It is sometimes supposed, and even assumed, that the demand of women that motherhood must never be compulsory, means that they are unwilling to be mothers on any terms.  In a few cases that may be so, but it is certainly not the case as regards the majority of sane and healthy women in any country.  On the contrary, this demand is usually associated with the desire to glorify motherhood, if not, indeed, even with the thought of extending motherhood to many who are to-day shut out from it.  “It seems to me,” wrote Lady Henry Somerset, some years ago ("The Welcome Child,” Arena, April, 1895), “that life will be dearer and nobler the more we recognize that there is no indelicacy in the climax and crown of creative power, but, rather, that it is the highest glory of the race.  But if voluntary motherhood is the crown of the race, involuntary compulsory motherhood is the very opposite....  Only when both man and woman have learned that the most sacred of all functions given to women must be exercised by the free will alone, can children be born into the world who have in them the joyous desire to live, who claim that sweetest privilege of childhood, the certainty that they can expand in the sunshine of the love which is their due.”  Ellen Key, similarly, while pointing out (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, pp. 14, 265) that the tyranny of the old Protestant religious spirit which enjoined on women unlimited submission to joyless motherhood within “the whited sepulchre of marriage” is now being broken, exalts the privileges of voluntary motherhood, while admitting that there may be a few exceptional cases in which women may withdraw themselves from motherhood for the sake of the other demands of their personality, though, “as a general rule, the woman who refuses motherhood in order to serve humanity, is like a soldier who prepares himself on the eve of battle for the forthcoming struggle by opening his veins.”  Helene Stoecker, likewise, reckons motherhood as one of the demands, one of the growing demands indeed, which women now make.  “If, to-day,” she says (in the Preface to Liebe und die Frauen, 1906), “all the good things of life are claimed even for women—­intellectual training, pecuniary independence, a happy vocation in life, a respected social position—­and at the same time, as equally matter-of-course, and equally necessary, marriage and child, that demand no longer sounds, as it sounded a few years ago, the voice of a preacher in the wilderness.”

The degradation to which motherhood has, in the eyes of many, fallen, is due partly to the tendency to deprive women of any voice in the question, and partly to what H.G.  Wells calls (Socialism and the Family, 1906) “the monstrous absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and rearing children, in their spare time, as it were, while they ‘earn their living’ by contributing some half mechanical element to some trivial industrial