Such a development, while perhaps satisfying the ideas of progress of the feminist, will be bad eugenically.  There will be a removal from the race of the value of these women, the intellectual members of their sex.  Whether the work this group of women do will equal the value of the children they might have had no one can say.

But after all, the number of women who will enter the professions and remain in them on the conditions above stated will be relatively small.  The main function of women will always be childbearing.  If ever there comes a time when the drift will be away from this function, then a counter-movement will start up to sway women back into this sphere of their functions.  Moreover, the bulk of women entering industry will enter it in the humbler occupations and they will in the main be willing enough to marry and bear children, even in the limited way.  Yet since they enter marriage with a wider experience than ever before, the conditions of marriage and the home must change, even though gradually.

So on the whole we may look to an increasing individuality of woman, an increasing feeling of worth and dignity as an individual, an increasing reluctance to take up life as the traditional housewife.  Rebellion against the monotony and the seclusive character of the home will increase rather than diminish, and it must be faced without prejudice and without any reliance on any authority, either of church or state, that will force women back to “womanly” ways of thinking, feeling or doing.

Sooner or later we shall have to accept legally what we now recognize as fact,—­the restriction of childbearing.  Whether we regard it as good or bad, the modern woman will not bear and nurse a large family.  And the modern man, though he has his little joke about the modern family, is one with his wife in this matter.  With husband and wife agreed there seems little to do but accept the situation.

That this condition of affairs is leaving the peopling of the world to the backward, the ignorant, and the careless is at present accepted by most authors.  One has only to read the serious articles on this subject in the journals devoted to racial biology to realize how deeply important the matter is.  Yet there may be some undue alarm felt, for contraceptive measures are becoming so prevalent in Europe, America, and Asia that all races will soon be on the same footing, and moreover all classes in society except the feeble-minded are learning the procedures.  The prolificness of the feeble-minded is indeed a menace, and society may find itself compelled to lower their fertility artificially.

What will probably happen is that the one, two, or three-child family will be born before the mother’s thirty-fifth year, and she will then or before forty become free from the severest burdens of the housewife.  What will she do with her time; what will the better-to-do woman do?  Will she gradually give her energies to the community, or will she while away her time in the spurious culture that occupies so many club women to-day?