To bear and to rear, to feel the dependence of man and child—­the necessity for themselves—­to know that upon them depend the health, the character, the happiness, the future of certain human beings—­to see themselves laying and preserving the foundations of so imposing a thing as a family—­to build so that this family shall become a strong stone in the state—­to feel themselves through this family perpetuating and perfecting church, society, republic,—­this is their destiny,—­this is worth while.  They may not be able to state it, but all their instincts and experiences convince them of the supreme and eternal value of their place in the world.  They dare not tamper with it.  Their opposition to the militant program badly and even cruelly expressed at times has at bottom, as an opposition always has, the principle of preservation.  It is not bigotry or vanity or a petty notion of their own spheres which has kept the majority of women from lending themselves to the radical wing of the woman’s movement.  It is fear to destroy a greater thing which they possess.  The fear of change is not an irrational thing—­the fear of change is founded on the risk of losing what you have, on the certainty of losing much temporarily at least.  It sees the cost, the ugly and long period of transition.

Moreover, respect for your calling brings patience with its burden and its limitations.  The change you desire you work for conservatively, if at all.  The women who opposed the first movement for women’s rights in this country might deplore the laws that gave a man the power to beat his wife—­but as a matter of fact few men did beat their wives, and popular opinion was a powerful weapon.  They might deplore the laws of property—­but few of them were deeply touched by them.  The husband, the child, the home, the social circle, the church, these things were infinitely more interesting and important to them than diplomas, rights to work, rights to property, rights to vote.  All the sentiments in the revolting women’s program seemed trivial, cold, profitless beside the realities of life as they dreamed them and struggled to realize them.

It is this same intuitive loyalty to her Business of Being a Woman, her unwillingness to have it tampered with, that is to-day the great obstacle to our Uneasy Woman putting her program of relief into force.  And it is the effort to move this mass which she derides as inert that leads to much of the overemphasis in her program and her methods.  If she is to attract attention, she must be extreme.  The campaigner is like the actor—­he must exaggerate to get his effect over the footlights.  Moreover, there are natures like that of the actor who could not play Othello unless his whole body was blackened.  Nor is the extravagance of the methods, which the militant lady follows to put over her program, so foreign to her nature as it may seem.  The suffragette adapts to her needs a form of feminine coquetry as old as the world.  To defy and denounce the male has always been one of woman’s most successful provocative ways!