Healthy, honest women will confess that they thoroughly enjoy every moment of motherhood; but inasmuch as to-day it is the fashion to speak of self-sacrifice in regard to these functions, they will only admit in secret, and with the feeling that they are making a guilty admission, that they have enjoyed them. It has become the custom in modern Europe, and particularly in England, to represent women as performing some mysterious personal “sacrifice” in marriage. In all modern novels and plays this view of women is taken for granted. But it is only another of the sentimental myths created by modern Western women for their own ends. Where it is true, it ought to be a subject of shame, as showing marked physiological inferiority; and where it is not true, it is never anything more than a hoax for exercising moral power over a foolish husband. For thousands of men nowadays are convinced that whether a woman be healthy or unhealthy, well or badly formed, there is something sweetly and edifyingly “unselfish” about motherhood. Western Civilization has not produced a greater lie, or a more pernicious lie than this; for it makes abnormality a virtue, and physiological inferiority a claim upon our admiration! Unfortunately the number of women to-day who really do suffer from maternity shows such a large annual increase, and men’s taste in women is so much vitiated by ignorance and false values, that the morbid association of “self-sacrifice” with motherhood is now regarded as almost inevitable, and doctors who thrive on it are the first to proclaim it as a necessary and even _natural_ association. FOOTNOTES: