| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: The Woman Movement
Author: Key, Ellen
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Woman Movement" ***
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
_By Ellen Key_
The Century of the Child
The Education of the Child
Love and Marriage
The Woman Movement
The Woman Movement
By
Ellen Key
Author of
“The Century of the Child,” “Love and Marriage,” etc.
Translated by
Mamah Bouton Borthwick, A.M.
With an Introduction by
Havelock Ellis
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1912
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
Es gibt kein Vergangenes das man zurücksehnen dürfte; es gibt nur
ein ewig Neues, das sich aus den erweiterten Elementen des
Vergangenen gestaltet, und die echte Sehnsucht muss stets productiv
sein, ein neues, besseres Erschaffen.—GOETHE.
“_There is no past that we need long to return to, there is only the
eternally new which is formed out of enlarged elements of the past; and
our genuine longing must always be productive, for a new and better
creation._”
PREFACE
The literature upon the right and the worth of woman, beginning as early
as the 15th century, has in recent times increased so enormously that a
complete collection would require a whole library building. In these
writings are represented all classes, from tables of statistics to comic
papers. Not only both sexes but almost all stages of life have
contributed to it. By immersing oneself in this literature, especially
in its belletristic and polemic portions, one could find rich material
for the illumination of that sphere to which the publisher limited my
work: the indication of the new spiritual conditions, transformations,
and reciprocal results which the woman movement has effected. Historic,
scientific, political, economic, juridical, sociological, and
theological points of view must, therefore, be practically set aside.
But even for my task, limited to the psychological sphere, time,
strength, and inclination are wanting to bury myself in this literature.
I must, therefore, confine myself to giving chiefly my own observations.
It is more than fifty years ago that I read _Hertha_, Sweden’s first
“feministic” (dealing with the woman question) novel, and listened to
the numerous contentions concerning it. With ever keener personal
interest I have since followed the operations of the woman
movement—above all, the new psychic conditions, types, and forms of
activities which the woman movement has evoked; I have also given
consideration to the new possibilities and new difficulties resulting
therefrom for individuals and for society.
The limited compass of this little book prevents me from substantiating
my assertions by means of parallels with earlier times, comparisons
which might illuminate certain spiritual transformations and new
formations. My comparisons of the present with the past do not go
farther back than my own memory reaches. And these touch, moreover, in
what concerns the past, principally upon Swedish conditions; while my
impressions of the present were gathered throughout Europe. I have
considered, however, that I could summarise both in a comprehensive
picture. For although the women of Sweden a generation ago possessed
rights for which the women in many countries are still struggling
to-day, yet the woman movement in the last decade has advanced so
rapidly that the conditions have in great measure been equalised.
Indeed, some of the grey-haired champions of the woman movement have
seen one after another of their demands fulfilled in this new
century—demands which in the fifties and sixties, in many countries even
in the seventies and eighties, were publicly and privately derided even
in the very person of these champions. And among peoples who even ten
years ago were unaffected by the emancipation of women, for example the
Chinese and the Turks, it is already progressing. It amounts to this,
that even if national peculiarities in character and in laws occasion
differences in the curve which the woman movement describes in the
different countries, yet everywhere the movement has had the same
causes, must follow the same main direction, and—sooner or later—must
have the same effects.
* * * * *
In _Hertha_, the book containing the tenets of the Swedish woman
movement, the demand is made for woman’s “freedom and future, and a home
for her spiritual life”; the desire is expressed that women should
“preserve the character of their own nature, and not be uniformly
moulded, not be led by a string as if they had not a soul of their own
to show them the way.” There must be “vital air for woman’s soul and a
share in life’s riches.” It is to be lamented that “woman’s spiritual
talent must be a field that lies fallow,” that the law “denies her free
agency in seeking happiness.” The prerogative is demanded that “woman in
noble self-conscious joy shall succeed in feeling what she is able to do
now and what she is capable of attaining”; that she shall be free to
“aspire to the heights her youthful strength and consciousness point out
to her”; that she may “be fully herself and be able to exercise an
uplifting, ennobling influence upon the man” to whom she says: “All that
is mine shall be thine and thereby the portion of each shall be
doubled.”
Even if all fields are made accessible to them, “God’s law in their
nature will always lead the majority of women to the home, to the
intimacy of the family life, to motherhood and the duties of rearing
children—but with a higher consciousness.” That women shall be citizens
signifies that they shall become “human beings in whom the life of the
heart predominates.”
This picture of the future, which has already become a reality in many
respects, was sketched at a time when innumerable women were still
compelled to experience that “there is no heavier burden than life’s
emptiness,” and when it was true of every woman, “dark is her way,
gloomy her future, narrow her lot.”
But because that _which is_, is always considered by the masses as that
which _ought to be_, “whatever is, is right,” so the writer who painted
the picture was called “dangerous,” “a disintegrator of society,” “mad,”
“ridiculous”! “Mademoiselle Bremer’s” name possessed then quite a
different intonation from that of Fredrika Bremer now; it caused strife
between the sexes; it was hated by some and derided by others.
I should like to advise young women of the present time to read
_Hertha_; they will thus obtain a criterion for the progress which has
taken place during the last half century and also a clear view of the
character of the opposition which the present desire for progress
encounters.
ELLEN KEY.
October 1, 1909.
INTRODUCTION
There can be little doubt that at the present moment what is called the
“Woman’s Movement” is entering a critical period of its development. A
discussion of its present problems and its present difficulties by one
of the most advanced leaders in that movement thus appears at the right
time and deserves our most serious attention.
The early promulgators of the Woman’s Movement, a century or more ago,
rightly regarded it as an extremely large and comprehensive movement
affecting the whole of life. They were anxious to secure for women
adequate opportunities for free human development, to the same extent
that men possess such opportunities, but they laid no special stress on
the abolition of any single disability or group of disabilities, whether
as regards education, occupation, marriage, property, or political
enfranchisement. They were people of wide and sound intelligence; they
never imagined that any single isolated reform would prove a cheap
panacea for all the evils they wished to correct; they looked for a slow
reform along the whole line. They held that such reform would enrich and
enlarge the entire field of human life, not for women only, but for the
human race generally. Such, indeed, is the spirit which still inspires
the wisest and most far-seeing champions of that Movement. It is only
necessary to mention Olive Schreiner’s _Woman and Labour_.
When, however, the era of actual practical reform began, it was obvious
that a certain amount of concentration became necessary. Education was,
reasonably enough, usually the first point for concentration, and
gradually, without any undue friction, the education of girls was, so
far as possible, raised to a level not so very different from that of
boys. This first great stage in the Woman’s Movement inevitably led on
to the second stage, which lay in a struggle, not this time always
without a certain amount of friction, to secure the entry of these now
educated women to avocations and professions previously monopolised by
the men who had alone been trained to fill them. This second stage is
now largely completed, and at the present time there are very few
vocations and professions in civilised lands, even in so conservative
and slowly moving a land as England, which women are not entitled to
exercise equally with men. Concomitantly with this movement,
however,—and beginning indeed, very much earlier, and altogether apart
from any conscious “movement” at all,—there was a tendency to change the
laws in a direction more favourable to women and their personal rights,
especially as regards marriage and property. These legal reforms were
effected by Parliaments of men, elected exclusively by men, and for the
most part they were effected without any very strong pressure from
women. It had, however, long been claimed that women themselves ought to
have some part in making the laws by which they are governed, and at
this stage, towards the middle of the last century, the demand for
women’s parliamentary suffrage began to be urgently raised. Here,
however, the difficulties naturally proved very much greater than they
were in the introduction of a higher level of education for women, or
even in the opening up to them of hitherto monopolised occupations. In
new countries, and sometimes in small old countries, these difficulties
could be overcome. But in large and old countries, of stable and complex
constitution, it was very far from easy to readjust the ancient
machinery in accordance with the new demands. The difficulty by no means
lay in any unwillingness on the part of the masculine politicians in
possession; on the contrary, it is a notable fact, often overlooked,
that, in England especially, there have for at least half a century been
a considerable proportion of eminent statesmen as well as of the
ordinary rank and file of members of Parliament who are in favour of
granting the suffrage to women, a much larger proportion, probably, than
would be found favourable to this claim in any other section of the
community. That, indeed,—apart from the delay involved by ancient
constitutional methods,—has been the main difficulty. Neither among the
masculine electors nor among their womenfolk has there been any
consuming desire to achieve women’s suffrage.
The result has been a certain tendency in the Woman’s Movement to
diverge in two different directions. On the one hand, are those who,
recognising that all evolution is slow, are content to await patiently
the inevitable moment when the political enfranchisement of women will
become possible, in the meanwhile working towards women’s causes in
other fields equally essential and sometimes more important. On the
other hand, a small but energetic, sometimes even violent, section of
the women engaged in this movement concentrated altogether on the
suffrage. The germs of this divergence may be noted even thirty years
back when we find Miss Cobbe declaring that woman’s suffrage is “the
crown and completion of all progress in woman’s movements,” while Mrs.
Cady Stanton, perhaps more wisely, stated that it was merely a vestibule
to progress. In recent years the difference has become accentuated,
sometimes even into an acute opposition, between those who maintain that
the one and only thing essential, and that immediately and at all costs,
even at the cost of arresting and putting back the progress of women in
all other directions, is the parliamentary suffrage, and on the other
hand, those who hold that the suffrage, however necessary, is still only
a single point, and that the woman’s movement is far wider and, above
all, far deeper than any mere political reform.
It is at this stage that Ellen Key comes before us with her book on _The
Woman’s Movement_, first published in Swedish in 1909, and now presented
to the reader in English. As Ellen Key views the Woman’s Movement, it
certainly includes all that those who struggle for votes for women are
fighting for; she is unable to see, as she puts it, why a woman’s hands
need be more soiled by a ballot paper than by a cooking recipe. But she
is far indeed from the well-intentioned but ignorant fanatics who fancy
that the vote is the alpha and the omega of Feminism; and still less is
she in sympathy with those who consider that its importance is so
supreme as to justify violence and robbery, a sort of sex war on mankind
generally, and the casting in the mud of all those things which it has
been the gradual task of civilisation to achieve, not for men only but
for women. The Woman’s Movement, as Ellen Key sees it, includes the
demand for the vote, but it looks upon the vote merely as a reasonable
condition for attaining far wider and more fundamental ends. She is of
opinion that the Woman’s Movement will progress less by an increased
aptitude to claim rights than by an increased power of self-development,
that it is not by what they can seize, but by what they are, that women,
or for the matter of that men, finally count. She regards the task of
women as constructive rather than destructive; they are the architects
of the future humanity, and she holds that this is a task that can only
be carried out side by side with men, not because man’s work and woman’s
work is, or should be, identical, but because each supplements and aids
the other, and whatever gives greater strength and freedom to one sex
equally fortifies and liberates the other sex.
Certainly we may not all agree with Ellen Key at every point, nor always
accept her interpretation of the great movement of which she is so
notable a pioneer. The breadth of her sympathies may sometimes seem to
lead to an impracticable eclecticism, and, in the rejection of narrow
and trivial aims, she may too sanguinely demand an impossible harmony of
opposing ideals. But if this is an error it is surely an error on the
right side. She has not put forward this book as a manifesto of the
advanced guard of the Woman’s Movement, but merely as the reflections of
an individual woman who, for nearly half a century, has pondered, felt,
studied, observed this movement in many parts of the world. But it would
not be easy to find a book in which the claims of Feminism—in the
largest modern sense—are more reasonably and temperately set forth.
[Signature: _Havelock Ellis._]
LONDON, May 1, 1912.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER
I THE EXTERNAL RESULTS OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT 23
II THE INNER RESULTS OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT 58
III THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN QUESTION UPON SINGLE WOMEN 71
IV THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON THE DAUGHTERS 89
V THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MEN AND WOMEN IN 111
GENERAL
VI THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MARRIAGE 139
VII THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MOTHERHOOD 169
The Woman Movement
INTRODUCTION
The first “woman movement” was Eve’s gesture when she reached for the
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—a movement symbolic of the entire
subsequent woman’s movement of the world. For the will to pass beyond
established bounds has constantly been the motive of her conscious as
well as of her subconscious quest. Every generation has called this
transgression, this passing beyond the bounds, a “fall of man,” the
“original sin,” a crime against God’s express command, a crime against
the nature of woman as prescribed for her for all time.
And yet from the beginning women have appeared who have passed far
beyond the established boundaries set for their sex by their era and
upheld by their own people. They have demonstrated that limitations thus
prescribed do not always coincide with what is considered by the
majority to be the “nature” of woman. At one time a woman has manifested
the “masculine” characteristics of a ruler or has performed a
“masculine” deed; at another time she has distinguished herself in
“masculine” learning or art, or again has dared to love without the
permission of law and custom. In a word the individual woman, when her
head or her heart was strong enough, has always shown the possibilities
of the development of personal power. But she has had in that effort
only her own strength and her own will upon which to rely; she has
neither been urged on by the spirit of her time (_Zeitgeist_) nor been
emulated by the masses. Exceptional women have sometimes been glorified
by their contemporaries and by posterity as “wonders of nature”;
sometimes been cited as “warning examples.” Seen in connection with the
world’s woman movement all these instances, where a bond was broken by
woman’s power of mind or creative gift, by a heart or a conscience, are
parts of what can be called the “prehistoric” woman movement. This
movement for personal freedom formed no step in that phase of the
development which possesses a conscious purpose, but was merely
sporadic. Even so the participation was long nameless which women took
in the great struggles for freedom where, without consideration for the
“nature” of woman, they dared bleed upon the arena and scaffold, ascend
the pyre, and be raised upon the gibbet. Very rarely did these women
martyrs alter immediately men’s—or even women’s—conception of woman’s
“being.” But just as many perfumes are dissipated only after centuries,
so there are also deeds whose indirect results persist through
centuries.
Most significant, however, upon the whole in the “prehistoric” woman
movement, are innumerable women whose souls found expression only in the
strong, quiet acts of every day life but yet remained living and
growing. As a reason for the “enslavement” of woman by man, the
primitive division of labour is still occasionally cited. This division
of labour made war and the chase man’s task and so developed in him
courage, energy, and daring, while the woman remained the “beast of
burden.” But we forget that, in this labour arrangement, the handicraft
and husbandry which woman practised at that time made her, to perhaps a
higher degree than man, the conservator of civilisation and probably
developed her psychic power in more comprehensive manner than his.
Even after this division of labour ceased there remained—and remain
still in innumerable country households—in and through many of the
important and difficult tasks of the mother of the house, numerous
possibilities for spiritual development. And exactly in this respect
industrial work robs the woman of much.
By the side of these innumerable nameless women who, century after
century, in and through the material work of culture which they
performed, increased their psychic power, we must remember all the
unnamed women who with flower-like quiet mien turned their souls to the
light.
Antique sepulchres and Tanagra figures tell us more about the
harmonious, refined corporeality of the Hellenic woman than the famous
statues of Aphrodite or Athena. In like manner it is not the illustrious
but the nameless women who most clearly reveal the will of the woman
soul, in antiquity, for light and life.
Numbers of Greek women were disciples of the philosophers, some even
were their inspiration. Generally courtesans, these women represented
the “emancipation” of that time from the servile condition of the
legitimate married women and also showed that women already longed to
share in the interests of men and to acquire their culture. History has
preserved also words and deeds of wives and mothers of the past which
show that these also at times attained “masculine” greatness of soul and
civic virtue. Pythias and Sibyls, Vestals and Valas, are other witnesses
that the power of woman’s soul was active and recognised long before
Christianity. Even among the purely primitive races there were found—and
are found—cases in which woman in power and rights was placed, not only
on an equality with man, but even above him. And if, on the one hand,
the rigid exactions which men from the earliest time have fixed upon the
wife’s fidelity—while they themselves had full freedom for
promiscuity—show that the wife was considered as the property of the
husband, so, on the other hand, this very conception was a means of
elevating and refining the soul life of woman. For the self-control
which she had to impose upon herself deepened her feeling for a devotion
which embraced only one, the man to whom she belonged. Nothing would be
more superficial than to estimate the real position of woman, among any
special people, only by what we know of their laws. It is as if one, in
a few centuries from now, should judge the actual position of the modern
European wife by referring it to the wretched marriage laws which now
obtain. They forget the deep gulf between law and custom who declare
that marriage devotion, veneration for the sanctity of the home, esteem
for the spiritual being of the wife first arose as a result of
Christianity.
It is significant enough for the freeing of woman that Jesus raised the
personal worth of _all_ mankind through His teaching that—whoever or
whatever the person in outer respects may be—every soul possesses an
eternal value comprised, as it were, in God’s love; significant enough
that Jesus Himself, because of this point of view, treated every woman,
even the sinner, with kindness and respect. Because of the increasing
uncertainty concerning the real ideals of Jesus, one is compelled to
assume that—just as Veronica’s handkerchief preserved the imprint of
Jesus’ outer image—the manner of life of the oldest Christian
communities has preserved the imprint of His teaching. It is significant
of their doctrines that in these communities women and men stood side by
side in the same faith, in the same hope, in the same exercise of love,
and in the same martyrdom. Here was “neither man nor woman,” but all
were one in the hope of the speedy second coming of Jesus to establish
God’s Kingdom.
But the more this hope faded, the more the Pagan-Jewish conception of
woman again made itself felt. It is true the Church sought to place man
and woman on an equality in regard to certain marriage duties and
rights; to uphold on both sides the sanctity of marriage; to protect
women and children against despotism. It is true the Church strove to
counteract crude sensuality, utilising, among other things, an emphasis
of celibacy as the expression of the highest spirituality.
But, on the other hand, the doctrine of this Church became the greatest
obstacle to the elevation of woman, because it lessened the reverence
for her mission as a being of sex. Marriage, the only recognised ends of
which were the prevention of unchastity and the propagation of the race,
was looked upon as an inferior condition in comparison with pure
virginity. And the more this ideal of chastity was extolled, the more
woman was degraded and considered the most grievous temptation of man in
his striving after higher sanctity. Before God, so man taught, man and
woman were truly equal; but not in human relationships or qualities;
yes, and man has gone in this direction even to the point of debating
the question in church councils, as to whether woman really had a soul
or not!
But when the Church revered pure virginity in the person of the Mother
of Jesus, it was woman in highest form—as happy or suffering mother—that
the Church unconsciously glorified. In the statues and altar pieces of
the cathedral man worships, in the likeness of Mary, the purest and
noblest womanhood. The virtues especially extolled by the Church were
also those in which Mary in particular and woman in general had
pre-eminence. By all these impressions a soul condition was created in
which the heart penetrated by religious ecstasy, must, of psychological
necessity, devote itself to the earthly manifestations of this same pure
womanhood. Generally this devotion was only an ecstatic cult, an
adoration from afar of an ideal, inspiring deeds or poetry. Sometimes
this ecstasy fused the being of man and woman in the sensuous-soulful
unity of great love. But when neither was the case, yet the adoration of
knights and minnesingers increased the esteem of man for woman and the
esteem of woman for herself. It also contributed to the esteem of man
for woman that, as the men were always obliged to stand in arms, they
could rarely acquire the learning which the priests—and through them the
wives and daughters of the castles—acquired. The superiority of woman in
this respect had a refining influence upon manners and customs and upon
the general culture of the time. Often through a number of women
auditors the poem of a minnesinger first became famous. When in Mainz
one sees Heinrich Frauenlob’s tombstone, one comprehends, through the
soulful noble lines, how mourning women bore him to the grave, as the
little bas-relief at the base of the stone represents. Their sympathy
made him their singer and his sympathy revealed, to their time and to
themselves, their own being. Woman’s ideal of love became through poetry
and courts of love the ideal also of the most cultured men. We see here
a movement of the time which women already half consciously effected by
their life of feeling and their culture. The authority which the wife
exercised as lady of the manor during the absence, often of many years’
duration, of her husband gave her increased power to disseminate about
her that finer culture which she herself had gained. But when the lords
of the manor returned and again assumed power, then indeed at times
strange thoughts might have come to their wives, while they fixed their
glance, under the great arched eyelids, upon the missal or the romance
of chivalry or, with long tapering fingers, moved the chessmen or played
the harp, or while they bent the slender white neck over the embroidery
frame or the lace-pillow upon which they wrought veritable marvels of
handicraft. Perhaps even then there stirred under many a brow the
presentiment of a time in which the relationship between man and woman
would be different. Such thoughts must have arisen also in the
manor-houses when the men began to arrogate to themselves one handicraft
after another, occupations which in earlier times the daughters once
learned from their fathers, at whose side they sometimes even entered
the guild. Could even the nun’s veil prevent such thoughts from rising
between the white temples of some of the women who—suffering or
superfluous outside in the world—had found refuge in the cloister? Here
was accomplished most peacefully the “emancipation,” of that time, of
the intellectual and artistic gifts of woman, for whom religion and the
life of the cloister had always employment. And if the soul of a nun was
greater and richer than usual, then might it indeed have happened that
she devoted herself to meditation, in a quandary as to whether all of
God’s purposes for the gifts of her soul were truly fulfilled. And this
the more intently since even then many women outside the cloister—women
whose religious inspiration directed their genius to great ends—outside
in the world, exercised a powerful influence upon the thought as upon
the events of their time and, after death as saints, retained power over
souls. Our Birgitta, for example, possessed herself of a great part of
“woman’s rights.”
So significant had the psychic power of woman shown itself to be in the
Middle Ages that already in the early Renaissance it brought forth a
number of “feminist” writers, both women and men. And in the height of
the Renaissance there was quite an “emancipation” literature, about
women and by women. This literature increased during the following
centuries. Famous men emphasised the importance of a higher education of
woman; some, as early as the beginning of the 16th century, claimed the
absolute superiority of woman in all things. Greater freedom, education,
and rights, in one or another respect, were demanded by men as well as
women “feminists.” This literature purposed less, however, to alter some
given conditions than, by means of examples of famous women of
antiquity, to demonstrate the personal right and the social gain of what
already obtained without hindrance, although with the disapproval of
many:—that numbers of women had appeared who in classic culture, in the
practice of learned professions, in political or religious, intellectual
or æsthetic interests, stood beside the men of Humanism, the
Renaissance, and the Reformation.
The ideal of the time, the fully developed human personality of marked
individuality, determined the conduct of life of women exactly as that
of men. Both sexes cherished the life value which the original,
isolated, individual personality signified for other such personalities.
Both sexes appropriated to themselves the right to choose that which was
harmonious with their own natures, that which soul or sense, thought or
feeling, desired. It followed from this conception that women sought to
attain the highest degree of the beauty and grace of their own sex and
at the same time to cultivate what “manly” courage or genius nature had
given them—attributes which men valued in them next to their purely
womanly qualities.
But at this time it was not the _work_ of woman which had the great
cultural significance, but the human essence of her being reflected in
_the works of men_. In antiquity woman exhibited the manly qualities of
greatness of soul and civic virtue; in the Middle Ages she revealed the
same faculty as man for saintliness and exercise of love; in the
Renaissance she manifested the same ability as man to mould her own
personality into a living work of art. If the spirit of equality between
the sexes, which prevailed in the Renaissance, had further directed the
progress of development, a “woman movement” would never have arisen,
because its ends, which are to-day still contended for, would have been
attained one after another, at the appointed time, as natural fruits of
the florescence of the Renaissance.
As it is, this florescence acquired only very slight _immediate_
influence upon the emancipation of woman—and the farther North one goes
the slighter it becomes. The periods of the Counter-Reformation, of the
Religious Wars and of the new Orthodoxy, on the contrary, had as result
an enormous retrogression in the position of woman.
The “Deliverance of the Flesh,” which was accomplished by the verdict of
Protestantism upon the life of the cloister, and by its support of
marriage, had little in common with the deep feeling for the right and
beauty of corporeality by which the Renaissance, intoxicated with life,
became the era of the great renascence of art. Luther’s conception of
the sex life, as “sanctified” by marriage, was so crassly utilitarian
that it again dragged woman down from that high level upon which the
finest life of feeling and culture of the Middle Ages and of the
Renaissance had placed her.
As matron of the household, woman retained her authority. The rational,
common-sense marriage was the one most conformable to this literal
doctrine of Luther, and the most usual. To the man who had chosen her,
the wife bore children by the dozen and threescore. The Church gave her
soul nourishment. If a woman occasionally sought to exercise her
spiritual gifts in a “worldly” direction, she needed powerful
protection, else she ran the danger of being burned as a witch!
Yet in spite of all, even this period produced not a few women who
procured for themselves the learning after which they thirsted, who
succeeded in keeping their souls alive, in finding springs in the midst
of the stony wastes of the desert. The more, however, the different
branches of learning developed, and especially as Latin became the
language of the learned, the more difficult it became for women to force
their way to these springs, sealed for the majority of their sex. For a
classical education became more and more infrequently extended to the
daughter, for whom even the ability to read and write was considered a
temptation to deviation from the path of virtue.[1]
That women in time of persecution adhered to the new doctrine with warm
belief and suffered for it with the whole strength of their souls, that
in time of war they managed house and estate with power and
understanding, altered in no respect, at the time, woman’s social or
marriage position. Man was woman’s sovereign master and therefore a good
bit nearer God than she. In marriage woman was considered, according to
the bishop’s word, “man’s chattel,” outside of marriage as a tool of the
devil. But however deeply the soul of woman was oppressed at this time,
yet it still lived and endowed sons, in whom the strong but unexercised
endowments of the mother became genius; it endowed daughters, who
secretly procured sustenance for their souls and who in turn transmitted
their rebellious spirit to a daughter or granddaughter.
When at the end of the period of Orthodoxy and Absolutism, the great
fundamental principle of Protestantism, the principle of personality,
once more made headway, one of the most characteristic expressions of
this reaction is that, in England, Milton wrote upon the right of
divorce and Defoe upon the right of woman to the development and
exercise of her mental powers. Among others who demanded greater
education for women were Comenius in Germany and Fénelon in France. It
was not in the former country that woman, so long oppressed, first won
her great cultural influence. That happened in the land where women had
never wholly lost it. In France, in the age of enlightenment, it was the
salons created by women that determined the European spirit of the time.
