n ultimately prevent its
waters from reaching the sea.

Chapter IV. Woman and War.

But it may also be said, "Granting fully that you are right, that, as
woman's old fields of labour slip from her, she must grasp the new, or
must become wholly dependent on her sexual function alone, all the other
elements of human nature in her becoming atrophied and arrested through
lack of exercise: and, granting that her evolution being arrested,
the evolution of the whole race will be also arrested in her person:
granting all this to the full, and allowing that the bulk of human
labour tends to become more and more intellectual and less and less
purely mechanical, as perfected machinery takes the place of crude human
exertion; and that therefore if woman is to be saved from degeneration
and parasitism, and the body of humanity from arrest, she must receive a
training which will cultivate all the intellectual and all the physical
faculties with which she is endowed, and be allowed freely to employ
them; nevertheless, would it not be possible, and perhaps be well, that
a dividing line of some kind should be drawn between the occupations
of men and of women? Would it not, for example, be possible that
woman should retain agriculture, textile manufacture, trade, domestic
management, the education of youth, and medicine, in addition to
child-bearing, as her exclusive fields of toil; while, to the male,
should be left the study of abstract science, law and war, and
statecraft; as of old, man took war and the chase, and woman absorbed
the further labours of life? Why should there not be again a fair and
even division in the field of social labour?"

Superficially, this suggestion appears rational, having at least this
to recommend it, that it appears to harmonise with the course of human
evolution in the past; but closely examined, it will, we think, be found
to have no practical or scientific basis, and to be out of harmony with
the conditions of modern life. In ancient and primitive societies, the
mere larger size and muscular strength of man, and woman's incessant
physical activity in child-bearing and suckling and rearing the young,
made almost inevitable a certain sexual division of labour in almost
all countries, save perhaps in ancient Egypt. (The division of labour
between the sexes in Ancient Egypt and other exceptional countries, is
a matter of much interest, which cannot here be entered on.) Woman
naturally took the heavy