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18 Its existence, at any rate, justifies us in regarding marriage as essentially (from the woman's point of view) a commercial or trade undertaking. By marriage she earned her bread; and as the instinct of self-preservation drove man forth to hunt, to till the soil, to dig beneath it—to cultivate his muscles and his brain so that he might get the better of nature and his rivals—so brute necessity and the instinct of self-preservation in woman urged and enjoined on her the cultivation of those narrow and particular qualities of mind and body whereby desire might be excited and her wage obtained.

A man who was also a poet has thoughtfully explained that

(It must be very pleasant to be a man and to entertain that conviction.) Translated into feminine and vulgar prose, the effusion runs something like this—

The housekeeping trade is the only one open to us—so we enter the housekeeping trade in order to live. This is not always quite the same