There are now, it is true, many women with so few claims that they think they have fulfilled the fourfold task. In reality, they have fulfilled all their duties imperfectly, or eliminated one task for a time in order to be able to accomplish the others. _No woman has ever been at the same time all_ that a wife can be to her husband, a mother to her children, a housewife to her house, a working woman to her work. In the last capacity the difficulty of the married woman is still further increased by the present competition, as also by the fact that the better a person works the more work falls to her, so that an exact and reasonable division of time between work and home is often rendered quite impossible. In addition to all these difficulties arising through actualities, there are finally also those evoked by the “spirit of the time.” A wife has, for example, decided to give up a vocation which she saw was not compatible with her home. But she stills finds no rest. She is harassed by the demand of the “spirit of the time” that a married woman should be able to take care of the house as well as to accomplish outside personal work. The husband, also influenced by the “spirit of the time,” thinks the same or feels painfully the fact that his wife, for love of him, has sacrificed the exercise of a talent, in which he perhaps has felt a personal interest; the longing for the vocation awakens in her, and she resumes her work, with the result that, if she has energetically resisted the lassitude that comes with beginning motherhood, she and the child must suffer later. Or she lives in a permanent state of over-exertion which finally culminates in nervous conditions under which the whole family must share her suffering. Had she been able to follow in peace her instinct to strike deep root in the home soil and to enlarge and enrich her being by the annual growth of ring after ring of her production of love, then the essential values would have been increased for all. Now, she is led astray by a biased opinion of the time, which owes its effectiveness to the single fact that the opinionated resolutely turn their back upon all facts. Thanks to these ideas of the time propagated by certain feminists, we see increasing numbers of women who perform their “social duty” as the telegraph poles perform their function; while such duty could have been fulfilled as the tree grows in a garden: blooming, fruit-bearing, joyful, joy-bringing. CHAPTER VII THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MOTHERHOOD