ABSTRACT
Actually, the policy of the barred door was, at the time, part of the habitual thinking of an epoGh. Everybody said " Woman's place is the-home ", without stopping to inquire whether that home could, or in fact did, provide her with the means whereby to live. So, working men, like middle-class men, felt that woman was not only a peril to their standards in industry and
the. professions ; they felt that she had no business to be there. Moreover, it was almost a slur on them, if she was there. There was something obscurely wrong about it; the idea offended them. It hurt their pride. It went against their deep, unconscious notions of what was right anci proper. All this was, at bottom, a matter of feeling, not of thinking. It had very little to do with the facts of working life, at any time. Workers who spoke and thought thus were, in so doing, departing from experience ; they were not thinking with their own minds. They were, without knowing it, taking over the thinking of the small leisured class.. In that class there was, once, a creature called the " lady ", a delicate, fragile being, who fainted at the sight of blood, and must be sheltered by her masculine protector from the harsh facts of common life. Of this being, the proper sphere was the drawing-room ; the room withdrawn from the struggle and the stress. This picture was long used to keep the middle-class girl in helpless ignorance, an4, often, to condemn her, if she remained single, as many did, to misery and want in her later years. Never at any time did it fit the circumstances or the actual living c~nditions of the great body of women; least of.all did it fit the women of the working class. Working-class women, whether they work at home or outside it, are, of course, the vast majority of their sex. At no time have they been "sheltered ". They have, however, been weakened, and that seriously, in their exposed struggle to make ends meet by notions that have never in the least fitted their case, or expressed the realities ·of their lives. The '' ladies '' have never been more than a handful. · The rest of womenkind have always, like their men-folk, worked because they had to.
