Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic
independence through self-support who was responsible for the
ultimate aversion to childbearing in the Roman world--for SHE did
not exist. It could not have been the woman who desires full
citizenship--for she did not exist. What economic power and what
political power the Roman Empire woman desired and achieved was
parasitic--the economic power which comes from the inheritance of
estates, the political power which comes from the exercise of
sexual charm.
The one essential difference between the women of that ancient
modern world and the women of this contemporary modern world is
in the emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the
agitation for equal economic and political opportunity.
The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her
girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for
her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting
the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so
ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in
the intervals of her real work; going then into marriage with
none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable
toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his
prosperity--that sort of New Woman they had, just as we have her
in smaller number, it is true, but in identical character.
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