osite.... Only when both man and woman have learned that the
most sacred of all functions given to women must be exercised by
the free will alone, can children be born into the world who have
in them the joyous desire to live, who claim that sweetest
privilege of childhood, the certainty that they can expand in the
sunshine of the love which is their due." Ellen Key, similarly,
while pointing out (_Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, pp. 14, 265) that the
tyranny of the old Protestant religious spirit which enjoined on
women unlimited submission to joyless motherhood within "the
whited sepulchre of marriage" is now being broken, exalts the
privileges of voluntary motherhood, while admitting that there
may be a few exceptional cases in which women may withdraw
themselves from motherhood for the sake of the other demands of
their personality, though, "as a general rule, the woman who
refuses motherhood in order to serve humanity, is like a soldier
who prepares himself on the eve of battle for the forthcoming
struggle by opening his veins." Helene Stoecker, likewise, reckons
motherhood as one of the demands, one of the growing demands
indeed, which women now make. "If, to-day," she says (in the
Preface to _Liebe und die Frauen_, 1906), "all the good things of
life are claimed even for women--intellectual training, pecuniary
independence, a happy vocation in life, a respected social
position--and at the same time, as equally matter-of-course, and
equally necessary, marriage and child, that demand no longer
sounds, as it sounded a few years ago, the voice of a preacher in
the wilderness."

The degradation to which motherhood has, in the eyes of many,
fallen, is due partly to the tendency to deprive women of any
voice in the question, and partly to what H.G. Wells calls
(_Socialism and the Family_, 1906) "the monstrous absurdity of
women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and
rearing children, in their spare time, as it were, while they
'earn their living' by contributing some half mechanical element
to some trivial industrial product." It would be impracticable,
and even undesirable, to insist that married women should not be
allowed to work, for a work in the world is good for all. It is
estimated that over thirty per cent. of the women workers in
England are married or widow