And now neither custom nor man demands of woman the “sacrifice of the personality.” This sacrifice is required only by the law of limitations which rules over us all.
The creative man or the man working objectively must often condemn the emotional side of his personality to a partial development; he must for the sake of his work renounce many family values important for this emotional side of his being. Even if shorter working hours could partially diminish this cultural offering, the _inner_ conflict, for the man or the woman, is not settled thereby.
Even if a man, in the consciousness of his wife’s endowment of talent, assumed a number of domestic duties, especially those pertaining to the children, the inner conflict would still continue. And this conflict is in no way solved by the amaternal theory that the personal life must be placed above the instinct life. For, as has been emphasised, the choice is not between the personal and the instinct life, but between the intellectual and the emotional side of woman’s personality. And the solution of this choice has not been discovered by the amaternals, who would combine commercial work with marriage and maternity. Women who remain unmarried or who give up commercial activity which they cannot carry on in the home, have not _settled the conflict_ either, but have only reduced its difficulties.
The fundamental error of the amaternal solution of the problem is that it characterises motherliness as a _non-social_ instinct, but, on the other hand, defines the “personal” activity of woman as an expression of the social instinct. _For all social instincts have been developed by culture out of primitive instincts._ All cultural development lies between the sex impulse of the Australian negress and the erotic sentiment of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets. And when the amaternals assert that motherliness, which “we have in common with beasts and savages,” cannot be an expression of the personality, their argument has the same validity as that which would deny to the Sistine Chapel the quality of an expression of personality because beasts and savages also exhibit the decorative instinct.
The development of the mother instinct into motherliness is one of the greatest achievements in the progress of culture, a development by which the maternal functions have continually become more complex and differentiated. Already in the case of the higher animals maternity involves much more than the mere act of giving birth; an animal not only faces death for her young, she gives them also a training which often indicates power of judgment. A cat, for instance, which sought in vain to prevent her kitten from entering the water and which finally threw the kitten in and then pulled it out, thus obtaining the desired result of her pedagogy, had not, as have so many modern mothers, read Spencer, but could, nevertheless, put many of these mothers to shame. Even the initial maternal functions, nursing and physical care, involve a culture of the spiritual life of the mother, not only through an increase in tenderness, but also in observation, discrimination, judgment, self-control; a woman’s character often develops more in a month during which she is occupied with the care of children, than in years of professional work. Mother love and the reciprocal love which it awakens in the child, not only exercise the first deep influence upon the individual’s life of feeling, but this love is _the first form of the law of mutual help—it is the root of altruism, the cotyledon_ of a now widely ramified tree of “social instincts.”