The strike of a Sex.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XI, Issue 3772, 30 March 1891, Page 2

The strike of a Sex.

Among the latest works added to the Sir George Grey collection (says the Auckland Herald) is au American novel, entitled The Strike of a Sex" by ? According to the author or authoress, women are not goina; to be content simply with industrial, social, and political rights, but as wives are going to claim " tho new Magna Charta,"which is foreshadowed in tho following quotation .from the work :—" The women say that while they are willing under proper conditions to undergo what George Sand grandly called 'the august martyrdom of maternity' they utterly refuse to have that martyrdom imposed upon them any longer. They say that maternity multiplied and practised, enforced as it is, constitutes the primeval curse wh'ch has rested upon thein since they were driven out from the Garden of Eden. They can bear that curse no longer, and the time has come for man, by the same enlightenment that is flooding all other fields iiNfnowledge, to find out a way to twe it. In short, they demand as inalienable right that man shall

give them on irrevocable, perpetual guaruntee that no women from this time forth and forever shall be subjected tg the wofs of maternity without her free and specific consent i t nil cases. She claims this right upon the ground that maternity is what George Sand called it a • martyrdom.' Ic puts the life of every womou who enters upon it in real jeopardy. It imperils an existence which is as sweet to womou under conditions as man's existence is to him. The terrible risks of maternity are woman's, and woman's alone. They cannot be shared by man, anil woman, therefore, intends that she alone should freely elect when she should inour these risks. For man to lightly or indifferently expose women to such peril and suffering without a free and undoubted consent is worse than the worst form of African slavery—obsolete, barbarous, and un-Christian."