at times spoken of as though they were a something portentous and
unheard-of in the order of human life.

But, the truth is, we are not new. We who lead in this movement today
are of that old, old Teutonic womanhood, which twenty centuries ago
ploughed its march through European forests and morasses beside its male
companion; which marched with the Cimbri to Italy, and with the Franks
across the Rhine, with the Varagians into Russia, and the Alamani into
Switzerland; which peopled Scandinavia, and penetrated to Britain; whose
priestesses had their shrines in German forests, and gave out the oracle
for peace or war. We have in us the blood of a womanhood that was never
bought and never sold; that wore no veil, and had no foot bound; whose
realised ideal of marriage was sexual companionship and an equality in
duty and labour; who stood side by side with the males they loved in
peace or war, and whose children, when they had borne them, sucked
manhood from their breasts, and even through their foetal existence
heard a brave heart beat above them. We are women of a breed whose
racial ideal was no Helen of Troy, passed passively from male hand
to male hand, as men pass gold or lead; but that Brynhild whom Segurd
found, clad in helm and byrne, the warrior maid, who gave him counsel
"the deepest that ever yet was given to living man," and "wrought on him
to the performing of great deeds;" who, when he died, raised high the
funeral pyre and lay down on it beside him, crying, "Nor shall the door
swing to at the heel of him as I go in beside him!" We are of a race
of women that of old knew no fear, and feared no death, and lived great
lives and hoped great hopes; and if today some of us have fallen on evil
and degenerate times, there moves in us yet the throb of the old blood.

If it be today on no physical battlefield that we stand beside our men,
and on no march through no external forest or morass that we have to
lead; it is yet the old spirit which, undimmed by two thousand years,
stirs within us in deeper and subtler ways; it is yet the cry of
the old, free Northern woman which makes the world today. Though the
battlefield be now for us all, in the laboratory or the workshop, in the
forum or the study, in the assembly and in the mart and the political
arena, with the pen and not the sword, of the head and not the arm, we
still stand side by side with the men we love, "to dare with them in
war and to suffer with them in peac