Letters and memoirs indicate sufficiently the influence of woman—in good
as well as in bad sense—in politics and literature, manners, customs,
and taste. Women transform indirectly the political, philosophic, and
scientific style. For they demand that every subject be treated in a
manner easily comprehensible and agreeable to them. A number of writings
appeared which aimed to make it easy for “women folk” also “to be freed
through the reason.”
Since it was the approval of women which determined fame, men were only
too eager to fulfil their expressed demands. Women disseminated the
ideas of men in wide circles, partly by buying their writings in great
numbers and distributing them, partly also by social life. Never has
woman more perfectly accomplished the important task of adjusting
culture values. The art of conversation, developed to the highest
perfection, was, it is true, often only a game of battledore and
shuttlecock with ideas. But it performed at the same time, and in more
elegant and more effective manner, a great part of the office of
to-day’s Press. The political leader, art and literary criticism, gossip
(_causerie_), the “portrait gallery” of contemporaries—all this was
gathered from clever discourse. Through their art of conversation the
women became—next to the philosophers and statesmen who in this or that
salon were the leading spirits—the intellectual leaders of the time;
they created “enlightened opinion,” they co-operated finally in the
Revolution. The mistresses of these salons scarcely felt the need of an
emancipation of woman; for they had for themselves as many possibilities
of culture, of development of their powers, of the exercise of their
faculties, as even they themselves could wish. The intellectual
curiosity, which coveted learning, and the cultural interest of these
women penetrated in wider circles, and a result of this general
awakening was the Woman’s Lyceum founded in Paris in 1786, among the
students of which were found, some years later, enthusiastic supporters
of the Revolution.
Also among the German peoples there appeared, in the age of
enlightenment, women with literary and scientific interest; some with
extraordinary gifts which they also exercised. But for the most part
women and men under more clumsy social forms, so-called “Academies” and
“Societies,” engaged in their “learned pastime”; and nowhere, except in
the person of some ruler, did woman attain in Europe, in the age of
enlightenment, an influence which can be compared to that of the French
women.
In the midst of the period of rococo elegance and gallantry, of reason
and esprit, came the great regeneration, the second Renaissance—the
Revival of Feeling. This occurred first in the field of religion,
through the pietistic movement of the time. Later it was Rousseau who,
in connection with religion, nature, love, motherhood, became the
liberator of feeling, and together with him were the English
“sentimental” poets and the German poetry, which reached its culminating
point in Goethe. Literature, the Theatre, and Art came more and more to
the front and, by that means, women acquired greater possibilities of
becoming acquainted with, understanding, and loving the richest culture
of the time.
And with this Revival of Feeling, personal freedom, individual
character, became again the great life value. Women who wish to give
expression to their feeling in their life now become more numerous:
women who are conscious that their being buries many unsatisfied
demands, not only in connection with the right of culture of their
natural character, but also in connection with the right, in private
life and in society, to give expression to this natural character. Men
are continually in intellectual interchange with women, giving as well
as receiving; woman nature is esteemed with ever finer comprehension.
Since feelings determine thoughts—for the thought always goes in the
direction in which the feeling says happiness is to be found—so it is
natural that, in the second half of the 18th century, the idea of
freedom is the ideal which kindles the soul of increasing numbers of
women. _The emancipation of the individual_ is the tale within the tale,
from the Renaissance up to the struggles of the Reformation for freedom
of conscience, freedom of learning, freedom of investigation, and
freedom of thought. Then finally came the struggle for constitutionally
protected civic freedom. In America as early as 1776 the demand for the
enfranchisement of women was raised, because they had taken part in the
struggle for freedom with such great enthusiasm and constancy. With the
same passion they threw themselves into the struggle in France for the
“Rights of Man.” But both times they had to learn to their sorrow that
“fellow-citizen” and “man” were terms which as yet referred only to men.
That a woman during the French Revolution proclaimed “Women’s Rights,”
that women discussed these questions as well as questions of education
and other vital questions, with ardour, had as little immediate effect
as the attempt at that time to enforce the right of the fourth estate.
These sorely oppressed movements, of women and of working men, dominate
the 19th century and now at the beginning of the 20th have every reason
for assurance of victory.
In the 17th and 18th centuries men and women writers appeared in
different countries to demonstrate and establish the worth and right of
woman as “man.” Indirectly inspired by the great women of the earlier
centuries, they were immediately influenced by woman’s political and
cultural exercise of power in the 18th century. Especially notable are
the arguments which were advanced in the 90’s of the 18th century by
writers manifestly uninfluenced by one another—the Swede, Thorild, in
_The Natural Nobility of Womankind_; the German, Hippel; the Frenchman,
Condorcet; the English woman, Mary Wollstonecraft. All insist that
difference in sex can form no obstacle to placing woman on an equality
with man in the family and in society; that she shall have the same
right as man to education and free agency. The men writers emphasised
more her individual human right, as “man,” and the advantage to society;
the women writers more the mother’s need of culture and her right to it,
in order to be able to rear and protect her children better. But all
four ideas are, at heart, determined by the same point of view which the
great philosopher of evolution thus formulated later: _the fundamental
condition for social equilibrium is the same as for human happiness and
lies in the law of equal freedom_. And this means that every one—without
regard to difference between sex and sex, man and man—must have the
right and the opportunity to develop and exercise his own capacities.
For no one to-day can undertake so certain a valuation of talents that
this valuation could justify society in restricting, a priori, the right
of a single one of its members _to develop_ his capacities, even though
these capacities might take such a direction, later, that society would
be compelled to limit their _exercise_.
Spencer arrived by the deductive method at the same demand Romanticism
reached earlier by the intuitive method. Romanticism recognised that in
the measure in which the individual is unusual he must be also
unintelligible, for he shows to the majority only his surface; his
innermost soul only to those in harmony with him. Even in the family
circle the individual often remains therefore undiscovered. How much
more then must society, composed for the most part of Philistines,
outrage the individual if it concedes rights to one category, to one
sex, to one class, and not to the other!
And from this point of view the Romanticists drew for women also the
logical conclusion of individualism. They pointed out that the sex
character, carried _to the extreme_, furnished neither the highest
masculine nor the highest feminine type; that each sex must develop in
itself both noble human _universality_ and individual _peculiarity_. And
this the great woman personalities did who shared the destiny of the
Romanticists. They were thereby fully and wholly able to share also the
intellectual life of their husbands. Love became thus a unity of souls.
The romantic ideal of love was expressed in _La Nouvelle Héloise_, in
Goethe’s letters to Charlotte von Stein, in Rahel, in Mme. de Staël. It
was found in the first half of the 19th century in many great women; for
example, George Sand, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Camilla Collett. It
appeared in Shelley and in the Swedish poet Almquist, in Stuart Mill and
Robert Browning, also in certain French and German poets and thinkers.
This ideal has now been for some centuries the ideal of most women and
of not a few men of feeling.
But since a truly psychic unity is possible only between two beings who
are, in outer as in inner sense, _free_, exactly for this reason,
“romantic love” has as consequence the demand for the emancipation of
woman.
The love of Romanticism, which has been caricatured to the extent that
it signified only moonshine, ecstasy, sonnets, and wife barter, had its
real essence in the desire for completeness of soul in love. This was,
in a new form, the ideal of the courts of love. But since completeness
of soul means that all the powers of the soul can freely and fully
penetrate and elevate one another, so the first requisite for that
soulful love was that _woman’s_ thinking as well as her feeling, her
imagination as well as her will, her desire for power, as well as her
conscience, be freed from the shackles imposed upon them from without,
in order to be strengthened and purified. The second stipulation was
that _man’s_ inner, spiritual life be freed from the deteriorating
results of the prerogatives and prejudices accorded to and maintained by
his sex.
A new ideal in the relationship between husband and wife, between mother
and child; the demand of the feminine individuality for the right to
free cultivation of her powers and to self-direction; the need of new
fields for this exercise of her power after industrialism began to usurp
one branch of domestic work after another—these are the fundamental
reasons for what is called the middle-class woman movement. The
middle-class woman—because of the increasing surplus of women, because
of the continually greater variety of economic conditions and the
decrease in marriage for this and other reasons—was to an ever greater
extent constrained to self-maintenance. Thus the _economic_ reason for
the woman movement, not only in the labouring class but also in the
middle class, became the most effective influence operating in the
_widest_ circles, although the reasons mentioned previously were the
first and deepest causes.
And herewith we stand at the beginning of the woman movement, become
_conscious of its purpose_.
But this movement would be a stream without sources if the “anonymous”
movements indicated here with the greatest brevity had not preceded, if
in the grey morning of time the endless procession had not begun in
which women now nameless for us walked at the head, each with an amphoræ
upon her shoulder—amphoræ which they filled at any fountain of life.
Before these nameless women vanished on the horizon, each, like a water
nymph of antiquity, lowered the brim of her urn to the earth, which thus
was traversed by innumerable interlacing rills. And all these—even if by
the most circuitous route—have augmented by some drops the mighty stream
now called the woman movement.
CHAPTER I
THE EXTERNAL RESULTS OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT
The history of the woman movement, conscious of its purpose, does not
fall within the compass of this book. But as foundation for later
judgments, it is necessary to take a short retrospective glance over the
essential results which the woman movement has attained in the struggle
for woman’s equality with man in the right to general culture,
professional education, and work, as well as in the sphere of family and
of civil status. These several demands for equality were voiced, as
early as 1848, in a powerful and man-indicting plea by the American
women in their “Declaration of Sentiments.” But in 1905 the program for
Germany’s “Allgemein Frauenverein,” as well as many both conservative
and radical resolutions for women congresses in different countries,
show how far removed Europe and, in many respects, America also, still
are from the desires expressed in the year 1848.
If the humble utterance of women, “We can with justice demand nothing of
life except a work and a duty,” be conclusive, then life has already
conceded to the demands of woman in rich measure. The woman movement and
the self-interest of the employers have made accessible to her a number
of new fields of labour, without mentioning those which fifty years ago
were the only ones “proper” for women of the middle class—those of
teacher, lady companion, and “lady’s help.” The woman movement and man’s
increasing recognition of woman’s need of general education and
professional qualification have created a large number of educational
institutions. But in regard to the right of work, the acquisitions are
but insignificant if this right be defined as _the opportunity for that
work which one prefers and for which one is best fitted_. Women have
now, for example, in many countries the right to pass the same
examinations as men, but in many cases not the right to the offices
which these examinations open to men. The profession to which women have
found a comparatively easy entrance, that of physician, is widely
extended among women in Europe as well as in America. That a dwelling
was denied to the first woman physician because her profession was
considered “improper” for a woman, sounds now like a fable. Everywhere
now are women nurses, teachers of gymnastics, dentists, apothecaries,
and midwives. In America there are even many women ministers and it
sounds likewise wholly fabulous to say that the first of these was
literally stoned. Women judges also have been appointed in America. In
Europe there are none to my knowledge and no women preachers. And yet
the woman pastor would often be, especially for women and children, a
better minister than the clergyman; for them also the woman judge might
often surpass the man in penetration and understanding. The profession
of law, open to women in many countries, is as yet little practised by
them in Europe. And yet as advocate, police officer, and prison
attendant, the female official would be of special service for her own
sex as well as for children and young people of both sexes. But in every
field where the living reality of flesh and blood has to be compressed
into legal paragraphs, mankind must be more or less mistreated. And
since even masculine jurists of feeling suffer under this conviction,
the reason for the fact that this career, in which woman could be of
infinitely great service to humanity, has thus far attracted her little,
may be sought in feminine sensitiveness.
All the more numerous are the women who have devoted themselves to the
task most akin to motherhood, the profession of teacher. Unfortunately
not always the inner call but the prestige of the position has
determined the choice. Millions of women are now employed as teachers in
all possible types of schools, from kindergartens to training schools,
from infant schools to boys’ colleges. Even in universities, although in
Europe very rarely it is true, women occupy chairs of learning. In the
field of popular education, women are zealously active as lecturers,
librarians, leaders of evening classes, and in similar work.
With every decade, woman’s powers have attained their right more fully
and in fields where it now seems incredible that men could, and still
partly do, insist upon getting along without them. I refer to the
associations and institutions connected with prison supervision and
reformatories; with schools and children’s homes; care of the poor and
the sick; health and factory inspection. Slowly but surely the woman
movement has prepared a place here for the mother of society beside the
father of society who in these domains is often very awkward or quite
helpless. Alone, or together with men, women have organised milk
distribution and crèches, housekeeping schools, school food-kitchens,
people’s food-kitchens, people’s polyclinics, sanitariums and
rest-homes, vacation colonies, homes for sick and neglected children,
etc. Many kinds of homes for working women, old people’s homes, rescue
homes, institutions for the protection of mothers and children,
employment bureaus, legal redress, and other forms of social relief are
connected, indirectly if not directly, with the woman movement. Great
women agitators on their part set thousands of women into action, as for
example, Harriet Beecher Stowe, agitating against negro slavery,
Josephine Butler against prostitution, Frances Willard against
intemperance, and Bertha von Suttner against war.
And yet in spite of the fabulous amount of time, strength, and money
which the associations and organisations thus created have cost in
donations of time and money, this social relief work is only the oil and
wine of the Samaritan for the wounds of society. As long as brigand
hands drag mothers and children into factories; as long as armies cost
much more than schools; as long as dwelling conditions in the cities are
for many people worse than those for domestic animals in the country; as
long as alcohol and syphilis brand the new generation—so long woman’s
devotion remains powerless.
And this conviction has urged women to transform their social work from
an often injudicious “Christian” compassion into an organised charity in
order to anticipate and prevent need and to facilitate self-help. But
also in this new phase of their philanthropic work many women of the
middle class are arriving at an understanding of the necessity of a
social reform in accordance with socialistic demands. A larger number of
women join the suffragist movement, less owing to individual demands for
rights than out of despair over the hopeless social work to which their
feeling of solidarity still impels them. For without suffrage (this they
experience every day) their work of relief is like seed sown in a
morass.
A by-product of the social relief work is that many single women have
found, in voluntary social work, an occupation and often also, in
remunerative social work, a livelihood; in both cases through service in
which certain feminine qualities can be of value.
Yes, exactly in the above mentioned fields of work, which so often bring
the modern woman in contact with the finest and most delicate as well as
with the coarsest and hardest sides of life; which place her before
conflicts of the most exceptional as well as of the most universally
human kind—there woman has nothing _new_ to give except her
motherliness. That means protecting tenderness, gentle patience, glad
readiness to help, the interest embracing each one in particular, the
fine and quick vibration in contact with the feelings of others which
we, in a word, call “tact.” If, however, a woman has not been endowed
with motherliness, or has none remaining, then she reverts to impersonal
devotion to duty, hard formalism, dry routine; then all the talk about
the _social_ significance of woman’s entrance into the field of medicine
or jurisprudence or the ministry or social work remains only empty
phrases. In all these spheres a good man is much more valuable than a
hard woman. And that woman’s hands can be rough, woman’s eyes cold,
woman’s soul base or cruel—this many suffering and crushed, sorrowing
and sinful, small and defenceless have already experienced. If woman is
to keep her superiority as the alleviator of the suffering of others,
the protector of others, solicitous for the welfare of others, then she
must not only acquire certain universal human qualities in which man is
often superior to her; she must also carefully guard and cultivate the
best capacities which her sex gained in and through the hundred thousand
years’ activity as that half of mankind which created the home and
reared the children.
Although the woman movement has multiplied and extended the social
relief work of woman in innumerable directions, still it has not yet
opened to her the field in which formerly deaconesses, and much earlier
still nuns, were engaged. But what is new as result of the woman
movement is that more and more single _cultured_ women now devote
themselves to the occupations of governess, nurse, midwife, and kindred
callings; as well as that more special training is demanded for these
vocations to which women turned earlier with downright criminal
carelessness.
* * * * *
Simultaneously with the need of the middle-class woman for new fields of
work, came the extraordinarily rapid development of commerce and
business, which occasioned the need of new working forces. Feminine
honesty, orderliness, and devotion to duty—alas, also her modest demands
of compensation—made the state as well as private employers favourably
disposed to employ women in increasingly greater numbers in the
different branches of commerce: in the post-office, railroads,
telegraph, telephone, as also in banks, counting houses, agencies or
stores, as secretaries, stenographers, and clerks. In cases where the
wife or daughter was the husband’s or father’s assistant such work then
received a personal interest, and what woman’s labour in this form can
signify for national wealth can be seen in France especially. But as a
rule no real joy in work could illuminate the days and years of the
generation of women who in all these vocations have grown gray and at
best have been pensioned. Nevertheless, in these offices one always sees
fresh faces bending over the desk to fade away in their turn.
Lack of courage or means often deters the European woman from more
independent business activity, and this in spite of increasing freedom
to choose her occupation, in spite of brilliant examples of successful
undertakings of women, in photography, hotel or boarding-house
management, dress-making, etc. In America, on the contrary, there is no
masculine occupation, from that of butcher and executioner to real
estate speculator and stock-exchange gambler that women have not
practised.
But while the women of the older generation were thankful if only they
succeeded in obtaining “a work and a duty,” however monotonous and
wearing it might be, the will of the younger generation for a
_pleasurable_ labour has fortunately increased. Partly alone, partly
co-operatively, women began to venture into the applied arts, handwork,
farming, or kindred work. And since corresponding special training
schools quickly arise to meet the awakening of the desire for a
vocation, we can hope for good results for these, as yet rare,
enterprising spirits. For special education is, in our time, the
essential condition of success, especially in agriculture, where the
women often succeeded without other help than their personal efficiency
and the “farmer’s customary practice.”
Since I know America only at second hand I have no claim to a final
judgment regarding the influence of business life and modern methods of
production upon the soul life of woman. In the women who have succeeded
in securing affluence through commercial life one finds probably the
same antichristian effects of this life as among men. Recently in
America a number of men and women endeavoured to live for fourteen days,
as Christ would have lived. The decision of most of those who were
engaged in business life was that either they must cease to follow in
the footsteps of Christ—or must resign their positions. And since, with
due consideration for the number of woman employers in America, many of
these experiences must surely have been made under feminine supervision,
the experiment does not lack a certain significance for the forming of a
judgment in the direction referred to.
The zeal of women’s rights advocates to open to women all of man’s
fields of labour, and not only this but to prove that these fields are
_as well adapted_ to woman as man—this zeal has unfortunately had as
result that the woman movement has turned the aptitude of many women in
a wrong direction and has fettered a great amount of woman’s misused
working power to thankless or galling tasks. But, on the other hand, how
the woman movement has elevated woman’s work, since it has raised the
standard of qualification in many fields and increased the feeling of
responsibility in all! How it has increased the honour of work and the
capacity for organisation, developed the judgment, stimulated the will
power, strengthened the courage! It has awakened innumerable slumbering
talents, given freedom of action to innumerable shackled powers. And
thus it has transformed hosts of women of the upper class, formerly the
most useless burden of earth, into productive members of society,
instead of mere consumers; made them self-supporting instead of
dependent, joyful instead of weary of life.
* * * * *
The woman movement of the lower classes is socialistic. It has increased
in extent and significance in the same measure in which the working
woman has given up farming, housework, and domestic service for
industry.
This woman movement also worked in two directions. The older program
reads: “Full equality of woman with man.” In the “state of the future”
both sexes shall have the same duty of work and the same protection of
work, while the children are reared in state institutions.
The movement in the other direction purposes to win back the wife to the
husband, the mother to the children, and, thereby, the home to all. The
old or right wing of the middle-class woman movement, as well as the
older direction of socialism just mentioned, still uphold, with
arguments of the old liberalism, the “individual freedom” of the working
woman against all protecting “exceptional laws.” Increasing numbers of
the more radical—that means in this connection more social—feminists of
the upper class, however, stand side by side with the less dogmatic
trend of socialism in its supreme struggle for the protection of the
mother.
In the socialistic woman movement, both efforts for freedom were
interwoven—that of the working men and that of women—checked during the
French Revolution but soon after revived as the two great forces of the
new century. In this intertwining of the woman question with the labour
question is found the explanation of the fact that socialists
characterise the woman question as an _economic_ question solely; while
in reality the woman question, _historically_, manifestly began as an
advocacy of the human right and worth of woman; and that too before any
great industry appeared on the horizon. As long as the man was the one
who, outside the home, was producer and provider, and the woman the one
who, within the home, managed and perfected the raw material, no
_economic_ woman question could arise, but on the other hand exactly a
question of _woman’s rights_. For, as some writers demonstrated, as
early as the 18th century it was absurd, if woman’s work in the home was
so valuable and so faithfully performed, that it should not secure in
consequence corresponding rights. And exactly because the middle-class
woman movement tried to uphold and defend the right and the freedom of
women in the compass of the old society, this movement became, and must
still often be, a struggle of women against men. The socialistic woman
movement is on the other hand merely a factor in a _joint struggle of
men and women against the old society and for a new condition_. The
struggle here cannot be sex against sex, but class against class. Each
of these woman movements has been partly right, each has partly
misunderstood the other. Only in recent times has a convergence between
the middle class and the socialistic woman movements been accomplished
for the attainment of a number of common ends; for example, the
protection of the mother, mentioned above, and especially the franchise.
This convergence has dissolved the prejudice on both sides. In both
quarters they begin to understand the power and aim of the other
movement.
Socialism and the woman movement are two mighty streams which drag along
with them great parts of the firm formations which they touch. But if
one wishes to be just toward both, one must not forget that in this way
new lands are created.
The socialistic women on their part, as speakers, agitators,
journalists, members of special associations, have stood in rank and
file beside the men as true comrades, and the middle-class women have
much to learn from the feeling of solidarity of the women socialists.
The masculine comrades have not always _in practice_ substantiated the
principle of equality, for even the socialist is first man and then
comrade; but _in theory_ he has generally supported it.
Through socialism, feminism has penetrated to the masses. What the
middle-class woman movement would have needed another century to effect,
socialism has accomplished in a few decades. Nothing shows better than
its fear of socialists how blindly prejudiced was the right wing of
middle-class feminism. And nothing so clearly elucidates in what stage
of feminism the upper-class movement was than its obstinate adherence to
“the principle of personal freedom” in face of the atrocious actual
conditions which resulted from the “freedom of work” of the women
factory hands.
I will here recall only in brief the progress of the economic woman
movement in the class of factory workers. When machines transformed the
whole method of production and a host of women no longer found
sufficient occupation in the home, while at the same time the
possibilities of marriage decreased because of the surplus of women and
also for other reasons, the middle-class women looked about them for new
fields of labour. The great industries in return looked about them for
more “hands.” And since, with the machine, female hands were quite as
serviceable as male—with a new machine it was possible to replace thirty
men with one woman—and since in addition they were cheaper, then began
that exodus of women from the home into the factory, the results of
which we are now experiencing.
When the mother is absent from the home, then there is lacking the
cohering, supervising, warming force, and the home deteriorates and
falls to pieces; the children are neglected, the husband suffers; the
street takes possession of the children, the alehouse of the men.
Moreover, the women work often for starvation wages, whereby less comes
into the home than is lost by the absence and incapacity of the mother.
In the middle classes daughters and wives, entirely or partly supported
in the home, could be satisfied with smaller wages and have thus become
the competitors of men and women wholly self-supporting. For the same
reason wives working in these industries have often become the
competitors of men, children again the competitors of women, and married
women the competitors of unmarried.
In woman, so long secluded in the sphere of the family, the social
feeling of solidarity has been very slowly awakened. Therefore,
organisation which could prevent the competition just mentioned has only
in the last decade made great progress everywhere among working women.
In the middle-class vocations this is almost entirely lacking. Among the
working women slowness of organisation is natural, for the more wretched
their position was, the more difficult was it for them to organise. But
among middle-class women the reason was partly their individualism,
partly their anti-socialism, partly the lack of feeling of solidarity
just referred to.
Home work for profit and pleasure in one’s own family or in service of
the applied arts has become a means for the “sweat system,” the facts of
which belong to the darkest side of modern working life. These facts
alone would be sufficient to prove that _working women_ have little to
gain from the luxury of the rich, an assertion with which luxury often
vindicates itself. There is still for the women working at home as well
as for the women working in the factory, beside their professional work,
also the duty of caring for the children and managing the home. However
insufficient this may be yet it still claims a great part of their
already meagre leisure; and the more tender and conscientious the
mothers are, the more they wear themselves out, and the sooner must
society, after night-watching, lack of light and hunger have ruined
them, maintain them as infirm or paupers. The life of these women passed
in the factory often from childhood has made them moreover, generation
after generation, more unfitted for household work. What does it profit
to attempt to remedy the evil by housekeeping schools and instruction in
the care of children? For where time and strength are lacking the home
has lost its right.
What can be expected of women who three or four days after confinement
must again stand at the machine, who are compelled to leave their
children behind them, shut in at home, exposed to all conceivable
accidents? What can be expected of mothers, who have become mothers
against their will,—mothers of children, who because of the conditions
of their parents’ work have become scrofulous, rickety, idiotic—children
who contract degeneration of the liver because the harassed, ignorant
mother quieted them with brandy, ill-treated them,—herself a physical
and psychic ruin who spreads destruction about her!
The feminists are accustomed to rage over the custom which formerly
condemned the Indian widows to be burned upon the funeral pyre—a custom
which is only an innocent sport in comparison with the woman slavery
which Europe has even brought to a system and which the woman movement
long ignored.
To these general facts, which apply also to women employed in hard
agricultural labour, there is also added an entirely new series of evils
associated with occupations dangerous to health—for example those in
which lead, quicksilver, phosphorus or tobacco poison the workers,[2] or
those branches of work where inhaling dust at the weaving loom or in
spinning, breathing gas and coal smoke, exposed to heat, smoke and damp,
they contract tuberculosis and other diseases; to say nothing of the
physical and moral misery in which miners and stevedores live. But the
worst begins only when the women are to become mothers. Either the
embryo is killed by an abortion, intentional or caused by the
occupation; or it comes into the world dead or sick or crippled; or it
dies in the first weeks or wastes away under artificial nourishment—in
England for example only one out of eight children is nursed. The
mothers either cannot or will not. Next to the labour conditions,
alcohol plays the greatest part in this indirect massacre of infants.
