the many old people shuffling towards misshapen graves?

There is manifestly another burden, familiar and accustomed to the figure
of woman. This does not bend her back, nor withdraw her eyes from the
distance, nor rank her with the haggard waste of fields. It is borne in
front, and she breasts the world with it; shoulder-high, and it is her
ballast. So loaded she stands like the Dresden Raphael, and there is no
bearer of sword and buckler more erect.

It is, by the way, a curious sign of indignity of race--or, if not
indignity, provincialism--in the more extremely Oriental people, that a
Japanese woman carries her child on her back and not upon her arm. It is
a charming infant, and the mother looks no more than a gentle child; with
the little creature bound to her back she carries a soft lantern in a
mild blue night. She is not of a classic race, and she shuffles on her
subordinate way, an irresponsible creature, who must not proffer opinions
except by way of quotation, and is scarcely of the inches that measure
the landscape or of the aspect that fronts the sky.

But whence is this now prevalent desire to slip the nobler and bear the
ignobler burden? It is not long since an American woman wrote a book,
_Women and Economics_, urging equal labour upon women, by the analogy
of animals that know no distinction between a strong sex and a weak, nor
between a free sex and one confined to the pen, or the lair, or the
cover, by the care of little ones. The reply seems too obvious that the
children of men are more helpless, and are helpless for a longer time,
even in proportion to their longer life, than the off-spring of other
living creatures. The children of men have to be carried. This author
complains that women are economically dependent upon men; and she finds
that the world has "misty ideas upon the subject." If those misty ideas