aring to become the
labour of but a portion of our sex?--then we demand for those among
us who are allowed to take no share in it, compensatory and equally
honourable and important fields of social toil. Is the training of
human creatures to become a yet more and more onerous and laborious
occupation, their education and culture to become increasingly a high
art, complex and scientific?--if so, then, we demand that high and
complex culture and training which shall fit us for instructing the race
which we bring into the world. Is the demand for child-bearing to
become so diminished that, even in the lives of those among us who are
child-bearers, it shall fill no more than half a dozen years out of the
three-score-and-ten of human life?--then we demand that an additional
outlet be ours which shall fill up with dignity and value the tale
of the years not so employed. Is intellectual labour to take ever and
increasingly the place of crude muscular exertion in the labour of
life?--then we demand for ourselves that culture and the freedom
of action which alone can yield us the knowledge of life and the
intellectual vigour and strength which will enable us to undertake the
same share of mental which we have borne in the past in physical labours
of life. Are the rulers of the race to be no more its kings and queens,
but the mass of the peoples?--then we, one-half of the nations, demand
our full queens' share in the duties and labours of government and
legislation. Slowly but determinately, as the old fields of labour close
up and are submerged behind us, we demand entrance into the new.

We make this demand, not for our own sakes alone, but for the succour of
the race.

A horseman, riding along on a dark night in an unknown land, may chance
to feel his horse start beneath him; rearing, it may almost hurl him to
the earth: in the darkness he may curse his beast, and believe its aim
is simply to cast him off, and free itself for ever of its burden.
But when the morning dawns and lights the hills and valleys he has
travelled, looking backward, he may perceive that the spot where his
beast reared, planting its feet into the earth, and where it refused to
move farther on the old road, was indeed the edge of a mighty precipice,
down which one step more would have precipitated both horse and rider.
And he may then see that it was an instinct wiser than his own which
lead his creature, though in the dark, to leap backward, seeking a