The conventional points of view, just mentioned in considering the woman question, retard the development of woman's individuality above all because they overlook the diversity of nature and the complexity of the problem. The conventional conception of self-renunciation as the highest expression of womanhood is still continually the greatest obstacle to the achievement of woman's personality. To be able to perish for a loved being with joy is one of the beautiful inalienable priviliges of woman nature. But by considering this under all circumstances as ideal, woman has thus retarded not only her own development but also that of man. If we compare marriages of older generations with those of the younger, the men of the latter show great advance in regard to considerate tenderness and sympathetic understanding toward their wives--wives who have on the other hand a personal life more complete and with other demands than formerly. Both have thus gained since women have begun to practice the self-renunciation of self-assertion! Because for every self-sacrificing woman nature it is infinitely harder to take her due than to sacrifice it. * * * * * Conventional womanhood will ever have its strongest support in education. The individuality of a child is seldom repressed in the inconsiderate and brutal manner of former times. But by attrition it is effaced. In the olden times the children enjoyed a certain freedom in the nursery where the expression of life, manifestation of joy, pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and antipathy of the growing personality was not continually moderated. Now the children are continually with the parents and these accustom them to a certain exacting restraint. The children wish to be entertained; they cannot play of their own initiative, for they lose the desire that originates in the freedom of the creative phantasy. Neither children nor parents possess themselves in peace. In the continual association the children are worn out by commands so varied and numerous that obedience cannot be maintained. They do not, therefore, learn the discipline necessary for the development of their personality--to subordinate the unessential life expressions to the essential and to dominate even over these last--a culture of the fallow child ground which must begin early in order to become a second nature.