Page:Our Girls.pdf/110

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94
OUR GIRLS

the preservation of her sexual attractions. Both are wrong, and both damnable, the one turning woman into the squaw, the other into the houri. Work, if it is right in kind and degree, is good for woman, and in this war the daughters of Britain seem to have found themselves. If, instead of five hundred thousand, there were a million of them at work in the factories, the British race would be the better for the next hundred years. Their work has increased their physical attractiveness, and it is not likely to lessen their fecundity. Doing a national service of immense importance has infused such a spirit of self-respect into British women as we have never known before. Earning substantial wages, and being free to marry or not to marry, as they please, has dealt a death-blow to that hoary old wickedness (prostitution in its various forms) which is based on the poverty of the woman and the wealth of the man. Let the German woman, in obedience to her imperial order, which imposes unbroken child-bearing