fields of intellectual or physical toil, because we are
unable to see today, with regard to them, any dividing wall raised by
sex which excludes us from them. We are yet equally determined to enter
those in which sex difference does play its part, because it is here
that woman, the bearer of the race, must stand side by side with man,
the begetter; if a completed human wisdom, an insight that misses no
aspect of human life, and an activity that is in harmony with the entire
knowledge and the entire instinct of the entire human race, is to exist.
It is here that the man cannot act for the woman nor the woman for the
man; but both must interact. It is here that each sexual half of the
race, so closely and indistinguishably blended elsewhere, has its own
distinct contribution to make to the sum total of human knowledge and
human wisdom. Neither is the woman without the man, nor the man without
the woman, the completed human intelligence.

Therefore;--We claim, today, all labour for our province! Those large
fields in which it would appear sex plays no part, and equally those
smaller in which it plays a part.

Chapter VI. Certain Objections.

It has been stated sometimes, though more often implicitly than in any
direct or logical form, (this statement being one it is not easy to make
definitely without its reducing itself to nullity!) that woman should
seek no fields of labour in the new world of social conditions that
is arising about us, as she has still her function as child-bearer: a
labour which, by her own showing, is arduous and dangerous, though she
may love it as a soldier loves his battlefield; and that woman should
perform her sex functions only, allowing man or the state to support
her, even when she is only potentially a child-bearer and bears no
children. (Such a scheme, as has before been stated, was actually put
forward by a literary man in England some years ago: but he had the
sense to state that it should apply only to women of the upper classes,
the mass of labouring women, who form the vast bulk of the English women
of the present day, being left to their ill-paid drudgery and their
child-bearing as well!)

There is some difficulty in replying to a theorist so wholly delusive.
Not only is he to be met by all the arguments against parasitism of
class or race; but, at the present day, when probably much more than
half the world's most laborious and ill-paid labour is still performed
by women, from