The growing substitution of machinery for human labour in almost all forms of handicraft has diminished the demand for untrained labour; both the family and the State have reached a point where they recognize that the mere production of a human creature, unless there be also the means of fitting it for the complex conditions and duties of modern life, does not increase the wealth or strength of either state or family, but is a source of weakness and suffering, and there is a steady tendency for persons to marry later and produce fewer offspring as civilization advances in a class or race. So radically has woman's condition changed with regard to this form of labour, that while, in most societies of the past, every woman not physically incapable was a child-bearer, and bore more or less persistently from youth to age, in our own societies at the present day there has arisen a vast body of women compelled, not by any religious enthusiasm, but by the exigencies of modern civilized life, to remain throughout life absolutely celibate and childless, performing no sex function whatever. This phenomenon is accompanied by another equally important, the increase as civilization advances, and especially in our vast cities where it is found in its complete form, of that body of women, who, while not celibate, are also not as a rule child-bearers and mothers, but leading a purely parasitic and non-productive life, drawing their aliment from a society to which they contribute nothing in return. Child-bearing must always remain the all-important labour of many women during some portion of their lives; at the present day it has become a labour which millions of women are never, by the exigencies of modern life, called upon or permitted to perform; and upon few or no women is the demand for child-bearing from youth to age sufficient to fill or even partially fill her life. Deplorable as it is that any woman should have to go through life without the joy of motherhood, the glory and compensation of woman through her long ages of excessive toil and suffering, the fact has to be faced that, for millions of women, child-bearing has ceased to be one of the labours that life offers them.