the Press the parrot cry of men echoes ceaselessly:
'Women shouldn't meddle in politics; women shouldn't do this or
that--let them mind their homes and their children.' But the restless
women who do these things have generally no homes or children to mind;
what is the use of preaching the sacredness of motherhood when you will
not allow them to be mothers? To what end prate of the duties of
wifehood when you do not ask them to be wives?

It is a well-known physiological fact that numbers of women become
insane in middle life who would not have done so if they had enjoyed the
ordinary duties, pleasures and preoccupations of matrimony--if their
women's natures had not been starved by an unnatural celibacy. This is
not a suitable subject to go into here, but I recommend it to the
attention of my more thoughtful readers and those who concern themselves
with the amelioration of the wretched social conditions of our glorious
twentieth-century civilisation.

Hardest of all is the case of the woman who longs not merely for
wifehood and 'a kind man,' but more especially for motherhood, the
bitter-sweet crown of the sex that celibate priests preach ceaselessly
as woman's first duty and highest good, but which thousands of women in
this country are debarred from fulfilling! Surely no bitterness must
be so poignant as the bitterness of the woman who longs for
motherhood--ceaselessly in her ears the Life Force is calling, and deep
in her heart the dream children are stirring, crying, 'Give us life!
give us life!' becoming more importunate every year, as each year finds
the divine possibilities unrealised.

I often think how everything combines to torment a generous-hearted,
full-blooded, mother-woman whose nature is starved thus. She has, of
course, to suppress all emotion on the subject, to hold her head high,
and endure with a smile the 'experienced' airs of girls, much younger
than herself, who happen to wear that magical golden ring that changes
all life for a woman; to pretend generally that she has no wish to
marry, never had, and could have if she chose, to laugh at this page if
she should happen to read it, and call the writer a morbid idiot--in
short, she always has to act a part before a world which professes to
find exquisitely humorous the fact of a woman being cheated out of the
birthright of her sex. Every paper and book she picks up nowadays
contains some reference to the glories of motherhood, the joys of love.
M