Social Science and Woman Suffrage. 79 



may safely be done. But even this will be pliysiologically de- 

 fensible only on the ground that the young woman's competi- 

 tion with the young man shall cease when she enters the mar- 

 riage relation and the forces of her system are directed by na- 

 ture to maternity. Woe betide the day to her offspring if she 

 attempt to carry it on then. There is exhaustion in any sys- 

 tem of education. It may be but healthy exhaustion if we 

 stop where nature has marked a pause. Your high systems 

 of culture for women will take their place only as part of a 

 general system of physical debilitation, if the struggle for 

 equality with man is to continue under the extraordinary tax 

 of maternity. 



Why woman needs a culture equal with man before mar- 

 riage, is because she must or ought to cease when she comes to 

 motherhood, from the efforts he can continue to make. If the 

 same tension that he can endure is kept on her continually, 

 and then she assume maternity beside, her thread will part. 



By and by, if we are not wise, we shall have a rebellion 

 against the attempt to open our higher systems of education to 

 woman, when the real trouble may not lie in this preliminary 

 work of life, but in the attempt to run an equal race, canying 

 double burdens afterwards. 



Kow if there is any one department of man's activity that 

 woman can afford to let him bear alone, it is this one of poli- 

 tics. She ought not to be so alien to her own nature but that 

 the sweet influences of maternity can compensate her for any- 

 thing man finds in political life. Politics is but pure drudg- 

 ery to the mass of men. So much is this so, that the great 

 difficulty is now to get intelligent men to endure its irksome- 

 ness. Doubtless almost anyone would be willing to accept 

 some office high in rank and flush with salary. But these 

 places are only for one in hundreds of thousands of men now, 

 and a mother would rarely or never see them if woman had 

 suffrage and was eligible to office. Motherhood in solid pha- 

 lanx would be remanded to the wearisome, distasteful tug of 



