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Is it not also the source of the discontent to-day, among almost all classes of women, except the most highly educated and efficient? Women say our modern daughters, wives, and mothers: "In the home, we do income-work for which we do not receive income. When strangers do this work, they are paid, and we are not."
The university professor, no less than the day-laborer, finds his income too small for him, and says, "I, too, do income-work which does not bring me bread, books, travel, society, a summer home, and surroundings which are not only decent and sanitary, but refined and beautiful."
The complaint of the working-man, when really analyzed, runs down to this: I do income-work, but it does not bring me bread enough to live. Not only that, but ground down as I am by toil, all possibility of the larger, universal work is shut away from me. My faculties are atrophied paralyzed and hence my soul smoulders with deep and angry discontent.
Thus Thoreau, when he, "by surveying, carpentry and day-labor of various other kinds," had earned $13.34, was doing income-work, the work by which he had to live. For the same purpose, he worked at raising potatoes, green corn, and peas. When he wrote Walden, he did a kind of work which also in time brought him an income.
Unless he or she can do income-work, he or she is not economically independent; unless he can do universal work, he is not socially and spiritually free. Much of the present-day discontent is owing to the fact that these two kinds of work are not represented, as they should be, in every working-life.
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