Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/636

618 as some economists have feared, the minute division of labor has a narrowing and dwarfing effect on the laborer's mind, then we might expect semi-specialized woman to be the mental superior of man, unless otherwise dwarfed. For, although the metes and bounds of her sphere are more rigid than his are, within those bounds each woman must as a rule cover the whole field, while he marks out for himself a small and constantly decreasing stint, leaving the rest to others. Much of her former work, to be sure, he has taken from her; and the moment he got it he began to divide it into specialties. But enough still remains for nobody knows how many specialties. What keeps these possible specialties fast bound in one?

The family implies a home, the home a home-keeper. The family system, plus monogamy, implies one woman to one home, and no more. The appearance of two women at work in one home implies that one of them has not yet been fitted into her normal place in the monogamic family system, or has dropped out of it. She is filling a gap in her own life by a service aimed to ease and amplify the life of another. In this way the home of the well-to-do may contain several women, and in such cases they generally do divide and specialize the work. So do the women who are filling interstices in their lives by working in hotels and boarding-houses.

But taking the average woman, even in the most civilized communities, whatever of her hardest-worked female ancestor's household duties are still necessary to be done, and can not be done away from home, she must do herself alone. She must also do whatever new kinds of work the diversifying tastes of herself and family have called into being. Has she any escape consistent with the maintenance of the family system?

Are we driven to this dilemma, that either the institution of the family, which has done so much to ennoble the race, must go, or else woman's work must for all time be prescribed, like that of the slave, while man's is elective? Must the already excessive heredity of her occupation and aptitudes be still further bred in and in? If so, what manner of person will she finally be?

I confess myself unable to answer these questions to my own satisfaction. Before attempting it let me call attention to the light they throw on the nature of the science of political economy. It has been called a mental science. It has been called a moral science. It has been treated as a deductive science. It has even been treated as a matter of mathematics. Yet here, at the very outset, we find half the objects of its solicitude bound fast in the embrace of biological evolution. Their economic destiny is sealed before they are born. It is a biological fact, and as such we must study it. It is a fact not wholly psychological, nor wholly ethical, nor sociological, but physiological as well. It comes as near as anything to being omni-biological.

It will serve us no good purpose to deceive ourselves in such