This problem has now become actual, through the woman movement, for the feminine half of mankind, after the _unconditional_ spirit of sacrifice has obtained for centuries as the indispensable attribute of womanliness. In the first stage of the woman movement the majority of the “emancipated” were still determined by their spirit of sacrifice, which they aspired to combine with their outside professional work. This generation lived _beyond its strength_. The younger generation of to-day does not believe that God gives unlimited strength. For they have seen that those who live unceasingly beyond their strength finally have no strength left, either for others or for themselves. And they know that in the long run one can live only upon his own resources and these must be conserved and renewed in order to suffice. But this knowledge makes the problem, which in the course of days and years appears in manifold different forms, only more difficult of solution: the problem to find the right choice in the collision between family duties, duties toward oneself and duties toward society; the choice which shall bring with it the essential enhancement of life.
The conflict is thus solved by some feminists: everything called family ties and family feeling is referred to the “impersonal” instinctive life, while our “personality” expresses itself in intellectual activity, in study, in creation, in universally human ends, in social activity, etc. And since the principle of emancipation is certainly the freeing of the “personality,” it follows from this idea, in connection with _this definition of the personality_, that the liberated personality must place the obligations of the intellectual life absolutely above those of the family life; the outside professional work above the work in the home. In a word, the earlier definition of _womanliness_ ignored the _universal human_ element, the present definition of _personality_ ignores the _womanly_ element in woman’s being. The last solution of the problem is quite as one-sided as the first.