If one turns from the women engaged in industrial work to the servant
class, then female drudgery reaches perhaps its height among the girls
employed in bars, cafés, and similar establishments. What physical and
psychic results this work entails can be divined from the fact that, in
England, half of all women suicides are such waitresses under 30 years
of age. That family servant girls are allowed to sleep in closets and to
work far beyond the present customary factory time; that in the class of
saleswomen, especially in cigar shops, the longest working hours
together with the most paltry starvation wages are found—all this, as
every one knows, is the fundamental reason why the path is so short from
all these occupations to the lowest—to prostitution. The servant girl
corrupted by the master of the house, the half-starved, overworked shop
girl, the night-watching cigar worker, and many, many others are found
here as sacrifices of a shameless exploitation. Herewith we stand before
that “woman question” in which both elementary instincts have united for
that captivity of woman from which the woman movement has found no means
of emancipation; against which the means sought in these and other
quarters prove fruitless. For only a radical transformation of society
and sexual ethics can here provide a remedy.
* * * * *
Every one in face of these facts, touched upon thus superficially, must
be astounded that women could oppose laws for the protection of women.
Fortunately these progress-impeding emancipation women had no influence
when, in England and other countries, certain night work began to be
prohibited to women, their working hours limited, certain employments
barred out, and a time of rest assured to the woman recently confined.
Still very small steps only, but in the right direction. At the same
time the organisation of working women advances so that by labour unions
and strikes here and there they have succeeded in enforcing better
wages, shorter working hours, and better labour conditions. And so long
as the woman movement of the upper classes has no solidarity with that
of the lower, the female factory inspector can accomplish very little,
as a result of the fear of the working women to give facts and the
adroitness of the employers in veiling these. But if women of the upper
class begin to compete with the slave-driving, sweat-system employers
through _well-organised co-operative enterprises_, especially for the
revival of artistic handwork, whereby a profitable work is made for
mothers at home under good working conditions; and if they boycott all
shops where the working hours of the women exceed the due measure, while
their wages are below the standard; then the woman movement would be
able to hasten certain reforms in the field of industry, just as so many
mistresses of girls’ private schools have hastened the reform of public
schools: they simply availed themselves of the improvements arising from
feminine initiative.
* * * * *
The married woman as family provider beside the man, often also in place
of the man, but always however _subservient to the man’s dominion_—this
is the worst form of woman slavery our time has created. The woman
movement purposes indeed to make the wife “of age,” in every respect,
and free from the husband’s guardianship. But within the woman movement
all are not yet entirely agreed that _the work of the mother outside the
home_ in and for itself is an evil. Attempts are indeed being made to
alter the conditions which are most to blame for the deterioration of
mothers and children. But a large faction in the woman movement wishes
still, as was said, to cling to the _immediately_ remunerative work of
the mother and remedy the resulting lack of home by social institutions
for care of children, housekeeping, etc.
On this side, the following arguments are heard: woman becomes free only
when she can wholly support herself and can devote herself to her work
unhampered by duties toward husband and children; only through the
reciprocal social obligation of work and the complete individual freedom
of both sexes can the present conflicts between the labour of man and
woman, between individual happiness and the common weal, finally cease.
Like every canalisation or drainage of the mighty river system of the
life of human feeling, this program is direct and conclusive. One may
easily understand that masculine brains, dominated by a passion for
logic, could devise it; but if we hear it advocated by multitudes of
women, then we recognise how harassed by the fourfold burden of family
provider, child bearer, child educator, and housekeeper the poor women
must be who can smilingly assent to the foregoing picture of the future.
And yet there is another possible ideal of the future which can be
realised as soon as production is determined, no longer by private
capitalistic interests, but by social-political interests. Women will
then be employed in industrial fields of work where their powers are _as
productive as possible_ with the least possible loss in time and
strength; above all in those fields where the work requires no _long_
preparation and the dexterity does not suffer by _interruptions_. Before
the years in which the _occupation is motherhood_, and after these
years, woman can still be always remunerated by an economic wage; during
the years on the contrary in which motherhood is the vocation, she can
be remunerated _by the state_. It is only necessary that women and men
_will_ a new order whereby in the future we attain the following
conditions:
A _Society_, in which the welfare of the new generation is the centre to
which all social-political plans, at heart, are aiming.
_Children_ born of parents whose souls and bodies are qualified and
prepared for a worthy parenthood and who can thus create for their
children sound and beautiful conditions of life.
_Mothers_ won back to the husbands, the children, the homes, but under
such circumstances that _as free human personalities they perform the
most important work of society_: the bearing and rearing of children.
_Fathers_ with time and leisure to share with the mothers the task of
education and to share with them and the children the joys of the home
life, as well as of the remainder of existence.
This ideal of the future state takes in my imagination the form of a
varied Italian garden with a wide outlook upon the great sea. The other
ideal of the future, on the contrary, is to me like a coal mine wherein
all spiritual and social vegetation is petrified so that it now serves
only as motive-power for machines.
* * * * *
Nothing more effectively proves how rife with reactions—and for that
reason how hidden—is the power of development, than to realise that the
unorganized, inorganic socialistic ideal of the future, just mentioned,
is the logical sequence of the woman movement if one draws the extreme
conclusion from its fundamental idea—the right of woman to individual,
free development of her powers. It is consistent historically that in
America, where the movement for the right and freedom of woman has been
most widely successful, many middle-class women have resolutely drawn
these extreme conclusions of emancipation. Quite as psychologically
logical is it, that at a time when the uncomplicated soul life and life
demands of the masses still form the most important factors in the
shaping of the ideal of the future, the socialistic women, from their
different point of view, have arrived at like ideals. But fortunately
there are in women, as in the masses, still great tracts of “new ground”
where new soul conditions will germinate, and in due time, new ideals
will flower. Groups of men can at times forget mankind in dwelling upon
themselves. But mankind in its entirety has never yet lost the instinct
for the conditions of self-preservation and the higher development of
the race. I will come back later to the psychological phase of the
question. I touch upon it here only as the social program of the future.
* * * * *
A new field which the woman movement has opened up to woman is the
scientific field. For the fact that as early as the Renaissance some
Italian women occupied chairs of academic instruction, that in the 17th
and 18th centuries some women devoted themselves seriously to classic
studies or the exact sciences—all that was only exceptional. And the
women who since the beginning of the woman movement have distinguished
themselves by great services in science are still exceptional. But in
many places, sometimes as assistants of their husbands or of other men,
women now perform good scientific work in different lines. Many women
are also active in the sphere of invention, without a single woman’s
name having been thus far connected with an _epoch-making_ invention.
Especially where constructive ability is necessary, women have as yet
not been eminent; they have created neither a philosophical system nor a
new religion, neither a great musical work nor a monumental building,
neither a classic drama nor an epic. On the other hand, the exact
sciences, which would be considered a priori as little adapted to women,
for example mathematics, astronomy, and physics, are exactly those in
which thus far they have most distinguished themselves. This contains a
warning against too precipitate conclusions about the intellectual life
of woman. Not until several generations of women—with the same
privileges of education as man, with the same encouragement from home
and society—have exercised their faculty for discovery and their
inventive and creative faculties can we really know whether the present
inferiority of woman in this respect is a provision of nature or not;
whether her genius was only hampered in its expression or whether, as I
believe, it is ordinarily of a different kind from that of man.
In art there are several fields which the woman movement did not need to
open for the first time to woman: dramatic art, music, and the dance.
Indirectly, however, the woman movement has transformed the position of
women occupied in these lines by increasing the respect for all good
work of woman and raising the requirements for woman’s education in
general. The woman movement has also exercised an immediate influence
upon certain artists of the present time. Thus Eleanora Duse said to me
that her most cherished desire has been to represent and interpret the
new types of women, although the dramatists of to-day have rarely given
her the material she desired wherewith to create characters by which she
could reveal the soul of the new woman and elevate man’s, as well as
woman’s own, ideal of woman.
In the dance, women have been, especially in America, creative in
connection with its forms and have been thereby also revelations of the
new spiritual life of woman which has found expression in these forms.
Great women singers, through Wagner’s operas and ballad-singing, have
given voice to the primeval yearning of the woman soul, as that yearning
now assumes form in the new woman. And in interpretations at the hands
of great pianists or violinists, not one classic musical work failed to
furnish similar revelations.
The very finest effects of the woman movement—mere shades of feeling
which cannot be enumerated nor discussed—have reached our present time
through lines, movement, rhythm, cadence, through the timbre of a voice,
the gesture of a hand, the glance of an eye, the tone of a violin. And
these effects have been secured without any disturbance of the
receptivity by strife over the precedence of woman or of man. In other
spheres, susceptibility to the effects of art creations by woman is
still often dulled by this strife. In the above named fields, long
before the beginning of the woman movement, conscious of its purpose,
women without arguments have convinced the world of the complete
equality of woman with man. And all these women, conquering through
beauty in one form or another, have done more for the woman movement
than it has done for them. Certainly the woman movement both directly
and indirectly has had its share in opening to women musical as well as
other art academies and schools of applied arts, but academies have a
doubtful value and the smaller the value, the more gifted the student.
The new right has thus become dangerous to the independence of real
gifts and, with all possibilities of education thus opened wide, there
comes a temptation for fancied talents to pass beyond their bounds. This
danger, as far as the plastic arts are concerned, has found more and
more its counterpoise in the schools of applied art, by which many women
have been directed to the decorative professions, from house and garden
architecture to fashion designing and holiday decorations.
But in the field of the applied arts, as well as of the plastic arts and
of music, the facility afforded by the modern conditions of training and
of public careers has instigated many women, who before had exercised
their little talent only for the pleasure of the home or society
circles, to exhibit and appear publicly to the detriment both of the
home circles and, alas, also of art!
The works of art by women, which humanity could not lose without really
becoming poorer, have been created, thus far, neither in the sphere of
music nor of plastic art; they all belong to literature. And this sphere
the woman movement has not opened to woman; ever since the days of
Sappho and of Corinna, women have attained fame as writers.
In letters and memoirs not originally designed for publication, next to
that in the field of romance and the novel, occasionally also in the
lyric, the feminine character has found thus far its fullest and finest
expression. In all these fields women have produced works which have
been placed by men, not it is true beside the _greatest_ works of
masculine genius in the same domain, yet beside eminent works of men. As
intermediary of the works of others, woman has not in our time, as in
the period of enlightenment or in the circle of Goethe, her greatest
significance through conversations and letters but through the
printing-press. The modern woman, however, as essayist and biographer,
as translator and collector, is a valuable intermediary of culture. She
is also unfortunately a menace to culture, not so much because of the
inferior works which she produces, for these, like the similar works of
men, soon sink into oblivion. The real danger lies in the fact that
women in great multitudes increase the number of those journalists who
lack intellectual as well as ethical culture, which should be an
imperative condition in that field of work. But this profession is now,
on the contrary, the one into which the amateur may most easily force an
entrance without special training and without professional reputation.
The result is that men and women who lack both can pull down, in their
journals, the real work and essential character of serious people,
without the remotest conception or the faintest comprehension of either.
On the other hand these cliques of coffee-house people crown one another
as kings and queens—for a day! The press-breed carries on in leaflets
its flirtation as well as its vengeance. The knife which the child of
nature thrusts into a rival’s breast is now transformed into the pen
with which the reviewer stabs a competitor’s latest work. In a word
women now furnish to the Press work, occasionally excellent, frequently
mediocre, all too often worthless. Their womanly characteristics make it
feasible more frequently for them than for men to adopt more completely
the rituals of the temple service of the deity of the Press—the Public.
This “womanliness” evinces itself, especially, in the ability “to grip
the fleeting moment by its fluttering locks” and also to anticipate when
that moment’s locks are false and so the grasp prove profitless.
While hosts of women have turned to journalism, they are seldom found in
the fields to which the woman movement should have directed them: in the
field of sociological and psychological research. Nearly all significant
works upon the normal, the abnormal, the criminal psychic life of
children, young people and women have been written by men. They have
unfortunately treated the feminine spiritual life in “scientific” works
also, in which the author dares speak of “woman” even though he knows
nothing of her except what his own happy or unhappy experiences in a
mother or sister, wife or sweetheart, have taught him.
The slight title of men to their “scientific method” when they venture
upon the terra incognita which the soul of woman still is for them,
explains why they extol, as “scientific,” works of women about women
which are quite as superficial as those of men themselves. With a few
exceptions, it is not the physiological-psychological books written by
women about women which have really taught the present something new
about womankind in general and the new woman in particular. No, in the
form of romances, of lyrics or in voluntary confessions, woman has
contributed the most valuable documents about her sex: on the one hand
those which indicate the transformations which the woman movement has
occasioned in woman’s nature, on the other hand those which demonstrate
the extent to which her fundamental nature has remained unchanged, even
though this elementary material exhibits many more facets in the modern
woman than in the woman of any previous time; facets resulting from the
manifold contacts and frictions with life to which woman now exposes
herself or is exposed.
From a literary point of view, these books of confession have seldom
a value which could be compared with that of the, in outer sense,
objective, classic works which talented women writers of the present
have produced. Often, however, one of these confessions, in which
the writer has candidly given her own history, has been of real
literary value. But even when the works contain mendacities and
self-extenuations, crass injustice toward men or toward other women,
as revelations of the modern woman soul they are more valuable for
the future than the clarified, artistically perfect works of women,
mentioned above. For the truth about woman in the century of the
woman is found only in the impassioned books in which the hard
struggles for freedom, work, right, or fame are recited; or in those
works impassioned in another way, in which the soul or the blood or
both cry out their yearning, ever unappeased, in spite of freedom
and work, right and fame. What we may _to-day_ rightly protest
against in these books is their recklessness which may _in the
future_ be regarded as their greatest value.
Because, up to the present time, the most exquisite as well as the most
horrifying women characters in literature have been created by men, many
men think that they understand women better than women do themselves.
And to this extent men are right—that women attain their most sublime
heights and reach their deepest degradation in and through love. But
aside from that, women have a much clearer insight and, for that reason,
a much more intelligent idea of one another than man has of woman. When
accordingly a woman speaks not only of herself but also of another
woman—sometimes also of children—we feel already that “the eternal
feminine” (_das Ewig-Weibliche_) in literature can create a feminine
art, in the best meaning of the word. For the present we hope, and with
good reason, that art as well as science will not appear as either
masculine or feminine but reveal a complete human personality. But this
does not mean that this personality has fused the masculine and feminine
qualities into a common humanity and thus enervated it. No, it means
that, in such a being, masculine and feminine traits exist side by side
and assert themselves alternately or harmoniously in all their strength.
In the rank of talent, one may find feminine men and masculine women; in
that of genius, never. There each one guards fully and completely the
character of his own sex in addition to the finest attributes of the
other sex. The distinctively masculine or distinctively feminine
attributes characterising an _earlier_ culture epoch are on the contrary
often lacking in these greatest men and women of their time. In other
words they lack exactly those attributes, hyper-masculine or
hyper-feminine, by which men and women, not abreast of the times in
their development, please each other and the masses, in literature as
well as in life.
In the woman-literature, directly evoked by the woman movement, we can
read the whole gamut of the feminine nature, from the feminine in the
highest sense to the feminine in the worst sense. This literature shows
how unthinkingly and defenceless certain women have plunged into the
struggle, how rationally and well equipped other women have fought it
out. The impartiality of this judgment can be proven by the admission
that in the first-named class I have not infrequently found adherents;
in the latter class, opponents.
The woman movement itself, partly in lectures and in literary activity,
partly by means of office-routine and work of organisation, has become a
new _field of labour_ for women. Even in this field it is found that
many are called but few are chosen. But when—except after defeat—was an
army ever seen without baggage?
* * * * *
In the field of _family right_, the woman movement has achieved,
directly and indirectly, great improvements in the legal position of the
_unmarried_ woman. The nearest proof is my own country. This has, within
a period of from seventy to eighty years, granted to the sister the same
right of inheritance as to the brother; declared the unmarried woman at
her majority at the same age as man, a majority which was also expanded
later through the suspension of the right of guardianship on the part of
the husband, existing for married women. The marriageable age of woman
was postponed to 17 years. Gradually woman has been placed on an
equality with man to carry on trade and industry; she has acquired the
right to hold certain public offices, although many still remain closed
to her. The married woman on the contrary is still always a minor; if no
marriage settlement is made the husband has the right to dispose of the
wife’s property; he has control of their common possessions; he can
restrict her freedom of work; he has authority over the children. A few
small progressive steps may nevertheless be pointed out: certain
reinforcements of the effectiveness of the marriage contract; the right
to her wages accorded to the wife; certain reforms in regard to the
division of property and divorce; some improvements in the position of
children born out of wedlock. In other countries also like reforms have
been accomplished, directly, through masculine initiative; indirectly,
through the influence of the woman movement. But everywhere family right
is still founded upon the principles of paternal right, supremacy of the
husband over the wife, indissolubility of marriage or solubility under
greater or less difficulties.
In regard to citizenship I draw my examples also from the land I know
best. In Sweden, women have long since participated in the choice of
pastor; for about fifty years they have possessed municipal franchise;
later in certain cases they have attained also municipal eligibility,
for example, to the school board, board of charities, and now finally to
the town council. Still others could be cited. In other countries women
have sometimes more sometimes less civic right; only in a few countries
have they won _political_ franchise; in a single one, Finland, also
political eligibility.
In the sphere of family right, as well as civic right, the woman
movement has then much more remaining to conquer than it has thus far
won. But I am convinced that the little girls I see down below in the
garden playing “mother and child” will possess all the rights due the
wife, the mother, and the citizen.
The woman movement, in its present form, has accomplished its task if it
has procured for every woman the _legal_ right to develop and practise
her individual characteristics unhindered because of her sex. But after
this emancipation of the woman as a _human being_ and a citizen, there
remains her emancipation as a _woman_. And here no transformation of
forms of thought and feeling, of manners and customs, attainable by any
legal provisions or paragraphs, avail. The present woman movement has
created and still continues to create the social _conditions_ for this
last emancipation. But it will not approve such far extending results of
its own work. It desires the same _rights_ but also the same duties for
all women. If a single woman uses the freedom, which the woman movement
has procured for her as a member of society, to fashion her individual
life according to the deepest demands of her being, then the old guard
trembles before the outcome of the battle for freedom in which it fought
so valiantly.
But nothing is more certain than that the feminine personality, whether
her innermost desire be spiritual creative instinct, erotic happiness,
maternal bliss, or universal human goodness, will acquire ever new forms
of expression: forms of expression which the once liberal, now more
conservative feminists and the modern socialistic feminists partly do
not divine and partly—divining—deplore! For the present even the
“emancipated” woman follows as a rule the paths which social custom has
marked out for her sex, as well as the cultural ideas which have been,
thus far, those of man. But if, in the coming thousand years, a
_feminine_ culture shall really supplement the masculine, then this will
be exactly in the measure in which women have the courage to create and
to act as most feminists now do not even dare think. Then it will be
evident that _all_ social movements of the present time, especially the
woman movement and socialism, are only the work of the path finder for
the masculine and feminine superman or, if you prefer the older
expression, _complete man_.
Like other “old guards,” the veterans of feminism will not surrender
but will fall upon the field of battle. The little girls there below
will one day celebrate their memory. For through their struggles the
way became free for youth, the way which leads out to the wide sea
where perhaps shipwreck awaits the one who ventures out into the
darkness with her fragile skiff. But many will brave the voyage and
bide their fate, strong, proud, and composed as the maiden in
Schwind’s _Wasserfahrt_—that splendid symbol of the woman of the
future.
CHAPTER II
THE INNER RESULTS OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT
If I now start out to consider the woman soul as it has developed itself
under the influence of all the circumstances mentioned above, perhaps
many will expect a theory about the character of the feminine soul life.
But, at present, when the greatest problems of psychology are in
revolution and undecided, such a theory would be as scientifically
impossible as aphorisms are unanswerable. Likewise, conclusions, based
upon experience, concerning the psychic peculiarity of woman would be in
this chaotic transition period, superficial, if they attempted to be
absolute. Only _one_ decided opinion about the spiritual life of woman I
cannot—in consequence of my monistic-evolutionary conception of the
spiritual and physical life—refrain from expressing. This opinion is
that, in the one hundred thousand years at least in which woman has
practised the physical maternal functions, the spiritual attributes
_essential_ for motherhood must have been so strongly developed by her
that this development has had, and still has always, as a result a
pronounced difference between the feminine and masculine soul—that is to
say, everywhere where the soul, as well as the body of a woman, is
adapted and desirous of motherhood—a fitness and readiness which can
still be called the _normal_ condition. The spiritual qualities which
maternity required have become the attributes of “womanliness,” the
qualities which paternity required, have become the attributes of
“manliness.” This difference has become quite as significant for the
functional fitness of both sexes for the perpetuation and development of
the race, as for the wealth of life of each new generation. The
obliteration or retention of this difference is therefore a vital
question for mankind.
Figuratively expressed, this seems to me the process: from a common root
of universal human spiritual life issue two stems which can again unite
in their blossoming. The ramification has necessarily involved a
division of labour in two equally important spheres. From this point of
view I give, in the following, my opinion of the value of the influence
of the woman movement upon the spiritual life of woman.
We all know that life expresses itself as movement, that movement brings
with it change, transformation; that this can mean quite as well
disintegration as higher organisation.
The woman movement is the most significant of all movements for freedom
in the world’s history. The question whether this movement leads mankind
in a higher or lower direction is the most serious question of the time.
Those who assert unconditionally the former or the latter have uttered a
premature judgment. The question must be formulated thus:
(_a_) Has the woman movement brought to mankind a higher degree of vital
force, a greater faculty for self-preservation, a more complete
organisation, by which the more simple forms have become more finely
complex, the more uniform have become richer, more diverse; the
incoherent have attained a more perfect unity? Or has the woman movement
called forth an activity which represses life? degrades, scatters, and
reduces the powers to uniformity, in society and in mankind?
(_b_) Is woman’s spiritual life now in general above the level at which
it was in the beginning of the woman movement? Have modern women finer
perceptions, deeper feelings, clearer ideas, a firmer will, richer
association of ideas? Do their spiritual faculties so work together that
they mutually enhance instead of hinder one another? In a word is the
modern woman more soulful than the woman of any other time?
(_c_) Is the body of the modern woman, at all stages of life, stronger,
more healthy, and more beautiful than that of the woman of the previous
century, when the woman movement began in real earnest in Europe?
(_d_) Does the modern woman perform in more perfect manner than the
woman of that time, the physical and psychic functions of motherhood?
If the question be put thus then the _objective_ investigator must
answer to all—“_Yes and No_.”
But if this investigator is an evolutionist, then he knows that the
progress of every social evolution is like that which womankind is now
experiencing. We see first, how, in any given sphere of society, where
those engaged therein have attained a pure, instinctive certainty in
their actions through laws and customs, the individuals oppressed by
these laws and customs must rebel against the limits, drawn from
without, for the development and exercise of their powers. This revolt
occasions at first a stage of anarchy in which everything seems to
collapse—while in the previous conserving epoch “crystallisation”
furnished the vital danger! But after such an anarchistic stage there
comes infallibly the constructive stage, where _a part of the old is
organised, incorporated, into the new_. But this acts no longer as
instinctive impulse. No, mankind has become conscious anew of these
values of law and custom; they have been recognised by the thought,
encompassed by feeling, sanctioned by the will as still always
indispensable, in another and higher form it is true than that against
which the individuals rebelled. But just as the leaves which once grew
green above in the summer light, gradually become one with the earth, so
the motives of the new customs sink gradually down into the unknown; man
acts again with instinctive certainty and uniformity—until the new
period of stagnation evokes a new rebellion and achievement of
individualism.
The woman movement finds itself now at a point where it is about to pass
from the dynamic stage to a static stage. Exactly at this point a survey
begins to be possible; and it is also necessary for every one who
believes that the ideal, as well as the practical direction of the woman
movement, in future, must be influenced by the knowledge gained about
the effect of the movement, thus far, upon the uplifting of the life of
mankind.
Every great achievement of individualism is as inconsiderate as the
spring tide and must be, in order to have strength for its task. The
woman movement was so also. But it encountered two other great ideas of
the time, Socialism and Evolutionism, and in consequence the woman
movement was obliged to modify gradually its conception of the feminine
individual and of her position in existence.
On the one hand, as has been already shown, man has had to understand
that “open competition” and “individual initiative” are not absolute
political-economic truths. On the other hand, the defender of women’s
rights has been forced to understand more and more that woman’s soul is
no unchangeable value which must remain the same however much the
spheres have changed toward which this spiritual life directed itself
and from which it received its impression. While feminists fifty years
ago scorned the objection that “womanliness” would be lost in business
life or in politics, now the evolutionist mind in thinking women
understands that all human soul life is subject to the law of change;
that just as indisputably as the soul life of man is changed by
different vocations and surroundings, so that of woman also must be
changed. The feminists founded their dogma that the woman movement can
_only benefit_ woman, man, the child, the family, society, mankind upon
the conviction of the _stability_ of “true womanliness.”
And if the woman movement had not had this religious certainty of
belief, how could it have withstood the mass of prejudice and stupidity
which it encountered in its own, as well as in the other sex? The woman
movement has conquered because it was self-intoxicated.
And quite naturally! After a stability of centuries, during which the
position of woman was altered only in and with the general progress of
culture, women finally recognised that they could accelerate their own
progress and with it also the somewhat snail-like course of universal
human culture. And so woman asserted herself and increased her motion.
The faster this movement became, the more was she seized by the
intoxication which always accompanies every vigorous physical or psychic
movement. And when has a movement of the time advanced more rapidly?
