and falls most among just the most efficient and active and best

adapted classes in the community. The species is recruited from

among its failures and from among less civilised aliens.

Contemporary civilisations are in effect burning the best of their

possible babies in the furnaces that run the machinery. In the

United States the native Anglo-American strain has scarcely

increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European countries

the same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic elements

in the community. The women of these classes still remain legally

and practically dependent and protected, with the only natural

excuse for their dependence gone…

The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory

groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless

effort to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a

solitary child grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes

that do no more than continue the culture of the parents at a great

social cost, here numbers of unhappy educated but childless married

women, here careless, decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and

asylums for the heedlessly begotten. It is just the disorderly

proliferation of Bromstead over again, in lives instead of in

houses.

What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying

boundaries, pushing research and discovery, building cities,

improving all the facilities of life, making great fleets, waging

wars, while this aimless decadence remains the quality of the

biological outlook?…

It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion

until I faced this mass of problems. But so far back as 1910 I had

it clear in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than

participate in all the surrenders of mind and body that are implied

in Dayton's snarl of "Leave it alone; leave it all alone!" Marriage

and the begetting and care of children, is the very ground substance

in the life of the community. In a world in which everything

changes, in which fresh methods, fresh adjustments and fresh ideas

perpetually renew the circumstances of life, it is preposterous that

we should not even examine into these matters, should rest content

to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a barbaric age.

Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the

solution of the woman's individual problem. The two go together,

are right and left of one question. The only conceivable way out

from our IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to

say of adequate mothering, as no longer a chance product of

individual passions but a service rendered to the State. Women must

become less and less subordinated to individual men, since this

works out in a more or less complete limitation, waste, and

sterilisation of their essentially social function; they must become

more and more subordinated as individually independent citizens to

the collective purpose. Or, to express the thing by a familiar

phrase, the highly organised, scientific state we desire must, if it

is to exist at all, base itself not upon the irresponsible man-ruled

family, but upon the matriarchal family, the citizen-ship and

freedom of women and the public endowment of motherhood.

After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows

clear to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and

mothering is their special function in the State, and that a

personal subordination to an individual man with an unlimited power

of control over this intimate and supreme duty is a degradation. No

contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to

recognise any claim a man can make upon her but the claim of her

freely-given devotion to him. She wants the reality of her choice

and she means "family" while a man too often means only possession.

This alters the spirit of the family relationships fundamentally.

Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a

pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel.

Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood

struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and tears…

I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the

matter. I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I

want to see women come in, free and fearless, to a full

participation in the collective purpose of mankind. Women, Iam

convinced, are as fine as men; they can be as wise as men; they are

capable of far greater devotion than men. I want to see them

citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily for them and for

their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's

satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and rearing good children