Against the significance and importance of maternity to woman, the mountainous waves of the movement for the emancipation of women dash themselves as vainly as against the solid rock. Much justification may be found for the efforts of women in modern civilized communities to engage in departments of activity to which hitherto men only have been admitted; and as regards the intellectual capacity of women we may acknowledge their competence for the higher scientific professions; but while admitting this we must hold firmly to the physiological standpoint and must more especially bear in mind the sexual life of woman. Such professions only are suitable for a woman as do not entail a restriction of the sphere of her reproductive activity, a hindrance to her principal duty, that of maternity, an interference with the discharge of her obligations to husband and children, or a diminution of her domestic value and an evasion of her responsibilities in family life. As _L. von Stein_ so justly remarks, the woman who spends the whole day at a desk, in the law courts, or in a house of assembly, may be a most honorable and most useful individual, but she is no longer a woman, she cannot be a wife, she cannot be a mother. In the condition of our society, the emancipation of woman is in its very nature the negation of marriage. We may not agree with the great misogynist, _Schopenhaur_, in his depreciation of the female sex, or in his assertion that woman exists simply and solely for the propagation of the species, and that “her life should therefore flow more quietly, more inconspicuously, and more gently than that of man toward its goal;” nor need we regard as justified the severe sentence of the philosopher, _E. von Hartmann_, that from the moral standpoint, “the greater number of women pass the whole of their lives in a state of minority, and, therefore, to the end stand in need of supervision and guidance;” but the statement made by _Friedr. Nietsche_ in his book _Also sprach Zarathustra_ deserves acceptation, “Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has its answer: it is called pregnancy,” and again, “For woman, man is only the means; the end is always the child.” Unsearchable in its judgments, nature has imposed on woman alone the consequences of the act of generation; man has the pleasure, but not the labor and the pain. We might indeed regard as highly unjust the distribution of the rôles in the process of reproduction, were it not that in a mother’s love and a mother’s joys, woman finds a compensatory solace. The man’s part is a much easier one and costs far less than that of woman; with the gratification of his sexual desire, man shakes off any further responsibility, whereas the woman’s body becomes the workshop in the wonderful act of creation of a new human life.