in the welfare of a class of children now
handicapped by birth outside of legal family bonds, that has issued
the call to "abolish illegitimacy." The slogan is also an expression
of a new demand that women fit to bear and rear children and deeply
desiring that personal experience and the social obligation which it
implies, should be given a social right to become mothers whether or
not the fitting permanent mate be found for a life-union under the
law. This demand is reaching a critical poignancy in those countries
in which the Great War has added to a long-increasing "surplus of
women" an astounding total of millions of women fit to marry whose
rightful mates are buried on the fields of conflict. Shall these
women, it is asked, be denied motherhood as well as wifehood? Shall
the state lose the children these women, child-loving and noble and
wise, might bear to help make good the horrible losses that war has
entailed?

Moreover, women everywhere are discerning the shallow inconsistency
between the ideal so long preached of motherhood as woman's chief if
not her only contribution to normal life and genuine social usefulness
and the abnormal economic conditions and double ethical standards
which doom so many women to single life. Still deeper in the hearts of
women, now for the first time free to give voice to inner questionings
of the inherited organization of society which has bound them to
conventions written solely by men in statute and custom, rises the
query, Is the present fashion of courtship and wedding favorable for
installing fit women as mothers or keeping to single life those least
capable of that social function?

=Ellen Key's Estimate of Motherhood.=--Ellen Key expresses this
feeling that fitness for a task so tremendous as parenthood is more
important than any mechanism by which parenthood is secured when she
says, "It is solely from one moral point of view that motherhood
without marriage, as well as the right of free divorce, must be
judged. Irresponsible motherhood is always sin with or without
marriage; responsible motherhood is always sacred with or without
marriage." And again she says, "The one necessary thing is to make
ever greater demands upon the men and women who take to themselves the
right to give humanity new beings." Ellen Key has also much to say
about the superior value of what women can do in and through their
race-service as mothers to anything they can do outside of that
office, ex