It works for a time,
and even for life in the case of incomplete and aberrant women. For the
others, it often spells liberty and interest and heightened
consciousness of self for some years; but the time comes when outraged
Nature exacts her vengeance, when middle age abbreviates the youth that
was really misspent, and is itself as prematurely followed by a period
of decadence grateful neither to its victim nor to anyone else.
Meanwhile the women who have chosen to be and to remain women realize
the promise of Wordsworth to the girl who preferred walks in the country
to algebra and symbolic logic:--
Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
Shalt show us how divine a thing
A woman may be made.
Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
Where is the woman, recognizable as such, who will question that the
brother of Dorothy Wordsworth was right?
In the following pages, it is sought to show that, women being
constructed by Nature, as individuals, for her racial ends, they best
realize themselves, are happier and more beautiful, live longer and more
useful lives, when they follow, as mothers or foster-mothers in the wide
and scarcely metaphorical sense of that word, the career suggested in
Wordsworth's lovely lines.
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