the Council of Obstetrics and Gynecological Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, but as a woman was not permitted to participate in the running of the society or the election of officers. After she retired from her posts in 1909, she continued in her private professional work. Her new "leisure" time was devoted to public works and to speaking and writing. In 1919 she was invited to give the eighth Norman Kerr Memorial Lecture by The Society for the Study of Inebriety, choosing as her topic, "The Relation of Alcohol and Alcoholism to Maternity and Child Welfare". Honours In 1926, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was a member of the royal commission on Venereal Diseases 1913–16. From 1918 to 1930 she was president of the London School of Medicine for Women. In 1928, she received honorary LLD from Edinburgh University. World War I After the outbreak of World War I she was offered (in September 1914) the charge of one of the Women's Hospitals in Belgium, but, realizing her age and her probable inability to stand the life, she declined. She offered to treat all officers' wives and Belgian women free of charge. She became Chairman of the Midwifery Committee of the Council of War Relief, and spent much of her time and remaining energies in its Maternity Hospital. Religious beliefs Scharlieb believed in the idea of "religious vocation." While this motivated her to persevere in her career, it also meant that she carried conventional moral attitudes about sexuality. An extremely devout Anglo-Catholic (Anglican), she opposed contraception and divorce. She stated that "artificial contraceptives are wrong, morally, medically, rationally". She put in a powerful plea for the exercise of natural means of spacing the family. She spoke of divorce and her belief that it is unjust even to the guilty party, who, if a second union is contracted by the innocent partner, is "thereby prevented from making reparation and by this debarred from full repentance". She pleaded for the Church of England to strengthen and expand its own school system:Among the queerest heresies is that which teaches that children ought not to be biassed, or, as they say, 'prejudiced' in their spiritual outlook ... [S]uch parents and guardians are, indeed, biassing and prejudicing their children's choice, because it is inevitable that children left without religious instruction must grow up in