Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/64

 refuse to admit that, childbearing and rearing being a woman's business, the details of how to bear and rear children are properly left to women to determine? And if the amount of freedom persons possess depends on the amount of service they render to the State (a principle which, as I have shown in Chapter II., I do not admit), how can anyone say that the service of killing the enemy in offensive or defensive war is a greater service than the provision of the human material for killing or being killed by the enemy? Suffering and sacrifice are immeasurable things, and it would be a bold man who would assert that the sufferings and sacrifices of men in warfare were, in modern states, equal to those of women in the giving and nurture of life. Indeed, this discussion, like so many others raised by people finding reasons for clinging to the past, is about as futile as the discussion which of two millstones grinds most corn. Yet one parting recommendation I would like to offer, before leaving this particular aspect. It is to advise the reactionaries that they would be on safer ground if they shifted man's claim to superiority from his military to his economic qualifications. For we can conceive, and an increasing number of people are contemplating with eager hope, a world in the far-off future that will not contain one soldier; but no one anticipates that this world will ever arrive at a state in which there will be no mothers.

In conclusion, I wish to disclaim altogether the kind of assumption that one frequently finds implicit