we could scarcely do more than observe and
despair, but if it be merely that the capacities of this generation of
women are being modified by the particular conditions to which they are
subjected, plainly we who have made those conditions can modify
them--"What man has made, man can destroy."

If we come to ask ourselves what these recent and novel conditions are,
the answer is only too ready at hand. The principles which will guide us
toward discovering it have been set forth at length in the earlier
chapters of this book. Let us recur to our Geddes and Thomson, and at
once we have the key. The production of milk is an act of anabolism or
building-up, such as we have seen to be characteristic of the female
sex, involving the accumulation and storage of quantities of energy so
large that if they were stated in the units of the physicist they would
astonish us. If we consider what the child achieves in the way of
movement and development and growth, and if we realize that at the most
rapid period of development and growth, all the energy therefor has been
gathered, prepared, and is dispensed by the nursing mother, we shall
begin to realize what an astonishing feat that is which she performs. It
is in reality, of course, the same feat which is performed by the
expectant mother, only that it is slightly less arduous, since after
birth the child can breathe and digest for itself.

Perhaps the reader will begin to realize what Mrs. Gilman and those who
think with her are asking us to believe when they say that the primal
physical functions of maternity will be best fulfilled by the mother who
"mingles in the natural industries of a human creature." This statement
is either ridiculously false or can be rendered true by rendering it as
a truism. The primal physical functions of maternity _are_ the natural
industries of the particular human creature we call a mother; and the
better she fulfils them, the better she fulfils them, certainly. But the
so-called natural industries in which the modern mother is desired to
be engaged whilst she is bearing or nursing her children are as
unnatural as anything can be. As at present practised, they are morbid
products of civilization which it will require to cast off if it is to
survive.

It is the student of life and its laws who must have the last word in
these matters. If he utters it wrongly or is unheeded, Nature is not
mocked, but will be avenged. The writer who can lay down a new