The Pinch of Poverty Author:Thomas Wright Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: "lions' providers." "LIONS' PROVIDERS." Among savages, " noble " or other, it is a common custom for the wife to perform whatever labour may be necessary f... more »or the maintenance of the home. She works while her lord and master fights or hunts, takes his lordly ease, or —if he happily have the means—gets drunk. Whether admirers of " the child of nature " extend their admiration to his views and practice upon the question of wife labour I will not pause to inquire, nor does the point really matter much. If the savage way be the natural one, I will take it that for once, at any rate, civilisation has improved upon nature. In civilised lands it is generally accounted a shameful thing for a man to live upon his wife's earnings, to allow —much more to force—her to work while he idles. In every grade of society, from the highest down to and including the poorly paid unskilled labourer class, such a man is held in contempt. It is true that in the latter class husband and wife have often both to work— to work for hire, that is; for that the woman should work as well as manage in the home department is of course understood. If people in this rank of life have a family—and, as a rule, they do have a family —some greater or lesser degree of wife labour will inmany instances become an absolute condition of existence with the household, seeing that unless wife as well as husband works neither can the family at large eat. But while the situation upon this point is accepted, it is lamented, and upon chivalrous as well as upon more material grounds. Moreover, here the husband, if not the only, is the chief bread-winner. The wife's smaller earnings merely supplement his, and so far as may be they are spent in some especial manner upon herself and the children. When, however, we get below th...« less