active sexual reproduction is concerned,
there is opened to the female a certain world of sensations and
experiences, from which her male companion is for ever excluded.

So also is our human world: alike in the sports, and joys, and sorrows
of infancy; alike in the non-sexual labours of life; alike even in the
possession of that initial instinct which draws sex to sex, and which,
differing slightly in its forms of manifestation is of corresponding
intensity in both; the moment actual reproduction begins to take place,
the man and the woman enter spheres of sensation, perception, emotion,
desire, and knowledge which are not, and cannot be, absolutely
identical. Between the man who, in an instant of light-hearted
enjoyment, begets the infant (who may even beget it in a state of
half-drunken unconsciousness, and may easily know nothing of its
existence for months or years after it is born, or never at all; and who
under no circumstances can have any direct sensational knowledge of its
relation to himself) and the woman who bears it continuously for months
within her body, and who gives birth to it in pain, and who, if it is to
live, is compelled, or was in primitive times, to nourish it for
months from the blood of her own being--between these, there exists of
necessity, towards a limited but all-important body of human interests
and phenomena, a certain distinct psychic attitude. At this one point,
the two great halves of humanity stand confronting certain great
elements in human existence, from angles that are not identical. From
the moment the universal initial attraction of sex to sex becomes
incarnate in the first concrete sexual act till the developed offspring
attains maturity, no step in the reproductive journey, or in their
relation to their offspring, has been quite identical for the man and
the woman. And this divergence of experiences in human relations must
react on their attitude towards that particular body of human concerns
which directly is connected with the sexual reproduction of the race;
and, it is exactly in these fields of human activity, where sex as sex
is concerned, that woman as woman has a part to play which she cannot
resign into the hands of others.

It may be truly said that in the laboratory, the designing-room, the
factory, the mart, the mathematician's study, and in all fields of
purely abstract or impersonal labour, while the entrance of woman would
add to the net result of human labou