vestibule to women's emancipation. Man's suffrage has not introduced the millennium, and it is foolish to suppose that woman's suffrage can. > It is merely an act of justice and a reasonable condition of social
The attainment of the suffrage, if it is a beginning and not an end, will thus have a real and positive value in liberating the woman's movement from a narrow and sterilizing phase of its course. In England, especially, the woman's movement has in the past largely confined itself to imitating men and to obtaining the same work and the same rights as men. Putting the matter more broadly, it may be said that it has been the aim of the woman's movement to secure woman's claims as a human being rather than as woman. But that is only half the task of the woman's movement, and perhaps not the most essential half.
Women can never be like men, any more than men can be like women. It is their unlikeness which renders them indispensable to each other, and which also makes it imperative that each sex should have its due share in moulding the conditions of life.
Woman's function in life can never be the same as man's, if only because women are the mothers of the race. That is the point, the only point, at which women have an uncontested supremacy over men.
The most vital problem before our civilization to-day is the problem of motherhood, the question of creating the human beings best fitted for modern life, the practical realization of a sound eugenics.
Manouvrier, the distinguished anthropologist, who carries feminism to its extreme point in the scientific sphere, yet recognizes the fundamental fact that "a woman's part is to make children." But he clearly perceives also that "in all its extent and all its consequences that part is not surpassed in importance, in difficulty, or in dignity, by the man's part." On the contrary it is a part which needs "an amount of intelligence incontestably superior, and by far, to that required by most masculine occupations." 7