SCH. I’m afraid of getting a bad name. And we hadn’t the means to bring up another.
MME. TUPIN [violently, much excited] Shut up! As it’s like that—as that’s what they do to our children—as men have found nothing to change that—we must do it—the women must do it. We must start the great strike—the strike—the strike of the mothers.
Cries in the audience, ‘Yes, yes.’
PRES. Silence.
MME. TUPIN [shouting] Why should we kill ourselves to get wage-slaves and harlots for other people?
TUPIN. We’re not the guilty ones.
PRES. I did not—
MME. THOMAS. And all the men that seduced the girls I saved—have you punished them?
PRES. Sit down.
TUPIN. The guilty ones are the people that tell us to have more children when the ones we have are starving.