“He knows it well, Nellie,” cried Connie, clapping her hands.

“Because you can’t raise free men from slave women.  We want to be free, only to be free, to be let alone a little, to be treated as human beings with souls, just 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.