Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/48

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THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

in part, to the limitation of the working women's opportunities, through the necessity of their earning a livelihood.

This much must be noted, that the motive which consciously or unconsciously inspires the working-woman feminist, is not the same which frequently actuates her better-off comrade. In the first case the demand is for improved conditions of labour, and the vote is sought as a means to that end. In the second case it is for labour itself that she cries, new openings, new spheres of labour, to fill her half-emptied life. She does not ask to go back to the conditions in which her great-grandmother lived her useful, fruitful life. She realises that the present method of producing necessaries is the most economical one, a vast saving of human energy for better ends. She does not cry for wifehood and motherhood, or, as the vulgar youth expressed it, she is not 'after a husband,' though there would be no shame in desiring to obey the law of her being. She asks that, in exchange for the domestic life stolen from her—the happy, busy productive life of the homes of her ancestors—she may have new activities given to her, in which she may minister to the common good as her forebears ministered to their families and their village communities. She would be doctor or lawyer, teacher or preacher. She would take an active part in