I would like to underline in the most emphatic way that it is possible to have this Great State, essentially socialistic, owning and running the land and all the great public services, sustaining everybody in absolute freedom at a certain minimum of comfort and well-being, and still leaving most of the interests, amusements, and adornments of the individual life, and all sorts of collective concerns, social and political discussion, religious worship, philosophy, and the like to the free personal initiatives of entirely unofficial people.

This still leaves the problem of systematic knowledge and research, and all the associated problems of aesthetic, moral, and intellectual initiative to be worked out in detail; but at least it dispels the nightmare of a collective mind organised as a branch of the civil service, with authors, critics, artists, scientific investigators appointed in a phrensy of wire-pulling—­as nowadays the British state appoints its bishops for the care of its collective soul.

Let me now indicate how these general views affect the problem of family organisation and the problem of women’s freedom.  In the Normal Social Life the position of women is easily defined.  They are subordinated but important.  The citizenship rests with the man, and the woman’s relation to the community as a whole is through a man.  But within that limitation her functions as mother, wife, and home-maker are cardinal.  It is one of the entirely unforeseen consequences that have arisen from the decay of the Normal Social Life and its autonomous home that great numbers of women while still subordinate have become profoundly unimportant They have ceased to a very large extent to bear children, they have dropped most of their home-making arts, they no longer nurse nor educate such children as they have, and they have taken on no new functions that compensate for these dwindling activities of the domestic interior.  That subjugation which is a vital condition to the Normal Social Life does not seem to be necessary to the Great State.  It may or it may not be necessary.  And here we enter upon the most difficult of all our problems.  The whole spirit of the Great State is against any avoidable subjugation; but the whole spirit of that science which will animate the Great State forbids us to ignore woman’s functional and temperamental differences.  A new status has still to be invented for women, a Feminine Citizenship differing in certain respects from the normal masculine citizenship.  Its conditions remain to be worked out.  We have indeed to work out an entire new system of relations between men and women, that will be free from servitude, aggression, provocation, or parasitism.  The public Endowment of Motherhood as such may perhaps be the first broad suggestion of the quality of this new status.  A new type of family, a mutual alliance in the place of a subjugation, is perhaps the most startling of all the conceptions which confront us directly we turn ourselves definitely towards the Great State.