Chapter II

., I do not admit), how can anyone say that the service of killing the enemy in offensive or defensive war is a greater service than the provision of the human material for killing or being killed by the enemy? Suffering and sacrifice are immeasurable things, and it would be a bold man who would assert that the sufferings and sacrifices of men in warfare were, in modern states, equal to those of women in the giving and nurture of life. Indeed, this discussion, like so many others raised by people finding reasons for clinging to the past, is about as futile as the discussion which of two millstones grinds most corn. Yet one parting recommendation I would like to offer, before leaving this particular aspect. It is to advise the reactionaries that they would be on safer ground if they shifted man’s claim to superiority from his military to his economic qualifications. For we can conceive, and an increasing number of people are contemplating with eager hope, a world in the far-off future that will not contain one soldier; but no one anticipates that this world will ever arrive at a state in which there will be no mothers.

In conclusion, I wish to disclaim altogether the kind of assumption that one frequently finds implicit in much of the feminist talk of the present day—the assumption that men have been the barbarians who loved physical force, and that women alone were civilised and civilising. There are no signs of this in literature or history. If men have enjoyed fighting, and gloried in bloodshed, as many still do, that is because their blood was hot within them, and the women of their age and race loved them for it. The experiences of men and women have each made for civilisation, and women have not the man’s obvious temptation with fists to try conclusions, since they are for the most part foregone conclusions. If motherhood has been for much in the education of the race, so have science and the love of the arts and beauty. Agriculture, manufacture, commerce, even finance have engaged men’s hearts, and more often than not turned them from war. War is waste and the women’s movement may be taken as the type of all the great conflicts there have been between coercion and development, bullying and understanding, love and hate. What has been good in war has been the life-forces, the energy, the joy that men have put into it. They are finding other conflicts than those with their fellow-men, into which they can put these forces, and the women’s movement, in part the cause, is also in great measure the effect of the disappearance of barbarism.

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