Important, even of vital importance, as the work of physical motherhood is, and disastrous as everyone must admit would be any social developments which impaired this, it is a monstrous distortion to talk as if physical motherhood were the only work of women. The maidens, the widows, the women who are having no more children, have endless natural spheres of usefulness and happiness, if only men will leave them free. There is a good deal to be said for the view that a large number of unmarried women were needed to get the women’s movement well going. As a matter of fact, the leaders of the three chief suffrage societies are married women, and there are of course a very large number of wives in the women’s movement; but women with young children can scarcely see the wood for the trees, and such a gigantic piece of work as the organisation of the hitherto unorganised half of humanity has been one which has, of necessity, taken all the time and energy of very many women. Never again, in all probability, will there be such need for many women who can travel light. It is admitted that marriage may often be a brake on the man pioneer; much more must it be so for the woman pioneer. It will not take us a hundredth part of the time to use our liberty that it has taken to win our liberty. Many a man, one is proud to record, has done his utmost to strengthen the hands of his wife in the movement which they both believe in; but the husband is not unknown who likes to see all the other women progressive, only not _his_ wife. And, of course, there are very many mothers whose children absorb, while they are young, the greater part of their energies. Children grow up and the mothers very often have two-score years to put in after the babies have left off coming. As women’s lives widen, there will be fewer of the mothers who bore their grown-up sons and nag their grown-up daughters. The work of such experienced matrons in the great organised work of mothering, care committees, schools for mothers, guardians of the poor, education authorities, is invaluable. But so long as the idiotic restrictions upon the civic work of women exist, and so long as women have not the means of independence, this work will still only be done by few of those who could do it so well. And the rest will still be like paddle-wheels out of water, wasting energy in a great whirring. The men who speak of the maidens as waste products might also be invited to consider the millions of unmarried men, and to ask themselves whether these men really could marry, and whether there are not already very many men, who can marry only because they have devoted sisters who shoulder the burden of the old folk and the invalids; nay, more, who help, out of their difficult earnings, to keep their nephews and their nieces.