that as late as the middle of the
sixteenth century Martin Luther wrote: "If a woman becomes weary or at
last dead from bearing, that matters not; let her only die from bearing,
she is there to do it;" and he doubtless gave expression, in a crude
and somewhat brutal form, to a conviction common to the bulk of his
contemporaries, both male and female.

Today, this condition has almost completely reversed itself.

The advance of science and the amelioration of the physical conditions
of life tend rapidly toward a diminution of human mortality. The infant
death-rate among the upper classes in modern civilisations has fallen
by more than one-half; while among poorer classes it is already, though
slowly, falling: the increased knowledge of the laws of sanitation has
made among all highly civilised peoples the depopulation by plague a
thing of the past, and the discoveries of the next twenty or thirty
years will probably do away for ever with the danger to man of zymotic
disease. Famines of the old desolating type have become an impossibility
where rapid means of transportation convey the superfluity of one land
to supply the lack of another; and war and deeds of violence, though
still lingering among us, have already become episodal in the lives of
nations as of individuals; while the vast advances in antiseptic surgery
have caused even the effects of wounds and dismemberments to become only
very partially fatal to human life. All these changes have tended to
diminish human mortality and protract human life; and they have today
already made it possible for a race not only to maintain its numbers,
but even to increase them, with a comparatively small expenditure of
woman's vitality in the passive labour of child-bearing.

But yet more seriously has the demand for woman's labour as child-bearer
been diminished by change in another direction.

Every mechanical invention which lessens the necessity for rough,
untrained, muscular, human labour, diminishes also the social demand
upon woman as the producer in large masses of such labourers. Already
throughout the modern civilised world we have reached a point at which
the social demand is not merely for human creatures in the bulk for use
as beasts of burden, but, rather, and only, for such human creatures as
shall be so trained and cultured as to be fitted for the performance of
the more complex duties of modern life. Not, now, merely for many men,
but, rather, for few men, an