Page:The Business of being a Woman by Ida Tarbell.djvu/226

 is that the labor of the world is naturally divided between the two different beings that people the world. It is unfair to the woman that she be asked to do the work of the outer circle. The man can do that satisfactorily if she does her part; that is, if she prepares him the material. Certainly, he can never come into the inner circle and do her work.

The idea that there is a kind of inequality for a woman in minding her own business and letting man do the same, comes from our confused and rather stupid notion of the meaning of equality. Popularly we have come to regard being alike as being equal. We prove equality by wearing the same kind of clothes, studying the same books, regardless of nature or capacity or future life. Insisting that women do the same things that men do, may make the two exteriorly more alike—it does not make them more