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MARRIAGE AS A TRADE
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them; to know more of the good in them, more of the ill; she has met and talked with them without compliment and without ceremony; has taken orders from and been rebuked by them; has been to them fellow-worker and sometimes friend; has sometimes met and fought the brute in them. In the same way she has worked with women and learned to know them; and the result of her experience is, that she has lost any natural distrust of her own sex which she may once have possessed; has come to rely upon her own sex for the help which she herself is willing enough to render. The sense of a common interest, the realization of common disabilities, have forced her into class-consciousness and partisanship of her class. I know many women of the type I have described—women who have gone through the mill, some married, some unmarried. And of them all I know hardly one whose life is not affected, to an appreciable extent, by the sense of fellowship with her sisters.

The average man, it seems to me, fails utterly to realize how strong this sense of fellowship, of trade unionism, can be in us; he has (as I have already pointed out) explained away its