astie;
I will carry on the burden alone; lie down and rest!' I might then have
listened. But now, just here, where I see the gates swinging open, a
smooth road, and green fields before us, I think I shall go on a little
farther. We two have climbed together; maybe we shall go on yet, side by
side."

For the heart of labouring womanhood cries out today to the man who
would suggest she need not seek new fields of labour, that child-bearing
is enough for her share in life's labour, "Do you dare say to us
now, that we are fit to do nothing but child-bear, that when that is
performed our powers are exhausted? To us, who yet through all the ages
of the past, when child-bearing was persistent and incessant, regarded
it hardly as a toil, but rather as the reward of labour; has our right
hand lost its cunning and our heart its strength, that today, when human
labour is easier and humanity's work grows fairer, you say to us, 'You
can do nothing now but child-bear'? Do you dare to say this, to us, when
the upward path of the race has been watered by the sweat of our brow,
and the sides of the road by which humanity has climbed are whitened on
either hand by the bones of the womanhood that has fallen there, toiling
beside man? Do you dare say this, to us, when even today the food you
eat, the clothes you wear, the comfort you enjoy, is largely given you
by the unending muscular toil of woman?"

As the women of old planted and reaped and ground the grain that the
children they bore might eat; as the maidens of old spun that they might
make linen for their households and obtain the right to bear men; so,
though we bend no more over grindstones, or labour in the fields,
or weave by hand, it is our intention to enter all the new fields of
labour, that we also may have the power and right to bring men into the
world. It is our faith that the day comes in which not only shall no man
dare to say, "It is enough portion for a woman in life that she bear
a child," but when it will rather be said, "What noble labour has that
woman performed, that she should have the privilege of bringing a man or
woman child into the world?"

But, it has also been objected, "What, and if the female half of
humanity, though able, in addition to the exercise of its reproductive
functions, to bear its share in the new fields of social labour as it
did in the old, be yet in certain directions a less productive labourer
than the male? What if, in the main, the