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“The truth in modern feminism came into history with some help from the errors of an inorganic and libertarian conception of the family and of an abstract rationalism which defied the facts of nature. The mother is biologically more intimately related to the child than the father. This fact limits the vocational freedom of women; for it makes motherhood a more exclusive vocation than fatherhood, which is indeed no more than an avocation. The wider rights of women have been achieved in the modern period, partly by defying this limitation which nature places upon womanhood. But it is also a fact that human personality rises in indeterminate freedom over biological function. The right of women to explore and develop their capacities beyond their family function, was unduly restricted in all previous societies. It was finally acknowledged in our society, partly because the bourgeois community had lost some of its appreciation of the organic integrity of the family. Had this error been prematurely suppressed, the new freedom of women would have been suppressed also. It must be added that the wisdom of the past which recognized the hazard of family life in the freedom of women, was not devoid of the taint of male “ideology.” The male oligarchy used fixed principles of natural law to preserve its privileges and powers against a new emergent in history. 

The freedom of society is thus made necessary by the fact that human vitalities have no simply definable limits. The restrains which all human communities place upon human impulses and ambitions are made necessary by the fact that all man’s vitalities tend to defy any defined limits. But since the community may as easily become inordinate in its passion for order, as may the various forces in the community in their passion for freedom, it is necessary to preserve a proper balance between both principles, and to be as ready to champion the individual against the community as the community against the individual.” 

                                     --Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness