Let us return now to the question of nursing capacity. "Bass voices"
and "beards" are doubtless unlovely in woman, but their extensive
appearance would be of no consequence at all compared with the
disappearance or weakening of the mammalian function which, as everyone
knows or should know, is the dominating factor in the survival or death
of infancy. Now it may be briefly asserted that civilized woman, and
more especially industrial woman, threatens to cease to be a mammal. If
this assertion can be substantiated, and if the "economic independence
of women" necessarily involves it, no biologist, no medical man, no
first-hand student of life, will hesitate to condemn finally the ideal
toward which Mrs. Gilman and those who think with her would have us go.
Things may be bad, things _are_ very bad: the lot of woman must be
raised immensely, because the race must be raised, and cannot be raised
otherwise; but progress is going forward and not backward, Mr.
Chesterton notwithstanding. Woman will not become more than a mammal by
becoming less, and going back on that great achievement of ascending
life. Individuals may do so, and are doing so, lamentably misdirected as
many of them now are; but that is the end of them and their kind. It is
quite easy to stamp out motherhood and its inevitable economic
dependence, but with it you stamp out the future.
It is generally admitted that our women nurse their babies less than
they used to do.
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