Folk-migrations, crusades, slave rebellions, revolutions have led a
race, a class, a group, beyond certain geographical or social
boundaries. The emancipation of women has shifted and extended the
limits of the freedom of movement of _half mankind_. No wonder that the
extent of the movement _in and for itself_ was advanced as proof of the
infallibility of its direction. All points of departure, the natural
right of man, individual freedom, social necessity—all led out into the
sun, which, in society as in nature, should radiate over woman as well
as over man; they led up onto the summit where man and woman both should
breathe the air of the heights. All obstacles which were raised with the
help of arguments such as, “the nature of woman,” “the welfare of the
family,” “the idea of society,” “the purpose of God”—all proved
temporary. And of necessity—for the innermost law of life, the law of
development, of life enhancement, carried the movement forward. When it
began, the Biblical expression about the wind was quoted, “Man knows not
whence it comes nor whither it goes.” Now all know it. Now the spirit of
the time speaks with “feminist” voice. The ideas of emancipation “are in
the air,” like bacilli, by which only savages are thus far wholly
untouched.
There are now no great movements of the time whose path does not run
parallel with or cut across the woman movement. Every new generation is
involuntarily and unconsciously drawn along with it. The ends already
attained seem to the present age obvious; the ends, for which man is
still struggling to-day, will appear equally obvious to the future. The
woman movement is now a power with which even its most bitter
adversaries must reckon. And this force has so quickly attained
prominence exactly as a result of fanaticism. Just as the White and the
Blue Nile mingle their waters in the main stream, so in every great
current of time enthusiasm is mingled with fanaticism. And it is the
latter which bears the most fruit, for it gives power of growth to the
passions of the majority, good as well as bad.
Every great idea begins with great promulgators. The promulgator who has
the spirit does not hold to the letter. And the woman movement which was
spirit began also with women and men who did not follow the call of the
spirit of the time; no, who from lonely heights sent out their awakening
call _to_ the time. Men who give their age new ideals have always
religious natures. This means, according to a good definition, that they
are “individualists in their being, social in their action.”
Such natures burn, above all, with the passion to find themselves. Then
they burn with the passion to sacrifice themselves in order to help
others, whose suffering or wrongs they feel as deeply as if they were
their own. No one who passively endures an injustice against himself has
the material in him to struggle for the rights of others. The one who
patiently forbears becomes an accessory to the injustice done to others.
He who resists the injustice which he himself meets can open up the way
to a higher right for others. Such path-finders were the first apostles
of the emancipation of women. They consecrated to this task a faith
which required no proof, a faith which saw visions and heard melodies of
the glorious future that their victory would prepare for mankind. They
emanated neither from scientific investigations, nor from systems of
political economy, nor from philosophic evidence, nor theories of
political science. They flung themselves into the struggle with
inadequate weapons, without plan of campaign, just as do all impelled by
the spirit. But such a method always evokes later dissension among the
disciples. Sects are formed, gradually a church is crystallised, an
orthodoxy, a papacy, and an inquisition. This course is physically
necessary as long as mankind is still in greatest part a mass. A Paul
more “Christian” than Christ and a Luther more “Paulist” than Paul are
met also in the woman movement.
This has now, among most people of culture, passed beyond the stage of
the great apostles and martyrs and heralds. The movement has reached the
point where certain typical manifestations, certain conventional forms
testify that the masses—which stoned the prophets—have now, since the
ideas of the woman movement have become truisms, banalities, the
fashion, appropriated them to themselves and endeavour to transform them
to their image and adapt them to their needs.
Again and again the old tale repeats itself: the trolls steal the
weapons of the gods but they cannot use them. Again and again there is
occasion to deplore the fact that the autocrat of genius, whether he
rule over a people or a kingdom of ideas, has heirs, heirs who diminish
his work. Again and again it must be recognised that no spiritual
formation vanishes at one blow. The servile mind, intrigue, pettiness,
delusion—all that, from which the great spirits of the woman movement
hoped to “emancipate” woman—could not suddenly vanish out of the world.
And since all this must go somewhere it finally finds room in the woman
movement itself!
But on the other side—since after all everything has another side—it
must be admitted that the levelling and conserving tendency of the
average person is of real value at the stage _when an idea begins to be
transformed into law and custom_.
Those who can work only in crowds receive their significance _exactly
because of their collective work_. They push aside the “individual
emancipation” which they do not need for their own part, since they have
no individuality to emancipate. But by diligent and efficient work they
succeed in securing certain results, which are the common cause of all.
So the Philistines make for themselves a footstool of that which was a
stumbling-block for their congenial souls in the previous generation.
From this height they look down upon the new truth of _their_ time. And
those who perceive and uphold this new truth turn aside from the great
uniformed army which now advances safely where the little vanguard has
previously and laboriously opened up the way. Those who turn aside will
form the new vanguard when it comes to achieving, in the spirit of the
first apostle, the emancipation not only of _women in the mass_, but of
_each individual woman_. When the present work of the woman movement for
joint, common ends shall no longer be necessary, because one end after
another has been attained, then comes the task of the present “radical”
feminism: the accomplishment of “emancipation” by leading it up to those
free heights which already the path-finders are endeavouring to attain,
the heights where every feminine individuality can choose her own path
of life, perhaps at variance with all others; can choose it in freedom,
answerable only to her own conscience. Although this summary grouping
historically as well as psychologically corresponds approximately to the
past, present, and future of the woman movement, yet there are so many
ramifications of the three groups into one another, that the woman
movement now exhibits a tangled confusion in which every exact
demarcation is impossible.
Whoever lives to witness it will see the course of progress just
described—for which the modern labour movement offers quite as good
material for observation as the woman movement—repeat itself in the next
great emancipation movement. I mean the movement for the right and
freedom of the _child_, which will be the unconditional result of the
victory of the woman and labour movements. This idea is still in the
morning-clear hour of inspiration. But from the cry, “Away with the
child destroying home training,” we can hear that the troop of
Philistines will appear by afternoon upon the scene, to adopt the idea
into their midst!
By means of the comparison with socialism, I have endeavoured to
emphasise that the woman movement’s formation of dogmas and its
doctrinary fanaticism are not effects of the peculiarity of the
_feminine_ mind. These phenomena are typical of every movement of the
time thus far observed. They are essential above all because a new
belief without dogma and without ritual is for the masses a sword
without a hilt: it offers nothing tangible, nothing whereby the masses
can come into relation with the idea.
That certain feminists still believe that the woman movement has
advanced just as the exodus of the Children of Israel out of the land of
bondage, that is to say, under God’s special protection against
wandering astray; that they stigmatise as “treason” and “defection” the
assertion that this movement was determined by the same psychological
and sociological laws as every other movement for freedom—this shows to
how high a degree many leaders of the woman movement lack elementary
psychological and sociological conceptions. This deficiency is, however,
being continually remedied. And in the generation which now advances,
dogmatic fanaticism has well nigh vanished, but pure enthusiasm is
preserved.
We can thus expect from this generation a clearer understanding of the
necessary _social_ repressions which the woman movement has now
sufficient strength to impose upon itself without forfeiting thereby its
character of a _movement for freedom_. As such it cannot and dare not
cease until it has attained _all_ its ends. As long as the law treats
women as one race, men as another, _there is a woman question_. Not
until man and woman, equal and united, work together for mankind will
the woman movement belong to the past.
CHAPTER III
THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN QUESTION UPON SINGLE WOMEN
The following comparisons between the life of women, especially their
spiritual life of about fifty years ago and their life as it has shaped
itself under the influence of the woman movement, have been arranged in
_descending_ scale. They begin with that phase of women’s life in which
this influence was most favourable from the point of view of life
enhancement, namely with the life of _unmarried_ women.
You will find to-day, among women seventy or eighty years of age, one or
another type of that fine culture which the gifted single woman, in
comfortable circumstances, could attain in the previous century. Her
home, especially if it was an estate in the country, became a cultural
fireside which radiated light and heat for relatives and friends. The
lesser gifted disseminated, each according to her nature, comfort or
discomfort, yet could in extremity at least be sure of the homage of
their future heirs. Toward those dependent upon them, these women were
sometimes kind, sometimes indifferent, sometimes hard: the feeling of
social responsibility was an unknown idea to them. The _penniless_
single women, on the contrary, were found either in one of the
“respectable” positions which, however, brought with them a multitude of
humiliations: as governess, companion, housekeeper—in Germany also as
maid of honour at one of the numerous small courts—or in some charitable
institution for gentle folks, an asylum for _pauvres honteuses_; but
most frequently in the corner of the home of a relative. This corner was
at times the warmest and most confidential in the whole house, that
corner which the children sought for stories and sweetmeats; the youth,
to find an embrace in which he could pour forth his grief, an ear which
listened to his most beautiful dreams. But it happened more frequently
that the “aunt” looked upon as a “necessary evil” was in reality that
very thing. Humiliated and embittered, she became ingenious in making
those about her suffer for her afflictions. Before they became
hopelessly old, the “aunts” were the laughing stock of the young through
their efforts, in the eleventh hour, to reach the “peaceful haven of
matrimony”; and they themselves looked with envious eyes upon the good
fortune of the young. We meet the unmarried woman of that time at her
best as trusty servant who shared the cares, the joys, and the sorrows
of the family and, in her garret chamber, of which she could be certain
to the day of her death, she looked back upon a rich life lived
vicariously. Not infrequently, she rejected a marriage proposal in order
to stay with her beloved master and mistress to whom she knew she was
indispensable. The superfluous women previously mentioned would have
thrown themselves into the arms of Beelzebub had he come as suitor. When
the years passed, when neither their desire for activity nor the thirst
of the heart nor of the senses was quenched, then not infrequently
insanity conjured up for these lonely women a life-content for which
they had longed in vain. To-day, however, we have for the position which
the expression, “a forsaken old maid,” betokens an entirely new type:
“the glorified spinster,” as the joyous, active, independent unmarried
woman is called by the people among whom she first became a reality.
Among these women, independent through their work, useful to society,
that older type is still occasionally found perhaps, a survival of the
time when emancipation was rather generally interpreted as freedom for
masculinity. The “man-woman” in masculine attire, with weapons of
defence against man in one hand and a cigarette in the other, her soul
filled with mad ambition for her own sex and, as representative of her
entire sex, with hatred toward the other, was however always rare. Now,
she has almost entirely vanished, except alas, the cigarette. But she
smokes it now often with—masculine friends! She follows in her mode of
life, as in her dress, the law of good taste—not to offend; she
endeavours, if only with a flower or two, to give a glimmer of cosy
comfort to her place of work. This comfort, which often comes into the
public life with woman is perhaps the reason why many men, who first
looked with indignation upon feminine fellow-workmen, would now miss
them. The more personal the culture of these women becomes, the more
they endeavour, according to their time and means, to express their
personality in the lines and colours of their dress and in the
arrangement of their room. Those best situated often succeed, toward the
end of their working days, in winning their own little home which they
perhaps share with a friend, or they join a co-operative enterprise and
can thus raise their standard of living. The same women who, at
twenty-five, scornfully declared that they “would never bury their head
in a sauce-pan,” are now, at fifty, consciously aware of the
significance of the table for the activity of the brain; indeed they are
now quite as proud if they have prepared a good dish as they were in
their youth when they passed a fine examination!
It is not to be wondered at that the emancipated women, exactly as all
recently emancipated masculine classes and races, at first groped
insecurely after a new form. The astonishing thing, on the contrary, is
that women adapted themselves so quickly to the new circumstances; that
the transition period furnished so few grotesque types; that the present
shows so many harmonious types, each in her own way. This harmony of
single women is no mere form. It has its inner counterpart in the
satisfaction with their existence, an existence in accord with their
desires. The psychology was not exhaustive which saw in feminism only a
“spinster question,” a question of the unmarried woman, springing from
the surplus of women and the increasing difficulty or disinclination of
men to contract marriage—a question therefore for the ugly, not for the
beautiful; for the unmarried, not for the married; for the poor, not for
the rich. For a great number of beautiful women prefer to remain
unmarried; a great number of rich desire to work; a great number of
married women are zealous suffragists. Fifty years ago, we saw the most
clever women idealise an ape into a god; now, the modern, intelligent
working girl, when she looks about her for her ideal, exercises a lively
criticism. She often flirts with one who exhibits some phase of the
ideal, but she has too clear an understanding and too much to do to
_imagine_ a great feeling for one who is unworthy. So it often happens
that youth has passed without such a feeling having stirred her. And she
enters without deep regret the age when ambition and desire for power
become her life stimulants. From these women of predominating mind and
will is formed more and more what Ferrero calls “The third sex,”
Maudsley, “The sexless ant”: energetic, clever, happy in their work,
cool, but sound; in private life, in the zeal of everyday work, often
egoistic but willing to make sacrifices in face of social exigencies.
So a great part of the fifty-year-old women form an exception since they
with true instinct have remained unmarried. For in the same degree that
their metallic being is well adapted to the machinery of society, it is
little qualified to make a home for husband and children. They do not
depreciate however the value of this task, unless they be fanatic
feminists. In that event they reproach the women who wish to marry with
“betraying the woman cause”; they demand at times, as imperative loyalty
toward this cause, that their friends shall protest against the present
marriage laws at least by the form of their marriage alliance if not
even by not marrying at all. Their theory of equality has at times been
carried so far that—as recently happened in France—they advocate women’s
performing also masculine military service.
But in spite of their aridity and inflexibility of principle how much
more human are even these feminists than the “ill-natured” aunts of
earlier times who became ill-natured exactly because their temperament
was of the kind mentioned above, but who could find no sphere of
operation for their passionate longing for activity. One or another was
perhaps burning with ambition. For there are women as well as men who
can live only as pagan gods, in the blaze and perfume of sacrificial
fires. In their youth these ambitious natures could be satisfied by
triumphs in social life. But later the passion became a fire in a powder
cask and occasioned incessant explosions. Now it is the electric motive
power for an activity of general utility. The “aunts” of the earlier
time who felt themselves always overlooked and injured are most easily
recognised again in the literary and artistic field to which daily bread
or ambition now urges many women, who endeavour to compensate by
energetic work for the talent which nature denied them. Since these
women are ordinarily not people of understanding but of feeling, they
must in a double sense be dissatisfied with a life which in addition is,
in most cases, still filled with economic cares and the humiliations
arising therefrom. And yet in spite of all, how much richer is their
life to-day than it would have been fifty years ago when they would have
been obliged to sit and draw their needles through interminable pieces
of handwork, after ugly patterns and for unnecessary uses, or to compose
sentimental birthday verses for persons whom they abominated.
Yet there are always those women natures who, in the past, had the
qualifications for a real “dear aunt,” who gently calmed the conflicts
and filled the gaps in the home of which they had become members. The
most tender and sensitive of these modern women, who, rain or shine,
year in year out, hasten to and from a work indifferent to them at
heart, not infrequently breathe a sigh of longing for those times when,
as “aunts,” they could have received and imparted warmth in a home. But
then again there come moments when they know how to value the
independence which puts them in a position to give help where otherwise
there would be none; when for example they can send a nephew to college,
or a friend to a sanatarium, or provide their mother with a nurse, which
they themselves can not be.
This kind of single woman fulfills more or less the office of family
provider just as she also is always ready with word and deed in circles
of friends and comrades. These women are so engrossed that the time of
love, sometimes love itself, passes them by without their observing it.
Their youth flees and they feel with sadness that their woman’s life is
unlived. But they persuade themselves that they have had enough in their
work, that many little joys can take the place of great happiness. And
they believe this as truly as the infant believes he is satisfied when
he sucks his own thumb. But some of these women acknowledge perhaps,
when they have passed the fifties, that they were often tempted to call
out to the first best man, “Give me a child.” Sometimes it happens that
in their last youth they appease their mother longing by adopting a
foster child; sometimes they still this longing by a child of their own,
from a love relation or a marriage. This late and uncertain happiness is
often made possible exactly through their work. And then, if not
earlier, they bless this work which gives them the economic possibility,
and thereby also the courage, for this hazardous adventure.
More frequent than these are the cases however where single women, who
have passed their first youth, find in friendship for another woman a
valve for their, in great part, unused feelings. In some natures this
friendship will be jealous and exacting, in others true and devoted. I
wish to emphasise that I speak here of entirely _natural spiritual
conditions_. There is to-day much talk about “Sapphic” women; and it is
even possible that they exist in that impure form which men imagine. I
have never met them, presumably because we rarely meet in life those
with whom no fibre of our being has any affinity. But I have often
observed that the spiritually refined women of our time, just as
formerly the spiritually refined men of Hellas, find most easily in
their own sex the qualities which set their spiritual life in the finest
vibration of admiration, inspiration, sympathy and adoration.
* * * * *
The fundamental types of single women depicted here—the person of
intellect and the person of feeling—are found everywhere. The former
according to current opinion already predominate in America; in Europe,
it seems to me, the latter still prevail. That the main classes include
innumerable varieties, it is needless to say. There are for example the
numerous, quite ordinary, family girls who would be happy if they could
give up their independence in order to enjoy the protection of their
parents’ or their own home. And the same obtains also with the quite as
ancient type of woman, Undine, who—soulless and cold—enslaves all men.
If she is in any civic vocation, she knows how to get the smallest
amount of work for herself and, in case she is engaged in the artistic
field, the best possible criticism. Conscience is an acquaintance which
she has never made and she is also of the opinion that everything
agreeable is permitted to her; she simply slides past anything
disagreeable. Although work belongs to these disagreeable things, she
continues it until she has found means to place her “qualities” in the
most advantageous manner upon the matrimonial market.
The diametrical antithesis of this curvilinear type is the rectilinear.
It has, just as the preceding type, existed at all times. It is the
woman who really never demanded anything of life but “a work and a duty”
and finds both in abundance in all positions of life. She is found year
in year out at her desk, in appropriate working garb, free from all
æsthetics; proud “if she never has needed to miss a day”; proud that she
never has come late. On the contrary she never _goes_ on time. For she
has so grown into the business or the office that she takes everything
upon herself that is required without murmuring, as a well-disciplined
soldier in the ranks of the grey working army; thankful, in addition, if
her long working cares yield her a little life annuity or pension for
her old age. This type is found principally among women over
fifty—fortunately. For this class of women which the pre-feministic
circumstances created, have, by their “frugality” carried almost to the
verge of criminality, by their humble, conscientious servitude, lowered
the wages of their colleagues who are more full of life. These latter
have begun work in the hope that it finally will “free” them; that is,
will give them something of that for which their innermost being longs,
not only their daily bread—a bread which sickness or a turn of affairs
moreover can take from them at any time. And perhaps they never succeed
even in having their own room where they at least could have repose!
Underpaid, overworked, tired to death, who can wonder if these women
have lost, if they ever possessed them, the essential characteristics of
“womanhood”—active kindness, repose even in movement, charming
gentleness? The Icelandic poet of yore already knew that “Few become
fair through wounds.” These women must put all their strength into their
work and into the effort to conceal their underpayment by “respectable”
clothing, or else lose their positions. In everything else they must
economise to the utmost and perhaps in addition be laughed at because of
their economy. They succeed, often admirably, in maintaining themselves
in proud fair struggle, in rejecting “erotic” perquisites to add to
their income and in fulfilling conscientiously the requirements of their
work. Yet to do this with lively interest, with preserved spiritual
elasticity, with quiet amiability—for this their strength does not
suffice, exhausted by insufficient nourishment, insufficient sleep,
still more insufficient recreation, and strained daily to the utmost.
Their nervousness finds vent in either hard or hysterical expression and
the public, annoyed by their ill-humour, divines little of the tragedies
enacted in offices, business houses, cafés or similar places. If a
suicide concludes the tragedy, the public shudders for a moment and—all
goes on as before.
Thus “emancipation” presents itself in reality for millions of women. To
what extent the middle-class woman movement is indirectly to blame for
this fact has already been emphasised.
The essential reason is however the prevailing economic condition of
society. By the uninterrupted fever of competition and the accumulation
of riches, it dries up the soul and robs it of goodness as well as of
joy. When the great, beautiful, eternal sources of joy are exhausted,
the life stimulus is sought in exclusively physical pleasures, which are
always made more exciting in order to be able to arouse still, in the
languid nervous system, feelings of desire. Moreover, there is the
neurosis and weariness of life of the overworked, of those continually
quaking about their material safety, of those who _could_ be revived by
the noble and simple joys of life, to which those jaded with riches are
already not susceptible; but for all these millions and millions such
joys are not accessible because hunger for profit depresses wages. If in
addition to that we take into account the increasing suffering of the
best because of the ever developing feeling of solidarity; and if
finally we consider that women, who through the protection of the home
could preserve something of warmth-irradiating energy, are now in
increasing numbers driven out of the home, then we have some of the
reasons which—in higher degree than the religious and philosophic
reasons which _also_ exist—contribute to the joylessness of our time.
* * * * *
A contribution to the meagre stock of good fortune of the present time
is furnished however by the joy of life among young girls working under
favourable conditions. Among them we meet a new soul condition, which
could be designated, as briefly as possible, as _covetousness_ of
everything which can promote their personal development and a beautiful
_liberality_ with what is thus won. They can gratify their energetic
desire for self-development by sport, travel, books, art and other means
of culture; their freedom of action between working hours is not
restricted by private duties. They can utilise their leisure time and
their income as they please: for recreation, pleasure, social
intercourse, social work or private, charitable activity. No father nor
husband encroaches upon their free agency. And so dear does this liberty
become to them through the manifold joys which it furnishes, that these
young girls, in constantly increasing numbers, refuse to relinquish
their individual independence for the sake of a marriage which, even
presupposing the happiest love, always means a restriction of the
freedom of movement that they enjoyed while single. And since the modern
woman knows that, in the sphere of spiritual values, nothing can be
attained without sacrifice, she prefers to keep free agency and to
sacrifice love. If she chooses in the opposite direction, the task of
adaptation will be the more difficult, the longer and the more intensely
she has enjoyed freedom. The modern young girl, if she deigns to bestow
her hand upon a man, not infrequently has her pretty head so crammed
full of principles of equality that she sometimes (frequently in
America), by written contract establishes her independence to the
smallest detail, which sometimes includes separate apartments and the
prohibition that either of the contracting parties shall have the key to
the apartment of the other.
There are many varieties of the new type of woman. There is for instance
the tom-boy, the “gamin,” who for her life cannot give up the right to
mad pranks and mischievous jokes. There is the girl consumed with
ambition, who sacrifices all other values in order to attain the goal of
her ambition in art or science. There is the fanatically altruistic
girl, who considers the work for mankind so important that she feels she
has not the right to an “egoistic” love happiness. There is the ascetic
ethereal girl, who looks upon marriage and child-bearing as animal
functions, unworthy of a spiritual being, but above all as
_unbeautiful_. And for many of these modern, æsthetically refined,
nervously sensitive young girls the æsthetic point of view is decisive.
All love the work which permits them to live according to their ideals.
Still it often happens that Ovidian metamorphoses take place: that the
young girl sees the cloud or the swan transformed into a god, upon whose
altar she sacrifices, with joy, her free agency and everything else
which only a few weeks earlier she cherished as her holy of holies. The
men who view this process with a smile, think that the anti-erotic
ideals were only a new weapon of defence in the eternal war between the
sexes. But these men often learn how mistaken they were when they
themselves become participators in the war. They meet women so proud, so
sensitive regarding their independence, so merciless in their strength,
so easily wounded in their instincts, so zealous to devote themselves to
their personal task, so determined to preserve their freedom, that
erotic harmony seldom can be realised. Yes, these women often repudiate
love only because it becomes a bond to their freedom, a hindrance to
their work, a force for the bending of their will to another’s will.
The women, womanly in their innermost depths, who really feel free only
when they give themselves wholly, are becoming continually more rare.
But where such a wholly devoted woman still exists, she is the highest
type of woman which any period has produced. Especially if she springs
from a family of old culture. She has then, combined in her personality,
the best of tradition and the best of the revolution evoked by the woman
movement. The fibres of her being absorb their nourishment with
instinctive certainty out of the fruitful soil which pride, devotion to
duty, family love, requirements of culture and refinement of form, for
many generations, have created. But her conscious soul-life flowers in
the sun of the present; she thinks new thoughts and has new aims. Just
as little as she disavows her desire for love, so little does she desire
love under other conditions than those of spiritual unity and human
equality. If she meets the man who can give her this and if she loves
him, then he can be more certain than the man of any other time that he
is really loved, that no ulterior motive obscures the devotion of this
free woman. He has seen her susceptible to all the riches of life; has
seen her assist in social tasks, perform the duty of every day joyful in
her work, proud of her independence attained through her work. He knows
that just as she is she would have continued to be if he had not entered
into her life. How different is this girl from the one of earlier times,
who was driven by the emptiness of her life into continual love affairs,
which could not lead to a marriage nor exist in a marriage that
possessed nothing of love!
This most beautiful new type of woman approaches spiritually the
aforementioned type of single, aged women, who because of their economic
independence found time for a fine personal culture. These followed not
infrequently in their youth, from a distance it is true, but with joyous
sympathy, the progress of the woman movement. They shook their heads
later over its extremes. With new joy they regard the young girls just
described, in whom they find a more universal development than in
themselves, because these young girls have been developed through active
consumption of power which was spared to the older women, although they
must have summoned much _passive_ energy in order to maintain their
personality against convention. The young girls find often in these
older women a fine understanding, which they richly reciprocate. Such
terms of friendship are the most beautiful which the present has to
offer: they resemble the meeting of the morning and evening red in the
bright midsummer nights of the North.
No time could have been so rich in exquisite feminine personalities, at
all ages and in all stages of life, as ours. We must not draw our
conclusions regarding the abundance of such women, in the older culture
epochs, from the illustrious names of women which incessantly recur in
the pictures of the earlier times—like stage soldiers—until they give
the illusion of a great host.
But exquisite women are even to-day exceptional. The Martha type rather
than the Mary type predominates. This is due on one hand to decreasing
piety, on the other hand to the kind of working and society life. Fifty
years ago single women were often spiritually petrified, now more often
they cannot succeed in settling into any form. Their existence, turned
outwardly, widens their sphere of interest but makes their soul-life
shallow. Restlessness is most unfavourable to the “development of the
personality,” which was however the goal of the emancipation of woman.
