These are the conditions to which many modern women, womanly at heart but divided, restless, groping, attempting much, will not submit. They could even learn to reverence these conditions in the child for whom play is such sacred seriousness; but instead they transform the most sacred earnest into play.
Other women, on the contrary, are beginning to understand these conditions of growth and to comprehend that it was exactly the protected position of woman in the home, which has made it possible for her family feeling to acquire that depth which is to be attained only by concentration. But if this is no longer possible, then woman will love those that belong to her with less religious warmth. Nothing can better illustrate the difference still existing between man and woman in this respect, than the fact that most men would consider themselves unfortunate if their entire exercise of power were concentrated upon the family, while most women still feel themselves fortunate when they have been given the opportunity to exercise to the uttermost the tendency inherent in them. For most women love best _personally_ and _in propinquity_, while the potency of love in man often seeks distant goals. Woman is happy in the degree to which she can bestow her love upon a person closely connected with her; if she cannot do that, then she may be useful, resigned, content, but never happy.[11] The very fact that woman’s strongest _primitive instinct_ coincided with her _greatest_ cultural _office_ has been an essential factor in the harmony of her being.
The modern developed mother feels with every breath a grateful joy in that she lives the most perfect life when she can contribute her developed human powers, her liberated human personality, to the establishment of a home and to the vocation of motherhood. These functions conceived and understood as social, in the embracing sense in which the word is now used, give the new mother a richer opportunity to exercise her entire personality than she could find in modern commercial work. In one such occupation she must suppress either the intellectual or the emotional side of her nature; in another, the life either of the imagination or of the will. In domestic duties, on the contrary, these powers of the soul can work in unison. This is undoubtedly the deepest reason why, taken as a whole, women have become more harmonious, and men stronger in any special crisis, women more soulful, men more gifted. On this account men offer their great sacrifice more readily for an idea, or for the accomplishment of a work; women, for persons closely connected with them. And yet this co-operation of woman’s spiritual powers was in earlier times partly repressed by man’s demand for passivity on the part of woman as a thinking and willing personality, but for her unceasing activity as promoter of his comfort and that of the entire home. The mother of to-day can, on the contrary, exercise, as distributer, her culture, her thought, her supervision, her judgment, and her criticism, in order to make fully effective the faculty of her sex for foresight and organisation. She applies a great amount of spiritual energy to the selection of the essentials and the subordination of secondary things, to the creation of such facilities in the material work that time and means are left for the spiritual values, which, alas, are still neglected in the domestic economy of small, private households, as well as in national housekeeping. And as mother, modern woman is offered the first fitting opportunity to assert herself as a thinking and willing personality.