Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/121

 men and women of co-operative and gregarious temperaments.

These developments will, of course, bring with them their characteristic dangers and disadvantages. Neither progress nor stagnation is safe; but the one is life, the other is death. What is necessary is to face things as they are and not go on eternally pretending that the world is what it is not: that women all have sheltered happy homes, if only they would stay in them; that it is only idleness or perversity which prevents women from making their own bread (without a suitable oven) and stocking their own jam (without even a shelf to put it on). We have seen enough of the very serious disadvantages of modern industrialism to have a shrewd idea of what the dangers of further development will be, and it would be the wisest thing for sociologists not to attempt to sweep back the tide, but to direct its channels for the future.

The divorce of the producer and the consumer has had many bad effects as well as some good. While people prepared their own food and made their own clothes and furniture, there was a direct personal incentive to make them good. This incentive must be replaced by one as strong, or quality will drop. The modern producer finds it difficult to know what his enormous public wants, and it profits him to assert, by advertisement, that what he makes is what the public wants. The consumer is confused and helpless, disorganised and very open to suggestion. Moreover, the power of finance, of trusts and