yet sleeps to make his tea and clean his boots, has brought his tea late,

and polished his boots ill; may he not even sharplycondemn her, and assure
her she will have to leave unless she works harder and rises earlier? Does

he exclaim to her, "Divine child-bearer! Potential mother of the race!
Why should you clean my boots or bring up my tea, while I lie warm in bed?

Is it not enough you should have the holy and mysterious power of bringing
the race to life? Let that content you. Henceforth I shall get up at dawn

and make my own tea and clean my own boots, and pay you just the same!"
Or, should his landlady, now about to give birth to her ninth child, send

him up a poorly-cooked dinner or forget to bring up his scuttle of coals,
does he send for her and thus apostrophise the astonished matron: "Child-

bearer of the race! Producer of men! Cannot you be contented with so
noble and lofty a function in life without toiling and moiling? Why carry

up heavy coal-scuttles from the cellar and bend over hot fires, wearing out
nerve and brain and muscle that should be reserved for higher duties? We,

we, the men of the race, will perform its mean, its sordid, its grinding
toil! For woman is beauty, peace, repose! Your function is to give life,

not to support it by labour. The Mother, the Mother! How wonderful it
sounds! Toil no more! Rest is for you; labour and drudgery for us!"

Would he not rather assure her that, unless she laboured more assiduously
and sternly, she would lose his custom and so be unable to pay her month's

rent; and perhaps so, with children and an invalid or drunken husband whom
she supports, be turned out into the streets? For, it is remarkable, that,

with theorists of this class, it is not toil, or the amount of toil,
crushing alike to brain and body, which the female undertakes that is

objected to; it is the form and the amount of the reward. It is not the
hand-labouring woman, even in his own society, worn out and prematurely

aged at forty with grinding domestic toil, that has no beginning and knows
no end--

"Man's work is from sun to sun,
But the woman's work is never done"--

it is not the haggard, work-crushed woman and mother who irons his shirts,
or the potential mother who destroys health and youth in the sweater's den

where she sews the garments in which he appears so radiantly in the
drawing-room which disturbs him. It is the thought of the woman-doctor

with an income of some hundreds a year, who drives round in her carriage to
see her patients, or receives them in her consulting-rooms, and who spends

the evening smoking and reading before her study fire or receiving her
guests; it is the thought of the woman who, as legislator, may loll for

perhaps six hours of the day on the padded seat of legislative bench,
relieving the tedium now and then by a turn in the billiard- or

refreshment-room, when she is not needed to vote or speak; it is the
thought of the woman as Greek professor, with three or four hundred a year,

who gives half a dozen lectures a week, and has leisure to enjoy the
society of her husband and children, and to devote to her own study and

life of thought; it is she who wrings his heart. It is not the woman, who,
on hands and knees, at tenpence a day, scrubs the floors of the public

buildings, or private dwellings, that fills him with anguish for womanhood:
that somewhat quadrupedal posture is for him truly feminine, and does not

interfere with his ideal of the mother and child-bearer; and that, in some
other man's house, or perhaps his own, while he and the wife he keeps for

his pleasures are visiting concert or entertainment, some weary woman paces
till far into the night bearing with aching back and tired head the

fretful, teething child he brought into the world, for a pittance of twenty
or thirty pounds a year, does not distress him. But that the same woman by

work in an office should earn one hundred and fifty pounds, be able to have
a comfortable home of her own, and her evening free for study or pleasure,

distresses him deeply. It is not the labour, or the amount of labour, so
much as the amount of reward that interferes with his ideal of the eternal

womanly; he is as a rule quite contented that the women of the race should
labour for him, whether as tea-pickers or washerwomen, or toilers for the

children he brings into the world, provided the reward they receive is not
large, nor in such fields as he might himself at any time desire to enter.

