nine development. These two aspects of the same significant tendency were:—
1. The woman's giving up of brute competition (where she excelled, be it remembered);
2. Her specialising in the home (accepting the yoke of silence and of service).
Woman purchased civilisation at the price of her individual liberty.
When our immemorial forefathers and foremothers lived in cave and tree-crotch, the female asked no consideration and got no quarter, not even in the performance of her vital function—she had no need of either. She was (in spite of the drain on her physical resources) quite equal to the task of taking care of both herself and her progeny.
So well able was she to bear the double burden—this major share in the perpetuation of the species—that where it was a question of protecting her young, she was accounted a foe more terrible than any male of her kind.[1]
No nonsense in those days about her being the weaker sex.
No hint of her being a creature for whom special allowances must be made—till she, the first specialist, began to specialise. Not till she gave up gambolling in the airy leafage and took to making a home; to nursing not alone the young, but the sick and the
- ↑ This was published before Mr. Kipling's tribute to "the sex."
