to be called up for duty.  There is certainly much to be said for such a proposal, considerably more than is to be said for compulsory military service.  For while it is very doubtful whether a man will ever be called on to fight, most women are liable to be called on to exercise household duties or to look after children, whether for themselves or for other people.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] It is not, of course, always literally true that each parent supplies exactly half the heredity, for, as we see among animals generally, the offspring may sometimes approach more nearly to one parent, sometimes to the other, while among plants, as De Vries and others have shown, the heredity may be still more unequally divided.

[2] It should scarcely be necessary to say that to assert that motherhood is a woman’s supreme function is by no means to assert that her activities should be confined to the home.  That is an opinion which may now be regarded as almost extinct even among those who most glorify the function of woman as mother.  As Friedrich Naumann and others have very truly pointed out, a woman is not adequately equipped to fulfil her functions as mother and trainer of children unless she has lived in the world and exercised a vocation.

[3] “Were the capacities of the brain and the heart equal in the sexes,” Lily Braun (Die Frauenfrage, page 207) well says, “the entry of women into public life would be of no value to humanity, and would even lead to a still wilder competition.  Only the recognition that the entire nature of woman is different from that of man, that it signifies a new vivifying principle in human life, makes the women’s movement, in spite of the misconception of its enemies and its friends, a social revolution” (see also Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, fourth edition, 1904, especially Ch.  XVIII).

[4] The word “puericulture” was invented by Dr. Caron in 1866 to signify the culture of children after birth.  It was Pinard, the distinguished French obstetrician, who, in 1895, gave it a larger and truer significance by applying it to include the culture of children before birth.  It is now defined as “the science which has for its end the search for the knowledge relative to the reproduction, the preservation, and the amelioration of the human race” (Pechin, La Puericulture avant la Naissance, These de Paris, 1908).

[5] In La Grossesse (pp. 450 et seq.) Bouchacourt has discussed the problems of puericulture at some length.

[6] The importance of antenatal puericulture was fully recognized in China a thousand years ago.  Thus Madame Cheng wrote at that time concerning the education of the child:  “Even before birth his education may begin; and, therefore, the prospective mother of old, when lying down, lay straight; when sitting down, sat upright; and when standing, stood erect.  She would not taste strange flavors, nor have anything