Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/47

 not find that reactionaries describe as a burden and a care what progressives regard as a tool or a weapon? There are people now, who, knowing that men have thought the franchise of such supreme importance that they have rioted and fought and died during centuries of the world's history for the right to choose who should be their rulers, yet assert that to give women an equal share in that choice would be to impose a fresh burden upon them! In effect these people claim that women do their work better when it is left to men to decide what that work shall be and under what conditions it shall be performed; that, although woman is the guardian of the race, and bears the burden of motherhood, it is still to be left to man to dictate the terms of motherhood.

To us, on the other hand, it seems that no distinction of race or class is so fundamental and ineradicable as the distinction of sex. Breeds may be mixed, a rich man may become poor, or a poor man rich; a man may begin life as an employed person, and end it as an employer, or vice versa; alone from the cradle to the grave, man is man and woman is woman. When I insist on this I do not overlook all the interesting and as yet unproven speculations that are made as to the varying degrees of maleness and femaleness that there may be in different individuals, nor do I subscribe to the endless cocksure generalisings upon sexual variation (for until we can separate acquired