certain feminists believe that the woman movement has accomplished such meagre results in regard to the reorganisation of family right for the sole reason that men, who once created the right for their own advantage, still cling to the injustice out of egoism. these feminists forget that the family is the social form of life in which tradition has the greatest power. it speaks here with the voice of the blood; it works through our deepest instincts, our strongest needs of life, our innermost feelings, as these have developed through many thousands of years under the influences which were exercised in and through the family. to accomplish in this sphere not only reforms upon paper but also vigorous modifications—that is, new laws and customs which are rooted in new spiritual conditions of the people as a whole—is more necessary than that man grant women a share in legislation. innumerable individual human vicissitudes must be experienced and repeated in new forms, entering finally into the 140universal consciousness, before such spiritual soil can be formed. the man became and remained the head of the family because all experiences and social factors once made this arrangement most advantageous for father, mother, and children. woman will be able to realise her new ideas in regard to love-life and mother-right to the degree in which she demonstrates, not only in speech and writing but also in vigorous daily living, that these ideals surpass in vital effect those which now obtain.

in the last half century, among the germanic peoples, however, the family life has already undergone essential transformations, while the romantic world still continues to exhibit features which in the first half of the 19th century were typical even among these peoples. marriages are arranged by the father, divorce is considered either a sin or a shame, the paternal power is still absolute, the homogeneous relationship among all the members of the family—in joy and sorrow—is inviolable. the feeling of the son for the mother, bordering almost upon madonna worship, and the passion of the father for their little children, must, however, always have been more characteristic of the romance peoples than of the germans.

among the latter the attainment of individualism, first in the sphere of legislation, still more in that of customs, most of all in that of mode of thought and feeling, has altered the position of 141the individual in the family. while the family exhibited fifty years ago a tightly closed unity, in which women had only slight significance, now the wife as well as the husband, mother as well as father, daughter as well as son, assert their personality, not only in the family, but often even against the family. wives draw the arguments for their self assertion most frequently from the principles of the woman movement.

truly, in the course of the century, many married women have succeeded in finding expression for their significant universal human or feminine attributes in marriage, and thus have ennobled it. but the self-conscious effort to elevate the position of the wife began simultaneously with the demand that no human right could be denied to a woman upon the ground of her sex, whether within or without marriage.

individualism has already made personal love, instead of family interest, decisive for the consummation of a marriage. in the name of her personality as of her work, woman desires with ever greater right full majority and legal equality with man in marriage. against individualism, the doctrine of evolution now advocates certain limitations of the personal erotic freedom to consummate marriage, but advocates at the same time, contrary to the christian sexual ethics, new freedom for the sake of the higher development of the race. here comes into effect, the new conception of life by which the possibilities of development 142and of happiness in the earthly life have acquired a new value and force.

the ultimate heights of the modern conception of sex life are indicated by erotic idealism, which since “la nouvelle héloise” has by poets and dreamers been continually elevated, while world-renowned lovers showed the possibility of this wonderful love. in addition to all these influences of the spirit of the time upon the transformation of marriage, come the indirect effects of the woman movement. thanks to the vibrations in which this movement has set the “spirit of the time,” many an ordinary man now accords to his wife that power and authority in the family which the law still denies her; yes, many commonplace people of both sexes now desire from their marriage things of which their equals fifty years ago did not even dream. if one adds also the decisive influences which the political-economic conditions of the present exercise upon the family life, one has found some of the threads which form the woof of the unalterable warp, a woof which makes the marriage of the present a variegated and unquiet fabric, whose pattern exhibits primeval oriental motives beside those in newest “modern style.”

here it is of the greatest importance to indicate the zigzag line which denotes the alternate repulsion and attraction that under the influence of the woman movement marriage has had for woman.

first came the little crowd of “masculine women” with their hatred of marriage and man. 143then the great working army that forgot, over the human rights of woman, that to these also must belong the right to fulfil her duty as a being of sex, and not alone the right to be “independent of marriage” through her work. then came the reaction against this incompleteness. at this time, the nature of woman was called an “empty capsule,” which received its content only from man: a “cry of the blood,” which finds its answer in the child. there was no other “woman question” than the possibility of living erotically a complete life. one woman wished this in love without marriage, another in love without children, a third in children without marriage, a fourth in children without love—“a work and a child” was the life cry—a fifth woman wished the man only for the sake of the child, a sixth the child only for the sake of the man, and the seventh wished both only for her own sake!

