The
practical question which we must determine, if possible, is the average
effect of industrial conditions and the assumption of the functions
commonly supposed to be more suitably masculine, upon women in general.
Here we definitely join issue with Mrs. Gilman.
It is impossible to discuss, as we might well do, the available evidence
as to the effect of external activities upon that wonderful function of
womanhood which, in its correspondence with the rhythm of the tides,
hints, like many other of our attributes, at our distant origin in the
Sea--the mother of all living. Reference was made in an earlier chapter
to this function, and its use as, in most cases at any rate, a criterion
of womanhood and a gauge of the effect of physical exercise or mental
exercise thereupon. The writer of "Women and Economics" has nothing to
say on this subject--less, if possible, than on the subject of
lactation. The menstrual function would admirably and fundamentally
illustrate the present contention, but it will be better to take the
great maternal and mammalian function of nursing as a criterion of
womanhood, and as a test of the contention that the more freely the
mother works as do the savage woman and the peasant woman, the more
rightly she fulfils the "primal physical functions of maternity."
Before we consider the actual evidence (and Mrs. Gilman does not deal at
all in evidence on these fundamentals to her argument) let us meet the
argument about the "savage woman," who works as hard as men do,--though
much less hard than early observers of savage life supposed--and who is
nevertheless a successful mother.
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