ach child means a period of rest, which is more
than the girl behind the counter gets in her entire working period.

These women, forced by a faulty social structure to support themselves
and carry heavy burdens, lack the intense metabolism of the male, his
power to husband his stores of carbon (an organic exception which
renders him indifferent to standing), and the superior quality of his
muscle. Biologically men and women are different from crown to sole.
It might be said that Nature fashioned man's body for warfare, and
that if he grows soft during intervals of peace it is his own fault.
Even so, unless in some way he has impaired his health, he has
heretofore demonstrated that he can do far more work than women, and
stand several times the strain, although his pluck may be no finer.

If one rejects this statement let him look about among his
acquaintance at the men who have toiled hard to achieve an
independence, and whose wives have toiled with them, either because
they lived in communities where it was impossible to keep servants, or
out of a mistaken sense of economy. The man looks fresh and his wife
elderly and wrinkled and shapeless, even if she has reasonable health.
It is quite different in real cities where life on a decent income (or
salary) can be made very easy for the woman, as I have just pointed
out; but I have noticed that in small towns or on the farm, even now,
when these scattered families are no longer isolated as in the days
when farmers' wives committed suicide or intoxicated themselves on tea
leaves, the woman always looks far older than the man if "she has done
her own work" during all the years of her youth and maturity. If she
renounces housekeeping in disgust occasionally and moves to an hotel,
she soon amazes her friends by looking ten years younger; and if her
husband makes enough money to move to a city large enough to minimize
the burdens of housekeeping and offer a reasonable amount of
distraction, she recovers a certain measure of her youth, although
still far from being at forty or fifty what she would have been if her
earlier years had been relieved of all but the strains which Nature
imposes upon every woman from princess to peasant.

It remains to be seen whether the extraordinary amount of work the
European women are doing in the service of their country, and the
marked improvement in their health and physique, marks a stride
forward in the physical development of the sex, bei