as men do. We have hands to work with, and brains to
think with, and hearts to feel with. Why not join hands with us in theory
as you do in fact? Do you tell us now that you won't have our help in the
movement? Will you refuse us the fruit of victory when the fight is won?
If I thought you would, I for one would cease to care whether the Cause
won or not."

"I, too, Nellie. We'd all go on strike," cried Connie.

"What is it to you whether women are good mothers or not? What objections
can you have to our rivalling men in the friendly rivalry that would be
under fair conditions? Are our virtues, our woman instincts, so weak and
frail that you can't trust us to go straight if the whole of life is
freely open to us? Why, when I think of what woman's life is now, what it
has been for so long, I wonder how it is that we have any virtues left."
She spoke with intense feeling.

"What are we now," she went on, "in most cases? Slaves, bought and sold
for a home, for a position, for a ribbon, for a piece of bread. With all
their degradation men are not degraded as we are. To be womanly is to be
shamed and insulted every day. To love is to suffer. To be a mother is to
drink the dregs of human misery. To be heartless, to be cold, to be
vicious and a hypocrite, to smother all one's higher self, to be sold, to
sell one's self, to pander to evil passions, to be the slave of the
slave, that is the way to survive most easily for a woman. And see what
we are in spite of everything! Geisner said he would sometimes be proud
if he were an Englishman. Sometimes I'm foolish enough to be proud I'm a
woman.

"Why should we be mothers, unless it pleases us to be mothers? Why should
we not feel that life is ours as men may feel it, that we help hold up
the world and owe nothing to others except that common debt of fraternity
which they owe also to us? Don't you think that Love would come then as
it could in no other way? Don't you think that women, who even now are
good mothers generally, would be good mothers to children whose coming
was unstained with tears? And would they be worse mothers if their brains
were keen and their bodies strong and their hearts brave with the healthy
work and intelligent life that everybody should have, men and women
alike?"

"You seem to have an objection to mothers somehow, Nellie," observed
Geisner.

"Oh, I have! It seems to me such a sin, such a shameful sin, to give life
for the world that we have. I can