But, suppose all those mentioned were really exempt, how would that apply
to women? If a like number were counted out, there would still be a goodly
array, from the maiden of twenty-one to the matron of forty-five, from
which to draw. Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony write: "Women have led armies
in all ages, have held positions in the army and navy for years in
disguise, have fought, bled, and died on the battlefield in our late war."
The isolated occasions on which they have done so are not such as to
commend the practice, neither do the Suffragists propose seriously to
commend it. Dr. Jacobi, in her address before the Committee of the
Constitutional Convention, says: "We do not admit that exemption from
military duty is a concession of courtesy, for which women should be so
grateful as to refrain from asking for anything else. The military
functions performed by men, and so often perverted to most atrocious uses,
have never been more than the equivalent for the function of child-bearing
imposed by nature upon women. It is not a fanciful nor sentimental, it is
an exact and just equivalent. The man who exposes his life in battle, can
do no more than his mother did in the hour she bore him. And the functions
of maternity persist, and will persist, to the end of time,--while the
calls to arms are becoming so faint and rare that three times since the
Revolutionary War, an entire generation of men has grown up without having
heard them."

This question of military service is not a question of equivalent at all--
sentimental or otherwise; it is a question of the actual service, and as
to the service to the state given by women in bearing sons, the men work
not only to support those sons but to support also their mothers and
sisters, and that far beyond the child-bearing age of the mother.

As to the rareness of the calls, I read of seven wars since the