and additional labour, paid as much as our males towards the cost of
war; nor is it that in a comparatively insignificant manner, as
nurses of the wounded in modern times, or now and again as warrior
chieftainesses and leaders in primitive and other societies, we have
borne our part; nor is it even because the spirit of resolution in its
women, and their willingness to endure, has in all ages again and again
largely determined the fate of a race that goes to war, that we demand
our controlling right where war is concerned. Our relation to war is
far more intimate, personal, and indissoluble than this. Men have made
boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another; we
have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed! We have in all ages
produced, at an enormous cost, the primal munition of war, without which
no other would exist. There is no battlefield on earth, nor ever has
been, howsoever covered with slain, which is has not cost the women of
the race more in actual bloodshed and anguish to supply, then it has
cost the men who lie there. We pay the first cost on all human life.

In supplying the men for the carnage of a battlefield, women have not
merely lost actually more blood, and gone through a more acute anguish
and weariness, in the long months of bearing and in the final agony of
childbirth, than has been experienced by the men who cover it; but, in
the long months and years of rearing that follow, the women of the race
go through a long, patiently endured strain which no knapsacked soldier
on his longest march has ever more than equalled; while, even in the
matter of death, in all civilised societies, the probability that the
average woman will die in childbirth is immeasurably greater than the
probability that the average male will die in battle.

There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, or
be merely potentially a child-bearer, who could look down upon a
battlefield covered with slain, but the thought would rise in her, "So
many mothers' sons! So many bodies brought into the world to lie there!
So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped
within; so many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be; so
many baby mouths drawing life at woman's breasts;--all this, that men
might lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen bodies, and fixed, blue,
unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed--this, that an acre of ground
might be manured with hum