It is true that, in order to rule man and to get a hold over him, also with the view of providing herself with an ever-ready means for creating in him a guilty conscience about her, Woman, in Europe at least, has grossly misrepresented her attitude to motherhood, and by concealing its joys and exaggerating its pains as much as possible, has at last succeeded in making maternity appear a sort of voluntary self-martyrdom. It should never be forgotten, however, that with stupid and ill-informed men, woman finds it easy to obtain power and mastery in this manner; for, if her man be foolish enough to believe her, it is the best means she has for cowing him. In making him believe that he gets all the joy and she all the suffering from the sexual life, she gives him a constant sense of guilt or at least of indebtedness which makes him submissive. But the whole attitude is of course pure misrepresentation and fraud. For the very idea that the performance of a natural function should be so painful as to amount to an act of “self-sacrifice,” is obvious nonsense. Certainly, when disease or malformation is present (as it is now in the majority of cases), maternity is nothing less than a torment; but in such circumstances, disease or malformation should be pleaded, and not maternity or matrimony, as the cause of the trouble. A man coupled to a wife who moans and groans over maternity, should realize that he has been guilty of a fundamental mistake in taste, that he has chosen an inferior woman, and should blame himself, his upbringing, and his general notions about life, for the trouble maternity brings into his household. But he should not let himself be persuaded that because his inferior woman suffers over a perfectly normal function, that therefore all maternity is “self-sacrifice” and “unselfishness.” There could not be a grosser misunderstanding. Only the sick or badly-formed woman has any honest right to complain of motherhood; _but she has no right to motherhood at all_. Motherhood is only “unselfish,” therefore, when it is unpleasant (i.e. when abnormal conditions prevail); and those English philosophers who derive altruism from the maternal instinct are guilty of taking the abnormal as the norm for the basis of their values.