ercised more
spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and
oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race
has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to
keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this
domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply
give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination
conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called
drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word.
If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges
in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge
behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more
heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul,
then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be
Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors
and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys,
boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area,
teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how
this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow
it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about
the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about
the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and
narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious,
but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs.
Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its
smallness.

But though the essential of the woman's task is universality, this does
not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely
wholesome prejudices. She has, on the whole, been more conscious than
man that she is only one half of humanity; but she has expressed it (if
one may say so of a lady) by getting her teeth into the two or three
things which she thinks she stands for. I would observe here in
parenthesis that much of the recent official trouble about women has
arisen from the fact that they transfer to things of doubt and reason
that sacred stubbornness only proper to the primary things which a woman
was set to guard. One's own children, one's own altar, ought to be a
matter of principle--or if you like, a