To these now moral, now immoral, motives for having few children or none at all, must be added woman’s desire to devote her purely human qualities to other tasks. This, however, does not refer to those wives who are obliged to establish their married life upon their own bread-winning labour as well as their husband’s; a necessity which for the present hinders them from motherhood although they are continually dreaming of the future child. It is here a question only of women’s personal self-assertion. Women are no longer content to manage their husbands’ incomes, but wish to earn their own; they will not use their husband as a middleman between themselves and society, but will themselves look after their interests; they will not confine their gifts to the home but will also put them in public circulation. And in all these respects they are right. But when, in order thus to be able to “live their life,” they wish to be “freed from the burden of the child,” one begins to doubt. For until automatic nurses have been invented, or male volunteers have offered themselves, the burden must fall upon other women, who—whether themselves mothers or not—are thus obliged to bear a double one. Real liberation for women is thus impossible; the only thing possible is a new division of the burdens. Those already “freed” declare that, by making money, studying, writing, taking part in politics, they feel themselves leading a higher existence with greater emotions than the nursery could have afforded them. They look down upon the “passive” function of bearing children—and rightly, when it remains only passive—without perceiving that it embodies as nothing else does the possibility of putting their whole personality in activity. Every human being has the right to choose his own happiness—or unhappiness. But what these women have no right to, is to be considered equally worthy of the respect of society with those who find their highest emotions through their children, the beings who not only form the finest subject for human art, but are at the same time the only work by which the immortality of its creator is assured. Another thing that these women who are afraid of children cannot expect is, that their experience should be considered equally valuable with that of women who—after they have fulfilled their immediate duties as mothers—employ for the public benefit the development they have gained in their private capacity.