipient development of sentiment to the effect that this whole
arrangement of tutelage and vicarious life and imputation of
merit and demerit is somehow a mistake. Or, at least, that even
if it may be a natural growth and a good arrangement in its time
and place, and in spite of its patent aesthetic value, still it
does not adequately serve the more everyday ends of life in a
modern industrial community.
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