the conviction of some women that the common erotic life of man and woman must have also a spiritual life value for two human souls, filling out and developing each other, was called “ibsenism.” and after the ideal demands which ibsen pressed upon the consciousness of the time, many men—and not a few women—found relaxation after their spiritual over-exertion, if they desired nothing more from one another than “the sound happiness of the senses.” woman’s “personality,” “equality,” and “human right” were old playthings, relegated to the rubbish heap.

144the reaction against this reaction is now in progress. just now—and equally one-sided as will be shown later—woman’s universal humanity is emphasised at the expense of the instinct life; her social labour-duty, at the expense of the domestic life; her personality, at the expense of the family.

among all these zigzag movements, more deeply thoughtful women continually sought to recall that neither the universal human nor the sexual being of woman must be over-developed at the expense of the other qualities of her being; that perfect humanity signifies for neither sex that the spiritual life has suppressed the sex life or sex, the soul-life, but that both find in a third higher condition their full redemption and harmony. through great love, exceptional natures already create this condition; but what to-day only exceptional natures attain, culture can gradually make attainable for many.

this great love demands fidelity. but often only one—ordinarily the woman—experiences this great feeling. and then not even the deepest devotion on her part suffices to preserve the community of life. to preserve the form for the purpose of guarding the inner emptiness, as was done earlier, is repugnant to the erotic consciousness of the modern woman. this is the deepest reason why the modern woman—even also the modern developed man—becomes continually more undecided about contracting marriage. they both 145know that the passion which attracts two beings is not synonymous with a sympathy which arises through the harmony of their natures, which must not be so complete that nothing remains of the unexpected and mysterious that is so essential an element of love. the modern woman asks herself, “what can prove to me that an erotic sympathy is profound, real, decreed by nature, life-long?” and she asks with good reason. if two lovers who know that they make each other happy with all the senses, constrained themselves, each in a corner of a room fettered to a stool, blindfolded, to entertain each other three hours daily for three months, this test would probably prevent a great number of marriages void of sympathy. but it would furnish no guaranty that those who consummated the marriage after such a concentrated soul interchange, would hold out. for souls which in a certain stage of development seem inexhaustible can be so transformed that they experience only satiety for each other. the young wife of to-day is deeply conscious of what a new problem for each newly married woman marriage is. she knows how impossible it is to foresee what difficulties will be encountered and whether good intentions and tactful adaptation will succeed in overcoming these difficulties. she knows that, even if the written law made her wholly equal to man, even if she made herself that equal by entering only into a marriage of the higher, newer conscience, yet all the inner, 146most difficult, deepest problems still remain. this certainly induces many women to become only the beloved, the mistress, of the man who wishes no community of life, but only happy hours. many more women still strike the possibilities of erotic happiness out of their plan of life, because they have not experienced the ideal love of which they dreamed, or else could not realise it.[3]

147sometimes their doubt, in regard to the duration of love and the unity of souls, decides them, another time the longing for a personal life-work is the reason for their determination—a life-work for which these women have suffered so keenly, been deprived of so much, and have so struggled, that it has become passionately dear to them, and they feel that a complete renunciation of the erotic life is easier than the torment of being “drawn and quartered,” as the death penalty of the middle ages was called—a quartering between profession, husband, home, and children. and the result 148usually demonstrates that celibacy is wiser than the compromise. it is most frequently the case,—in europe at least,—if the work of the unmarried woman had no personal character, and if the home is not dependent upon the earnings of the wife, that she gives up her professional work after her marriage.

against this sacrifice, however, the higher erotic idealism has begun to rebel and has, thereby, come into conflict with the conservative direction of feminism, which while planning to make the wife equal to the husband, adheres firmly to the present marriage as protection for wife and children.

