class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 33]"/>electricity, mechanics, physics, chemistry, surgery, as well as events in the world of sports. On the other hand, the conversations among girls are almost entirely on the subject of boys, men, clothes and the theatre.

The psychology of the sexes in youth is totally different. The ideas of the average young man are those of one who expects to become some day a producer or at least a worker; the ideas of the average young woman are those of one who expects and intends (for here, too, Youth sees only personal victory) to rise into the leisure, non-producing or supported class.

The small boy sent forth to play with his comrades with his hair done up in curls by a fond mama, would encounter the jeers of the whole neighborhood. From babyhood, the ribbons, curls, frills and silks are for the girls, who are thereby rendered deeply conscious of their appearance and taught above all things to keep themselves clean and "looking nice."

Nothing is sacred from the invasion of small boys, who climb in, and under and over all obstacles to discover what makes the wheels go around, while the small girls sit about and take care of their clothes and learn to count them of supreme importance.

And the matter of clothes is a vital one to the woman of today. Clothes are the frame that enhances the picture as well as its price tag; they are the carton wrapping the package in the show window, the case that best displays the jewel for sale within.

All our social institutions encourage girls and young women, and all women up to the age of ninety, or more, in believing that it is the supreme good for a woman to make the best possible matrimonial bargain. On the stage, in our press, and pulpit, in the books and magazines produced for the consumption of the young people in this country, marriage is nearly always represented as the safe, ultimate and greatly-to-be-desired haven for a woman.

Hence, young women, intent upon securing the best the world has to offer, rarely take any sort of work seriously. They regard jobs as merely temporary conveniences, or inconveniences.

The wise employer hires ugly women stenographers, when he cannot afford to engage men, because he knows they usually possess more brains than their lovely sisters, and because they remain longer. The beautiful woman sees no need for intelligence nor for understanding because she has always been able to outstrip her less attractive competitors in making the best match and securing the rich husbands. And so her neurones rarely "connect," or react, except to stimuli pertaining to things that will enhance her charms and increase her selling price.

The young man expects to accomplish something in the world, to earn much money, or "high position," in order to be able to marry the most charming girl. The "most charming girl," if she be temporarily forced to earn her own living, expects to find somebody who will marry her, give her more luxuries than she has been accustomed to, and lift her far above her companions. She hopes to become a member of the leisure class even if she never attains it.

Arnold Bennett says that men usually marry through the desire to mate, while women marry for economic reasons. It seems to us that this is often true.

Women are potential parasites even if they never become real ones, and this is the gist of the matter we are discussing. Why are nearly all small farmers reactionary, individualistic, distrustful, competitive? Because they hope some day to become gentleman farmers. Why are most small business men narrow, egoistic, conservative? For the reason that they hope one day to become men of Big Business. The young woman in America today possesses the same psychology. Being young, she not only hopes, she expects, to rise into the leisure class when some young man asks her for the privilege of supporting her through life.

We are making no claim that the lot of millions of housekeeping mothers, married to working men, is more enviable than is the condition of their husbands. We merely wish to point out that millions of women, potentially, actually, or psychologically, are "of the leisure class," and that fact and expectation keep women, as a sex, allied to the forces of reaction. When a woman is competing in a life and death struggle among a score of other young women, to make a permanent legal bargain which entails the promise of an income or support for life, she has little leisure or energy to spare in making over, or revolutionizing the present social system.

The mind of the average woman today is that of the petty shop-keeper. Entertaining, ofttimes, impossible dreams, these dreams, are, nevertheless, productive of a conservative and bourgeois ideology of a life of leisure and non-productiveness.

It was the machine process in production that permitted the rise of a parasitical, or leisure, class. As long as both men and women were forced to produce things in order to live, an exploiting class, that lives off the labor of others, was impossible. But as spinning, weaving, canning, soap-making, butter, bread, candle, clothes-making and a hundred other functions formerly performed by women in the home, were absorbed into the factories, the young girls often followed the old task into the new plant. This was also true of the boys on the farms, who turned toward the cities and entered factories, where hogs were slaughtered, farm machines manufactured, or where shoes were made.

But the farm youths expected to become permanent producers in the shops and mills; they sought to become able to support a woman, and, perhaps, children. The girls entering the factories, on the other hand, did so to earn money to help pay their expenses at home until they married, or in order to buy gay and expensive clothes, unconsciously, perhaps, for advertising as well as decorative purposes.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FAMILY

Undoubtedly the early savages drew together for self-protection against their forest enemies. And out of this necessity grew the love of society. Man became a gregarious animal.

Promiscuity in sexual intercourse among these herds was another factor for holding the tribes, or groups together.

In his "Origin of the Family," Frederick Engels says:

"The development of the family is founded on the continual contraction of the circle, originally comprising the whole tribe, within which marital intercourse between both sexes was general. By the continual exclusion, first of near, then of ever remoter relatives, including finally even those who were simply related legally, all group marriage becomes practically impossible. At last only one couple, temporarily and loosely united, remains ... even from this we may infer how little the sexual love of the individual in the modern sense of the word had to do with the origin of monogamy."

Any casual student of sociology can prove that marriage and the family have not always been what they are today. Lewis J. Morgan, in his well-known work, "Ancient Society," says:

"When the fact is accepted that the family has passed through four successive forms, and is now in a fifth, the question at once arises whether this form can be permanent in the future. The only answer that can be given is that it must advance as society advances, and change as society changes, even as it has done in the past. It is the creature of the social