Those who hoped that woman’s independence through work would assure man’s knowledge of being loved, did not reckon for woman’s dependence on man in and for the tenor of her life. This dependence, created by nature and not by society, still drives many otherwise independent women into marriage without love; and it drives other women, who wish to preserve their independence by not contracting marriage, to the desire of attaining a mother’s happiness without it. The new woman’s will to live through herself, with herself, for herself, reaches its limit when she begins to regard man merely as a means to the child. Woman could scarcely take a more complete revenge for having herself been treated for thousands of years as a means. We must hope, however, that woman’s lust for vengeance will not long retain this form. Woman’s degradation to a means has retarded man’s and her own development. But a similar degradation of man would have the same effect, and the children might suffer just as much through woman’s misuse of man as through his of her. The child must be an end in itself. It requires love as its origin; it requires in its mother love’s understanding of the qualities it has inherited from its father, not a surprised coldness or resentment of the unsuspected or unwelcome elements in its nature. The woman who has never loved her child’s father will infallibly injure that child in some way—if in no other, then by her way of loving it. The child needs the joy of brothers and sisters, and not even the tenderest motherly love can take the place of this; and finally the child needs the father as the father the child. That children, both in and out of wedlock, often lose their father or brother or sister through death or life, belongs to the inevitable, in most cases at any rate. But that a woman with full knowledge and purpose should deprive her child of the right of gaining life through love, that she should exclude it in advance from the possibility of a father’s affection, is a piece of selfishness which must avenge itself. The right of motherhood without marriage must not be equivalent to the right of motherhood without love. It is equally degrading to surrender one’s self without love in a free relationship as in marriage. In both cases one can steal one’s child and thereby lose the right of one day proudly assuring it that it has enjoyed the best conditions for its entry into life. Love—it must be constantly repeated—desires the future, not the moment; it desires union, not only at the formation of a new being, but in order that two persons through each other may care for a new and greater being than either of themselves. A woman may be mistaken in this love, as she may be in her suitability for marriage. But this she cannot know in advance. She experiences these things first in loving. If she has misplaced her devotion, then it will not save her to conceal the mistake in a marriage. But to receive her child from a man with whom