to do, the things they want. Observe first of all that they
want very little for themselves. Even their political liberty they want
only because it will enable them to get other things--things needed,
directly or indirectly, by children. Most of the things are directly
needed,--playgrounds, school gardens, child-labor laws, juvenile courts,
kindergartens, pure food laws, and other visible tokens of child
concern. Many of the other things are indirectly needed by
children,--ten-hour working days, seats for shop girls, protection from
dangerous machinery, living wages, opportunities for safe and wholesome
pleasures, peace and arbitration, social purity, legal equality with
men, all objects which tend to conserve the future mothers of children.
These are the things women want.

In my introductory chapter I cited three extremely grave and significant
facts which confront modern civilization. The first was the fact of
women's growing economic freedom, their emancipation from domestic
slavery. I believe that women would not wish to be economically free if
their instinct gave them any warning that freedom for them meant danger
to their children. But no observer of social conditions can have failed
to observe the oceans of misery endured by women and children because of
their economic dependence on the fortunes of husbands and fathers.

Whatever may be the solution of poverty, whatever be the future status
of the family, it seems certain to me that some way will be devised
whereby motherhood will cease to be a privately supported profession. In
some way society will pay its own account. If producing citizens to the
State be the greatest service a woman citizen can perform, the State
will ultimately recognize the right of the woman citizen to protection
during her time of service. The first step towards solving the problem
is for women to learn to support themselves before the time comes for
them to serve the State. Through the educating process of productive
labor the woman mind may devise a means of protecting the future mothers
of the race.

The second fact, the growing prevalence of divorce, on the face of it
seems to menace the security of the home and of children. So deeply
overlain with prejudice, conventionalities, and theological traditions
is the average woman as well as the average man that it is difficult to
argue in favor of a temporary tolerance of divorce that a permanent high
standard of marriage may be establ