Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/175

 women would make all these tremendous sacrifices for the sake of producing finer men. It is a stiff demand to make even of the self-sacrificing sex! But would it have the anticipated results?

The question brings us to the well-fought battleground of breeding versus environment. When a suffragist procession in the States carried a banner declaring, "We prepare our children for the world; we must prepare the world for our children," there was an outcry from some scientific persons, saying that that put the whole fallacy into a nutshell: the first was woman's job, the second was man's. It was for woman to breed the good child, and for man to make the good environment. A manufacturing nation still thrills responsive to the call for further division of labour; that is to say, the dominant class, the employers do. But can we really produce a human being on the same system as we produce the pin beloved of early economists? Let us look a little further. Even if we make the huge admission that a woman, a human being after all, with a mind, to say nothing of a soul, would retain her bodily and mental health under so hideous a system,—can this woman produce a good child all by herself? Does it not matter in the least who is the father of the child? Whether he has clean blood, and is of good stock? What of the racial poisons which a man may inherit, but may also acquire in the course of a misspent life? It is clear that the woman will have to select her mate, but how is a woman in subjection to do this? So