This development is delayed most of all perhaps by the lack of personal
contact with other personalities, of immediate, intimate human
connections. This can, from no point of view, be supplied by the society
or club life in which single women are to-day absorbed.
CHAPTER IV
THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON THE DAUGHTERS
As late as sixty or seventy years ago, the daughters of good families
had still few points of contact with life outside the four walls of the
home. From the hands of nurse-maids they went into those of the
governess, and after confirmation, studies were at an end. If it was a
cultured home then reading aloud or music was often practised, whereby
it is true no “specific education” qualifying them for examinations was
attained, but frequently a fine universal human culture. There was
always employment in the house for the zeal for work. The great presses
were filled with linen which was not infrequently spun and woven by the
daughters; in the autumn they assembled for sausage-making and candle
dipping; later, for Christmas baking and roasting; in summer endless
rows of glasses of preserves were set in the store-room. Before
Christmas, night after night, Christmas presents were made; after
Christmas, night after night, they danced. At these balls those in outer
respects uncomely, received a foretaste of that waiting which must fill
their life for many long years: would the invitation to the dance—or the
wooing respectively—come or not? Every man whose shadow merely fell upon
the scene, was immediately considered from the point of view of a
suitor. As the years went by the girl, who before twenty-five years of
age was considered an “old maid,” saw how the glance of the father and
the brothers became gloomy, yes, she could even hear how “unfortunate”
she was. If such a daughter lived in a home poor in books—and most of
them were—then she could not even procure a book she wished. For the
daughters worked year in year out without wages, in case they did not
receive meagrely doled out pin-money which only through great ingenuity
sufficed for their toilette. All year long there were christenings and
birthday celebrations; in summer games were played, where it was
possible riding parties arranged, in winter sleighing parties were
organised. Other physical exercise was considered superfluous. The young
girls were averse to going to a neighbouring estate if it lay a mile
away; and during the week to take a long walk for pleasure or sit down
with a book, which had been borrowed, would be considered simply as
idling away one’s time. In summer a cold bath was permissible—a warm
bath was used only in cases of sickness—but swimming was considered so
unwomanly, that whoever had learned it must keep it secret. Rowing,
tobogganing and skating were, even if permitted in the country, yet half
in discredit as “masculine.”
When grandfather related an heroic deed of some ancestress whose proud
countenance shone out among the family portraits, then the daughter of
such a family must have asked herself why this deed was lauded while
everything “manly” was forbidden her.
The days and years went by at the embroidery frame or netting needles,
amid continuous chatter about the family and neighbours, amid eternal
friction and in disputing back and forth over mere trifles. The confined
nervous force sought an outlet, and in an existence where each
one—according to the first paragraph of family rights—interfered in the
greatest as in the smallest concerns of all the others, there was always
plenty of material about which to become irritated and excited.
In the country, life was, however, fuller and fresher than in the city
where the young girl had less to do and never dared go out alone; yes,
where a walk was considered so superfluous, that the mother of the great
Swedish feminist Fredrika Bremer advised her daughters to jump up and
down behind a chair when they insisted that they needed exercise!
* * * * *
The relation to the parents, even if the principle of unswerving and
mute obedience was not wholly carried out, was ordinarily a reverential
alienation. Neither side knew the inner life of the other. The
temperament of the mother determined the everyday domestic comforts, the
will of the father the external occurrences of life, from the trip to
the ball to marriage. The daughter whose inclination corresponded with
the will of the father considered herself fortunate. The one married
against her will wept, but obeyed. As an almost fabulous occurrence it
was related of one or another girl that she dared to say “No” before the
marriage altar; cases were not unusual in which daughters received a box
on the ear and were confined to their room until they accepted the
bridegroom whom the father had chosen. Even if a mother, moved by the
recollections of her own youth, attempted to support a daughter it
rarely succeeded. For the power of the father rested quite as heavily
upon the wife. But the worst however was to water myrtle year after
year, without ever being able to cut it for a bridal wreath. Even she,
who in her heart loved another, found it therefore often wisest to give
her consent to an acceptable suitor. Only the one whose dowry was valued
at a “ton of gold”—or who also was a celebrated beauty—could run the
risk of declining a courtship; yes, she could permit herself to occasion
it only to decline it. The more suitors she could recount, the prouder
she was; such a beauty even embroidered around her bridal gown the
monograms of all her earlier wooers.
The unmarried remained behind in an environment where the idea prevailed
that “woman’s politics are her toilettes, her republic is her household
and literature belongs to her trinkets.” The talented daughter sewed the
fine starched shirts in which her stupid brother went to the academy and
sighed therewith: “Ah, if one only were a man.”
When the income of the house was small, she increased it perhaps by
embroidery, sold in deepest secrecy; for it was a disgrace for a girl of
good family to work for money. For her rebellious thoughts she had
perhaps a girl friend to whom she could pour out her heart—or a sister.
But it often fared with sisters growing old together, just as it must
fare with North-pole explorers wintering together, that those holding
together of necessity finally loathe one another from the bottom of
their hearts. And yet the sisters were most fortunate who could grow old
and die in their childhood home and were not compelled to become old
household fixtures in the home of relatives.
Not infrequently this last fate was their portion because a father, a
brother or a guardian out of personal, economical self-interest
prevented their marriage, or a brother through debt or studies had
defrauded them of their inheritance.
It was not the woman movement but the religious movement, beginning
among the Northern peoples almost simultaneously with it, called in
Sweden “Läseri” (“Reading”) that was the first spiritual emancipation
for the old or young unmarried girls—likewise for wives who longed for a
deeper content. Because they took seriously the Bible doctrine that one
should disregard the commands of the family in order to follow Christ,
the home gradually became accustomed to one of the feminine members’
going her own way. Often amid great struggles. For the “Reader” was more
or less considered as insane; the father was ashamed of her, the mother
mourned over her, the brothers laughed at her. But nothing could hinder
those strong in their faith from following the inner voice. And so these
women, without knowing it themselves, were a bridge to that emancipation
of women to which they themselves later—Bible in hand—were often an
obstacle.
* * * * *
The movement _could_ not however be prevented. And now—how is it now in
the family? Already the ten-year-old talks about what she is sometime
going to be. Now, the sisters go with the brothers to school or to the
academy and share their intellectual interests as well as their life of
sport. Now, the fathers and mothers sit at home often alone, for the
daughters belong to that host of self-supporting girls who can gratify
the parents by short visits only. Alas, these visits are not always an
unclouded joy. There are collisions between the old and the young often
over seeming bagatelles. But a feather shows which way the wind blows
and the parents observe that, in the spiritual being of the daughter,
the wind blows from an entirely different direction from theirs. The
daughter, on the other hand, thinks that perfect calm prevails in the
being of her parents; she wishes to raise the dust. The mother pleads
her cause in dry and offended manner, the daughter in superior and
impetuous words. Accustomed to her freedom, she encounters again at home
control over her commissions and omissions, attempts upon her privacy
from which she had been freed by leaving home. And they separate again
each with a sigh that they “have had so little of one another.” In other
cases—when the parents have followed the times and the daughters
understand that not only children but also parents must be educated with
tenderness—then the visits to the parents’ home become on both sides
elevating episodes in their lives. The daughters repose in the parental
tenderness, which they have only now learned to value when they compare
it with their customary loneliness. The parents confide to the daughter
their cares which she sometimes can effectively lighten, and they revive
with her spiritual interests which they themselves had to lay aside.
Through her own working life the daughter has gained an entirely new
respect for her parents. Through her independence of parental authority
she has now gained a frankness, which makes a real interchange of ideas
possible. They discover that they can have something reciprocal for one
another. The father, who perhaps at first sighed when the young faces
vanished out of the home, now admits that it would have been foolish if
the whole troop of girls had continued here at home and so had stood
there at his demise, empty-handed, without professional training. The
mother, who had helped them persuade the father, smiles, when he insists
that he “would not exchange his capable girls for boys.” And he is not
at all afraid that the daughters could not marry if they would; he
remembered indeed how his contemporaries declared that they “would never
look at a girl student, a Blue stocking,” and yet so many of these were
now happily married to—girl students.
Beside these results of the independence of the daughters which elevate
life for all sides, there are opposite cases; when, for example, a
single daughter _without_ outer economic compulsion or inner personal
necessity, impelled only by the current of the time, leaves a home where
her contribution of work could be significant, in order to follow a
vocation outside. The results are often of doubtful value, not only from
a social point of view but also from that of the family and herself,
when the daughter remains at home but carries on a work outside. This
comes partly because they are contented with less pay and thus lower the
wages of those who support themselves entirely; partly because they
over-exert themselves. In those cases where several daughters can share
with one another the domestic duties, no over-exertion results perhaps.
But when a single daughter combines an exacting professional work with
quite as exacting household duties, then she is exhausted by her double
task; then she feels the burden, not the joy, of work. For all
professional working girls who remain at home, have moreover in
addition, even under the most favorable circumstances, the spiritual
strain of turning from work back again to the gregarious demands of the
home, as well as to the many different attractions and repulsions,
antipathies and sympathies which determine the deviations in temperature
of the home; the strain of respecting the sensibilities which must be
spared or of paying attention to the domestic demands which must be
refused, if the work is not to suffer from lack of rest and time for
preparation. All this can be so nerve racking that the young girl is
seized with an irresistible longing for a little home of her own, where
she would be mistress of her leisure time, and could see her own
friends—not alone those of her family,—where she could join those who
held the same views, where she, in a word, would live her life according
to the dictates of her personal demands. If she can, she often does
this. For to-day young girls _live to apply_ the principle of the woman
movement—individualism. The older women’s rights advocates desired, it
is true, that woman should be allowed to “develop her gifts,” but she
should “administer” them for the benefit of others; they desired that
she should receive _new rights_ from law and custom, but that she should
seek always in _law and custom support and security for her action_. The
young women’s rights advocates, on the other hand, believe that their
own growth, just as that of animals and trees, is intended above all for
self-development, that in their own character the direction for their
growth is specified, and that they have not the right to confine
themselves by circumstances or subject themselves to influences by which
they know they hinder the development of their powers, according to
their individual natures. The more refined the feeling of personality
becomes, the more exactly these young people understand how to choose
what is essential for them and to repudiate what is a hindrance. But
before they attain this certainty they evince often an unnecessary lack
of consideration, and the family is often right when it speaks of the
egoism of youth. They find no opportunity for helping father or mother
nor for participation in the elders’ interests. The whole family is
rarely assembled even at meal-time; the daughters as well as the sons
rush off to lectures, work, sport, clubs. The mother who sees how
occupied the daughters are has not the heart to add to their work or to
thwart them in their pleasures; thus she allows the selfishness of the
young creatures to increase to the point where she herself in
indignation begins—seasonably and unseasonably—to react against it. The
young girl answers her mother’s reproof then with the complaint that,
“Mamma does not understand” her and that she is “behind her time.”
Especially the young examination-champions distinguish themselves by
their arrogance in the family as in the club, where they look down upon
the older ladies who have not passed examinations just as they do upon
their own mother.
It fares best in the families, and they are even now numerous, where the
mother herself has studied or worked outside the home and therefore
knows what domestic services she may or may not require; where she
herself personally understands the intellectual occupation of the young
people and has preserved her own youthfulness, so that she becomes not
infrequently the real friend of her daughters and sons. If the mother,
on the contrary, was one of the many who, at the beginning of the woman
movement, sacrificed her own talent to the wishes of her family or the
demands of the home, in spite of the possibilities for its development
made accessible to her at that time, then she has often absolutely no
comprehension of the egoism of her daughter. She herself had acted so
entirely differently! Or she understands fully that in her daughters as
well as in her sons she views the attainment of a new conception of
life, with all its Storm and Stress, which the spring-times in the life
of mankind bring with them—an attainment in which, to her sorrow, she
could not take part in her youth.
At such spring-times youth is not, as the parents hoped, sunlight and
the twittering of birds in the home; but March storms and April clouds.
The parents feel themselves at first swept out, superfluous,
disillusioned. They are angered but rejuvenated, thanks to all the new
points of view that youth makes valid. Yes, father and mother sometimes
could live through a second youth if their own contemporaries did not
depress their buoyancy by their disapproving astonishment and the
children by their cool rejection of the comradeship of their parents.
But in spite of this twofold opposition, there are now fathers and
mothers who are able to enjoy the riches of life quite as youthfully as
and more deeply than their children; while the parents of earlier times,
especially the mother, forever stagnated as early as forty. More and
more frequently we find mothers who, like their daughters, lead a
spiritually rich and emotional life, who have so preserved their
physical youthfulness and who possess moreover through experience and
self-culture so refined a soul-life, that, in regard to the impression
they make, they are not infrequently the rivals of their daughters. They
are already revelations of that type of woman which, in token of
emancipation, has found the equilibrium between the old devoted ideal
and the new self-assertive ideal. They view life from a height which
gives them a survey also over the essential, in questions concerning
their own children. Even if these become something other than the
mothers wish, these mothers are so penetrated with the idea of
individualism that they let the children follow their own course.
Modern fathers rarely find so happy a home as it once could be with a
bevy of daughters always at hand. But they find the home richer in
content, often also freer from petty dissensions. For in the measure in
which _each_ member of the family desires his right and his freedom, do
all gradually learn to respect those of others. If the parents consider
with dignity _their_ right and _their_ freedom, then a reciprocal
consideration results after the boldness which youth evinces under the
first influence of the intoxication of freedom. Youth, at first so proud
and strong in their assurance of bringing new ideal values to life,
begin themselves to experience how the world treats these; and what they
once called their parents’ prejudice appears to them now often in a new
light. Their self-assertion becomes a product of culture, out of a raw
material. The manifestations of their individualism become continually
more discreet, more controlled, but at the same time more essential and
more effective. When then the young people have found _their_ way and
the parents endeavour to turn them aside to the main road—which they
call the way of wisdom or of duty—then certainly and with right the
young people put themselves on the defensive.
Even a devoted daughter cannot bring to the home to-day as undivided a
heart as formerly. But this gift was earlier a matter of course, so to
speak, a natural result of the conditions. But if to-day a girl
sacrifices a talent to filial duty, then it is an infinitely greater
personal sacrifice; a real choice. And if she does not make the
sacrifice, it is not in the least always on the ground of egoism. It
happens often in conviction that the unconditional demand of
Christianity that the strong must have consideration for the weak, makes
these latter often egoists and tyrants; that the strong, who are more
significant for the whole, are thus rendered inefficient.
If a troop of athletic boys continually conformed to the level of the
weakest, then all would remain upon a lower plane, and the weak find no
incentive to seek _their_ triumphs in another sphere.
On the other hand it is fine and eminently sane and in harmony with the
laws of spiritual growth, when the strong shall help the weak to reach a
goal which is thus, in his own peculiar direction, really attainable by
him. Neither paganism nor Christianity has created the most _beautiful_
strength; it is a union of both. It has found its most perfect
expression in art in Donatello’s St. George, in Michelangelo’s David:
youths, whose victorious power conceals compassion and whose compassion
embraces even the conquered: symbols of strength which has become kind,
of kindness which has become strong. If a mother has seen this
expression upon the face of her son or her daughter then she can address
to life the words of Simeon: “Now let thy servant depart in peace for
mine eyes have seen thy glory.” For the glory of life is the harmony
between its two fundamental powers—conquest and devotion: self-assertion
and self-sacrifice. In every new phase of the ethical development of
mankind the cultural problem is this harmony and the cultural profit is
not the per-dominance of one of the two but the perfected synthesis of
both.
This problem has now become actual, through the woman movement, for the
feminine half of mankind, after the _unconditional_ spirit of sacrifice
has obtained for centuries as the indispensable attribute of
womanliness. In the first stage of the woman movement the majority of
the “emancipated” were still determined by their spirit of sacrifice,
which they aspired to combine with their outside professional work. This
generation lived _beyond its strength_. The younger generation of to-day
does not believe that God gives unlimited strength. For they have seen
that those who live unceasingly beyond their strength finally have no
strength left, either for others or for themselves. And they know that
in the long run one can live only upon his own resources and these must
be conserved and renewed in order to suffice. But this knowledge makes
the problem, which in the course of days and years appears in manifold
different forms, only more difficult of solution: the problem to find
the right choice in the collision between family duties, duties toward
oneself and duties toward society; the choice which shall bring with it
the essential enhancement of life.
The conflict is thus solved by some feminists: everything called family
ties and family feeling is referred to the “impersonal” instinctive
life, while our “personality” expresses itself in intellectual activity,
in study, in creation, in universally human ends, in social activity,
etc. And since the principle of emancipation is certainly the freeing of
the “personality,” it follows from this idea, in connection with _this
definition of the personality_, that the liberated personality must
place the obligations of the intellectual life absolutely above those of
the family life; the outside professional work above the work in the
home. In a word, the earlier definition of _womanliness_ ignored the
_universal human_ element, the present definition of _personality_
ignores the _womanly_ element in woman’s being. The last solution of the
problem is quite as one-sided as the first.
The “principle of personality,” as it has just been described is
entertained especially in America. In Europe there are still women who
reflect deeply upon their own being and—who have a depth over which they
may meditate! These women have not yet succeeded in simplifying the
problem which is the central one of their life. They know that not only
do instincts, impulses of the will, feelings, form the strongest part of
the individual character which nature has given them, but also that this
part determines their thinking and creating power—their whole conscious
existence. They know that their character receives its peculiarities
through the development which they themselves accord to one or another
side of their individual temperament. In one personality the
intellectual life will predominate, in another the emotional: in one the
ethical, in another the æsthetic motive. The personality becomes
harmonious only when no essential motive is lacking, when all attain a
certain degree of development, a harmony which is as yet only so won
that no motive receives its _greatest possible development_. Such a
harmony has long been the especial characteristic of the most beautiful
womanhood, while the most significant men have ordinarily achieved their
superior strength in _one_ direction, at the cost of harmony in the
whole. If now women believe that they can achieve the strength of men
without, for that reason, being obliged to sacrifice something of their
harmony, then they believe their sex capable of possibilities which thus
far have been granted rarely and then only to the exceptional in both
sexes. What experience shows is: the greater harmony of single women in
a _limited_ existence as compared with the lack of harmony in the lives
of daughters, owing to the irreconcilable problems which their _richer_
existence brings with it. For these problems must be solved, at one
time, by sacrifice of intellectual, at another, by sacrifice of
emotional values. In every case, the sacrifice leaves behind it, not the
joyful peace of fulfilled duty, but the gnawing unrest of a duty still
ever unfulfilled. Every woman who has a heart knows it is at least quite
as important a part of her personality as her passion for science
perhaps. If for example she is obliged to surrender to another the
loving service of a sick father in order to pursue scientific
researches, then her heart is quite as certainly in the sick-room as, in
case of the opposite choice, her thoughts would have been in the
laboratory. By calling one factor “instinct” and the other
“personality,” nothing is in reality gained. Theorising ladies can
easily write—the paper is forbearing. But human nature is of flesh and
blood. And therefore thousands of women grapple to-day with tormenting
questions:—When we women shall belong entirely to industrial work and to
the social life, who then is left for the work of love? Only paid hands.
What becomes then of the warmth in human life when such a division of
labour is established that kindness becomes a profession, and the rest
of us shall be exempt from its practice because our “Personality” has
more important fields for the exercise of its strength? What does it
signify to live for society when we come to the service of society with
chilled hearts? If the warmth is to be preserved then we must have
leisure for love in private life, a right to love, peace and means for
love. Only thus can our hearts remain warm for the social life. Can the
whole really profit if we sacrifice unconditionally that part of the
whole which is nearest us? Can our feeling of solidarity increase toward
mankind when we pass by exactly those people to whom we could, by our
deeds, really show our sympathetic fellow-feeling?
The woman whose instinct life is still strong and sound, whose
personality has its roots deep in life—which means not social life
alone—she also understands how to determine what life in its deepest
import purposes with her; she knows how she serves it best, whether by
remaining in a position where she fulfils her personal obligations as
part of a family or by seeking another position where she fulfils this
obligation as a member of society.
It is true the erroneous idea still prevails in many homes that the
daughter must willingly sacrifice her social task for the family, a
sacrifice which the family would never even wish on the part of a son.
But the assurance that the daughter _could_ have made another choice
instils in the family, unconsciously, a new conception of her sacrifice,
and gives to herself the courage to assume a position in the home other
than that she held at the time when no choice remained to her. If the
total of efficacious daughterly love of to-day and earlier times be
estimated, this total would not prove less now. But it is now given
rather in a great sum; earlier, on the contrary, in many small coins.
Because of the professional work of the daughter, there are now often
lacking in the home the ready obliging young hands whose help father and
brother so willingly engrossed; the cheerful comforter, the admiring
listener. But in a great hour the daughter or sister gives now often a
hundred times more in deep, personal understanding. One draws a false
conclusion when one thinks that the more closely a family holds together
the more it signifies a corresponding unity and devotion. The young act
in submission because they permit themselves to be cowed by the family
authority which like a steam-roller passed over their wills and their
hearts. But the indignation that they experienced in their innermost
hearts, the criticism which they exercised among one another, were not
less bitter than that which they to-day openly utter.
The home life of fifty years ago was a school of diplomacy; it
especially served to oppose cunning to the father’s authority, and the
mother often taught the children to use this weapon of weakness. Now the
father does not wish to make himself ridiculous by saying: “I forbid
you,” for the daughter answers: “Well, then, I will wait until I am
twenty-one.” The threat, “I disinherit you,” recoils from the
determination of the daughter, “I can work.” Only in a distant province,
in a little town, or among the “upper ten thousand” of a large city,
where the daughters still often receive a “general education,” which
does not fit them to earn their living, are they occupied all day
without the feeling of having worked. They serve at five o’clock teas,
embroider for charity bazaars, etc. But they also experience the power
of the spirit of the time strongly enough to know that they lead a
selfish life but not a life of self. The lower the scale of riches the
more housework do the daughters have to perform. But as a result of the
patriarchal organisation of labour they still perform this without their
own responsibility, without the joy of independence, without regular
unoccupied time and without one penny at their disposal!
Even in these circles however the spirit of the time is active; such a
daughter leads now in every case a life of much richer content than some
decades ago, when even though middle-aged she was still treated as
ignorant innocence and must allow herself to be extolled to every
possible marriage candidate. She suffers when she sees her mother as the
submissive wife, whose continual according smile has graven lines of
humility about her mouth, whose continually pacifying tone has made her
voice whining. She suffers when the father cuts short a diversity of
opinion with the words, “You have heard what I said—That will do.” She
suffers when her brothers find her “insufferably important” or declare
her new ideas “crazy.” But exactly these new ideas about the right and
freedom of woman, which she encounters everywhere, have given a dignity
to her own being which has its influence even without words. On the
other hand, the fact that the fathers lose one legal right after another
over the feminine members of the family has its effect, so that they
gradually change their tone, the clenched fist falls less and less
frequently upon the table, the disdain is silenced, and even in the
provinces the family life is changing more and more from the despotic
political constitution to the democratic, where each one maintains his
position by virtue of his own personality. There are still men it is
true, who wish to confine “woman’s sphere” to the four “C’s”—“Cooking,
clothing, children, church.” But there is no one who now insists that “a
girl _cannot_ learn Mathematics,” or that it is “unwomanly to pore over
books”—sayings which were still often heard fifty years ago. Certainly
there are still men who accept the cherishing thoughtful care on the
part of the women members of the family as obvious homage. But the men
are becoming more and more numerous who receive these womanly acts of
tenderness with waking joy. Daughters and sisters of earlier times have
pardoned the vices of their fathers and brothers seven and seventy
times; those of the present throw away the fragments of trust and love
which have been irrevocably shattered. The assurance that the daughters
and sisters could do nothing else except pardon, since they were
dependent upon their tormentors, often made the fathers and brothers of
earlier times grossly inconsiderate. The men of to-day will be refined
by the necessity of showing consideration and justice to their daughters
and sisters if they wish to enjoy their presence in the home. Fathers
and brothers have, in a word, gained quite as much spiritually through
the loss of their power to oppress as the daughters and sisters have
gained in being no longer oppressed. And this experience will be
repeated in marriage when man and wife shall be absolutely free and
equal.
CHAPTER V
THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MEN AND WOMEN IN GENERAL
In their struggle for freedom for the same opportunities of study, for
the same fields of work, the same citizenship as man, women have
encountered all possible opposition, from that of the Pope, who recently
pronounced the most positive condemnation of the whole movement for the
emancipation of woman, and that of Parliament, to the rough pranks of
students. Man’s attempt to define the boundaries of “woman’s natural
sphere” continues always. The woman physician, for example, had to
struggle, in her student years, against prejudice in the dissecting
room, and, in her practice, against the professional jealousy of men.
The history of emancipation has much shameful conduct on the part of man
toward woman to record. Great reluctance to recognise the results of
woman’s work is still common. When this work, in literature and art for
instance, is compared with man’s, the comparison is made not for the
purpose of getting a finer understanding of woman’s peculiar
characteristics, but only to disparage it. The energy which men of the
present time not infrequently lack they cannot endure to recognise in
women, who often possess it in high degree. In the Romance countries,
self-supporting working women are always looked upon as a special
caste—a caste into which a man does not marry however high respect he
pays, theoretically, to “les vierges fortes.”
And yet how different—and more beautiful—are the present relations
between men and women in general, especially among the Germanic peoples.
