A good while ago I was ingenuous enough to maintain that motherhood was the central factor of existence for most women. In the discussion of this question I considered several facts: woman's work imposed by necessity, woman's ambition stimulated by the freedom of her power, woman's intellectual life modified by many other influences of contemporary thought,--all these have forced the maternal instinct into the background for the time being. Here was a danger which, it seemed, was not too late to expose. There are women in whom the feeling of love is really and absolutely stunted; there are others who do not find in modern man the soulful and profound harmony in love that they quite rightly demand; there are others, more numerous, who wish for love but do not wish for motherhood. They absolutely fear it. The famous German authoress Gabrielle Reuter has spoken of this fear, this alarm of motherhood continually vigilant, active, placing woman in an attitude of self-defence,--a fear which to-day has taken possession of so many strenuous and creative women. The alarm, the aversion, becomes so strong, so dominant in them that one might almost believe it a dark perverse instinct, which, like all unnatural instincts, has been conceived and born through cruel necessities, and through these necessities has become overmastering. It is as if a secret voice in the depths of their nature was telling these women that, by paying their tribute to their sex, they would lose that power, brilliancy, and sharpness of intellect by which they have elevated themselves above their sex; and perhaps certain kinds of women are right in having this fear. I am convinced, just as the German writer is, that every actual phenomenon of disease and of health alike is a necessary result from given causes; and I am more convinced than the advocates of women's rights ever were, that it is in the sphere of human freedom to choose one's own type of development, happiness, or ruin. I am not inclined to say anything further to the women who do not desire motherhood. It would be very disastrous if these women, who have never been moved by tenderness when they felt a soft childish hand in their own, who have never longed to surrender themselves entirely to another being, were to become mothers. Their children would be more unfortunate than they themselves.