Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/48

 from inherited characteristics, we shall never get very far); I am content to base the essential differences between men and women upon the known fact that their share in reproduction is different and produces difference of life, needs and temperament. How is it possible then, more peculiarly in sex-relations, for men alone wisely to prescribe to women?

For example. Because willingness to sacrifice is one of the attributes of motherhood, it is too often assumed that the sacrifice of the woman must be for the good of the race. Nature gives to each child two parents; man in his wisdom makes the laws which assign one only, mother or father, as may be most expedient for him,—never both,—and when he discusses racial problems, he is very apt to attribute any shortcomings to the woman, who "has only one task to perform and performs that badly." He forgets that the child may inherit not only personal qualities but racial poisons from the father as from the mother, and that the liberty he denies the woman in sexual relations (giving as his reason the sacredness of the home and the family) has too often been used by him to the great damage of the race. He forgets, too, that whereas fatherhood is voluntary, motherhood by far too often is not. He adds laws to laws, dealing with factories and workshops, and leaves the mother's factory—the home—to take its chance in the sauve-qui-peut of industrialism. In Great Britain he contrives a National Health Insurance