When men advance as an argument against women’s rights the fear that women will lose their womanliness in public life, the older feminists answer that womanliness, especially motherliness, is rooted too firmly in nature to make it possible for this danger to exist. Nothing has, however, become more clear in this amaternalistic time than that motherliness is _not_ an indestructible instinct. Just as our time produces in increasing numbers sterile women and women incapable of nursing their children, so it produces more and more psychically amaternal women. We can pass in silence the cases of children martyred in families or in children’s homes, for sexual perversity and religious fanaticism often play a rôle in such connections; we can also pass by the millions of mothers who bring about the abortion of their offspring, for the poor are driven to such practices largely by necessity, the rich mostly by love of pleasure. There still remain a sufficient number of women in whom the mother instinct has faded away because of a course of thought like that just described. Our time furnishes manifold proofs of the fact that the mother instinct can easily be weakened, or even entirely disappear, although the erotic impulse continues to live; that motherliness is not a spontaneous natural instinct, but the product of thousands of years not merely of _child-bearing_, but also of _child-rearing_; and that it must be strengthened in each new generation by the personal care which mothers bestow upon their children. A woman learns to love the strange child whom she nurses as if it were her own; a father who can devote himself to the care of his little children is possessed by an almost “motherly tenderness” for them, as are also older brothers and sisters for the little ones whom they care for. But while those who advocate the cause of the amaternal women draw from such facts the conclusion that motherliness cannot be used as a criterion of womanliness, yet an entirely different conclusion forces itself upon everyone who sees in the united uplift of the individual and of mankind the criterion of the life-enhancing effect of the woman movement, the conclusion that the amaternal soul not only confirms the worst apprehensions of men in regard to the results of the woman movement, but also constitutes the greatest danger to the woman movement itself. For the amaternal ideas will evoke a violent reaction _on the part of men_, in case such a reaction does not appear at an early stage on the part of women.