The question brings us to the well-fought battle-ground of breeding _versus_ environment. When a suffragist procession in the States carried a banner declaring, “We prepare our children for the world; we must prepare the world for our children,” there was an outcry from some scientific persons, saying that that put the whole fallacy into a nutshell: the first was woman’s job, the second was man’s. It was for woman to breed the good child, and for man to make the good environment. A manufacturing nation still thrills responsive to the call for further division of labour; that is to say, the dominant class, the employers do. But can we really produce a human being on the same system as we produce the pin beloved of early economists? Let us look a little further. Even if we make the huge admission that a woman, a human being after all, with a mind, to say nothing of a soul, would retain her bodily and mental health under so hideous a system,—can this woman produce a good child all by herself? Does it not matter in the least who is the father of the child? Whether he has clean blood, and is of good stock? What of the racial poisons which a man may inherit, but may also acquire in the course of a misspent life? It is clear that the woman will have to select her mate, but how is a woman in subjection to do this? So that the first part of the division of labour manifestly cannot take place. The man must take part in preparing our children for the world. Can we really say that man alone does or can prepare the world for our children? It is too late in the day to tell us that, when every year that passes shows us more plainly the injurious effects upon the race of the industrial system, which is so largely the product of men’s minds, and of the great social evils which were treated of in Chapters X. and XI., and which men have so largely agreed to consider “necessary.” The theory of the cow-woman, who shall do nothing but bear and suckle babies, is not, as some people would have us believe, a revival of what once was and may be again. It never was. The masses of women have always worked very hard indeed. Nor will women be brought to accept it for the future. Degraded as women often have been, they have always had the one safeguard of work, even if it were not the work they would have chosen, and may have had to be done under unfavourable conditions. In complex modern society the work of women is even more necessary than in simpler days; only now there is more need than ever there was of intelligence, adaptability, scientific knowledge and organisation among women, for they cannot even be efficient mothers under modern conditions if their minds do not keep pace with knowledge and the arts of living.