lean my own boots, and pay you just the same!" Or, should his
landlady, now about to give birth to her ninth child, send him up a
poorly-cooked dinner or forget to bring up his scuttle of coals, does he
send for her and thus apostrophise the astonished matron: "Child-bearer
of the race! Producer of men! Cannot you be contented with so noble and
lofty a function in life without toiling and moiling? Why carry up heavy
coal-scuttles from the cellar and bend over hot fires, wearing out nerve
and brain and muscle that should be reserved for higher duties? We, we,
the men of the race, will perform its mean, its sordid, its grinding
toil! For woman is beauty, peace, repose! Your function is to give life,
not to support it by labour. The Mother, the Mother! How wonderful it
sounds! Toil no more! Rest is for you; labour and drudgery for
us!" Would he not rather assure her that, unless she laboured more
assiduously and sternly, she would lose his custom and so be unable to
pay her month's rent; and perhaps so, with children and an invalid or
drunken husband whom she supports, be turned out into the streets? For,
it is remarkable, that, with theorists of this class, it is not toil, or
the amount of toil, crushing alike to brain and body, which the female
undertakes that is objected to; it is the form and the amount of the
reward. It is not the hand-labouring woman, even in his own society,
worn out and prematurely aged at forty with grinding domestic toil, that
has no beginning and knows no end--

"Man's work is from sun to sun,
But the woman's work is never done"--

it is not the haggard, work-crushed woman and mother who irons his
shirts, or the potential mother who destroys health and youth in
the sweater's den where she sews the garments in which he appears so
radiantly in the drawing-room which disturbs him. It is the thought
of the woman-doctor with an income of some hundreds a year, who drives
round in her carriage to see her patients, or receives them in her
consulting-rooms, and who spends the evening smoking and reading before
her study fire or receiving her guests; it is the thought of the woman
who, as legislator, may loll for perhaps six hours of the day on the
padded seat of legislative bench, relieving the tedium now and then by
a turn in the billiard- or refreshment-room, when she is not needed to
vote or speak; it is the thought of the woman as Greek professor, with
three or four hundred a year, who gi