Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/227

 It is one of the fond delusions of middle-class reactionaries that a girl will be a better mother if she idles about at home when she has left school, instead of taking up some definite and attaching work. This is absolutely untrue. Many of the qualities that go to make a good mother can be developed and strengthened in other work. The aimless, vacuous young woman of our middle classes is a standing reproach to her parents, who are silly enough to require or allow her so to waste all her virtue, and in the end allow it to die of atrophy. The parasitic daughters require a whole book to themselves, and I hope they will get it. For my part, when I consider the mixture of petting and tyrannising to which they are subjected in the home, I am more often surprised by their sense than by their folly. That they ever do anything useful is to their credit, when one thinks how their lives are ordered to discourage purpose, concentration, thoroughness, independence and responsibility.

Women, who bear the children, will be increasingly concerned, as they grow in mental stature, with the quality of the children produced. Theirs, it is said, is the task of handing on the torch of life. They must ask themselves, with ever deepening sense of responsibility, what is the life they are making? Is it worthy? And, while sterility will rightly trouble them, because it is the result of disease, they will not allow themselves to be frightened by the smaller birth-rate per woman. They will perhaps think that the best remedy