Masculine legislation, making all the while, in the face of economic difficulties, for the ever further release of women and children from the more laborious and debasing tasks, has made compulsory, in their own and in the interests of their unborn infants, a month of respite for expectant mothers, and a further month for mothers after delivery. Extending thus to these poor victims--beasts of the burden of toil, and beasts of the burden of sex--a mercy and consideration wholly lacking in the Feminist propaganda. For this latter repudiates indignantly all need for concession or privilege to wifehood or to motherhood, equally with womanhood. To justify the claim for equality in all things, women must be forced, at all cost, to identical standards of work and production. To ask privileges and concessions would be to confess, in the sex, weaknesses and disabilities that must disqualify it from economic identity with the other. Far, indeed, from such vain-glorious and disastrous straining for equality, the leaders of the Woman's Movement should, before all else, have demanded insistently still further industrial concessions and privileges for a sex handicapped for industry, by Nature. First and foremost, they should come into the open and boldly proclaim--what it is useless to deny, indeed--that in the function of parenthood, at all events, men and women are wholly dissimilar. They should reject outright all tinkerings and half-measures for relief of this great human disability, whereof one sex only bears the stress and burden for the benefit of both, and for survival of nations and races. Not only for the pitiful respite of a month before and a month after the birth of her child, should the mother be prohibited from industrial labour. By that time all the damage will have been done. The power that should have been put into the evolution of her infant will have been put into the revolutions of a lathe. The life-potential that should have gone to build its living bone and brain and muscle will have gone to feed the life of a machine. The breath she will have drawn for it will have been contaminated by the dust and fumes of toil. Its poor nascent brain and faculties will have been dulled and depleted, stupefied and vitiated by the stress and turmoil of its mother's labours. Only the dregs of the maternal powers will have been invested in the Race. The finest and most valuable will have gone to swell the balance-sheets of Capital. The trumpet-cry of The Woman's Movement should be, indeed, _The Absolute Prohibition of young Wives and Mothers from all Industrial and Professional employment!_