it is this point of view that is condemned by the new idealism. for it “protection” signifies, in its innermost meaning, that the man buys love and the woman sells it, which is considered “moral,” while it is considered immoral for a man to sell love and for a woman to buy it. the “protection” in this relationship has as result that the “virtue” of the maid is synonymous with untouched sexual nature, and that of the wife, with physical fidelity; while the “virtue” of the youth and the man is judged from an entirely different point of view.

the relationship affording “protection” has also brought with it the idea that a woman could not show her love as openly as a man, except when he was proud and poor and she was rich. only when the duty of support on the part of the man ceases, will woman be able to demand the same 149chastity and fidelity from him as he demands from her; she will then be able, quite as proudly and naturally as he, to show the flowering of her being—her love—instead of as now increasing her demand in the marriage market by artful dissimulation. as long as maintenance, within or outside of marriage, is the price for “possession” of the woman, the man will consider the woman as “his,” and the more submissive she is the more fully she satisfies his feeling of ownership. now marriage has become only an affair of custom, a common death or comatose condition, because neither party needs trouble himself to keep the love of the other. only when woman, through her work, can lead an existence worthy of a human being, when no woman will sell her love but every woman can freely give it, will man experience what perfect womanly devotion is. and when no man can “possess” love but must remain worthy of love in order to be loved then only will women, on their side, experience what tenderness and fine feeling masculine devotion can attain.

this, the purest and warmest erotic idealism, is the morality of the future. but the way to its realisation is not, as many women believe to-day, that mothers, even, should continue their work of earning a livelihood, but that way whose direction i have elsewhere pointed out.[4]

150here we have to do, however, only with the spiritual conditions which arise in the marriage of to-day, whether the wife has retained her work or has given it up.

even the cultivated modern man, who brings 151to the human personality of his wife admiration and sympathy, seeks in her always that “womanliness” to which goethe has given the classic expression: the finely reserved, quiet, strong, self-contained woman, reposing harmoniously in the fulness of her own nature, a maternally lovely being, wholly “natural,” a “beautiful soul,” observing, creative, but using these gifts only to create a home. these creative offices the modern man who loves desires to assure, when he wishes to “maintain” his wife, and begs her to abandon the outside commercial work in which he foresees a danger to the beautiful life together of which both dream. the woman who along with her new self-conscious individuality and her profound culture has guarded the “old” devotion, understands ordinarily this desire of the man. she chooses, in spite of her idealism, as he wishes, in cases where her work has not been very personal. if she has worked in the same field as the man, then she converts her gifts into comprehension of him, into personal interest for all his interests; and these marriages in which the wife has enjoyed the same education as the man, but later has devoted herself entirely to the home, are, as a rule, the happiest marriages of the present time. but in the proportion in which her work was creative, is the difficulty of the choice. in the case where the productive power has the strength of genius, the modern man will scarcely utter such a wish and in those circumstances the modern woman will 152not grant it. and because the woman of genius is generally a complete human being, with strong erotic as well as universal human demands, she chooses often compromise. she finds in love, in motherhood, new revelations; and in the mysterious depths of her nature, the productive element of the maternal function has an elevating influence upon her gift of creative power. thus the energy temporarily diminished by motherhood is restored. and her uneasy conscience, because she must entrust to others much of the care and education of the children, is appeased by the consciousness that she has often given to mankind richer natures, and so more significant children, than more devoted mothers, and that her own nature, because of the double creative activity, has attained a ripeness and richness which make her personality more significant for husband and children than if she had given up her calling to please them. these thoughts cannot, however, prevent the daily conflict between her feelings of love and the impossibility, in times of strong spiritual production, of giving expression to it. the very proximity of the children consumes at such times too much nervous energy. and since all creation requires selfishness—in the sense of concentration upon one’s own needs in order to be able to work creatively and to sink oneself in the work—while all love’s solicitude requires active attention to the needs of the loved ones, the conflict must remain permanent and insoluble.

