"What do they want?" cries the Gentle Lady. "Why some of them are rich women--some of them are titled women. Why don't they mind their own business and attend to their own children?" "But maybe they have no children, or maybe their children, like Mrs. Pankhurst's, are grown up!" The Gentle Lady will not hear you--will not debate it--she turns to the personal aspect again. "Well, I am sure _I_ have enough to do with my own affairs, and I really have no patience with that sort of thing!" That settles it! She does not see, of course, that the new movement among women is a spiritual movement--that women, whose work has been taken away from them, are now beating at new doors, crying to be let in that they may take part in new labors, and thus save womanhood from the enervation which is threatening it. Women were intended to guide and sustain life, to care for the race; not feed on it. Wherever women have become parasites on the race, it has heralded the decay of that race. History has proven this over and over again. In ancient Greece, in the days of its strength and glory, the women bore their full share of the labor, both manual and mental; not only the women of the poorer classes, but queens and princesses carried water from the well; washed their linen in the stream; doctored and nursed their households; manufactured the clothing for their families; and, in addition to these labors, performed a share of the highest social functions as priestesses and prophetesses. These were the women who became the mothers of the heroes, thinkers and artists, who laid the foundation of the Greek nation. In the day of toil and struggle, the race prospered and grew, but when the days of ease and idleness came upon Greece, when the accumulated wealth of subjugated nations, the cheap service of slaves and subject people, made physical labor no longer a necessity; the women grew fat, lazy and unconcerned, and the whole race degenerated, for the race can rise no higher than its women. For a while the men absorbed and reflected the intellectual life, for there still ran in their veins the good red blood of their sturdy grandmothers. But the race was doomed by the indolent, self-indulgent and parasitic females. The women did not all degenerate. Here and there were found women on whom wealth had no power. There was a Sappho, and an Aspasia, who broke out into activity and stood beside their men-folk in intellectual attainment, but the other women did not follow; they were too comfortable, too well fed, too well housed, to be bothered. They had everything--jewels, dresses, slaves. Why worry? They went back to their cushions and rang for tea--or the Grecian equivalent; and so it happened that in the fourth century Greece fell like a rotten tree. Her conqueror was the indomitable Alexander, son of the strong and virile Olympia.