gone for ever; and, would you and yours
swim again, it must be in other waters." New machinery, new duties.)

But it is not only, nor even mainly, in the sphere of women's material
domestic labours that change has touched her and shrunk her ancient
field of labour.

Time was, when the woman kept her children about her knees till adult
years were reached. Hers was the training and influence which shaped
them. From the moment when the infant first lay on her breast, till her
daughters left her for marriage and her sons went to take share in man's
labour, they were continually under the mother's influence. Today,
so complex have become even the technical and simpler branches of
education, so mighty and inexorable are the demands which modern
civilisation makes for specialised instruction and training for all
individuals who are to survive and retain their usefulness under modern
conditions, that, from the earliest years of its life, the child is of
necessity largely removed from the hands of the mother, and placed
in those of the specialised instructor. Among the wealthier classes,
scarcely is the infant born when it passes into the hands of the trained
nurse, and from hers on into the hands of the qualified teacher; till,
at nine or ten, the son in certain countries often leaves his home for
ever for the public school, to pass on to the college and university;
while the daughter, in the hands of trained instructors and dependents,
owes in the majority of cases hardly more of her education or formation
to maternal toil. While even among our poorer classes, the infant
school, and the public school; and later on the necessity for manual
training, takes the son and often the daughter as completely, and always
increasingly as civilisation advances, from the mother's control. So
marked has this change in woman's ancient field of labour become, that a
woman of almost any class may have borne many children and yet in early
middle age be found sitting alone in an empty house, all her offspring
gone from her to receive training and instruction at the hands of
others. The ancient statement that the training and education of her
offspring is exclusively the duty of the mother, however true it
may have been with regard to a remote past, has become an absolute
misstatement; and the woman who should at the present day insist on
entirely educating her own offspring would, in nine cases out of ten,
inflict an irreparable injury on them,