Post-Prandial Philosophy, page 109 by Grant Allen
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us 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 so-called Socialism--for to me your Socialist is the true and only individualist. My correspondent's argument is written from the standpoint of the class in which women have or may have money. But most women have none; and schemes of reconstruction must be for the benefit of the many. So-called individualists seem to think that under a more organised social state they would not be so able to buy pictures as at present, not so free to run across to California or Kamschatka. I doubt their premiss, for I believe we should all of us be better off than we are to-day; but let that pass; 'tis a detail. The main thing is this: they forget t