Marriage, argued writer, actor and feminist Cicely Hamilton at the height of the suffrage campaign in 1909, is a leading cause of the economic and social disabilities suffered by women. ‘It is ridiculous to suppose that nature, who never makes two blades of grass alike, desired to turn out indefinite millions of women all cut to the regulation pattern of wifehood.’ Marriage, for women, is a compulsory trade, simply an exchange of persons for the means of subsistence, and thus akin to prostitution. Its reality as ‘a sweated trade’ and the status of women as ‘class wives’ is concealed and maintained by a variety of subterfuges on the part of men: the idea of women’s natural domestic instinct, of a ‘natural’ division of labour, of women’s deficient rationality, of women as nothing more than breeding machines and ‘the necessary adjunct to a frying pan’. Hamilton’s case is argued with uncompromising logic and a healthy dash of humour, and it includes the point, crucial to the reformers of both sanitary science and municipal housekeeping, that a trade thus exercised is hardly likely to be an efficient one, since the care of homes and families requires education, expertise, science and respect for the individual human dignity of those whose work it is.

Cicely Hamilton’s Marriage as a trade was a major document of Edwardian feminism. It provided an analysis of patriarchy without using the term, and it drew people’s attention to the economic subjection of women in the home as considerably more important than the vote. It was one of many texts on this theme, and Hamilton was one of many women who cast a critical eye over the conventional division between public and private worlds. Just as the women considered how the conduct of public life often favours warfare over welfare, so they thought it essential to look at how the conditions of home life interfere with the promotion of welfare. There were three tasks: to analyse what marriage and conventional family life does to people; to interrogate the status of children and childhood; and to re-envision the material and administrative design of homes. This chapter takes a journey through all these topics. It aims to show how some women reformers’ objections to militarism, aggression and power inequalities were reflected in their perspectives on personal life.