A celebrated German authoress of the present day, _Gabriele Reuter_, refers in similar terms to the justifiable fear with which so many aspiring and hard-working women regard maternity, “the perpetual, watchful, emotional dread of motherhood, a dread which causes them to turn at bay. A dread, a hatred, it is, which has grown so strong, so active, that one might almost regard it as an obscure perverse instinct, awakened and developed and strengthened by bitter necessity. It is as if in the innermost recesses of their nature such women had a belief that should they pay their tribute to sex they would loose all the energy, clearness, and brightness of mind, by means of which they have raised themselves above the level of their sex. And perhaps women of a certain type are justified in this fear.”
Fortunately, however, the woman who does not prize maternity still remains an exception. The great instinct for the preservation of the species, which nature has planted deeply in every human being, still as a rule in women remains much more powerful than the instinct of self-preservation at every one else’s expense—more powerful than such self-sufficient egoism. And now as ever it is the duty of humanity to educate women for maternity from her youth upward, so that she is in every way fitted for the supreme duty of her sexual nature, the renewal of life from generation to generation.
Against the significance and importance of maternity to woman, the mountainous waves of the movement for the emancipation of women dash themselves as vainly as against the solid rock. Much justification may be found for the efforts of women in modern civilized communities to engage in departments of activity to which hitherto men only have been admitted; and as regards the intellectual capacity of women we may acknowledge their competence for the higher scientific professions; but while admitting this we must hold firmly to the physiological standpoint and must more especially bear in mind the sexual life of woman. Such professions only are suitable for a woman as do not entail a restriction of the sphere of her reproductive activity, a hindrance to her principal duty, that of maternity, an interference with the discharge of her obligations to husband and children, or a diminution of her domestic value and an evasion of her responsibilities in family life. As _L. von Stein_ so justly remarks, the woman who spends the whole day at a desk, in the law courts, or in a house of assembly, may be a most honorable and most useful individual, but she is no longer a woman, she cannot be a wife, she cannot be a mother. In the condition of our society, the emancipation of woman is in its very nature the negation of marriage.