qualified teacher; till, at nine or ten, the son in certain countries often
leaves his home for ever for the public school, to pass on to the college
and university; while the daughter, in the hands of trained instructors and
dependents, owes in the majority of cases hardly more of her education or
formation to maternal toil. While even among our poorer classes, the
infant school, and the public school; and later on the necessity for manual
training, takes the son and often the daughter as completely, and always
increasingly as civilisation advances, from the mother's control. So
marked has this change in woman's ancient field of labour become, that a
woman of almost any class may have borne many children and yet in early
middle age be found sitting alone in an empty house, all her offspring gone
from her to receive training and instruction at the hands of others. The
ancient statement that the training and education of her offspring is
exclusively the duty of the mother, however true it may have been with
regard to a remote past, has become an absolute misstatement; and the woman
who should at the present day insist on entirely educating her own
offspring would, in nine cases out of ten, inflict an irreparable injury on
them, because she is incompetent.

But, if possible, yet more deeply and radically have the changes of modern
civilisation touched our ancient field of labour in another direction--in
that very portion of the field of human labour which is peculiarly and
organically ours, and which can never be wholly taken from us. Here the
shrinkage has been larger than in any other direction, and touches us as
women more vitally.

Time was, and still is, among almost all primitive and savage folk, when
the first and all-important duty of the female to her society was to bear,
to bear much, and to bear unceasingly! On her adequate and persistent
performance of this passive form of labour, and of her successful feeding