Civilization faces a female ultimatum to-day. Ah, more than that, it is a racial ultimatum; for effete women produce their kind, and final racial standards are fixed in the womb. This is the ultimatum: Parasite or partner?
Woman must be admitted on equal terms to participation in all activities of modern society, or she must occupy an ever-narrowing sphere that will crowd her at last to the soft couch of voluptuous idleness, where Roman splendor waned and Grecian greatness died.
Do you say that woman's sphere is in the home? Because I so believe I am intensely concerned that she shall find no barred doors anywhere that open to knowledge and power which will make her more competent in her paramount task of motherhood. For the sake of the future we must not consent to send woman into the social arena short of being fully armed.
Woman is to-day following the unerring sex instinct that warns her to keep always by the side of her mate. Her cry for political freedom is a plea for and a movement toward a fuller understanding, a more blessed helpfulness, between husband and wife, mother and son, male and female. Those who grow not together, grow apart.
I have seen towering trees fall before the joined cuttings of two axe-men who, working together, with blow following blow, hewed to the heart of the monarch of the forest. I have seen a giant workman laying the bricks of a city pavement, with his left and right hands toiling in perfect unison and with almost incredible rapidity. In the crash of a great line drive on the gridiron I have felt the swaying of the human mass in deadlock, and then the impact of the reserve from the back field that has destroyed the balance and forced the ball over the line.
Just as the tree falls slowly before the attack of a single axe-man, just as the paving waits on a "one-handed" layer of bricks, just as the gridiron struggle remains undecided until it has felt the drive of the reserve back, so society waits to-day on the fulness of the strength of womanhood.
For the times that are to come with the close of the war we must now prepare; for the reforms that will be possible then, for that mighty new dispensation of social justice, we must doubly arm ourselves. No resources of power available for the world programme of peace, sobriety, economic freedom, and democracy, dare be overlooked. Hear the female ultimatum to the race: a drag or a lift, a plaything or a mate, a parasite or a partner.