If it be today on no physical battlefield that we stand beside our men, and
on no march through no external forest or morass that we have to lead; it
is yet the old spirit which, undimmed by two thousand years, stirs within
us in deeper and subtler ways; it is yet the cry of the old, free Northern
woman which makes the world today. Though the battlefield be now for us
all, in the laboratory or the workshop, in the forum or the study, in the
assembly and in the mart and the political arena, with the pen and not the
sword, of the head and not the arm, we still stand side by side with the
men we love, "to dare with them in war and to suffer with them in peace,"
as the Roman wrote of our old Northern womanhood.

Those women, of whom the old writers tell us, who, barefooted and white
robed, led their Northern hosts on that long march to Italy, were animated
by the thought that they led their people to a land of warmer sunshine and
richer fruitage; we, today, believe we have caught sight of a land bathed
in a nobler than any material sunlight, with a fruitage richer than any
which the senses only can grasp: and behind us, we believe there follows a
longer train than any composed of our own race and people; the sound of the
tread we hear behind us is that of all earth's women, bearing within them
the entire race. The footpath, yet hardly perceptible, which we tread down
today, will, we believe, be life's broadest and straightest road, along
which the children of men will pass to a higher co-ordination and harmony.
The banner which we unfurl today is not new: it is the standard of the
old, free, monogamous, labouring woman, which, twenty hundred years ago,
floated over the forests of Europe. We shall bear it on, each generation
as it falls passing it into the hand of that which follows, till we plant
it so high that all nations of the world shall see it; till the women of
the humblest human races shall be gathered beneath its folds, and no child
enter life that was not born within its shade.