25. A Point of Criticism

A few pages back, I ventured to remark that in Utopia or the Millennium
the women of the community would probably be supported in common by the
labour of the men, and so be secured complete independence of choice and
action. When these essays first appeared in a daily newspaper, a Leader
among Women wrote to me in reply, "What a paradise you open up to us!
Alas for the reality! The question is--could women ever be really
independent if men supplied the means of existence? They would always
feel they had the right to control us. The difference of the position of
a woman in marriage when she has got a little fortune of her own is
something miraculous. Men adore money, and the possession of it inspires
them with an involuntary respect for the happy possessor."

Now I got a great many letters in answer to these Post-Prandials as they
originally came out--some of them, strange to say, not wholly
complimentary. As a rule, I am too busy a man to answer letters: and I
take this opportunity of apologising to correspondents who write to tell
me I am a knave or a fool, for not having acknowledged direct their
courteous communications. But this friendly criticism seems to call for
a reply, because it involves a question of principle which I have often
noted in all discussions of Utopias and Millennia.

For my generous critic seems to take it for granted that women are not
now dependent on the labour of men for their support--that some, or even
most of them, are in a position of freedom. The plain truth of it
is--almost all women depend for everything upon one man, who is or may
be an absolute despot. A very small number of women have "money of their
own," as we quaintly phrase it--that is to say, are supported by the
labour of many among us, either in the form of rent or in the form of
interest on capital bequeathed to them. A woman with five thousand a
year from Consols, for example, is in the strictest sense supported by
the united labour of all of us--she has a first mortgage to that amount
upon the earnings of the community. You and I are taxed to pay her. But
is she therefore more dependent than the woman who lives upon what she
can get out of the scanty earnings of a drunken husband? Does the
community therefore think it has a right to control her? Not a bit of
it. She is in point of fact the only free woman among us. My dream was
to see all women equally free--inheritors from the community of so much
of its earnings; holders, as it were, of sufficient world-consols to
secure their independence.

That, however, is not the main point to which I desire just now to
direct attention. I want rather to suggest an underlying fallacy of all
so-called individualists in dealing with schemes of