WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA
dred children born should not live to a ripe age. Accordingly, in any modern Utopia, it must be insisted they will.
§ 3
All former Utopias have, by modern standards, erred on the side of over-regulation in these matters. The amount of State interference with the marriage and birth of the citizens of a modern Utopia will be much less than in any terrestrial State. Here, just as in relation to property and enterprise, the law will regulate only in order to secure the utmost freedom and initiative.
Up to the beginning of this chapter, our Utopian speculations, like many Acts of Parliament, have ignored the difference of sex. "He" indeed is to be read as "He and She" in all that goes before. But we may now come to the sexual aspects of the modern ideal of a constitution of society in which, for all purposes of the individual, women are to be as free as men. This will certainly be realised in the Modern Utopia if it can be realised at all—not only for woman's sake, but for man's.
But women may be free in theory and not in practice, and as long as they suffer from their economic inferiority, from the inability to produce as much value as a man for the same amount of work—and there can be no doubt of this inferiority—so long will their legal and technical equality be a mockery. It is a fact that almost every point in which a woman differs from a man is an economic disadvantage to her, her incapacity for great stresses of exertion, her
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