But it may also be said, "Granting fully that you are right, that, as
woman's old fields of labour slip from her, she must grasp the new, or must
become wholly dependent on her sexual function alone, all the other
elements of human nature in her becoming atrophied and arrested through
lack of exercise: and, granting that her evolution being arrested, the
evolution of the whole race will be also arrested in her person: granting
all this to the full, and allowing that the bulk of human labour tends to
become more and more intellectual and less and less purely mechanical, as
perfected machinery takes the place of crude human exertion; and that
therefore if woman is to be saved from degeneration and parasitism, and the
body of humanity from arrest, she must receive a training which will
cultivate all the intellectual and all the physical faculties with which
she is endowed, and be allowed freely to employ them; nevertheless, would
it not be possible, and perhaps be well, that a dividing line of some kind
should be drawn between the occupations of men and of women? Would it not,
for example, be possible that woman should retain agriculture, textile
manufacture, trade, domestic management, the education of youth, and
medicine, in addition to child-bearing, as her exclusive fields of toil;
while, to the male, should be left the study of abstract science, law and
war, and statecraft; as of old, man took war and the chase, and woman
absorbed the further labours of life? Why should there not be again a fair
and even division in the field of social labour?"

Superficially, this suggestion appears rational, having at least this to
recommend it, that it appears to harmonise with the course of human
evolution in the past; but closely examined, it will, we think, be found to
have no practical or scientific basis, and to be out of harmony with the
conditions of modern life. In ancient and primitive societies, the mere
larger size and muscular strength of man, and woman's incessant physical