A friendly comradeship prevails among the young men and women studying
at the university, in art academies, music schools, business colleges,
etc. In the North, this comradeship often continues from the primary
schools, through the grades to the university, with results advantageous
to both sexes. Especially in the years under twenty, this comradeship
has a significance which cannot be overestimated. Girls, who were,
earlier, confined to a narrow, uninteresting, joyless family circle, now
often find in the circle of masculine and feminine comrades their share
of the joy of youth without which life has no springtime. Youths who
formerly had known no other young women than those with whom they should
never have come in contact, now learn to know soulful, pure-minded
girls, and this gives them a new conception of woman. Both sexes now
experience together the joys of youth in such fresh and significant
forms as folk-dancing, sport, etc. They have opportunity for stimulating
interchange of ideas in a great circle, and quiet discussion with a few
congenial friends. During the last twenty or thirty years, young men and
young women have again begun to discover one another spiritually,
discoveries which since the days of romanticism have been made only
through the stained glass of literature. In the romantic period, men and
women exercised reciprocally upon one another a humanising influence. A
like influence again obtains at the present time, but upon a much
broader basis. The men and women of romanticism formed a group bound
together only by spiritual relationship, in which the women aspired to
the culture of the men and shared their intellectual interests, while
the men promoted the women’s “desire for men’s culture, art, knowledge,
and distinction” (_Geluste nach der Männer Bildung, Kunst, Weisheit und
Ehre._—Schleiermacher). Now, young people studying in different fields
exert a mutual humanising influence and thereby learn to know one
another from the side of intelligence as well as from that of character
and disposition. Thus are dispelled certain illusions and conceptions
almost forced upon them through which both sexes in the years of
adolescence once regarded each other. Men as well as women obtain a
finer criterion for the conception of “womanliness” and of “manliness”;
both discover the innumerable shadings which these conceptions conceal;
both recognise that the sexes can meet not only upon the erotic plane,
but upon a plane that is universally human; finally, both learn that the
more perfect and complete human beings they become, the more they have
to thank one another for it.
Comprehension in erotic relations is most difficult because, there,
women are far in advance of men. Woman’s ideal of love, however, is
becoming more and more the ideal of young men. Young girls, on their
side, are beginning to understand better the sexual nature of men. The
whole world in which man received his culture, won his victories,
suffered his defeats, is no longer _terra incognita_ to women; they have
lost the blind reverence or the blind hostility with which they formerly
regarded the doings and dealings of men. Men, on the other hand, are
learning that the domestic labours for the comfort of the family, which
they have thus far regarded as the sole duty of woman, cannot engross
her whole soul, that domesticity leaves many wishes unfulfilled. So both
sexes have begun, each on its own side, to build a bridge across the
chasm which law and custom had dug between them. The young still ponder
over the enigmatical antitheses in their natures, yet they find they
have very much that is human in common with one another. In comradeship,
however, that “chivalry” vanishes, which among other things consisted in
the ideal that the young men had always to bear all the burdens and
duties. Now as a rule, the girl carries her own knapsack on excursions
and pays her share of the expenses. But if she really needs help, the
youth is quite as ready as before to grant it to her, just as she also
on her part is ready to assist according to her strength: honest
friendship has replaced rapturous chivalry. This friendly comradeship
often satisfies the young man’s need of feminine kindness and enjoyment
in those dangerous years when, as a young man said, “Three fourths of
the life of a youth, conscious and unconscious, is sex life.” And
nothing can more effectually prevent him from degrading himself than
access to a circle where in quiet and freedom he meets young girls,
without an indelicate, intruding family surveillance, interfering and
asking him about his “intentions.” If between two such comrades an
erotic feeling finally develops, even if the wooing takes place in a
laboratory instead of a romantic arbour, the possibilities always exist,
in the golden haze of love, of making mistakes. But both have, however,
had opportunities of seeing each other in many character-illuminating
situations; they have observed each other, not only with their own eyes,
but also through the more critical glasses of the comrade circle. On the
other hand, it often happens that discussions and interchange of letters
conjure up a congeniality which exists only in opinions and temperament,
not in nature. It is fortunate when this is discovered in time.
Otherwise bitter conflicts may be the result, should a strong individual
nature wish to mould the other after himself or after his ideal of man
or woman. For that anyone loves the individuality of another without
illusions is still very rarely the case. It now happens somewhat more
frequently, since young people in comradeship learn to know mutually
their ideals and dreams, as well in erotic as in universally human
aspects. But if these ideals and dreams do give a hint of character,
comradeship brings a true knowledge of character only when it also
offers an opportunity of seeing others _act_; not only of _hearing_ them
speak of themselves. Such analyses of one’s own soul or the soul of
others in the atmosphere of tea and cigarettes, music and poetry, give
the “interesting” masculine or feminine parasites opportunity to ensnare
a victim, who is then intellectually or erotically, often even
economically, sucked dry.
But even if such an interchange of ideas really enriched all, it can be
carried to excess and become deleterious to energy for work, directness,
and idealism. However beneficial may be the honesty of to-day in sexual
questions, the discussion of the instincts of life which has now become
a commonplace is also dangerous. These discussions are fraught with the
same danger to the roots of human life as is a continual digging up of
the roots of a plant to see how it is growing.
The earlier a marriage can be consummated, the less is the danger of
freshness being lost in this way; the greater the prospect that man and
wife will grow close together, just as do the man and wife of the
people, through the difficulty of the common struggle for existence. But
if this struggle becomes easier before youth has entirely passed, then
there enters often into the life of the man a crisis which the practised
French call “La maladie de quarante ans”: the need of the man for a new
erotic experience. While those on a lower erotic plane, to-day as at all
times, seek this in transient secret alliances, it leads those on a
higher level in our time to the most tragic of all separations, where
the man—after decades of the most intimate life together, of the most
faithful work together, of mutual understanding—drives the wife out of
the home in order to bring in a young wife who has never been to him,
perhaps never can be to him, a fellow fighter and helper, as the
repudiated wife was, but who has for him the charm of the mystery which
the maiden had for the man before the days of coëducation, sexual
discussions, comradeship, and dress-reform!
Women students now escape the earlier danger of the daughter of the
family, falling in love out of lack of occupation. They have not the
time, often also not the means to permit themselves erotic dreams. There
are among them many poor girls who dare lose no single semester, for
they must hasten to earn their livelihood. Moreover, such a girl knows
that if she should yield to the need for tenderness, for support, that
is so strong in her, the same fate could happen to her as to this or
that fellow student who after a short happiness was left alone when the
lover found a good match. And she was left behind not only in her sorrow
but also in her work. And the more a yearning girl buries herself in her
studies, the more science or art unlock their riches to her, the
happier, more full of life she feels herself in spite of loneliness,
scanty means, and shabby dress.
Among women students there are also many of the cerebral type, mentioned
above, women who need tenderness neither in the form of friendship nor
of love; yes, who fear in both a bond for their “free individuality.”
These take part in sports, discuss, jest, with their fellow men
students, openhearted and unconcerned, without thinking whether they
please or not. All these young girls now go about with perfect freedom;
even in the Romance countries, a young woman can now go alone with her
bag of books or her racquet. For in circles where study has not yet
exercised its freeing influence, sport has brought this about.
In America, student life, because of the early entrance of the men into
the professions, becomes more a one-sided, feminine comrade life. There,
the women have to develop their arts of the toilet for each other, whom
they find more interesting, more worthy of pleasing than the masculine
sex. Even in Europe, feminine comradeship in the student years is at
times most intimate. For a friendship between a young girl and a young
man often ends with love—on one side. Or in an intimate circle A has
fallen in love with B, but B with C, etc. Such eventualities the wise
girl will avoid for they can bring both suffering and obstruction to her
work. With women comrades, she has, without this risk, an interchange of
ideas which promotes study, deepens culture, opens up new views, and
gives to all new impulses. There exists, at least at the present time, a
difference between the masculine and feminine method of inquiry, of
solving problems, of apprehending ideas, which results in the fact that
comradeship between women cannot take the place of comradeship between
men and women. It is, however, for deep and beautiful natures often
impossible at the beginning of life to be capable, in a spiritual sense,
of more than a single friendship with their own sex; for each new
spiritual contact becomes a new and difficult problem. For such men or
women a friendship with a comrade of their own sex is often the richest
advantage of their student time. Often a student in good circumstances
finds her joy in taking care of some lonely comrades. They find at her
apartments, in a friendly welcome, a few flowers and pictures, a
teakettle, a fireplace, that feeling of homely warmth for which the
shivering students have longed,—a longing which has often driven a
lonely, impressionable youth from the dreary students’ room to “rough
pleasures.” Now when he leaves the little comrade circle, his sweetest
memories of home, his finest dreams, vibrate in him. And the timid girl
goes in the certainty that there is another girl who is concerned about
her wretched fate.
In such a quiet as also in a more lively comrade life both sexes learn
to know not only each other but also different classes and, in certain
European universities, the several nations. It is not unusual for nine
or ten races to be found represented in one small group of comrades.
Life thus becomes everywhere enriched by strong manifestations or fine
shades of congeniality; spiritual attractions and repulsions cross one
another; inspiring or restraining impressions radiate in all directions.
It would be quite as impossible to estimate the fructifying influence of
such a friendly intercourse as to measure the life which comes into
existence on a spring day filled with the sigh of the wind, the
fluttering of butterflies, and humming of bees.
In such a circle of comrades, devotion and capacity for sacrifice are
past belief, especially in the nation where “the girls wear short hair
and the young men long hair,” as a wag characterised the young Russians
studying abroad. That a couple of Russian girls, for a whole winter,
possessed together but a single pair of shoes and so could never go out
at the same time, is one of the innumerable small and great expressions
of the feeling of solidarity among the poorest students of the
university.
When the comrade life assumed the form exclusively of coffee-house
visits, then the women had to revolt against it. But they often, alas,
allowed themselves to be carried with the stream. Because the
coffee-house life at first really gave a certain polish to the
intelligence, it could for a short time have its justification. But when
a blade is worn out, the artist of life should cease grinding; if on the
contrary he allows the grindstone to go on continually, then at last he
has only the haft in his hand. Formerly, it was only the young men but
now even the girls wear out thus their weapons or tools before they ever
use them seriously.
* * * * *
The darkest side of coëducational life has been that women could
demonstrate their equal capability with men in no other way than by the
same courses and examinations as those of the men. The eagerness of
women to prove their like proficiency with men in study and in sport has
often had disastrous physical results. These are continually becoming
more infrequent, thanks to the decreasing prudery in regard to the
sexual functions and to the increasing hygienic conscience. The
intellectual results, however, continue to exist and are disastrous
alike for both sexes; but because of the ambition and conscientiousness
of girls, perhaps still more disastrous for them. The examinations which
they pass are often dearly bought. This was not noticed in the
beginning, when a woman doctor was still looked at with wonder as a
noteworthy product of culture, and regarded herself also with wonder.
Truly she had sacrificed to grinding and cramming for examinations a
multitude of youthful joys, but she had, as was thought, won in this way
much greater values. This, however, is not always really the case.
Ethically, the conscientious girl is certainly above the boy who, not
infrequently in the unconscious instinct of self-preservation, idles
away his time. But the mental strength of the latter may frequently be
better preserved in any determined direction. Girls, conscientious and
zealous in their work, have filled their heads full of lessons to which
the coming examination and not their own choice has urged them. What is
thus crammed in is not assimilated and consequently has not promoted
spiritual or mental growth. But it has taken up room and has thereby
impaired the intellectual freedom of motion and compelled the natural
individuality to compress itself so that it is long before the space
conditions in the brain permit it to extend again—in case it is not
simply choked by all the chaotic mass that has been absorbed. How many
young girls have come to the university or to the art academy full of
thirst for knowledge and energy for work! But after a few years they
feel the disgust of surfeit, unless they have found a teacher who has
been to them a leader to the essentials in science or in art. Then their
joy in study could really be as rich as they had once dreamed it—yes, as
perhaps even their grandmothers had dreamed it when they had to content
themselves with their little text-books written for “girls.” Many young
girls maintain to-day, through some teacher or some masculine comrade,
that spiritual development which only an exceptional relationship
between a father and daughter, a brother and sister, could give in
earlier times.
* * * * *
When men and women can study together, then the relationship later
between masculine and feminine fellow-workmen will, as a rule, be better
than when the sexes work independently in the student days. It is true
masculine competitors still have recourse to the weapon of spreading
reports of the incapacity of their feminine competitors—at times
honestly convinced of it themselves. The same weapon is of course turned
also against masculine competitors. Yet there it is a question of the
_individual_, while in regard to women, the _sex_ is often the only
proof the man thinks he need assign for the inferiority of their work.
It can be said, however, upon the whole, that the relationship between
men and women professional colleagues exhibits the same good side as the
common student life, although naturally to a lesser degree. The joint
work does not often leave much time for significant interchange of
ideas, and after working hours each usually longs for new faces. The
influence of joint labour is often limited to the refining effect that
the presence of one sex exercises upon the other. Small services are
mutually rendered and each worker learns also to respect the
achievements of the other; or one is provoked because the work which
should have been dispatched by the other now falls to his share!
If the woman performs the same work as the man, then she is often
indignant because she must do it for smaller compensation than he. All
too easily, the feminists forget that this injustice is equalised if a
man who wishes to establish a family cannot obtain a post which he seeks
because a woman retains it who can be satisfied with a smaller wage
since she remains in her parents’ home. For this disparity, raising
bitterness on both sides, there is no remedy under the present economic
system. Feminists can _demand_ the same compensation, but working women
will not obtain it so long as the supply of workers is to the demand as
one hundred to one in the professional occupations to which women flock.
In vain underpaid women will call to the agitators of the woman
movement, “Help us to obtain endurable conditions of life.” The only
honest answer is, “Help one another, just as the working men have helped
one another, by union and solidarity!”
The competition of the sexes in the labour field is only indirectly
connected with the woman movement; it is a part of the social question
and will therefore only be touched upon here.
The hostility which the competition between the sexes has evoked
is a factor in the social war; and if—_by reason of this
competition_—marriage decreases, then such competition is a form
of social danger. If the cause is sought in the woman movement,
then the question is begged completely, because the women with
sufficient income _to be able_ to live at home without industrial
work, after the loss of a husband or a father, are constantly
becoming more rare. There is the additional fact that in many
positions where man and woman have equal salary, the woman is
preferred because of her greater honesty and faithfulness to duty.
Further it must be emphasised that, even in middle-class
vocations, women with increasing frequency earn their _whole_
livelihood, not merely a supplementary remuneration, when if they
did not thus work they would be a burden to some man and so
perhaps prevent him from marrying. Many of these women would wish
nothing better than to enjoy the warmth of “the domestic hearth”
to which men in theory relegate them; but since no man offers this
warmth, they must at least be allowed to procure fuel for their
lonely hearth fire.
When men declare that “the only duty which has life value for a woman is
to be man’s helpmeet,” then they ought not to forget that this task is
more and more rarely assigned to a woman, because men prefer to do
without her aid, and even find a richer life in bachelorhood than in
marriage. They should not dare to forget also that a great number of men
disinclined or disqualified for work compel their sisters, daughters,
wives, to undertake the task of family provider, and these women also
must forego being, “in the quiet of the home, man’s helpmeet.”
However weak the feminist logic often may be, it is not so weak as the
anti-feminist logic of man. Masculine vacuity has found there an arena
where it performs the most incredible gymnastics. The hysteria of
literary fanatics, the crude lordly instincts of the mediocre man, the
irritation of the masculine good-for-nothing at the increasing ability
of women, the rage, confounding cause and effect, over the competition
of women—these are some of the reasons for the present antagonism
between men and women. The deepest reason is this: the more woman is
compelled to maintain the struggle for existence under the same social
conditions as those under which men have been thus far compelled to
struggle, the more she loses that character by which she gives happiness
to man and receives it from him. A diminished erotic attraction is
frequently the result, not of the work of women, but of their work under
such conditions that the drudging, worn-out women comrades finally
appear to their masculine colleagues only as “sexless ants.” Sometimes
they really exhibit that obliteration of all characteristic marks of sex
which Meunier has indicated to us in his _Woman Miner_, a great
thought-inspiring work of art.
Many a woman of the present time, deeply feminine, suffers under this
compulsory neutralising of her womanly being. Others again consider this
a path to complete humanity.
But the complete personality is only that man or woman who has
cultivated and exercised the strength which he or she as a human being
possessed without having neutralised thereby the characteristic of sex.
It is tragic when nature herself creates deviations from normal
sexuality, but criminal when the ideas of the time weaken sound
instincts and inculcate unsound ones. It is not woman nature but the
denatured woman who is beginning to grow through the ultra-feminism
which looks down upon woman’s normal sexual duty as only a low, animal
function.
That sound men abominate this tendency is justifiable. On the other
hand, it is unwarrantable to confuse a variation of feminism with the
woman movement in its entirety, a movement which includes in itself a
great earnest desire to work for the welfare of both mothers and
children. As a manifestation of womanliness in its most complete,
perfect form, many men still elect the woman whose entire life-content
consists in the cult of her own beauty, a cult whose attendant
phenomenon is the æsthetic culture which raises the temple about the
altar. Under this perfect and apparently inspired form there is,
however, rarely anything to be found of that which the man seeks: the
longing and the power of true womanhood to give happiness by erotic and
motherly devotion. Such women, like those cerebral women engrossed by
their studies and their work, allow a real love to pass them by; men are
only sacrificial servants of the cult, and the high priest is chosen not
upon the ground of motives of feeling. This type is said to be more
common in America than in Europe. But it existed thousands of years ago
on the Tiber as well as on the Nile. That Cleopatra in the language of
feminism now speaks of the “right of the personality,” and means thereby
her right to represent no other value in life than that of the white
peacock and the black orchid—the value of rarity—that does not make her
a “product of the woman movement.”
But certain men characterise a woman thus, if they have been deceived in
her: a psychology which equals in value that of the feminist when she
speaks of man as the “oppressor,” the “corrupter,”—without noting that
the world is full of poor men corrupted or tormented by women! Amid such
mutual accusations, just or unjust—whereby _gifted_ men maintain
generalisations about “woman’s” being which are quite as ingenuous as
those which _silly_ women propose about “man’s” being—the sexes, in the
days of the woman movement, have been almost as much alienated from each
other as drawn together. The estrangement has taken place in the erotic
field and through labour competition; the reconciliation has been
effected—leaving out coëducation—by common industry and the social
activity of both sexes.
The middle-class women of Europe have still so little share in the
control of production that one cannot determine whether or not they have
even awakened to the understanding that the fundamental condition of a
universal life-enhancing issue of the woman movement must be new social
conditions. One cannot yet predicate anything at all in regard to their
desires to promote more humane labour conditions and a more just
distribution of profit. Under the system now prevailing they must, like
men, either conform to it or be destroyed economically. It is even so in
public offices and similar fields of labour. Just as so many young men
do, at the beginning of their career, a great number of women attempt to
abolish the abuses and mitigate the formalism. But they meet such
obstacles that, like the young men, they are obliged to abandon the
effort; or they are compelled to give up the position whereby they win
their scanty bread.
In this way, principally, the work of women in the sphere of charitable
activity has given to men the opportunity for a correct valuation of the
social working power of woman. Men have then in a wider sphere than that
of the family circle, so often overlooked by them, learned to appreciate
feminine enthusiasm and capacity for organisation, energy and devotion,
initiative and endurance. Innumerable men—from the soldiers up, who in
the hospitals of the Crimea literally kissed Florence Nightingale’s
shadow on the floor of the hospital ward—have learned in the last half
century that life has become more kindly for them since social
motherliness has obtained for itself a certain elbow-room. The more
women lose their present fear of appearing, in coöperation with men,
“womanly” impulsive, savage in face of injustice and cruelty, the more
will they signify in that joint work where, at least to-day, they still
have a more fortunate hand—the hand of the mother.
And since a single fact is more convincing than a thousand words, so the
facts gained in the social activity of woman have won, in later years,
many men supporters of woman suffrage. The arguments derived from
abstract right—however obvious they may be for every tax-paying,
law-abiding woman—go to the rear to make way for the argument of “social
utility.”
Not only women themselves but men also refer now to what women have
accomplished when they are allowed to work in the service of society;
they point to the reforms which were retarded or bungled because women
had no immediate influence there where appropriations were granted and
laws were enacted.
Especially significant for the reconciliation of the sexes is the joint
social work of young people. The temperance cause or the education of
the masses or socialism now brings together a host of young men and
girls, who learn thereby that the social as well as the private life of
labour gains in strength and wealth if men and women participate in it
together.
* * * * *
The men who fear political life for woman are, however, right. Just as
this life has injured the best qualities in the manhood of many men, so
will it impair the womanhood of many women. Neither the spiritual
personality of woman nor of man, nor even their secondary physical sex
characteristics can withstand the influences of their private _milieu_,
of their private labour conditions. Why should women better resist the
influences of the public life? When the man is compelled, in political
work for the state, to neglect in the highest degree the foundation of
the state—the home—how should women be able to do otherwise than the
same thing? The political work of both can benefit the home _in general_
but _their own_ home must always suffer for it, for a time at least.
Women will learn, as so many men have already learned, that the fresh
enthusiasm, the unexhausted optimism with which they entered the
political life soon vanish before party pressure, general prejudice,
opportunism, and the demands of compromise. And just as now so many men
for these reasons withdraw from Parliament, many women will do likewise
when they learn that what they can accomplish there with the
characteristics peculiar to them, is so insignificant that it does not
compensate for the injury which ensues because these characteristics are
missing in the home.
If the eligibility of woman is really to benefit society, then the right
of resignation must be unconditioned for mothers, and they themselves
must understand that the parliamentary mandate is incompatible with
motherhood so long as the children are still in the home; in like manner
during the same period, the franchise of the mother of a family must not
result in rushing into electioneering. The ballot in and of itself does
not injure the fineness of a woman’s hand any more than a cooking
receipt.
* * * * *
Because woman’s motherhood must be preserved, if she is to bring to the
social organism a really _new_ factor, so she must always continue to be
found and to work in private life, in order to be, meanwhile, useful in
public life. The genius of social reform which women will develop can
complement that of man only if this genius is of a new order; if it
originates thoughts which bring new points of view to the social
problems, wills which seek new means, souls which aspire to new ends.
Women could, if they received their full civic right before they lost
their intuitive and instinctive power through masculinisation, effect
the progress of culture as, for example, the entrance of the Germans
influenced the antique world.
The sooner woman receives her political franchise, the more, on the
whole, can be expected from it. The generation which has now fought the
fight for suffrage is wholly conscious of the reforms that await woman
for their final realisation. And this generation of women would
introduce into the political life a new, fresh current. In any event, we
can hope to secure from women new impulses and better organisation in
political life, as has already been the case in social life. But every
new generation of parliamentary women, who together with the men have
been “politically trained,” would have—as long as the present economic
conditions obtain—continually greater economic interests to advocate
“parliamentarily,” and would also for other reasons evince the same
parliamentary maladies as the men evince now. And as little as evil men
lose their evil characteristics because of the franchise, quite as
little will bad women lose theirs. The entrance of women into politics
cannot therefore—as certain feminists maintain—signify the victory of
the noble over the ignoble. But it signifies a great increase in noble
as well as ignoble powers hitherto inactive in political life, which in
the wider sphere that they there maintain oppose one another, now
conquering, now yielding. Men and women _together_, however, will be
able to enact more humane laws than men alone can enact. Questions
concerning women and children can be treated with deeper seriousness by
men and women _together_ than is now the case. Men and women _together_
will consider the social life from more significant points of view than
can one sex alone. Government consisting of men and women _together_
will be more profound than heretofore. No one who has observed the
effects of masculine and feminine coöperation in fields already
mentioned can doubt this. Who can deny that with the civic right of
woman her feeling of social responsibility will increase and that her
horizon will widen? And therewith her value as wife and mother of men
will also increase? But she will increase in value for the men closely
connected with her as well as in social respects. The woman of earlier
times, for all of whom society might go to pieces if only _her_ home and
family prospered, was only in a restricted sense man’s help. In certain
great crises she usually betrayed him simply because she wholly lacked
the social feeling.
Obviously, the female member of Parliament cannot confine herself solely
to questions which concern the protection of the weaker and the
education of the new race. The more women concentrate upon the cause of
justice against power, and of public spirit against self-interest, the
more advantageous it will be for her herself and for the public life.
But concentration is, unfortunately, exactly what modern parliamentarism
does not promote; what it does promote is disintegration.
Woman has, however, where she has entered into parliamentary life as
elector and eligible, shown thus far exactly this tendency toward
concentration. She has worked for moral, temperance, and hygienic
questions; for questions concerning schools and education of the masses;
for mother and child protection; reform of marriage laws, and kindred
subjects. What thinking man can maintain that all this does not belong
to “woman’s sphere” or can say that these and similar social interests
have been sufficiently attended to by an exclusively masculine
government? Already the opposite danger appears in certain social
spheres: an exclusively “feminine government.”
In the present forms of public life, however, much feminine power will
without doubt be wasted. Only when man, upon a higher plane, has created
a new kind of representation “of the people,” where professional
interests in every sphere are represented, can the highest vocation of
woman—motherhood—come into its rights.
It belongs to the necessary course of historical development that women
also go through the stage of party-power politics in order together with
man to reach the stage of social politics and finally that of culture
politics.
But women cannot wait until this development has been attained; they
must accomplish it together with man. Just as the best masculine powers
sooner or later must be concentrated to transform increasingly untenable
parliamentary conditions, so the best feminine powers will also work in
the same direction, especially if the will becomes intense in mothers
not only to awaken in their children the social spirit, but also to
create for them better social conditions.
In later years, the movement for the suffrage of woman has not only
filled the world with suffrage societies but the agitation has even
achieved popular representation in eighteen European countries, in the
legislative assemblies of a number of American States, in Australasia,
in legislative assemblies in Canada and in the Philippines. In Iceland
as well as in Italy, in Japan as in South Africa, the movement is in
progress, and whoever thinks it will not attain its goal is politically
blind.
When anti-feminist men prophesy that men will love their mothers,
sisters, wives, and daughters less when pitted against them as political
opponents or competitors, they prophesy certainly in many cases the
truth. Politics have already estranged fathers from sons, brothers from
brothers. But this demonstrates only either that the personal feelings
were weaker than the political passions or that these latter have
destroyed the attributes which made the personality lovable. But if men
are really able to love and women remain lovable, even as political
personalities, then a man will not cease to love a woman, even if she
votes for a different congressional candidate! Such prophecies have not
been verified in other spheres from which men sought to intimidate women
by similar warnings. For woman retains her power over man. if she
retains her womanly charm, created out of peace, harmony, and kindness.
