labours, we find
that fully three-fourths of it have shrunk away for ever, and that the
remaining fourth still tends to shrink.

It is this great fact, so often and so completely overlooked, which lies
as the propelling force behind that vast and restless "Woman's Movement"
which marks our day. It is this fact, whether clearly and intellectually
grasped, or, as is more often the case, vaguely and painfully felt,
which awakes in the hearts of the ablest modern European women their
passionate, and at times it would seem almost incoherent, cry for new
forms of labour and new fields for the exercise of their powers.

Thrown into strict logical form, our demand is this: We do not ask that
the wheels of time should reverse themselves, or the stream of life
flow backward. We do not ask that our ancient spinning-wheels be again
resuscitated and placed in our hands; we do not demand that our old
grindstones and hoes be returned to us, or that man should again betake
himself entirely to his ancient province of war and the chase, leaving
to us all domestic and civil labour. We do not even demand that society
shall immediately so reconstruct itself that every woman may be again a
child-bearer (deep and over-mastering as lies the hunger for motherhood
in every virile woman's heart!); neither do we demand that the children
whom we bear shall again be put exclusively into our hands to train.
This, we know, cannot be. The past material conditions of life have gone
for ever; no will of man can recall them; but this is our demand: We
demand that, in that strange new world that is arising alike upon
the man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are
assuming new shapes and relations, that in this new world we also shall
have our share of honoured and socially useful human toil, our full
half of the labour of the Children of Woman. We demand nothing more than
this, and we will take nothing less. This is our "WOMAN'S RIGHT!"

Chapter II. Parasitism (continued).

Is it to be, that, in the future, machinery and the captive motor-forces
of nature are largely to take the place of human hand and foot in
the labour of clothing and feeding the nations; are these branches
of industry to be no longer domestic labours?--then, we demand in the
factory, the warehouse, and the field, wherever machinery has usurped
our ancient labour-ground, that we also should have our place, as
guiders, controllers, and possessors. Is child-be