153in this conviction, many women of genius choose the lesser conflict: marriage without children. such a relationship occurs not infrequently in our time in this way: a man of feeling through the work of a woman is first moved by her being. the man is in that case often the younger or the less developed. at first, marriage brings both a rich happiness. but later comes a time when the power of the personality of the woman of genius becomes too strong for the man; when he feels himself exhausted by all the sensitiveness and impatience which charge the air about a creative personality with electricity. he has now had enough of the rich spiritual exchange and longs for a woman who is only fresh richness, sunny quiet, easy docility; the now vanished “ingénue” would be the type of woman who most of all could entrance him.

in another case, it is the wife who becomes wearied, when the man can no longer keep pace with her development nor afford her new inspiration. the erotic life of the woman as well as of the man of genius exhibits two phases: in one they are attracted by their opposite, in the other by a congeniality of souls; in one phase they have sought sentiment, intimacy, nature; in the other, soul, passion, culture. the order changes in different cases, but the phenomenon repeats itself. what both consciously or unconsciously desire of love is not another individuality to love but only a means of inspiration.

154yet one thing may be emphasised: the richer the nature of a woman is and the greater her talents, the more life-determining love will be for her; at one time making her existence desolate, at another time making it fruitful. for the woman of genius is less able than the man to renounce her own fate. this the man is capable of doing, in the midst of passion, without his work suffering thereby in vigour and strength; the woman on the contrary—even the genius—loses more easily her creative impulse in happiness, her creative power in unhappiness.

in this connection it may be recalled that many of the most gifted, most highly developed woman personalities of to-day have produced nothing, but have been what a frenchman has called “les grandes inspiratrices.” these have not, indeed, like the “ladies” of the middle ages, been worshipped at a distance by knights and poets; but they have had an influence similar to that of beatrice, through the power of communication of their rich personality in a relationship which had now the character of an “amitié amoureuse,” now that of a love imbued with sympathy, which in some cases, infrequently however, led to marriage. i need only mention the name richard wagner for the forms of two such women to appear, one of whom, who was his wife, surpassed in personal greatness all independently creative women of her time. but there have always been less unusual women who had significance as propagandists 155of the ideas of a great man through their specifically feminine gifts of convincing, of diffusing ideas, of modifying views, etc. if the future, because of the wife’s zeal for production on her own part, should lose this element of culture, it would be deplorable.

one of the favourite arguments of the woman movement has been that two married people working in the same profession had the best opportunities for understanding each other and consequently also for being happy. and truly they can best talk shop with each other. but that is what the working man needs least of all in his home; there he seeks rather relaxation from his calling, or at least a quite disinterested, immediate sympathy with its annoyances or joys. when one of the married fellow-workmen needs exactly this sympathy, the other is perhaps busy or too tired to be capable of such lively interest as the other expects. or one has experienced disappointments, the other joys, and then a real sympathy is still more difficult. to these crossings of mood is added also the unintentional, involuntary competition, which the similarity of vocation brings with it. the wife gains patients, the husband does not; his picture is praised, hers is pulled to pieces; she comes home from the theatre victorious, he after a defeat. during work, the criticism of one often disturbs the other; after the work, the criticism of the press disturbs the harmony of both. love wishes to fuse them 156into one being, the outer world compels them always to feel themselves separate. in the beginning they think: “nothing can come between us.” but if both do not possess a rare tenderness as well as rare fineness of soul, soon needles of ice fly through the air between them. only when the wife, as is the case so often in france, puts her ability into her husband’s affairs does this common interest prevent rivalry.

whether the province of the husband and wife is the same or not, difficulty always results from the wife’s commercial or professional work in that she rarely finds a good substitute for the domestic and maternal duties. and when the husband sees the house badly managed and the children ill-bred, he tries according to his strength to render assistance or, as more frequently happens, seeks his comfort outside the home. but even if these stumbling-blocks may be cleared away by other feminine hands, the fact still remains that the wife because of her work must demand sacrifices on the part of the man such as his work has required at all times from the wife. she is often compelled to forego much of the society of her husband, of his solicitude and tenderness because he has no available time. now each of the married people has consideration for the leisure of the other and for all other severe conditions of the work. but beside these favourable results stands also the detrimental fact that each suppresses his claims upon the sympathy of the other, as well 157as the wish to express his own, whenever this receiving and giving would interfere with the work. if this has become for one or for both a real passion, then the passion blinds him to everything that does not concern the work, and causes alternately joy or suffering. each of the married couple then disturbs the other by moods, and each needs to be cherished by the other. the tenderness which neither can give to the other, they find perhaps in a third.

