far as to advocate a general training of young women in such
duties, carried on in a kind of enlarged and improved midwifery
school. The service would last a year, and the young woman would
then be for three years in the reserves, and liable to be called
up for duty. There is certainly much to be said for such a
proposal, considerably more than is to be said for compulsory
military service. For while it is very doubtful whether a man
will ever be called on to fight, most women are liable to be
called on to exercise household duties or to look after children,
whether for themselves or for other people.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] It is not, of course, always literally true that each parent supplies
exactly half the heredity, for, as we see among animals generally, the
offspring may sometimes approach more nearly to one parent, sometimes to
the other, while among plants, as De Vries and others have shown, the
heredity may be still more unequally divided.

[2] It should scarcely be necessary to say that to assert that motherhood
is a woman's supreme function is by no means to assert that her activities
should be confined to the home. That is an opinion which may now be
regarded as almost extinct even among those who most glorify the function
of woman as mother. As Friedrich Naumann and others have very truly
pointed out, a woman is not adequately equipped to fulfil her functions as
mother and trainer of children unless she has lived in the world and
exercised a vocation.

[3] "Were the capacities of the brain and the heart equal in the sexes,"