Let no one think this is petulant abuse. It is the accumulation of these details, and the pressure of public opinion which gradually destroy the nerve and independent judgment of married women who, in their free state, have been brilliant and remarkable. It is the fact that, by marriage, we conform and place ourselves in a line with millions of others whose view of what we have done is entirely foreign to our own. As a Labour Minister is corrupted by Court dress, so is a free woman by the marriage-contract. Nothing but our desire for children would make us endure it. We, to whom the mutual nature of sex-love is sacred, to whom a partnership involving children is of equal dignity on both sides, to whom the surrender of our whole being in love is a free gift――the highest we can bestow; who would neither bind ourselves nor others where love is non-existent; we must submit to a contract based on rights of property and possession, buying and selling of our bodies; a law whose conception of conjugal wrongs is sin, punishment, and just revenge; and a Church whose utmost concession is to bid us “serve” instead of “obey” our husbands. Build, O Aspasia, a trade union of lovers to conquer the world, and cry aloud that feminism is nowhere so much needed as in the home. IV HECUBA _Feminist Mothers_ So far I have refrained from any detailed discussion of modern women and maternity because it is still necessary to make it clear that a full life of activity for women is perfectly possible and permissible without it. I am quite aware that certain religious people assert as a moral principle that the purpose of sex-love is not mutual enjoyment but the perpetuation of the race. I am also aware that militarists enjoin on women the necessity of marriage and large families as a patriotic duty. Further, certain doctors have gone out of their way to try to prove that the use of contraceptives is contrary to health and nature. These same people, we may note, have no aversion from the wearing by women of internal remedial rubber supports for months on end nor to patching up with silver, papier mâché, and other foreign materials, the insides and outsides of human beings mutilated in the natural and healthy pursuit called war. I am not concerned with the morals of convention or superstition, but with the morals of experience. It is the experience of modern women that sex is an instinctive need to them as it is to men, and further that the prevention of conception brings to them no loss of poise, health, or happiness. On the contrary, when once they embark on the task of maternity, contraception is a blessed safeguard to health and recovery in the periods of rest between pregnancies. I am not going to deny that the most perfect delight known to human beings is the completely reckless, mutually adoring union of two people of vitality