but in those cases where the work is not passionately absorbing or where both husband and wife are persons of understanding, rather than of feeling, marriages of colleagues turn out well. each has in the other an intelligent, appreciative friend; the common work together is rich, and neither gives nor requires more than the other is able to reciprocate. the education of the wife makes her a good organiser in the home, which is comfortable without the work’s suffering thereby. when this is not too strenuous for either, but after the close of a reasonable working time, the two meet spiritually free in the home, the duties of which they often share—then the domestic life is happy and the work progresses easily, as long as there are no children. when children arrive, then there begins for the wife, even in such marriages, a life beyond her strength.

but since nature, in the interest of the race, often makes opposites attractive to each other, one may find a husband, full of feeling, who loves 158children, united to a wife for whom science is the greatest value of life, while she relegates feeling to a lower plane and considers motherhood an animal function. in place of the tenderness and of the children for which the husband longed, he has to participate in the victories and defeats of a woman of science. or we see a wife who dreamed of an intimate life with her husband and who sacrificed her work to it; but the life together was wrecked upon the husband’s artist concentration, and the wife had to suffer under a twofold emptiness: the lack of her work and the lack of happiness. then one sees instances where the wife retained her work because it was economically necessary and because she hoped out of the richness of her young strength to be able to fulfil all duties. and all this she was able to do except one thing—to preserve under the excessive strain her beauty, her power of charm, the elasticity of her nature. perhaps she belonged to the very highest among the new women who are so undivided, so proud, who think so highly of themselves, of man, of love, that they are beyond a wholly justified coquetry and rest blindly upon the uniting power of spiritual congeniality. but the day comes perhaps when these strong and, in all other respects, wise women have nothing other than freedom to give to the man whose senses, whose fancy, need that charm which the wife no longer possesses. in case, however, the man’s nature is not of those for whom the silken threads of daily 159domestic comfort form the strong band, but on the contrary is of the sort which needs renewal, then the very absence of the wife, occasioned temporarily by the work, can keep the relationship long fresh. this is upon the assumption that she understands what some of these women do not understand: to give, but in such a way that the man always longs for more; to remain sweetheart, not only friend; to be able to jest, not only to talk seriously. the modern wife of to-day, tested upon so many subjects, is often deeply mistaken in regard to the kind of “ministry” the man needs. the simple wisdom of their grandmothers consisted in this: to give much and to require nothing, always to subordinate themselves to the man with gentleness and humility, never to assert themselves before him as a free, self-determining personality. the wives of to-day, sacredly convinced of the right and freedom of women, succeed better in asserting their personality than in pleasing their husbands, and the quantity of their demands is often more noteworthy than the quality of their gifts. that many modern marriages turn out well shows that the adaptability of the modern husband is beginning to be even as great as that of the wife in former times!

the marriage is absolutely wrecked when the wife brings to it all the new demands of woman, but the husband all the primeval instincts of his sex. what in each sex relationship most intimately 160unites or most deeply sunders is and remains the erotic depth of nature in each. and the difference in this respect between the men and women of the present ever more widely separates them, and this division becomes fatal to innumerable individual lovers of to-day, as well as for the attitude of the sexes toward marriage in general. the erotically symmetrical woman views with hostility the dualism in the erotic nature of the modern man. this dualism evinces itself, with innumerable nuances it is true, in three typical ways: infinite erotic discussion, but inability to be stirred by it either with the soul or with the senses; ability to love only with the senses, not with the soul; and finally looking down upon the senses and desiring “spiritual love” only. for the modern completely developed woman the chattering vacuity, the animal instinct, the ascetic spirituality, are equally repellent. and yet it happens that the rosy mist of love can bring such a woman to a point where she creates for herself an illusion out of one of the above mentioned types. most frequently this occurs in the case of the vigorous man who divines nothing of the spiritual content of the woman whose outer appearance has charmed him. the tragedy of the modern woman is then like that which hebbel has revealed in judith, that the sex being in her is attracted by the muscular masculinity, which her human personality hates as her mortal enemy. for as a personality she admires in man only the spiritual 161strength of the man. the man on his part regrets his mistake that he did not choose a pretty amiable girl “of the old sort,” who would punctually lay his table and willingly share his bed; a woman “into whose head ibsen had put no fancies,” who “had not allowed herself to be talked into some folly by feminism.”

