PLAIN WORDS ON THE WOMAN QUESTION. 173 



this prime natural necessity. To the end of all time, it is mathe- 

 matically demonstrable that most women must become the moth- 

 ers of at least four children, or else the race must cease to exist. 

 Any supposed solution of the woman problem, therefore, which 

 fails to look this fact straight in the face, is a false solution. It 

 cries " Peace, peace ! " where there is no peace. It substitutes a 

 verbal juggle for a real way out of the difficulty. It withdraws 

 the attention of thinking women from the true problem of their 

 sex to fix it on side-issues of comparative unimportance. 



And this, I believe, is what almost all the Woman's Rights 

 women are sedulously doing at the present day. They are pursu- 

 ing a chimera, and neglecting to perceive the true aim of their 

 sex. They are setting up a false and unattainable ideal, while 

 they omit to realize the true and attainable one which alone is 

 open to them. 



For let us look again for a moment at what this all but uni- 

 versal necessity of maternity implies. Almost every woman must 

 bear four or five children. In doing so she must on the average 

 use up the ten or twelve best years of her life the ten or twelve 

 years that immediately succeed her attainment of complete wom- 

 anhood. For note, by the way, that these women must also for 

 the most part marry young : as Mr. Galton has shown, you can 

 quietly and effectually wipe out a race by merely making its 

 women all marry at twenty-eight : married beyond that age, 

 they don't produce children enough to replenish the population. 

 Again, during these ten or twelve years of child-bearing at the 

 very least, the women can't conveniently earn their own liveli- 

 hood ; they must be provided for by the labor of the men under 

 existing circumstances (in favor of which I have no Philistine 

 prejudice) by their own husbands. It is true that in the very 

 lowest state of savagery special provision is seldom made by the 

 men for the women even during the periods of pregnancy, child- 

 birth, and infancy of the offspring. The women must live (as 

 among the Hottentots) over the worst of these periods on their 

 own stored-up stock of fat, like hibernating bears or desert cam- 

 els. It is true also that among savage races generally the women 

 have to work as hard as the men, though the men bear in most 

 cases the larger share in providing actual food for the entire fam- 

 ily. But in civilized communities and the more so in proportion 

 to their degree of civilization the men do most of the hardest 

 work, and in particular take upon themselves the duty of provid- 

 ing for the wives and children. The higher the type, the longer 

 are the wives and children provided for. Analogy would lead 

 one to suppose (with Comte) that in the highest communities the 

 men would do all the work, and the women would be left entirely 

 free to undertake the management and education of the children. 



