Page:The Woman Socialist - Snowden - 1907.djvu/39

 and all that is involved in the performance of that duty, the care of the children and the home, and, by no means incidentally, the service of the children’s father.

Thousands of intelligent women are in revolt against this doctrine, and their numbers increase daily. Still, by far the greater part of the population, men and women alike, are in bondage to this ignoble conception of woman’s purpose in life, having advanced no farther in these Christian times than their heathen predecessors of Greece, one of whose teachers declared: “War, politics, and public speaking are the sphere of man; that of woman is to keep house, to stay at home, and to receive and tend her husband.”

The fact that so many women of the present still cling tenaciously to this old idea of their sex’s servitude is due in part to their belief in its Divine sanction, and partly to a condition of intellect and soul which is the most painful effect of ages of subjection. Ages of domination have produced a love of domination, a desire for servitude. Enslaved for so long in the flesh they have become also slavish in spirit, loving fondly the chains that bind