among such “follies,” similar men, and many others as well, include the demand advanced by the woman movement for the married woman’s property right, as well as a specified income for the wife working in the home, who however has to contribute from her property or her “remuneration” as housekeeper to the common household—a corollary which is always forgotten by the anti-feminist writers who assert that “the man becomes a slave when he has to work for the whole, but the wife may retain everything of hers.” (strindberg.)

the modern woman who before her marriage was independent, owing to her work, abhors the thought of a request for money—this most painful moment even in the happiest marriages—to so great a degree that this aversion determines the wife in some cases to keep up her own work. if on the contrary she has given this up, the consciousness of her earlier independence makes her often so sensitive that she feels herself injured by a protest however delicate in regard to the expenditure of money. more than one man has 162regretted, in consequence of the unreasonable demands of his wife, that he ever begged her to give up her own work. there are women, on the other hand, who continue their work and thereby only increase the incapability of a good-for-nothing man. in such cases, it avails little that in many countries the law now allows the wife free disposal of the income from her labour. notwithstanding this, the assertion is ridiculous that “if the man drinks up the money of his wife it is with her consent,” and “it is therefore of no avail to alter the law.” for it makes a significant difference in the relative position of the man and wife whether the law gives him the right to it, or whether he takes it by force. but in this as in other cases, the woman movement obviously cannot free women so long as they are impelled by unconscious forces from within to actions and sacrifices at variance with their conscious personality. the one thing which the woman movement has already achieved and can continue to achieve, is that the undue encroachment of the men ceases to have legal protection.

it is undeniable, on the other hand, that the unmarried woman’s personal and economic independence fashions wives who in marriage show themselves in a high degree egotistic, but who yet incessantly scold about man’s egotism, wives who themselves exhibit very little devotion and fine feeling, but place very great importance upon consideration. these wives were the ones whom 163fifty years ago men called “graters.” but the lack of amiability, which in certain women was usually due to childbirth, has nevertheless in modern woman, at least during the freedom of her girlhood, been unrestrained habit. her firm—and just—decision not to be “subservient” to her husband has resulted in, first, an armed peace, later, a war, in which the wife’s work is one of the projectiles. “i have my work, why should i stay here to be used up and tormented?” she asks herself. and when such questions begin, there is usually but one answer.

there is one decided advantage in giving to the woman the opportunity to earn her living: she has again acquired thereby significance in the home, while the generation of women, who neither co-operated productively in the home nor assumed all the duties of the mother, were regarded by man with less respect than, on the one side, their grandmothers who produced all of the household requisites, on the other side, their now independent self-supporting granddaughters. only when society recompenses the vocation of mother, can woman find in this a full equivalent for self-supporting labour.

another typical group of our time is formed by the numerous women for whom no choice remains in regard to their work, since it is of a kind that they must give up because of the removal to another place, or more frequently because they find so much work in the new home that every 164thought of anything further outside must cease. those who think that industry has made the work of the wife in the home to-day superfluous, speak only of the great cities, and usually only of opulent families in the great cities, where they are in a position to buy cheaper everything that the labour of the wife could produce. but in the country, among all classes, the mother must be the director of the work; and in all country homes in moderate circumstances—as in countless poor or not very well-to-do city families—the work of the mother is still frequently indispensable, and in addition is more economical than her earnings out of the house could be, especially since the developed modern woman is usually capable of a more rational housekeeping than the woman of earlier times.

but while the mothers of that time knew nothing except housework, those of to-day have often, as unmarried and self-supporting women, enjoyed a freedom of movement and opportunities of development which, now that they are over-burdened with household cares, they may seriously miss. the work of the mother is now still further increased by the difficulty of getting servants—at least capable ones—and also by the demands of luxury. the result of this again is that hospitality in the home decreases, that the watchword of the time, “the windows of the house wide open to the world, fresh air in the home, no creeping into the chimney corner,” is so interpreted that warmth 165and intimacy vanish. yes, the overworked mother often herself insists that the family leave the house and seek some place of recreation for the annual festivals, which were once the children’s happiest and brightest recollections of home.

