of women and the public endowment of motherhood.
After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows clear to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and mothering is their special function in the State, and that a personal subordination to an individual man with an unlimited power of control over this intimate and supreme duty is a degradation.
No contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to recognise any claim a man can make upon her but the claim of her freely-given devotion to him.
She wants the reality of her choice and she means “family” while a man too often means only possession.
This alters the spirit of the family relationships fundamentally.
Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel.
Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and tears....