Not that _of which_ a woman speaks, not that _for which_ she works,
determines man’s feeling and conduct; but _how_ she does it. A woman may
charm a man by a political speech, and drive him away by her table talk.
A poor working woman can, without a word, induce the same man to give
her his seat in a street car who the next minute can be brutal to an
assuming and incapable fellow workwoman. In a word, what a woman makes
of her rights and what they make of her—that alone determines the
measure of veneration, sympathy, love, which she may expect from a man.
That women have lost their equilibrium cannot be denied. How could it be
otherwise? Not only have they in the last half century experienced,
together with man, Naturalism and the New Romantic movement,
Neo-Kantianism, the Higher Criticism, Bismarck and Bebel, Darwin and
Spencer, Wagner and Nietzsche, Ibsen and Tolstoi, Haeckel and von
Hartmann, and still many, many more, but they themselves in dizzy haste
have been hurled out of their position in society, protected by the
family, which they had occupied for centuries. It is obvious that at the
present moment the spiritual mobility of women must be greater than
their harmony; that the raw culture material which they possess must be
richer than that which they can utilise; their life experiences more
significant than their art of life. The modern woman must appear for the
present less symmetrical, more uncertain, than man’s ideal woman in
earlier times. But enduring cultural progress cannot be measured by
comparison with the ideal figures of the poetry or of the life of
earlier times. It must be estimated according to the _average type_ in a
certain period. And the average woman of our time is, in the fullest
significance of the word, more full of vitality and adaptability, more
individually developed, more beneficial socially, than the average woman
of fifty years ago. With the freedom of movement the social feeling has
increased; with the participation in universal human culture, the
richness of content: the spiritual life has become more complex, and the
possibilities of expression of this new soul-life, more numerous.
But since the average man, in the meantime, has undergone no comparable
development, he is estranged, has lost his bearings, and consequently
repudiates a movement which, directly and indirectly, makes such great
demands for the development of his own higher spiritual qualities.
Heretofore men could force women to endure undue interference, and so
have deprived them of the education wherein the possible consequences of
action are considered at the same time with the thought of the action.
But the woman movement has now raised a partition between the sexes such
as is found in the aquarium where it becomes necessary to teach the pike
to allow the carp, also, to live: every time the pike makes a dash at
the carp he strikes his head against the obstruction, until the motive
of repression becomes so strong that the glass wall can be taken away
and both carp and pike live together in peace.
CHAPTER VI
THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MARRIAGE
Certain feminists believe that the woman movement has accomplished such
meagre results in regard to the reorganisation of family right for the
sole reason that men, who once created the right for their own
advantage, still cling to the injustice out of egoism. These feminists
forget that the family is the social form of life in which tradition has
the greatest power. It speaks here with the voice of the blood; it works
through our deepest instincts, our strongest needs of life, our
innermost feelings, as these have developed through many thousands of
years under the influences which were exercised in and through the
family. To accomplish in this sphere not only reforms upon paper but
also vigorous modifications—that is, new laws and customs which are
rooted in new spiritual conditions of the people as a whole—is more
necessary than that man grant women a share in legislation. Innumerable
individual human vicissitudes must be experienced and repeated in new
forms, entering finally into the universal consciousness, before such
spiritual soil can be formed. The man became and remained the head of
the family because all experiences and social factors once made this
arrangement most advantageous for father, mother, and children. Woman
will be able to realise her new ideas in regard to love-life and
mother-right to the degree in which she demonstrates, not only in speech
and writing but also in vigorous daily living, that these ideals surpass
in vital effect those which now obtain.
* * * * *
In the last half century, among the Germanic peoples, however, the
family life has already undergone essential transformations, while the
Romantic world still continues to exhibit features which in the first
half of the 19th century were typical even among these peoples.
Marriages are arranged by the father, divorce is considered either a sin
or a shame, the paternal power is still absolute, the homogeneous
relationship among all the members of the family—in joy and sorrow—is
inviolable. The feeling of the son for the mother, bordering almost upon
Madonna worship, and the passion of the father for their little
children, must, however, always have been more characteristic of the
Romance peoples than of the Germans.
Among the latter the attainment of individualism, first in the sphere of
legislation, still more in that of customs, most of all in that of mode
of thought and feeling, has altered the position of the individual in
the family. While the family exhibited fifty years ago a tightly closed
unity, in which women had only slight significance, now the wife as well
as the husband, mother as well as father, daughter as well as son,
assert their personality, not only _in_ the family, but often even
_against_ the family. Wives draw the arguments for their self assertion
most frequently from the principles of the woman movement.
Truly, in the course of the century, many married women have succeeded
in finding expression for their significant universal human or feminine
attributes in marriage, and thus have ennobled it. But the
self-conscious effort to elevate the position of the wife began
simultaneously with the demand that no human right could be denied to a
woman upon the ground of her sex, whether within or without marriage.
Individualism has already made personal love, instead of family
interest, decisive for the consummation of a marriage. In the name of
her personality as of her work, woman desires with ever greater right
full majority and legal equality with man in marriage. Against
individualism, the doctrine of evolution now advocates certain
limitations of the personal erotic freedom to consummate marriage, but
advocates at the same time, contrary to the Christian sexual ethics, new
freedom for the sake of the higher development of the race. Here comes
into effect, the new conception of life by which the possibilities of
development and of happiness in the earthly life have acquired a new
value and force.
The ultimate heights of the modern conception of sex life are indicated
by erotic idealism, which since “La Nouvelle Héloise” has by poets and
dreamers been continually elevated, while world-renowned lovers showed
the possibility of this wonderful love. In addition to all these
influences of the spirit of the time upon the transformation of
marriage, come the _indirect_ effects of the woman movement. Thanks to
the vibrations in which this movement has set the “spirit of the time,”
many an ordinary man now accords to his wife that power and authority in
the family which the law still denies her; yes, many commonplace people
of both sexes now desire from their marriage things of which their
equals fifty years ago did not even dream. If one adds also the decisive
influences which the political-economic conditions of the present
exercise upon the family life, one has found some of the threads which
form the woof of the unalterable warp, a woof which makes the marriage
of the present a variegated and unquiet fabric, whose pattern exhibits
primeval oriental motives beside those in newest “modern style.”
Here it is of the greatest importance to indicate the zigzag line which
denotes the alternate repulsion and attraction that under the influence
of the woman movement marriage has had for woman.
First came the little crowd of “masculine women” with their hatred of
marriage and man. Then the great working army that forgot, over the
human rights of woman, that to these also must belong the right to
fulfil her duty as a being of sex, and not alone the right to be
“independent of marriage” through her work. Then came the reaction
against this incompleteness. At this time, the nature of woman was
called an “empty capsule,” which received its content only from man: a
“cry of the blood,” which finds its answer in the child. There was no
other “woman question” than the possibility of living erotically a
complete life. One woman wished this in love without marriage, another
in love without children, a third in children without marriage, a fourth
in children without love—“A work and a child” was the life cry—a fifth
woman wished the man only for the sake of the child, a sixth the child
only for the sake of the man, and the seventh wished both only for her
own sake!
The conviction of some women that the common erotic life of man and
woman must have also a spiritual life value for two human souls, filling
out and developing each other, was called “Ibsenism.” And after the
ideal demands which Ibsen pressed upon the consciousness of the time,
many men—and not a few women—found relaxation after their spiritual
over-exertion, if they desired nothing more from one another than “the
sound happiness of the senses.” Woman’s “personality,” “equality,” and
“human right” were old playthings, relegated to the rubbish heap.
The reaction against this reaction is now in progress. Just now—and
equally one-sided as will be shown later—woman’s universal humanity is
emphasised at the expense of the instinct life; her social labour-duty,
at the expense of the domestic life; her personality, at the expense of
the family.
Among all these zigzag movements, more deeply thoughtful women
continually sought to recall that neither the universal human nor the
sexual being of woman must be over-developed at the expense of the other
qualities of her being; that perfect humanity signifies for neither sex
that the spiritual life has suppressed the sex life or sex, the
soul-life, but that both find in a third higher condition their full
redemption and harmony. Through great love, exceptional natures already
create this condition; but what to-day only exceptional natures attain,
culture can gradually make attainable for many.
This great love demands fidelity. But often only one—ordinarily the
woman—experiences this great feeling. And then not even the deepest
devotion on her part suffices to preserve the community of life. To
preserve the form for the purpose of guarding the inner emptiness, as
was done earlier, is repugnant to the erotic consciousness of the modern
woman. This is the deepest reason why the modern woman—even also the
modern developed man—becomes continually more undecided about
contracting marriage. They both know that the passion which attracts two
beings is not synonymous with a sympathy which arises through the
harmony of their natures, which must not be so complete that nothing
remains of the unexpected and mysterious that is so essential an element
of love. The modern woman asks herself, “What can prove to me that an
erotic sympathy is profound, real, decreed by nature, life-long?” And
she asks with good reason. If two lovers who know that they make each
other happy with all the senses, constrained themselves, each in a
corner of a room fettered to a stool, blindfolded, to entertain each
other three hours daily for three months, this test would probably
prevent a great number of marriages void of sympathy. But it would
furnish no guaranty that those who consummated the marriage after such a
concentrated soul interchange, would hold out. For souls which in a
certain stage of development seem inexhaustible can be so transformed
that they experience only satiety for each other. The young wife of
to-day is deeply conscious of what a new problem for each newly married
woman marriage is. She knows how impossible it is to foresee what
difficulties will be encountered and whether good intentions and tactful
adaptation will succeed in overcoming these difficulties. She knows
that, even if the written law made her wholly equal to man, even if she
made herself that equal by entering only into a marriage of the higher,
newer conscience, yet all the inner, most difficult, deepest problems
still remain. This certainly induces many women to become only the
beloved, the mistress, of the man who wishes no community of life, but
only happy hours. Many more women still strike the possibilities of
erotic happiness out of their plan of life, because they have not
experienced the ideal love of which they dreamed, or else could not
realise it.[3]
Sometimes their doubt, in regard to the duration of love and the unity
of souls, decides them, another time the longing for a personal
life-work is the reason for their determination—a life-work for which
these women have suffered so keenly, been deprived of so much, and have
so struggled, that it has become passionately dear to them, and they
feel that a complete renunciation of the erotic life is easier than the
torment of being “drawn and quartered,” as the death penalty of the
Middle Ages was called—a quartering between profession, husband, home,
and children. And the result usually demonstrates that celibacy is wiser
than the compromise. It is most frequently the case,—in Europe at
least,—if the work of the unmarried woman had no personal character, and
if the home is not dependent upon the earnings of the wife, that she
gives up her professional work after her marriage.
Against this sacrifice, however, the higher erotic idealism has begun to
rebel and has, thereby, come into conflict with the conservative
direction of feminism, which while planning to make the wife equal to
the husband, adheres firmly to the present marriage as protection for
wife and children.
It is this point of view that is condemned by the new idealism. For it
“protection” signifies, in its innermost meaning, that the man buys love
and the woman sells it, which is considered “moral,” while it is
considered immoral for a man to sell love and for a woman to buy it. The
“protection” in this relationship has as result that the “virtue” of the
maid is synonymous with untouched sexual nature, and that of the wife,
with physical fidelity; while the “virtue” of the youth and the man is
judged from an entirely different point of view.
The relationship affording “protection” has also brought with it the
idea that a woman could not show her love as openly as a man, except
when he was proud and poor and she was rich. Only when the duty of
support on the part of the man ceases, will woman be able to demand the
same chastity and fidelity from him as he demands from her; she will
then be able, quite as proudly and naturally as he, to show the
flowering of her being—her love—instead of as now increasing her demand
in the marriage market by artful dissimulation. As long as maintenance,
within or outside of marriage, is the price for “possession” of the
woman, the man will consider the woman as “his,” and the more submissive
she is the more fully she satisfies his feeling of ownership. Now
marriage has become only an affair of custom, a common death or comatose
condition, because neither party needs trouble himself to keep the love
of the other. Only when woman, through her work, can lead an existence
worthy of a human being, when no woman will sell her love but every
woman can freely give it, will man experience what perfect womanly
devotion is. And when no man can “possess” love but must remain worthy
of love in order to be loved then only will women, on their side,
experience what tenderness and fine feeling masculine devotion can
attain.
This, the purest and warmest erotic idealism, is the morality of the
future. But the way to its realisation is not, as many women believe
to-day, that mothers, even, should continue their work of earning a
livelihood, but that way whose direction I have elsewhere pointed
out.[4]
Here we have to do, however, only with the spiritual conditions which
arise in the marriage of to-day, whether the wife has retained her work
or has given it up.
* * * * *
Even the cultivated modern man, who brings to the human personality of
his wife admiration and sympathy, seeks in her always that “womanliness”
to which Goethe has given the classic expression: the finely reserved,
quiet, strong, self-contained woman, reposing harmoniously in the
fulness of her own nature, a maternally lovely being, wholly “natural,”
a “beautiful soul,” observing, creative, but using these gifts only to
create a home. These creative offices the modern man who loves desires
to assure, when he wishes to “maintain” his wife, and begs her to
abandon the outside commercial work in which he foresees a danger to the
beautiful life together of which both dream. The woman who along with
her new self-conscious individuality and her profound culture has
guarded the “old” devotion, understands ordinarily this desire of the
man. She chooses, in spite of her idealism, as he wishes, in cases where
her work has not been very personal. If she has worked in the same field
as the man, then she converts her gifts into comprehension of him, into
personal interest for all his interests; and these marriages in which
the wife has enjoyed the same education as the man, but later has
devoted herself entirely to the home, are, as a rule, the happiest
marriages of the present time. But in the proportion in which her work
was creative, is the difficulty of the choice. In the case where the
productive power has the strength of genius, the modern man will
scarcely utter such a wish and in those circumstances the modern woman
will not grant it. And because the woman of genius is generally a
complete human being, with strong erotic as well as universal human
demands, she chooses often compromise. She finds in love, in motherhood,
new revelations; and in the mysterious depths of her nature, the
productive element of the maternal function has an elevating influence
upon her gift of creative power. Thus the energy temporarily diminished
by motherhood is restored. And her uneasy conscience, because she must
entrust to others much of the care and education of the children, is
appeased by the consciousness that she has often given to mankind richer
natures, and so more significant children, than more devoted mothers,
and that her own nature, because of the double creative activity, has
attained a ripeness and richness which make her personality more
significant for husband and children than if she had given up her
calling to please them. These thoughts cannot, however, prevent the
daily conflict between her feelings of love and the impossibility, in
times of strong spiritual production, of giving expression to it. The
very proximity of the children consumes at such times too much nervous
energy. And since all creation requires selfishness—in the sense of
concentration upon one’s _own needs_ in order to be able to work
creatively and to sink oneself in the work—while all love’s solicitude
requires active _attention_ to the _needs of the loved ones_, the
conflict must remain permanent and _insoluble_.
In this conviction, many women of genius choose the lesser conflict:
marriage without children. Such a relationship occurs not infrequently
in our time in this way: a man of feeling through the work of a woman is
first moved by her being. The man is in that case often the younger or
the less developed. At first, marriage brings both a rich happiness. But
later comes a time when the power of the personality of the woman of
genius becomes too strong for the man; when he feels himself exhausted
by all the sensitiveness and impatience which charge the air about a
creative personality with electricity. He has now had enough of the rich
spiritual exchange and longs for a woman who is only fresh richness,
sunny quiet, easy docility; the now vanished “ingénue” would be the type
of woman who most of all could entrance him.
In another case, it is the wife who becomes wearied, when the man can no
longer keep pace with her development nor afford her new inspiration.
The erotic life of the woman as well as of the man of genius exhibits
two phases: in one they are attracted by their opposite, in the other by
a congeniality of souls; in one phase they have sought sentiment,
intimacy, nature; in the other, soul, passion, culture. The order
changes in different cases, but the phenomenon repeats itself. What both
consciously or unconsciously desire of love is not another individuality
to love but only a means of inspiration.
Yet one thing may be emphasised: the richer the nature of a woman is and
the greater her talents, the more life-determining love will be for her;
at one time making her existence desolate, at another time making it
fruitful. For the woman of genius is less able than the man to renounce
her own fate. This the man is capable of doing, in the midst of passion,
without his work suffering thereby in vigour and strength; the woman on
the contrary—even the genius—loses more easily her creative impulse in
happiness, her creative power in unhappiness.
In this connection it may be recalled that many of the most gifted, most
highly developed woman personalities of to-day have produced nothing,
but have been what a Frenchman has called “les grandes inspiratrices.”
These have not, indeed, like the “Ladies” of the Middle Ages, been
worshipped at a distance by knights and poets; but they have had an
influence similar to that of Beatrice, through the power of
communication of their rich personality in a relationship which had now
the character of an “amitié amoureuse,” now that of a love imbued with
sympathy, which in some cases, infrequently however, led to marriage. I
need only mention the name Richard Wagner for the forms of two such
women to appear, one of whom, who was his wife, surpassed in personal
greatness all independently creative women of her time. But there have
always been less unusual women who had significance as propagandists of
the ideas of a great man through their specifically feminine gifts of
convincing, of diffusing ideas, of modifying views, etc. If the future,
because of the wife’s zeal for production on her own part, should lose
this element of culture, it would be deplorable.
One of the favourite arguments of the woman movement has been that two
married people working in the same profession had the best opportunities
for understanding each other and consequently also for being happy. And
truly they can best talk shop with each other. But that is what the
working man needs least of all in his home; there he seeks rather
relaxation from his calling, or at least a quite disinterested,
immediate sympathy with its annoyances or joys. When one of the married
fellow-workmen needs exactly this sympathy, the other is perhaps busy or
too tired to be capable of such lively interest as the other expects. Or
one has experienced disappointments, the other joys, and then a real
sympathy is still more difficult. To these crossings of mood is added
also the unintentional, involuntary competition, which the similarity of
vocation brings with it. The wife gains patients, the husband does not;
his picture is praised, hers is pulled to pieces; she comes home from
the theatre victorious, he after a defeat. During work, the criticism of
one often disturbs the other; after the work, the criticism of the press
disturbs the harmony of both. Love wishes to fuse them into one being,
the outer world compels them always to feel themselves separate. In the
beginning they think: “Nothing can come between us.” But if both do not
possess a rare tenderness as well as rare fineness of soul, soon needles
of ice fly through the air between them. Only when the wife, as is the
case so often in France, puts her ability into her husband’s affairs
does this common interest prevent rivalry.
Whether the province of the husband and wife is the same or not,
difficulty always results from the wife’s commercial or professional
work in that she rarely finds a good substitute for the domestic and
maternal duties. And when the husband sees the house badly managed and
the children ill-bred, he tries according to his strength to render
assistance or, as more frequently happens, seeks his comfort outside the
home. But even if these stumbling-blocks may be cleared away by other
feminine hands, the fact still remains that the wife because of her work
must demand sacrifices on the part of the man such as his work has
required at all times from the wife. She is often compelled to forego
much of the society of her husband, of his solicitude and tenderness
because he has no available time. Now each of the married people has
consideration for the leisure of the other and for all other severe
conditions of the work. But beside these favourable results stands also
the detrimental fact that each suppresses his claims upon the sympathy
of the other, as well as the wish to express his own, whenever this
receiving and giving would interfere with the work. If this has become
for one or for both a real passion, then the passion blinds him to
everything that does not concern the work, and causes alternately joy or
suffering. Each of the married couple then disturbs the other by moods,
and each needs to be cherished by the other. The tenderness which
neither can give to the other, they find perhaps in a third.
But in those cases where the work is not passionately absorbing or where
both husband and wife are persons of understanding, rather than of
feeling, marriages of colleagues turn out well. Each has in the other an
intelligent, appreciative friend; the common work together is rich, and
neither gives nor requires more than the other is able to reciprocate.
The education of the wife makes her a good organiser in the home, which
is comfortable without the work’s suffering thereby. When this is not
too strenuous for either, but after the close of a reasonable working
time, the two meet spiritually free in the home, the duties of which
they often share—then the domestic life is happy and the work progresses
easily, as long as there are no children. When children arrive, then
there begins for the wife, even in such marriages, a life beyond her
strength.
But since nature, in the interest of the race, often makes opposites
attractive to each other, one may find a husband, full of feeling, who
loves children, united to a wife for whom science is the greatest value
of life, while she relegates feeling to a lower plane and considers
motherhood an animal function. In place of the tenderness and of the
children for which the husband longed, he has to participate in the
victories and defeats of a woman of science. Or we see a wife who
dreamed of an intimate life with her husband and who sacrificed her work
to it; but the life together was wrecked upon the husband’s artist
concentration, and the wife had to suffer under a twofold emptiness: the
lack of her work and the lack of happiness. Then one sees instances
where the wife retained her work because it was economically necessary
and because she hoped out of the richness of her young strength to be
able to fulfil all duties. And all this she was able to do except one
thing—to preserve under the excessive strain her beauty, her power of
charm, the elasticity of her nature. Perhaps she belonged to the very
highest among the new women who are so undivided, so proud, who think so
highly of themselves, of man, of love, that they are beyond a wholly
justified coquetry and rest blindly upon the uniting power of spiritual
congeniality. But the day comes perhaps when these strong and, in all
other respects, wise women have nothing other than freedom to give to
the man whose senses, whose fancy, need that charm which the wife no
longer possesses. In case, however, the man’s nature is not of those for
whom the silken threads of daily domestic comfort form the strong band,
but on the contrary is of the sort which needs renewal, then the very
absence of the wife, occasioned temporarily by the work, can keep the
relationship long fresh. This is upon the assumption that she
understands what some of these women do not understand: to give, but in
such a way that the man always longs for more; to remain sweetheart, not
only friend; to be able to jest, not only to talk seriously. The modern
wife of to-day, tested upon so many subjects, is often deeply mistaken
in regard to the _kind_ of “ministry” the man needs. The simple wisdom
of their grandmothers consisted in this: to give much and to require
nothing, always to subordinate themselves to the man with gentleness and
humility, never to assert themselves before him as a free,
self-determining personality. The wives of to-day, sacredly convinced of
the right and freedom of women, succeed better in asserting their
personality than in pleasing their husbands, and the quantity of their
demands is often more noteworthy than the quality of their gifts. That
many modern marriages turn out well shows that the adaptability of the
modern husband is beginning to be even as great as that of the wife in
former times!
The marriage is absolutely wrecked when the wife brings to it all the
new demands of woman, but the husband all the primeval instincts of his
sex. What in each sex relationship most intimately unites or most deeply
sunders is and remains the erotic depth of nature in each. And the
difference in this respect between the men and women of the present ever
more widely separates them, and this division becomes fatal to
innumerable individual lovers of to-day, as well as for the attitude of
the sexes toward marriage in general. The erotically symmetrical woman
views with hostility the dualism in the erotic nature of the modern man.
This dualism evinces itself, with innumerable nuances it is true, in
three typical ways: infinite erotic discussion, but inability to be
stirred by it either with the soul or with the senses; ability to love
only with the senses, not with the soul; and finally looking down upon
the senses and desiring “spiritual love” only. For the modern completely
developed woman the chattering vacuity, the animal instinct, the ascetic
spirituality, are equally repellent. And yet it happens that the rosy
mist of love can bring such a woman to a point where she creates for
herself an illusion out of one of the above mentioned types. Most
frequently this occurs in the case of the vigorous man who divines
nothing of the spiritual content of the woman whose outer appearance has
charmed him. The tragedy of the modern woman is then like that which
Hebbel has revealed in _Judith_, that the sex being in her is attracted
by the muscular masculinity, which her human personality hates as her
mortal enemy. For as a personality she admires in man only the spiritual
strength of the man. The man on his part regrets his mistake that he did
not choose a pretty amiable girl “of the old sort,” who would punctually
lay his table and willingly share his bed; a woman “into whose head
Ibsen had put no fancies,” who “had not allowed herself to be talked
into some folly by feminism.”
* * * * *
Among such “follies,” similar men, and many others as well, include the
demand advanced by the woman movement for the married woman’s property
right, as well as a specified income for the wife working in the home,
who however has to contribute from her property or her “remuneration” as
housekeeper to the common household—a corollary which is always
forgotten by the anti-feminist writers who assert that “the man becomes
a slave when he has to work for the whole, but the wife may retain
everything of hers.” (_Strindberg._)
The modern woman who before her marriage was independent, owing to her
work, abhors the thought of a request for money—this most painful moment
even in the happiest marriages—to so great a degree that this aversion
determines the wife in some cases to keep up her own work. If on the
contrary she has given this up, the consciousness of her earlier
independence makes her often so sensitive that she feels herself injured
by a protest however delicate in regard to the expenditure of money.
More than one man has regretted, in consequence of the unreasonable
demands of his wife, that he ever begged her to give up her own work.
There are women, on the other hand, who continue their work and thereby
only increase the incapability of a good-for-nothing man. In such cases,
it avails little that in many countries the law now allows the wife free
disposal of the income from her labour. Notwithstanding this, the
assertion is ridiculous that “if the man drinks up the money of his wife
it is with her consent,” and “it is therefore of no avail to alter the
law.” For it makes a significant difference in the relative position of
the man and wife whether the law gives him the _right_ to it, or whether
he takes it by force. But in this as in other cases, the woman movement
obviously cannot free women so long as they are impelled by unconscious
forces from within to actions and sacrifices at variance with their
conscious personality. The one thing which the woman movement has
already achieved and can continue to achieve, is that the undue
encroachment of the men ceases to have legal protection.
It is undeniable, on the other hand, that the unmarried woman’s personal
and economic independence fashions wives who in marriage show themselves
in a high degree egotistic, but who yet incessantly scold about man’s
egotism, wives who themselves exhibit very little devotion and fine
feeling, but place very great importance upon consideration. These wives
were the ones whom fifty years ago men called “graters.” But the lack of
amiability, which in certain women was usually due to childbirth, has
nevertheless in modern woman, at least during the freedom of her
girlhood, been unrestrained habit. Her firm—and just—decision not to be
“subservient” to her husband has resulted in, first, an armed peace,
later, a war, in which the wife’s work is one of the projectiles. “I
have my work, why should I stay here to be used up and tormented?” she
asks herself. And when such questions begin, there is usually but one
answer.