When master and ass, drawing a heavy burden between them, have climbed a
steep mountain range together; clambering over sharp rocks and across

sliding gravel where no water is, and herbage is scant; if, when they were
come out on the top of the mountain, and before them stretch broad, green

lands, and through wide half-open gates they catch the glimpse of trees
waving, and there comes the sound of running waters, if then, the master

should say to his ass, "Good beast of mine, lie down! I can push the whole
burden myself now: lie down here; lie down, my creature; you have toiled

enough; I will go on alone!" then it might be even the beast would whisper
(with that glimpse through the swinging gates of the green fields beyond)--

"Good master, we two have climbed this mighty mountain together, and the
stones have cut my hoofs as they cut your feet. Perhaps, if when we were

at the foot you had found out that the burden was two heavy for me, and had
then said to me, 'Lie down, my beastie; I will carry on the burden alone;

lie down and rest!' I might then have listened. But now, just here, where
I see the gates swinging open, a smooth road, and green fields before us, I

think I shall go on a little farther. We two have climbed together; maybe
we shall go on yet, side by side."

For the heart of labouring womanhood cries out today to the man who would
suggest she need not seek new fields of labour, that child-bearing is

enough for her share in life's labour, "Do you dare say to us now, that we
are fit to do nothing but child-bear, that when that is performed our

powers are exhausted? To us, who yet through all the ages of the past,
when child-bearing was persistent and incessant, regarded it hardly as a

toil, but rather as the reward of labour; has our right hand lost its
cunning and our heart its strength, that today, when human labour is easier

and humanity's work grows fairer, you say to us, 'You can do nothing now
but child-bear'? Do you dare to say this, to us, when the upward path of

the race has been watered by the sweat of our brow, and the sides of the
road by which humanity has climbed are whitened on either hand by the bones

of the womanhood that has fallen there, toiling beside man? Do you dare
say this, to us, when even today the food you eat, the clothes you wear,

the comfort you enjoy, is largely given you by the unending muscular toil
of woman?"

As the women of old planted and reaped and ground the grain that the
children they bore might eat; as the maidens of old spun that they might

make linen for their households and obtain the right to bear men; so,
though we bend no more over grindstones, or labour in the fields, or weave

by hand, it is our intention to enter all the new fields of labour, that we
also may have the power and right to bring men into the world. It is our

faith that the day comes in which not only shall no man dare to say, "It is
enough portion for a woman in life that she bear a child," but when it will

rather be said, "What noble labour has that woman performed, that she
should have the privilege of bringing a man or woman child into the world?"

But, it has also been objected, "What, and if the female half of humanity,
though able, in addition to the exercise of its reproductivefunctions, to

bear its share in the new fields of social labour as it did in the old, be
yet in certain directions a less productive labourer than the male? What

if, in the main, the result of the labour of the two halves of humanity
should not be found to be exactly equal?"

To this it may be answered, that it is within the range of possibility
that, mysteriously co-ordinated with the male reproductivefunction in the

human, there may also be in some directions a tendency to possess gifts for
labour useful and beneficial to the race in the stage of growth it has now

reached, in excess of those possessed by the female. We see no reason why
this should be so, and, in the present state of our knowledge, this is a

point on which no sane person would dogmatise; but it is possible! It may,
on the other hand be, that, taken in the bulk, when all the branches of

productive labour be considered, as the ages pass, the value of the labour
of the two halves of humanity will be found so identical and so closely to

balance, that no superiority can possibly be asserted of either, as the
result of the closest analysis. This also is possible.

But, it may also be, that, when the bulk and sum-total of human activities
is surveyed in future ages, it will be found that the value of the labour

of the female in the world that is rising about us, has exceeded in quality
or in quantity that of the male. We see no reason either, why this should

be; there is nothing in the nature of the reproductivefunction in the
female human which of necessity implies such superiority.

Yet it may be, that, with the smaller general bulk and the muscular
fineness, and the preponderance of brain and nervoussystem in net bulk

over the fleshy and osseous parts of the organism, which generally, though
by no means always, characterises the female as distinguished from the male

of the human species, there do go mental qualities which will peculiarly
fit her for the labours of the future. It may be, that her lesser

possession of the mere muscular and osseous strength, which were the