Colleges have occasionally declared marriage to be a lamentable end to a woman's "career," a sad falling off from the "higher life." Talking will not change matters, nor argument eradicate the fact that as long as the race has a mother, that mother will have to be a woman, and if a woman is not a mother she has failed, either voluntarily or involuntarily, to do the only thing for which, in the original scheme of creation, she was intended.
Therefore, the assuming of political duties [primarily voting, of course, but--as later detailed--also "...carrying out of political plans,...attending political conventions,...doing jury duty..."], as many women must assume them in the event of a granted franchise to all adults properly qualified, must be not substitutional, but additional. We cannot wholly, nor even in large measure, evade our own duties and responsibilities, and to these we must add the burdens and duties of men. There is nothing of a woman's natural duty which a man can do as well as a woman, yet, with amusing arrogance, women claim that they will be able easily to do the work in which for centuries men have been specially trained,--to do this work as well as he, or better than he, and to do their own at the same time.
Let us just state frankly a few things which every woman knows. During all the forceful period of a woman's life she labors under distinct disabilities on account of her sex; it trips her up at every turn; many women are in a constant state of rebellion because they absolutely must take some sort of care of themselves or be invalided out of the race. In the carrying out of political plans, in attending political conventions, in doing jury duty, a woman will be at the mercy of her nature. For one whole year, if a new life is to emerge [i.e., if a child is to be born from her pregnancy], she is unfit to assume additional risk in the overstrain of her normally taxed nervous system. Maternity is an exhibition of a woman's nervous system taxed to a normal limit, and normally entirely equal to the strain. But while pregnancy is not a pathological condition, it is the limit of nerve-tax. Presumably there are other children and a home. How much more ought a woman to do? And for every woman married or single, during the greater part of her life, there is the plain and unchangeable fact that she lives in a periodic nervous cycle [i.e., women have a menstrual cycle], when the life-forces are normal, below normal, and again normal, and that during the below-normal period she is again very nearly at the nervous limit. Why pretend that these things are negligible? Every woman knows they are not, but she fears the derision of other women if she admits it. Where, then, is her surplus strength, where the extra force to be expended in political excitements?
Every student of industrial conditions, every one who tries to wrestle with the new science of eugenics, recognizes that the danger to the working girl which transcends all other dangers, is the danger to her motherhood [presumably either or both that working in industrial environments could cause the loss of a woman's ability to become a mother due to the strain on her nervous system (and, thus, her "life-force")--which would weaken her so that she might be unable to conceive and/or carry a child to birth--or that she may die (as a direct result of the job or due to the "nervous system strain") and, thus, be eliminated as a potential provider of children to her society], and that the paramount danger to the state in her industrial life is the loss of so many potential mothers; for the great wheels eat up the nerve-forces of a woman's life; the standing, the treading, are perilous to her feminine powers.
--Pages 86-89
The average woman has as much brains as the average man, and average persons are going to do the greater part of the voting, but the woman lacks endurance in things mental; her fortitudes are physical and spiritual. She lacks nervous stability. The suffragists who dismay England are nerve-sick women.
--Page 92
Want to read the entire book? You can do so here, at Google Books. (It seems that the first page or few of the text is missing from their copy.)
