But Marie
(and this means millions of women throughout the modern world)
was free, wonderfully, unparalleledly free.
She was free, though a leisured woman, from the requirement of an
heir for a great family estate. She was free from the dictates of
historic Christianity about conjugal duty and unrestricted
reproduction. She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance
with a husband's will.
Modern life had done all this for her. She was uncoerced by
family authority, ecclesiastical authority, or marital authority.
She was limitlessly free, limitlessly irresponsible, a creature
of infinite opportunities and no duties.
All social coercion toward childbearing having been withdrawn
from her, the only guide she had left (and it would have been her
best one) was instinct and impulse.
But with the cessation from struggle, with the cessation from
effort and from fatigue and from discipline, and from the sorrow
of pain that brings the joy of accomplishment, that instinct and
impulse had disappeared. With the petrifaction of its soil, it
had withered away.
She had been sedulously trained to sterility.
Nevertheless, when it got talked around among her friends that
she didn't want children, everybody thought it very surprising,
in view of all that had been done for her.
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