The best woman, with comparatively few exceptions, is already and will still more in the future be the woman who, out of a long, healthy and vitally active life, is called upon to spend but a comparatively small proportion of her years in an _exclusive_ subservience to motherhood. A woman should have eighty to ninety active years of life; if she bears three or perhaps four children, she will, even if she gives up all her normal activities during the later months of pregnancy and the earlier of nursing, still have cut out of her life but a very small proportion of its total. She should, indeed, after she once is a mother, always devote a proportion of her energies to the necessary supervision of her children’s growth and education, but with the increasing number of schools and specialists, nurses, teachers and instructors of all sorts, the individual mother has much less of the purely physical labour of her children than formerly. That this is not only so, but is _approved_ by the State can be seen at once by imagining a working class mother insisting on keeping her child at home all day under her personal supervision--the School Inspector would step in and take the child from her for a certain number of hours every day. But this book is primarily for middle and upper class women, and for them motherhood increasingly should mean a _widening_ of their interests and occupations. The counter-idea still expressed, even by leading doctors and others, is that the whole capability of the individual mother should be devoted solely to contributing to her children. This is exemplified in the recent statement of Blair Bell: “A normal woman, therefore, would not exploit her capabilities for individual gain, but for the benefit of her descendants.” This view is a false one and is based on a narrow vision. This pictures an endless chain of fruitless lives all looking ever to some supreme future consummation which never materializes. By means of this perpetual sinking of woman’s personality in a mistaken interpretation of her duty to the race, every generation is sacrificed in turn. The result has not been productive of good, happiness or beauty for the majority. No; the individual woman, normal or better than the average, _should_ use her intellect for her individual gain in creative work; not only because of its value to the age and community in which she lives, but also for the inheritance she may thus give her children and so that when her children are grown up they may find in their mother not only the kind attendant of their youth, but their equal in achievement. With a woman of capacities perhaps still exceptional, but by no means so rare as some men writers would like to pretend, the pursuit of her work or profession and honourable achievement in it is not at all incompatible with but is highly beneficial to her motherhood. As Charlotte Gilman says:--