The World-Builders
“IT seems to me,” said my audience, “that you look on women as though they were all married and with household duties to perform.”
“I look on women as though they were all married women, or women preparing to enter that state. No other women are of any account at all as world-builders.
“They may be delightful, charming, pleasant, true women in every way, but if they are not married they are not true women-factors in the progress of the world. Simply because they have no hand in the physical building of the future.
“The child is the future made visible and concrete. When you lay your finger on a child you are touching not flesh only, but future ages.
“The unmarried woman-genius may influence the art or the thought of her time; the labourer’s wife who produces a bouncing boy that lives has produced the future. More than that, she has sent forth her own attributes to dwell in the future. More than that, by her care and education of that child she is laying the foundation for vast world effects.
“That is the woman’s triumphant position in the scheme of things. She is a partner in world-building, and the duties lying on her share of the partnership are patent and obvious to the meanest intelligence.
“They are both moral and material, and they imply in their performance one supreme virtue: self-sacrifice. Not freedom to develop according to inclination; not freedom to alter her morals; not freedom to imitate the worst faults of men; but slavery in the interests of her children, her husband, and her home.
“And what happy people these slaves are! Just as happy as the men-slaves who, under the dominion of good conduct, love, and the hive instinct, often work themselves to death, like the bees, that others may live and prosper.