Morality and its victim, the mother--what a terrible picture! Is there, indeed, anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood? The woman, physically and mentally unfit to be a mother, yet condemned to breed; the woman, economically taxed to the very last spark of energy, yet forced to breed; the woman, tied to a man she loathes, yet made to breed; the woman, worn and used-up from the process of procreation, yet coerced to breed, more, ever more. What a hideous thing, this much-lauded motherhood! With the economic war raging all around her, with strife, misery, crime, disease, and insanity staring her in the face, with numberless little children ground into gold dust, how can the self and race-conscious woman become a mother? Morality cannot answer this question. It can only dictate, coerce, or condemn--and how many women are strong enough to face this condemnation, to defy the moral dicta? Few indeed. Hence they fill the factories, the reformatories, the homes for feeble-minded, the prisons.... Oh, Motherhood, what crimes are committed in thy name! What hosts are laid at your feet. Morality, destroyer of life! Fortunately, the Dawn is emerging from the chaos and darkness.... Through her re-born consciousness as a unit, a personality, a race builder, woman will become a mother only if she desires the child, and if she can give to the child, even before its birth, all that her nature and intellect can yield ... above all, understanding, reverence, and love, which is the only fertile soil for new life, a new being. I have talked lately with a man who thinks Emma Goldman ought to have been hanged long ago. She's directly or indirectly "responsible" for so many crimes. "Do you know what she's trying to do?" I asked him. "She's trying to break up our government," he responded heatedly. "Have you ever read any of her ideas?" "No." "Have you ever heard her lecture?" "No! I should say not." In a play, that line would get a laugh. (It did in Man and Superman.) But in life it fares better. It gets serious consideration; it even has a certain prestige as a rather righteous thing to say. Another man threw himself into the argument. "I know very little about Emma Goldman," he said, "but it has always struck me that she's simply trying to inflame people--particularly to do things that she'd never think of doing herself." That charge can be answered best by a study of her life, which will show that she has spent her time doing things that almost no one else would dare to do.