It fares best in the families, and they are even now numerous, where the mother herself has studied or worked outside the home and therefore knows what domestic services she may or may not require; where she herself personally understands the intellectual occupation of the young people and has preserved her own youthfulness, so that she becomes not infrequently the real friend of her daughters and sons. If the mother, on the contrary, was one of the many who, at the beginning of the woman movement, sacrificed her own talent to the wishes of her family or the demands of the home, in spite of the possibilities for its development made accessible to her at that time, then she has often absolutely no comprehension of the egoism of her daughter. She herself had acted so entirely differently! Or she understands fully that in her daughters as well as in her sons she views the attainment of a new conception of life, with all its Storm and Stress, which the spring-times in the life of mankind bring with them—an attainment in which, to her sorrow, she could not take part in her youth.
At such spring-times youth is not, as the parents hoped, sunlight and the twittering of birds in the home; but March storms and April clouds. The parents feel themselves at first swept out, superfluous, disillusioned. They are angered but rejuvenated, thanks to all the new points of view that youth makes valid. Yes, father and mother sometimes could live through a second youth if their own contemporaries did not depress their buoyancy by their disapproving astonishment and the children by their cool rejection of the comradeship of their parents. But in spite of this twofold opposition, there are now fathers and mothers who are able to enjoy the riches of life quite as youthfully as and more deeply than their children; while the parents of earlier times, especially the mother, forever stagnated as early as forty. More and more frequently we find mothers who, like their daughters, lead a spiritually rich and emotional life, who have so preserved their physical youthfulness and who possess moreover through experience and self-culture so refined a soul-life, that, in regard to the impression they make, they are not infrequently the rivals of their daughters. They are already revelations of that type of woman which, in token of emancipation, has found the equilibrium between the old devoted ideal and the new self-assertive ideal. They view life from a height which gives them a survey also over the essential, in questions concerning their own children. Even if these become something other than the mothers wish, these mothers are so penetrated with the idea of individualism that they let the children follow their own course.