the fact that most modern women of culture devote themselves to some branch of social work, often to several, contributes still further to the over-exertion of the mother. even when this occurs from pure altruism, the motive cannot prevent such altruism from becoming sometimes a disease of which one may die quite as surely as of other diseases. this death is quite as immoral as any other resulting from neglected hygiene. no one has the right to perish from altruism, except when destruction is the condition of his fulfilling his duty. but in many cases the occasion is the widely ramified social activity of the woman for whom the home now often falls short; not a result of altruism, but a manifestation of that desire for power which once was satisfied in the family. or it may be a form of the hysteria characteristic of the present time. in the sixteenth century, the hysterical were burned as witches; now they “sacrifice” themselves to an activity which offers them in reality the variety, the intoxication of publicity—in a word, the life stimulus they need. but even sound, sincere, and conscientious women are driven by the woman movement and by social work to assume pseudo duties, for which the real 166duties are pushed aside. if instead of instituting official inquiries among wives and mothers as to what they can accomplish, one should direct the same questions to their husbands and children, these would, if they dared be honest, testify that they must pay the price for the altruistic activity.

since the work of married women outside the home, the woman movement, and the social work began, one seldom finds a wholly sound, joyous, harmonious wife and mother. the constant complaint of the modern woman is that she “never has time.” the minority who live a life of luxury, wholly free from work, while the husband works feverishly to provide the luxury which neither will forego, telephone away a quarter of the day making appointments concerning the toilette, visits, and amusements, which take up the remaining three quarters of the day. and others, loaded down with household work or divided between this and work for their livelihood, how shall they find time!

least of all have they the time necessary for the countless little tokens of tenderness which intensify all relationships between people. a french mother who became a widow and brought up her children by means of her own work received from her son, grown to a youth, the judgment: “thou hast never loved us.” too late, it became clear to her that “it requires time to love,” that it is not enough to feel love, and, looked at as a whole, to act with love—no, love must be expressed. 167and for this the harassed mother of to-day lacks time and quiet.

formerly, it was only the husband and father who had no time; the wife and mother had it and could thus preserve the warmth of the home. but now?

there are now, it is true, many women with so few claims that they think they have fulfilled the fourfold task. in reality, they have fulfilled all their duties imperfectly, or eliminated one task for a time in order to be able to accomplish the others. no woman has ever been at the same time all that a wife can be to her husband, a mother to her children, a housewife to her house, a working woman to her work. in the last capacity the difficulty of the married woman is still further increased by the present competition, as also by the fact that the better a person works the more work falls to her, so that an exact and reasonable division of time between work and home is often rendered quite impossible.

in addition to all these difficulties arising through actualities, there are finally also those evoked by the “spirit of the time.” a wife has, for example, decided to give up a vocation which she saw was not compatible with her home. but she stills finds no rest. she is harassed by the demand of the “spirit of the time” that a married woman should be able to take care of the house as well as to accomplish outside personal work. the husband, also influenced by the “spirit of 168the time,” thinks the same or feels painfully the fact that his wife, for love of him, has sacrificed the exercise of a talent, in which he perhaps has felt a personal interest; the longing for the vocation awakens in her, and she resumes her work, with the result that, if she has energetically resisted the lassitude that comes with beginning motherhood, she and the child must suffer later. or she lives in a permanent state of over-exertion which finally culminates in nervous conditions under which the whole family must share her suffering. had she been able to follow in peace her instinct to strike deep root in the home soil and to enlarge and enrich her being by the annual growth of ring after ring of her production of love, then the essential values would have been increased for all. now, she is led astray by a biased opinion of the time, which owes its effectiveness to the single fact that the opinionated resolutely turn their back upon all facts.

thanks to these ideas of the time propagated by certain feminists, we see increasing numbers of women who perform their “social duty” as the telegraph poles perform their function; while such duty could have been fulfilled as the tree grows in a garden: blooming, fruit-bearing, joyful, joy-bringing.