When I tried in my book called _The Misuse of the Power of Woman_ to urge women to test the consequences of this process, my thesis was as follows: In our programme of civilisation, we must start out with the conviction that motherhood is something essential to the nature of woman and the way in which she carries out this profession is of value for society. On this basis we must alter the conditions which more and more are robbing woman of the happiness of motherhood and are robbing children of the care of a mother. Or, we must begin with the assumption that motherhood is not essential: then everything must continue to go on as it is going on now, and work directed towards external spheres with its satisfaction in the joy of creation, of ambition, of gain, of enjoyment, of independence, will be more and more the end towards which women will arrange their plan of life. For this end they will modify their fundamental habits and remould their feelings. The naïve belief that every woman, who has the liberty to do so, is following her own nature, shows a complete ignorance of psychology and history. Some ideal considered worth striving for, the prevailing view of a period, will obtain supremacy over nature. This is shown best in the stunted feeling of motherhood peculiar to the eighteenth century, by the plain results of mediæval asceticism. By a new ideal innumerable women are now driven from a life directed inwards to a life directed outwards. I am in favour of real freedom for woman; that is, I wish her to follow her own nature, whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary woman. But the opinion held by the feminine advocates of woman's emancipation, in regard to the nature and the aims of the everyday woman, does violence to the real nature of most women. It is one of the most remarkable manifestations of the times that, while women preach about the rights of woman and her will to work and to act unrestrained by family ties, men like Ibsen, for example, in _When We Dead People Awake_, show that the real Fall of Man in life is transgression of the law of love, meaning that man through this transgression not only diminishes his personality, but lessens his creative capacity. It would appear as though men were approaching the conception of love once held by women, while women were beginning to regard love as a petty episode in life compared with what are really its true concerns, an episode which gives life the colour of a sensual, sentimental, psychological, or sportsmanlike adventure, an episode which she treats as a game which she can get into, and just as easily get out of. From this new position in which extremes meet, suffering, previously undreamed of, must arise. Such results coming to the emancipated woman will I hope reveal to her the eternal laws of her own being, laws from which she cannot be freed without destroying herself.