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 frequent liability to slight illnesses, her weaker initiative, her inferior invention and resourcefulness, her relative incapacity for organisation and combination, and the possibilities of emotional complications whenever she is in economic dependence on men. so long as women are compared economically with men and boys they will be inferior in precisely the measure in which they differ from men. all that constitutes this difference they are supposed not to trade upon except in one way, and that is by winning or luring a man to marry, selling themselves in an almost irrevocable bargain, and then following and sharing his fortunes for “better or worse.”

but — do not let the proposition in its first crudity alarm you — suppose the modern utopia equalises things between the sexes in the only possible way, by insisting that motherhood is a service to the state and a legitimate claim to a living; and that, since the state is to exercise the right of forbidding or sanctioning motherhood, a woman who is, or is becoming, a mother, is as much entitled to wages above the minimum wage, to support, to freedom, and to respect and dignity as a policeman, a solicitor-general, a king, a bishop in the state church, a government professor, or anyone else the state sustains. suppose the state secures to every woman who is, under legitimate sanctions, becoming or likely to become a mother, that is to say who is duly married, a certain wage from her husband to secure her against the need of toil and anxiety, suppose it pays her a certain gratuity upon the birth of a child, and continues to pay at regular intervals sums sufficient to keep her and her child in independent freedom, so long as the child keeps up to the minimum standard of health and physical and mental development. suppose it pays more upon the child when it rises markedly above certain minimum qualifications, physical or mental, and, in fact, does its best to make thoroughly efficient motherhood a profession worth following. and suppose in correlation with this it forbids the industrial employment of married women and of mothers who have children needing care, unless they are in a position to employ qualified efficient substitutes to take care of their offspring. what differences from terrestrial conditions will ensue?

this extent of intervention will at least abolish two or three salient hardships and evils of the civilised life. it will abolish the hardship of the majority of widows, who on earth are poor and encumbered exactly in proportion as they have discharged the chief distinctive duty of a woman, and miserable, just in proportion as their standard of life and of education is high. it will abolish the hardship of those who do not now marry on account of poverty, or who do not dare to have children. the fear that often turns a woman from a beautiful to a mercenary marriage will vanish from life. in utopia a career of wholesome motherhood would be, under such conditions as i have suggested, the normal and remunerative calling for a woman, and a capable woman who has borne, bred, and begun the education of eight or nine well-built, intelligent, and successful sons and daughters would be an extremely prosperous woman, quite irrespective of the economic fortunes of the man she has married. she would need to be an exceptional woman, and she would need to have chosen a man at least a little above the average as her partner in life. but his death, or misbehaviour, or misfortunes would not ruin her.

now such an arrangement is merely the completed induction from the starting propositions that make some measure of education free and compulsory for every child in the state. if you prevent people making profit out of their children — and every civilised state — even that compendium of old-fashioned individualism, the united states of america — is now disposed to admit the necessity of that prohibition — and if you provide for the aged instead of leaving them to their children’s sense of duty, the practical inducements to parentage, except among very wealthy people, are greatly reduced. the sentimental factor in the case rarely leads to more than a solitary child or at most two to a marriage, and with a high and rising standard of comfort and circumspection it is unlikely that the birth-rate will ever rise very greatly again. the utopians will hold that if you keep the children from profitable employment for the sake of the future, then, if you want any but the exceptionally rich, secure, pious, unselfish, or reckless to bear children freely, you must be prepared to throw the cost of their maintenance upon the general community.

in short, utopia will hold that sound childbearing and rearing is a service done, not to a particular man, but to the whole community, and all its legal arrangements for motherhood will be based on that conception.