If a mother carries on her work at home and must put it away in order to be beside the sick-bed of her child, or to make those arrangements which assure domestic comfort, or to help her husband, then she feels that her book or her picture suffers, that the activity which binds her more intimately to the home relaxes for a time the intimacy of her connection with her work. One can by day carry on a dull industrial task, and by night produce an achievement of the soul; but one cannot let one’s soul radiate in one direction without impairing its energy in another. A work needs exclusive devotion. And this is, viewed externally, difficult to attain in joint action; viewed from within, it requires a renunciation that in the case of a loving soul evokes a continual inner struggle. For that reason, also, literature with woman as its subject has for some decades been filled with the great conflict of modern woman’s life: the conflict between vocation and parents, between vocation and husband, between vocation and child. Certainly the family has often been a torture chamber for individuality, as a consequence of laws and customs, which the future will regard as we now do the rack and the thumbscrew. But nature is more severe than law and custom when she confronts us with a choice which, however it may turn out, tears a piece from our heart. And now neither custom nor man demands of woman the “sacrifice of the personality.” This sacrifice is required only by the law of limitations which rules over us all. The creative man or the man working objectively must often condemn the emotional side of his personality to a partial development; he must for the sake of his work renounce many family values important for this emotional side of his being. Even if shorter working hours could partially diminish this cultural offering, the _inner_ conflict, for the man or the woman, is not settled thereby. Even if a man, in the consciousness of his wife’s endowment of talent, assumed a number of domestic duties, especially those pertaining to the children, the inner conflict would still continue. And this conflict is in no way solved by the amaternal theory that the personal life must be placed above the instinct life. For, as has been emphasised, the choice is not between the personal and the instinct life, but between the intellectual and the emotional side of woman’s personality. And the solution of this choice has not been discovered by the amaternals, who would combine commercial work with marriage and maternity. Women who remain unmarried or who give up commercial activity which they cannot carry on in the home, have not _settled the conflict_ either, but have only reduced its difficulties.