The Woman Movement

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1912. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VII THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MOTHERHOOD Because it has increased the culture of woman and her feeling of personal responsibility, the woman movement has had its influence, both directly and indirectly, upon the postponement of the legal and customary marriage age. Since young girls have exercised their brains as much as the boys have, they are no longer so far in advance of the boys in physical development. But when modern girls finish their studies they are physically as well as psychically more universally developed than their grandmothers were. They know much more of the difficulties and realities of life, not least of the sexual life. And this knowledge has instilled in them a reluctance to undertake too early the serious and difficult task of motherhood. They have greater need of truth and culture, and less tendency to erotic visionary dreaming than girls of their age in the middle of the previous century; their desire for work and their social feeling fix goals, and they work with all their might to attain them. And because, as already explained, both sexes have for each other a more many-sided attraction than the merely erotic, young people are more careful, more choice, in their erotic decisions. The finest young girls of to-day are penetrated by the Nietzschean idea, that marriage is the combined will of two people to create a new being greater than themselves. But their joy does not consist in the fact "that the man wills"; they are themselves "will," and above all they have the will to choose the right father for their children, not only for their own sake but for the sake of the children. If it be true that immediate, "blind," erotic attraction is most instinctively correct in choice, then the present comrade life of young peo...