n line should never repress the activities of the
individual creature, which we as women bring into the world.

But it may also be said to us, "What, and if, all your dreams and hopes
for woman and the future of the race be based on air? What, and if,
desirable as it is that woman should not become practically dependent on
her sexual function alone, and should play at least as great a part in
the productive labour of the race in the future as she played in that of
the past--what, if woman cannot take the same vast share in the complex
and largely mental labour fields of the future, as in the largely
physical fields of the past? What, and if, in spite of all her effort
and sacrifice to attain this end, exactly now and when the labour of
civilised societies becomes mental rather than mechanical, woman be
found wanting?"

In Swiss valleys today the traveller comes sometimes on the figure of
a solitary woman climbing the mountain-side, on her broad shoulders a
mighty burden of fodder or manure she is bearing up for the cattle, or
to some patch of cultivated land. Steady, unshrinking eyes look out
at you from beneath the deeply seamed forehead, and a strand of hair,
perhaps almost as white as the mountain snows on the peaks above,
escapes from under the edge of the binding handkerchief. The face is
seamed and seared with the stern marks of toil and endurance, as the
mountain-side is with marks of storm and avalanche. It is the face of
one who has brought men into the world in labour and sorrow, and toiled
mightily to sustain them; and dead must be the mind to the phases of
human existence, who does not see in that toilworn figure one of the
mighty pillars, which have in the long ages of the past sustained the
life of humanity on earth, and made possible its later development; and
much must the tinsel of life have dazzled him, who fails to mark it with
reverence and, metaphorically, to bow his head before it--the type of
the mighty labouring woman who has built up life.

But, it may be said, what if, in the ages to come, it should never again
be possible for any man to stand bowed with the same respect in the
presence of any other of earth's mighty toilers, who should also be
mother and woman? What, if she, who could combine motherhood with the
most unending muscular toil, will fall flaccid and helpless where the
labour becomes mental? What if, struggle as she will, she can become
nothing in the future but the pet pug-dog o