To put her entire personality into the education of her children is a twofold error. First and foremost, most mothers are _bad_ educators and serve their children better if they entrust them to a born teacher; in the second place, _gifted_ children educate themselves best and should be spared all educational arts. The mediocre child, who is more susceptible to education, has ordinarily also only mediocre parents, who likewise benefit the children most if they put them in the care of excellent teachers. Children who are _below_ mediocrity can also be best educated by specialists. So there remains for the mother, after the first years’ care and training, no especial task as educator, at least none in which she can really put her personality. To talk to a mother about the possibilities of a richer office of mother, as educator of her children, she calls lulling her into an illusion under which she must labour only to suffer. A woman who can exercise her personality in another way should not therefore put it into the education of her children. The amaternal advocates deny that motherliness is the criterion of womanliness; they find this criterion in the form, the external being of woman, in her manner and physical appearance—in a word, in the _outer_ expression of the inner disposition, which they deny as typical of womanliness! “Womanliness” is thus reduced to an “æsthetic principle,” while woman’s spiritual attributes are considered as “universally human”; and the right is granted to the feminine sex to emancipate herself from the result of the heresy that _motherliness_ should be the ethical norm for the “being” or “essence” of womanhood. The suitability of woman’s _psychic_ constitution for her work as mother is not acknowledged as proof that motherliness is the distinguishing characteristic of womanliness. For this constitution is less conspicuous in the higher stages of differentiation. Its suitability was then a phenomenon of adaptation and changed with the conditions of life. Thus this constitution cannot be cited as a reason for limiting woman’s personal exercise of her powers. Motherliness is no social instinct. How can motherliness, which we have in common with beasts and savages, be considered as higher than, for example, justice, truth, and other gradually won spiritual values, which woman can promote by her personal activity? The higher the forms of life woman attains, the less will her personality be determined by motherliness. Why then should women bring to the domestic life the sacrifice of their personality, while no one demands this of men? Why shall not woman, just as man, satisfy her demands as a sex being in marriage and, as for the rest, follow her profession, attend to her spiritual development, her social tasks? Why condemn woman to remain a half-being—that is, with unexercised brain—only because certain of her instincts attract her to man, while he is not constrained to suppress his personality because he in like manner