The ultimate heights of the modern conception of sex life are indicated by erotic idealism, which since “La Nouvelle Héloise” has by poets and dreamers been continually elevated, while world-renowned lovers showed the possibility of this wonderful love. In addition to all these influences of the spirit of the time upon the transformation of marriage, come the _indirect_ effects of the woman movement. Thanks to the vibrations in which this movement has set the “spirit of the time,” many an ordinary man now accords to his wife that power and authority in the family which the law still denies her; yes, many commonplace people of both sexes now desire from their marriage things of which their equals fifty years ago did not even dream. If one adds also the decisive influences which the political-economic conditions of the present exercise upon the family life, one has found some of the threads which form the woof of the unalterable warp, a woof which makes the marriage of the present a variegated and unquiet fabric, whose pattern exhibits primeval oriental motives beside those in newest “modern style.” Here it is of the greatest importance to indicate the zigzag line which denotes the alternate repulsion and attraction that under the influence of the woman movement marriage has had for woman. First came the little crowd of “masculine women” with their hatred of marriage and man. Then the great working army that forgot, over the human rights of woman, that to these also must belong the right to fulfil her duty as a being of sex, and not alone the right to be “independent of marriage” through her work. Then came the reaction against this incompleteness. At this time, the nature of woman was called an “empty capsule,” which received its content only from man: a “cry of the blood,” which finds its answer in the child. There was no other “woman question” than the possibility of living erotically a complete life. One woman wished this in love without marriage, another in love without children, a third in children without marriage, a fourth in children without love—“A work and a child” was the life cry—a fifth woman wished the man only for the sake of the child, a sixth the child only for the sake of the man, and the seventh wished both only for her own sake! The conviction of some women that the common erotic life of man and woman must have also a spiritual life value for two human souls, filling out and developing each other, was called “Ibsenism.” And after the ideal demands which Ibsen pressed upon the consciousness of the time, many men—and not a few women—found relaxation after their spiritual over-exertion, if they desired nothing more from one another than “the sound happiness of the senses.” Woman’s “personality,” “equality,” and “human right” were old playthings, relegated to the rubbish heap.