equate
mothering, as no longer a chance product of individual passions but
a service rendered to the State. Women must become less and less
subordinated to individual men, since this works out in a more or less
complete limitation, waste, and sterilisation of their essentially
social function; they must become more and more subordinated as
individually independent citizens to the collective purpose. Or, to
express the thing by a familiar phrase, the highly organised, scientific
state we desire must, if it is to exist at all, base itself not upon
the irresponsible man-ruled family, but upon the matriarchal family,
the citizen-ship and freedom 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....

I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the matter.
I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I want to
see women come in, free and fearless, to a full participation in the
collective purpose of mankind. Women, I am convinced, are as fine
as men; they can be as wise as men; they are capable of far greater
devotion than men. I want to see them citizens, with a marriage law
framed primarily for them and for their protection and the good of the
race, and not for men's satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and
rearing good children in the State as a generously rewarded public duty
and service, choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no
way enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen. The social
consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched mine
of wealth for the