because she is incompetent.

But, if possible, yet more deeply and radically have the changes of
modern civilisation touched our ancient field of labour in another
direction--in that very portion of the field of human labour which is
peculiarly and organically ours, and which can never be wholly taken
from us. Here the shrinkage has been larger than in any other direction,
and touches us as women more vitally.

Time was, and still is, among almost all primitive and savage folk, when
the first and all-important duty of the female to her society was
to bear, to bear much, and to bear unceasingly! On her adequate and
persistent performance of this passive form of labour, and of her
successful feeding of her young from her own breast, and rearing it,
depended, not merely the welfare, but often the very existence, of
her tribe or nation. Where, as is the case among almost all barbarous
peoples, the rate of infant mortality is high; where the unceasing
casualties resulting from war, the chase, and acts of personal violence
tend continually to reduce the number of adult males; where, surgical
knowledge being still in its infancy, most wounds are fatal; where,
above all, recurrent pestilence and famine, unfailing if of irregular
recurrence, decimated the people, it has been all important that woman
should employ her creative power to its very uttermost limits if the
race were not at once to dwindle and die out. "May thy wife's womb never
cease from bearing," is still today the highest expression of goodwill
on the part of a native African chief to his departing guest. For, not
only does the prolific woman in the primitive state contribute to the
wealth and strength of her nation as a whole, but to that of her own
male companion and of her family. Where the social conditions of life
are so simple that, in addition to bearing and suckling the child, it
is reared and nourished through childhood almost entirely through the
labour and care of the mother, requiring no expenditure of tribal
or family wealth on its training or education, its value as an adult
enormously outweighs, both to the state and the male, the trouble and
expense of rearing it, which falls almost entirely on the individual
woman who bears it. The man who has twenty children to become warriors
and labourers is by so much the richer and the more powerful than he who
has but one; while the state whose women are prolific and labour for and
rear their children stands