The brunt of this injustice falls on women, because the old traditional morality is the invention of men.  “No religion, no physical or moral code,” wrote the clear-sighted George Drysdale, “proposed by one sex for the other, can be really suitable.  Each must work out its laws for itself in every department of life.”  In the moral code developed by the Church, women have been so degraded that they have been habituated to look upon themselves through the eyes of men.  Very imperfectly have women developed their own self-consciousness, the realization of their tremendous and supreme position in civilization.  Women can develop this power only in one way; by the exercise of responsibility, by the exercise of judgment, reason or discrimination.  They need ask for no “rights.”  They need only assert power.  Only by the exercise of self-guidance and intelligent self-direction can that inalienable, supreme, pivotal power be expressed.  More than ever in history women need to realize that nothing can ever come to us from another.  Everything we attain we must owe to ourselves.  Our own spirit must vitalize it.  Our own heart must feel it.  For we are not passive machines.  We are not to be lectured, guided and molded this way or that.  We are alive and intelligent, we women, no less than men, and we must awaken to the essential realization that we are living beings, endowed with will, choice, comprehension, and that every step in life must be taken at our own initiative.

Moral and sexual balance in civilization will only be established by the assertion and expression of power on the part of women.  This power will not be found in any futile seeking for economic independence or in the aping of men in industrial and business pursuits, nor by joining battle for the so-called “single standard.”  Woman’s power can only be expressed and make itself felt when she refuses the task of bringing unwanted children into the world to be exploited in industry and slaughtered in wars.  When we refuse to produce battalions of babies to be exploited; when we declare to the nation; “Show us that the best possible chance in life is given to every child now brought into the world, before you cry for more!  At present our children are a glut on the market.  You hold infant life cheap.  Help us to make the world a fit place for children.  When you have done this, we will bear you children,—­then we shall be true women.”  The new morality will express this power and responsibility on the part of women.

“With the realization of the moral responsibility of women,” writes Havelock Ellis, “the natural relations of life spring back to their due biological adjustment.  Motherhood is restored to its natural sacredness.  It becomes the concern of the woman herself, and not of society nor any individual, to determine the conditions under which the child shall be conceived....”