Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/185

Rh this prime natural necessity. To the end of all time, it is mathematically demonstrable that most women must become the mothers of at least four children, or else the race must cease to exist. Any supposed solution of the woman problem, therefore, which fails to look this fact straight in the face, is a false solution. It cries "Peace, peace!" where there is no peace. It substitutes a verbal juggle for a real way out of the difficulty. It withdraws the attention of thinking women from the true problem of their sex to fix it on side-issues of comparative unimportance.

And this, I believe, is what almost all the Woman's Rights women are sedulously doing at the present day. They are pursuing a chimera, and neglecting to perceive the true aim of their sex. They are setting up a false and unattainable ideal, while they omit to realize the true and attainable one which alone is open to them.

For let us look again for a moment at what this all but universal necessity of maternity implies. Almost every woman must bear four or five children. In doing so she must on the average use up the ten or twelve best years of her life the ten or twelve years that immediately succeed her attainment of complete womanhood. For note, by the way, that these women must also for the most part marry young: as Mr. Galton has shown, you can quietly and effectually wipe out a race by merely making its women all marry at twenty-eight: married beyond that age, they don't produce children enough to replenish the population. Again, during these ten or twelve years of child-bearing at the very least, the women can't conveniently earn their own livelihood; they must be provided for by the labor of the men under existing circumstances (in favor of which I have no Philistine prejudice) by their own husbands. It is true that in the very lowest state of savagery special provision is seldom made by the men for the women even during the periods of pregnancy, childbirth, and infancy of the offspring. The women must live (as among the Hottentots) over the worst of these periods on their own stored-up stock of fat, like hibernating bears or desert camels. It is true also that among savage races generally the women have to work as hard as the men, though the men bear in most cases the larger share in providing actual food for the entire family. But in civilized communities and the more so in proportion to their degree of civilization the men do most of the hardest work, and in particular take upon themselves the duty of providing for the wives and children. The higher the type, the longer are the wives and children provided for. Analogy would lead one to suppose (with Comte) that in the highest communities the men would do all the work, and the women would be left entirely free to undertake the management and education of the children.