.......“On the other hand think of the discouragements. While
the mother toils in a restricted anxious home amid her
children, she sees through her imperfectly cleaned window (one
can’t do everything) the childless wives having a glorious
time, going a-bicycling with their husbands, dressed gaudily
with all his superfluous income, talking about their ‘Rights.’
As her children grow up to an age when they might help drudge
with her or drudge for her, the State, without a word of thanks
to her, takes them away to teach them and make good citizens of
them. If the husband presently becomes bored by his restricted
prolific household and its incessant demands, and absconds, or
if he is simply unlucky and gets out of work, the State deals
with her in a spirit of austere ingratitude. She is subjected
to ‘charity’ and every conceivable indignity; she undergoes
profounder humiliations than fall to the lot of the most
dissolute women. If a husband ‘goes wrong’ and a woman has kept
childless, she can get employment, she can shift for herself
and be well quit of him, but a family disaster for a mother is
catastrophe.
“I submit the situation is preposterous. I do not believe that
with increasing intelligence and refinement women will go on
marrying and bearing children under such conditions. I gather
that the statistics of marriage-rates and birth-rates bear me
out in this.”