But it is clear that this fragment of feminine egoism must have a further consequence. With the rights of sex the feeling of solidarity must be awakened. The woman must see that her emancipated and developed human personality will lead to this solidarity by the realisation of her especial vocation as woman. Women in parliament and in journalism, their representation in the local and general government, in peace congress and in workingmen's meetings, science and literature, all this will produce small results until women realise that the transformation of society begins with the unborn child, with the conditions for its coming into existence, its physical and psychical training. It must be the general conviction that the new instincts, the new feelings, the new thoughts, the new ideas, which mothers and fathers pass on into the flesh and blood of their children, will transform existence. When, after many successive generations, the new spiritual kingdom of this world has arisen, there will come into being these greater ideas through which life may be renewed.
Until that time secular misdeeds, political injustice, economic struggles,—all these socially destructive abuses will go on from generation to generation. Mankind remains the same though its acts may take different shapes. Thinkers will always find new ideas, scholars new methods and systems, artists new æsthetic creations, but on the whole everything must remain the same. Only when woman heeds the message which life proclaims to her, that, through her, salvation must come—will the face of the earth be renewed. Oratorical talk of the high task of mothers and of the great profession of education are empty phrases, until we see that the possibility of humanity and civilisation winning some day the victory over savagery depends on the physiological and psychological transformation of man's nature. This transformation requires an entirely new conception of the vocation of mother, a tremendous effort of will, continuous inspiration. Those who believe they can fulfil their duties as mothers and at the same time can accomplish other valuable work have never made the experiment of education. The long continued habit of alternately caressing and striking one's children is not education. It needs tremendous power to do one's duty to a single child. This by no means signifies giving up to the child every hour of one's time, but it does mean that our soul is to be filled by the child, just as the man of science is possessed by his investigations and the artist by his work. The child should be in one's thoughts when one is sitting at home or walking along the road, when one is lying down or when one is standing up. This devotion, much more than the hours immediately given to one's children, is the absorbing thing; the occupation which makes an earnest mother always go to any external activity with divided soul and dissipated energy. Therefore the mother, if she gives her children the share they need, can devote to social activities only her occasional attention. And for the same reason she should be entirely free from working to earn her living during the most critical years of the children's training.
Neither in the upper nor in the lower classes, have I ever heard of any mother forced to do work of this kind or one engaged in artistic productions through the stimulus of her talents, who was able to satisfy her children in the period when they were growing up.
Adele Gerhard and Helen Simon under the title of Motherhood and Intellectual Work published a very interesting investigation in which I found my own observations substantiated. The book showed that a mother who wished to train her children and at the same time engage in an occupation, or take part in some public activity, could give to neither her whole personality. The result is a mediocre education for the children and for herself; mediocre work done with a divided soul. This is allowed to be true by all of those really conscientious mothers who have maintained a high aim in their work and in the bringing up of their children. They are dilettantes in both directions; what they do is half done owing to the effort to unite two separate fields of work.
From the point of view of women's rights, it is said, in reply to these opinions of mine, that motherhood can be made infinitely easier by a natural method of life, that work can be very well combined with it. It is said that children soon grow out of needing the protection of their mother, that the mothers can then devote themselves entirely to their work. They contend besides that motherhood is no unconditional obligation; that people are fully justified in making different individual arrangements; one woman wishes to become a mother, another not. The one gets married with the hope of becoming a mother; the other with the resolution of avoiding maternity. The third does not marry at all. Attempts to generalise on this matter in which individual freedom has every right to be recognised, they consider reactionary. Full freedom for the woman, married or unmarried, to choose her work and to continue it; full freedom to choose motherhood or to do without it, this they say is the way to free woman, this is the line of progress. Here woman is subject to that economic law which has made it necessary for her to work for her own living. Just as woman's household work has been superseded by factory work, so too, they say, will the maternal obligations of woman be fulfilled collectively, and the difficulties on which the so-called reactionary members of the women's rights movement base their arguments, will in the future only arise in exceptional cases. As regards these arguments, I have already shown that I recognise fully the right of the feminine individual to go her own way, to choose her own fortune or misfortune. I have always spoken of women collectively and of society collectively.
From this general, not from the individual standpoint, I am trying to convince women that vengeance is being exacted on the individual, on the race, when woman gradually destroys the deepest vital source of her physical and psychical being, the power of motherhood.
But present-day woman is not adapted to motherhood; she will only be fitted for it when she has trained herself for motherhood and man is trained for fatherhood. Then man and woman can begin together to bring up the new generation out of which some day society will be formed. In it, the completed man—the Superman—will be bathed in that sunshine whose distant rays but colour the horizon of to-day.