There is one decided advantage in giving to the woman the opportunity to
earn her living: she has again acquired thereby significance in the
home, while the generation of women, who neither co-operated
_productively_ in the home nor assumed all the duties of the mother,
were regarded by man with less respect than, on the one side, their
grandmothers who _produced_ all of the household requisites, on the
other side, their now independent self-supporting granddaughters. Only
when society _recompenses the vocation of mother_, can woman find in
this a full equivalent for self-supporting labour.
Another typical group of our time is formed by the numerous women for
whom no choice remains in regard to their work, since it is of a kind
that they must give up because of the removal to another place, or more
frequently because they find so much work in the new home that every
thought of anything further outside must cease. Those who think that
industry has made the work of the wife in the home to-day superfluous,
speak only of the _great cities_, and usually only of _opulent families
in the great cities_, where they are in a position to buy cheaper
everything that the labour of the wife could produce. But in the
country, among all classes, the mother must be the director of the work;
and in all country homes in moderate circumstances—as in countless poor
or not very well-to-do city families—the work of the mother is still
frequently indispensable, and in addition is more economical than her
earnings out of the house could be, especially since the developed
modern woman is usually capable of a more rational housekeeping than the
woman of earlier times.
But while the mothers of that time knew nothing except housework, those
of to-day have often, as unmarried and self-supporting women, enjoyed a
freedom of movement and opportunities of development which, now that
they are over-burdened with household cares, they may seriously miss.
The work of the mother is now still further increased by the difficulty
of getting servants—at least capable ones—and also by the demands of
luxury. The result of this again is that hospitality in the home
decreases, that the watchword of the time, “the windows of the house
wide open to the world, fresh air in the home, no creeping into the
chimney corner,” is so interpreted that warmth and intimacy vanish. Yes,
the overworked mother often herself insists that the family leave the
house and seek some place of recreation for the annual festivals, which
were once the children’s happiest and brightest recollections of home.
The fact that most modern women of culture devote themselves to some
branch of social work, often to several, contributes still further to
the over-exertion of the mother. Even when this occurs from pure
altruism, the motive cannot prevent such altruism from becoming
sometimes a disease of which one may die quite as surely as of other
diseases. This death is quite as immoral as any other resulting from
neglected hygiene. No one has the right to perish from altruism, except
when destruction is the _condition_ of his fulfilling his duty. But in
many cases the occasion is the widely ramified social activity of the
woman for whom the home now often falls short; not a result of altruism,
but a manifestation of that desire for power which once was satisfied in
the family. Or it may be a form of the hysteria characteristic of the
present time. In the sixteenth century, the hysterical were burned as
witches; now they “sacrifice” themselves to an activity which offers
them in reality the variety, the intoxication of publicity—in a word,
the life stimulus they need. But even sound, sincere, and conscientious
women are driven by the woman movement and by social work to assume
pseudo duties, for which the real duties are pushed aside. If instead of
instituting official inquiries among wives and mothers as to what they
can accomplish, one should direct the same questions to their husbands
and children, these would, if they dared be honest, testify that _they_
must pay the price for the altruistic activity.
Since the work of married women outside the home, the woman movement,
and the social work began, one seldom finds a wholly sound, joyous,
harmonious wife and mother. The constant complaint of the modern woman
is that she “never has time.” The minority who live a life of luxury,
wholly free from work, while the husband works feverishly to provide the
luxury which neither will forego, telephone away a quarter of the day
making appointments concerning the toilette, visits, and amusements,
which take up the remaining three quarters of the day. And others,
loaded down with household work or divided between this and work for
their livelihood, how shall they find time!
Least of all have they the time necessary for the countless little
tokens of tenderness which intensify all relationships between people. A
French mother who became a widow and brought up her children by means of
her own work received from her son, grown to a youth, the judgment:
“Thou hast never loved us.” Too late, it became clear to her that “it
requires time to love,” that it is not enough to feel love, and, looked
at as a whole, to act with love—no, love must be expressed. And for this
the harassed mother of to-day lacks time and quiet.
Formerly, it was only the husband and father who had no time; the wife
and mother had it and could thus preserve the warmth of the home. But
now?
There are now, it is true, many women with so few claims that they think
they have fulfilled the fourfold task. In reality, they have fulfilled
all their duties imperfectly, or eliminated one task for a time in order
to be able to accomplish the others. _No woman has ever been at the same
time all_ that a wife can be to her husband, a mother to her children, a
housewife to her house, a working woman to her work. In the last
capacity the difficulty of the married woman is still further increased
by the present competition, as also by the fact that the better a person
works the more work falls to her, so that an exact and reasonable
division of time between work and home is often rendered quite
impossible.
In addition to all these difficulties arising through actualities, there
are finally also those evoked by the “spirit of the time.” A wife has,
for example, decided to give up a vocation which she saw was not
compatible with her home. But she stills finds no rest. She is harassed
by the demand of the “spirit of the time” that a married woman should be
able to take care of the house as well as to accomplish outside personal
work. The husband, also influenced by the “spirit of the time,” thinks
the same or feels painfully the fact that his wife, for love of him, has
sacrificed the exercise of a talent, in which he perhaps has felt a
personal interest; the longing for the vocation awakens in her, and she
resumes her work, with the result that, if she has energetically
resisted the lassitude that comes with beginning motherhood, she and the
child must suffer later. Or she lives in a permanent state of
over-exertion which finally culminates in nervous conditions under which
the whole family must share her suffering. Had she been able to follow
in peace her instinct to strike deep root in the home soil and to
enlarge and enrich her being by the annual growth of ring after ring of
her production of love, then the essential values would have been
increased for all. Now, she is led astray by a biased opinion of the
time, which owes its effectiveness to the single fact that the
opinionated resolutely turn their back upon all facts.
Thanks to these ideas of the time propagated by certain feminists, we
see increasing numbers of women who perform their “social duty” as the
telegraph poles perform their function; while such duty could have been
fulfilled as the tree grows in a garden: blooming, fruit-bearing,
joyful, joy-bringing.
CHAPTER VII
THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MOTHERHOOD
Because it has increased the culture of woman and her feeling of
personal responsibility, the woman movement has had its influence, both
directly and indirectly, upon the postponement of the legal and
customary marriage age. Since young girls have exercised their brains as
much as the boys have, they are no longer so far in advance of the boys
in physical development. But when modern girls finish their studies they
are physically as well as psychically more universally developed than
their grandmothers were. They know much more of the difficulties and
realities of life, not least of the sexual life. And this knowledge has
instilled in them a reluctance to undertake too early the serious and
difficult task of motherhood. They have greater need of truth and
culture, and less tendency to erotic visionary dreaming than girls of
their age in the middle of the previous century; their desire for work
and their social feeling fix goals, and they work with all their might
to attain them. And because, as already explained, both sexes have for
each other a more many-sided attraction than the merely erotic, young
people are more careful, more choice, in their erotic decisions. The
finest young girls of to-day are penetrated by the Nietzschean idea,
that marriage is the combined will of two people to create a new being
greater than themselves. But their joy does _not_ consist in the fact
“that the man wills”; they are themselves “will,” and above all they
have the will to choose the right father for their children, not only
for their own sake but for the sake of the children.
If it be true that immediate, “blind,” erotic attraction is most
instinctively correct in choice, then the present comrade life of young
people and the increased clear-sightedness which it gives, as well as
the increasing erotic idealism of young girls, are not unconditionally
advantageous to the new race. The question is, however, still undecided.
Here it may only be emphasised that the young girl of to-day, in spite
of all intellectual development, is still won always by powerful
spiritual-sensual love, which the woman movement has too long considered
as a negligible quantity. Under the influence of the doctrine of
evolution, young girls begin to understand that their value as members
of society depends essentially upon their value for the propagation of
mankind; all the more they realise the duty of physical culture which
will enable them to fulfil this function better; they no longer consider
their erotic longing as impure and ugly but as pure and beautiful. It is
out of this soul condition that the different movements for the
protection of mothers and children, theoretically considered, have
proceeded. These are at present the most important “woman movements,”
although unrecognised by the older woman movement. And this older
movement has not yet recognised the fact that, because of present
marriage conditions, the degenerate, uneducated, decrepit, have greater
opportunity for propagating the race, both within and outside of
marriage, than the young, sound, pure-minded, and loving; that it can
therefore _be no sin_, from the point of view of the race, if the latter
become parents without marriage, nor should it be a subject of shame
from the social point of view. All women’s rights have little value,
until this one thing is attained: that a woman who through her
illegitimate motherhood has lost nothing of her personal worth, but on
the contrary has proved it, does not forfeit social esteem.
Our time can point to women who have been typical of the reform
tendencies of the century in this respect. Some of these women, if they
really accomplished the unprecedented task of “a child and a work,” have
drawn their strength for the task out of precisely the commonplace,
homely qualities and sterling virtues, contrary to which they believed
they were acting when they became mothers, driven by a power greater
than their _conscious_ personality. Others again became mothers with the
consent of their whole personality. They were clear that they thus made
use of the masculine rights and freedom which feminism first brought
home to women. And although many advocates of women’s rights refrain
from such consequences of their ideas, the women who in other respects
determine their conduct of life by their own free personal choice
recognise that this, their _real_ “emancipation,” is a fruit of the
woman movement.
In Europe, however, most women under thirty still dare to dream of
motherhood in a love marriage as the greatest happiness and the highest
duty of life.[5]
But, as direct and indirect result of the woman movement, the fact none
the less remains that there is found _among women an increasing
disinclination for maternity_, a reluctance which deprives mankind of
many superior mothers, while at the same time woman’s commercial work
for self-support in all classes increases her sterility or makes her
incapable of the suckling so vitally important for the children.
That the modern woman, because of individual fate or her own choice,
often remains unmarried is no danger in and for itself. This fact, as I
have emphasised above, is connected with a number of cultural and
material conditions, which sometime will be altered, and then woman’s
desire for marriage will again increase. The real danger has appeared
only since women have begun to strengthen the tendency to celibacy by
the amaternal theory, which now confuses the feminine brain and leads
the feminine instinct astray.
The woman movement in and with this influence upon maternity sinks to
the lowest point of the scale according to the criterion of worth
employed here: the elevation of the life of the individual and of the
race. In this we stand in our time before a twofold mystery, which lies
in the circumstance that not only women—women “with breasts made right
to suckle babes”—emphasise this stultifying influence, but that there
are men, each the son of a mother, who also propagate it. These men have
allowed themselves to be blinded by the false logic concerning women,
which declares that since rich mothers do not wish to fulfil the duties
of a mother and the poor cannot fulfil them, superior social
organisations must be created for that purpose; in other words,
instigated by a mere temporary unpleasant discrepancy, we will create a
new, a different order of things. But, if this obtained universally, it
would inflict incomparably greater injury upon mankind than do present
unhappy conditions.
Upon the whole, however, it is precisely as a result of this tendency
that the deepest hostility of men against feminism has developed. The
fact that the idea of evolution is now beginning to enter into the flesh
and blood of man also contributes its share to this feeling. Just as
formerly a man wished heirs for his personal and real estate and for his
name, he now desires inheritors of his being; he desires an eternal
life, which becomes a certainty only by means of parenthood, whereby the
individual as father or mother lives on physically and spiritually, in
body and soul, in his children and grandchildren down to the last of his
descendants. This conception has made the sex instinct again holy, as it
was for the pagans. This new reverence for their duty as beings of sex
now induces many young men to guard their sexual health and strength by
an asceticism the motive of which is the exact opposite of that which
determined the asceticism called forth by Christianity, the asceticism
which was fear of the sex instinct as impure and as a temptation to sin.
Now the innermost aim of young men’s creative desire is the higher
development of mankind. Love becomes for them the condition by which
they can most perfectly redeem their religious certainty of being part
of a great design, their religious longing for harmony with life’s
creative desire, with the infinite.
There are now men who work most zealously for the ennoblement of the
race—“eugenics,” as this effort is called in England—as well as for the
protection of mother and child—“puericulture,” as this endeavour is
called in France. There are men who write excellent works upon the
psychology of the child, and upon sexual instruction; men, who, in art
and poetry, give expression to the new veneration for the sanctity of
generation, for motherhood, for the child. The finest thing written
about the child as a cultural power is written by an American.[6]
Painting has now new devotional pictures of the Mother with her Child,
especially those conceived by a Frenchman and an Italian.[7] The most
beautiful representation of youth’s new desire for love is by a German
sculptor.[8] Likewise a German, Nietzsche, has the most profound
conception of parenthood and education as the means whereby humanity
will cross over the bridge of the men of to-day to the superman.
Only when all this is realised can one conceive what the feelings of
these new men must be when they meet those new women “who are no longer
willing to be slaves of the instinct for the propagation of the race;”
who see in motherhood “a loss of time from their work;” “an attack upon
their beauty;” an obstacle to the refined conduct of life;—a conduct of
life certain to debase woman’s worth as a child-bearing being, but to
elevate her to that exquisite, perfect product of culture, a “woman of
the world;” an obstacle also for woman as creator of other objective
cultural values. If a man with a father’s desires finds himself united
with such a woman, he finds himself in marriage quite as much a
prostitute as innumerable wives have felt themselves to be when they
were mere tools of a man’s desire. On the contrary the desire for the
elevation of mankind on the part of the new woman and the new man, is
evinced in the idea that not the quantity but the quality of the
children they give to humanity is most significant; that a land of fewer
but more perfect men is a higher culture ideal than the principle still
always maintained from the point of view of national competition, that
the inhabitants of a country must only be numerous however inferior they
may be.
To this wholly new evolutionary conception of life the amaternal women
oppose the following train of thought which greatly influences the
feeling and desire of women to-day[9]:
Culture now sets new duties for woman, more significant than exclusively
natural ones. The more the individual life increases in value, the more
the interest for the mere functions of sex declines, and with it also
the value of woman _as woman_ for a society where, because of
motherhood, she has become a being of secondary rank. It evinces lack of
ideality if one censures this tendency of the modern woman to renounce
maternity for the sake of more spiritual interests. While the mother
concentrates herself upon her own child only, the woman who renounces
motherhood can extend her being to embrace children as children in
general. As a mother, woman is only a being of nature. But the
personality, with its multiplicity of feelings and endeavours, demands
an independent activity as well as maternity.
To put her entire personality into the education of her children is a
twofold error. First and foremost, most mothers are _bad_ educators and
serve their children better if they entrust them to a born teacher; in
the second place, _gifted_ children educate themselves best and should
be spared all educational arts. The mediocre child, who is more
susceptible to education, has ordinarily also only mediocre parents, who
likewise benefit the children most if they put them in the care of
excellent teachers. Children who are _below_ mediocrity can also be best
educated by specialists. So there remains for the mother, after the
first years’ care and training, no especial task as educator, at least
none in which she can really put her personality. To talk to a mother
about the possibilities of a richer office of mother, as educator of her
children, she calls lulling her into an illusion under which she must
labour only to suffer. A woman who can exercise her personality in
another way should not therefore put it into the education of her
children.
The amaternal advocates deny that motherliness is the criterion of
womanliness; they find this criterion in the form, the external being of
woman, in her manner and physical appearance—in a word, in the _outer_
expression of the inner disposition, which they deny as typical of
womanliness! “Womanliness” is thus reduced to an “æsthetic principle,”
while woman’s spiritual attributes are considered as “universally
human”; and the right is granted to the feminine sex to emancipate
herself from the result of the heresy that _motherliness_ should be the
ethical norm for the “being” or “essence” of womanhood. The suitability
of woman’s _psychic_ constitution for her work as mother is not
acknowledged as proof that motherliness is the distinguishing
characteristic of womanliness. For this constitution is less conspicuous
in the higher stages of differentiation. Its suitability was then a
phenomenon of adaptation and changed with the conditions of life. Thus
this constitution cannot be cited as a reason for limiting woman’s
personal exercise of her powers. Motherliness is no social instinct. How
can motherliness, which we have in common with beasts and savages, be
considered as higher than, for example, justice, truth, and other
gradually won spiritual values, which woman can promote by her personal
activity? The higher the forms of life woman attains, the less will her
personality be determined by motherliness. Why then should women bring
to the domestic life the sacrifice of their personality, while no one
demands this of men? Why shall not woman, just as man, satisfy her
demands as a sex being in marriage and, as for the rest, follow her
profession, attend to her spiritual development, her social tasks? Why
condemn woman to remain a half-being—that is, with unexercised
brain—only because certain of her instincts attract her to man, while he
is not constrained to suppress his personality because he in like manner
felt himself attracted to woman? It is the old superstition of the
family life as “woman’s sphere,” which still confuses the conception. By
the present form of family life woman is “oversexed.” Her higher
development, as well as that of her husband and children, will be
promoted if woman guards her independence by earning her own living, in
commercial work conducted beyond the portal of the home; if housekeeping
becomes co-operative; if the education of the children is carried on
outside the home, in which now the motherly tenderness emasculates the
children and fosters in them family sentiment of an egoistic nature and
not social feelings. Thus are solved the difficulties which are entailed
when the wife’s work is carried on outside the home; equipoise between
her intellectual and emotional, her sexual and social nature follows,
and her worth, as that of a man, will be measured by her human
personality, not by her womanliness, her efficacy in the family, for the
exercise of which she is now constrained to renounce her personality.
So runs in brief the programme of the amaternals.
* * * * *
It has already been indicated that the woman movement, in its
_inception_, could gather strength only by combating with all its power
the prejudice that _woman is incapable of the same kind of activity as
man_. But now the whole woman movement has for a long time been
emphasising the fact that woman is entitled, not only on her own behalf
but more especially in her capacity as home-keeper, wife, and mother, to
the full development of her powers and to equality with man in the
family and in society. In the amaternal programme sketched above,
however, the fanaticism, which characterised the entire woman movement a
generation ago, now evinces itself in the error that _equal rights_ for
the sexes must mean also _equal functions_; that the development of
women’s powers involves also their application in the same spheres of
activity in which man is engaged; that _equality_ of the sexes implies
_sameness_ of the sexes. While moderate feminism begins to see that, if
man and wife compete, this rivalry can benefit[10] neither the woman,
the man, nor the children, amaternal feminism urges the keenest
competition. And if this is once accepted as advantageous to woman’s
personality and to society, then it is obvious that she must, with all
the energy of the attacked, defend herself from the duties of maternity,
because of which she would obviously come off second-best in the
competition.
From the point of view of individualism it is obvious that the _law_
must set no limitations to woman’s practice of a vocation, unless
evident hygienic dangers menace either her or the coming generation.
Women must, for their own sake as well as for that of society, have free
_choice of work_, for life and nature possess innumerable unforeseen
possibilities. Nevertheless, it does happen that a woman who gives
superior children to humanity may, nevertheless, feel herself incapable
of educating them; likewise it sometimes happens that a husband and wife
who have exceptional children, cannot endure to live together. In
neither case has law or custom a right to force upon a mother or a
father a yoke that is intolerable or to demand of a mother or a father
unreasonable sacrifices.
But the right to limit the choice of work, the law does not possess;
nature assumes that right herself: first of all from the axiom that no
one can be in two places at the same time, and in the second place
because no one can respond simultaneously and with full energy to two
different spiritual activities. One cannot, for example, count even to
one hundred and at a certain number give a simple grasp of the hand
without suspending the counting momentarily. Although no one has ever
been denied the privilege of solving a mathematical problem and of
following carefully at the same time a piece of music, yet it is certain
that the effectiveness of both intellectual activities would be thereby
diminished. These extremely simple observations can be continued until
the most complex are reached. If the observation be directed to the
sphere of domestic life, every wife and mother who _is willing to
institute impartial observations of self_, will affirm the difficulty of
working with a divided mind.
If a mother carries on her work at home and must put it away in order to
be beside the sick-bed of her child, or to make those arrangements which
assure domestic comfort, or to help her husband, then she feels that her
book or her picture suffers, that the activity which binds her more
intimately to the home relaxes for a time the intimacy of her connection
with her work. One can by day carry on a dull industrial task, and by
night produce an achievement of the soul; but one cannot let one’s soul
radiate in one direction without impairing its energy in another. A work
needs exclusive devotion. And this is, viewed externally, difficult to
attain in joint action; viewed from within, it requires a renunciation
that in the case of a loving soul evokes a continual inner struggle. For
that reason, also, literature with woman as its subject has for some
decades been filled with the great conflict of modern woman’s life: the
conflict between vocation and parents, between vocation and husband,
between vocation and child. Certainly the family has often been a
torture chamber for individuality, as a consequence of laws and customs,
which the future will regard as we now do the rack and the thumbscrew.
But nature is more severe than law and custom when she confronts us with
a choice which, however it may turn out, tears a piece from our heart.
And now neither custom nor man demands of woman the “sacrifice of the
personality.” This sacrifice is required only by the law of limitations
which rules over us all.
The creative man or the man working objectively must often condemn the
emotional side of his personality to a partial development; he must for
the sake of his work renounce many family values important for this
emotional side of his being. Even if shorter working hours could
partially diminish this cultural offering, the _inner_ conflict, for the
man or the woman, is not settled thereby.
Even if a man, in the consciousness of his wife’s endowment of talent,
assumed a number of domestic duties, especially those pertaining to the
children, the inner conflict would still continue. And this conflict is
in no way solved by the amaternal theory that the personal life must be
placed above the instinct life. For, as has been emphasised, the choice
is not between the personal and the instinct life, but between the
intellectual and the emotional side of woman’s personality. And the
solution of this choice has not been discovered by the amaternals, who
would combine commercial work with marriage and maternity. Women who
remain unmarried or who give up commercial activity which they cannot
carry on in the home, have not _settled the conflict_ either, but have
only reduced its difficulties.
The fundamental error of the amaternal solution of the problem is that
it characterises motherliness as a _non-social_ instinct, but, on the
other hand, defines the “personal” activity of woman as an expression of
the social instinct. _For all social instincts have been developed by
culture out of primitive instincts._ All cultural development lies
between the sex impulse of the Australian negress and the erotic
sentiment of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets. And when the
amaternals assert that motherliness, which “we have in common with
beasts and savages,” cannot be an expression of the personality, their
argument has the same validity as that which would deny to the Sistine
Chapel the quality of an expression of personality because beasts and
savages also exhibit the decorative instinct.
The development of the mother instinct into motherliness is one of the
greatest achievements in the progress of culture, a development by which
the maternal functions have continually become more complex and
differentiated. Already in the case of the higher animals maternity
involves much more than the mere act of giving birth; an animal not only
faces death for her young, she gives them also a training which often
indicates power of judgment. A cat, for instance, which sought in vain
to prevent her kitten from entering the water and which finally threw
the kitten in and then pulled it out, thus obtaining the desired result
of her pedagogy, had not, as have so many modern mothers, read Spencer,
but could, nevertheless, put many of these mothers to shame. Even the
initial maternal functions, nursing and physical care, involve a culture
of the spiritual life of the mother, not only through an increase in
tenderness, but also in observation, discrimination, judgment,
self-control; a woman’s character often develops more in a month during
which she is occupied with the care of children, than in years of
professional work. Mother love and the reciprocal love which it awakens
in the child, not only exercise the first deep influence upon the
individual’s life of feeling, but this love is _the first form of the
law of mutual help—it is the root of altruism, the cotyledon_ of a now
widely ramified tree of “social instincts.”
Although woman through the mere _physical_ functions of motherhood makes
a great social contribution, the importance of her contribution is
greatly enhanced if one also takes into consideration her _spiritual_
nature. And notwithstanding the fact that fatherhood has also, to a
certain degree, developed in man the qualities of tenderness,
watchfulness, patience, yet the enormous predominance of woman’s
_physical_ share in parenthood, in comparison with man’s, is in itself
enough to create, in course of time, the intimate connection which still
exists to-day between mother and child, as well as the difference
between the personality of woman and man. The physical functions of
motherhood were the fundamental reasons for the earliest division of
labour. And this division of labour, the aim of which, next to
self-preservation, was for both sexes the protection of posterity,
augmented and strengthened the qualities which each sex employed for its
special functions. All human qualities lie latent in each. But they have
been so specialised by this division of labour, or, on the other hand,
suppressed by it, that they now appear in varying proportions: in woman,
a careful, managing, supervising, lifeguarding, inward-directed sense of
love; in man, courage, desire for action, force of will, power of
thought, an activity subduing nature and life, became the distinguishing
characteristics; and fatherhood became psychologically, as it is
physiologically, something different from motherhood. Even if culture
continues to efface the sharp lines of demarcation, so that it becomes
more and more impossible to generalise about “woman” and “man,” and
increasingly more necessary for each and every woman to solve the “woman
question” individually, yet from the point of view of the race, the
_division of labour must on the whole remain the same as that which
hitherto existed_, if the higher development of mankind shall continue
in uninterrupted advance to more perfect forms. It is necessary for
_these higher ends of culture_ that woman _in an ever more perfect
manner shall fulfil what has hitherto been her most exalted task_: the
bearing and rearing of the new generation.
The amaternal assertion, that motherliness can be no higher than justice
and truth, is an infuriating antithesis. It is as if one should assert
that “air is better than water, or both better than bread.” Both
assertions place the fundamental condition of life counter to other
needs of life! Who shall exercise justice and truth when no new men are
born? And, moreover, how shall justice and truth increase in mankind if
children are not trained to a greater reverence for justice and a deeper
love of truth? In order to fulfil this one office _of education_ well,
mothers need their _universal human culture in its entirety_. But even
if this were not so, if motherhood did not require the concentration of
woman’s personality; even if motherliness remained only “primitive
instinct,” yet this instinct, in the women who have guarded it, is more
valuable for mankind than the universal human development of power of
the women who have lost this instinct. No social nor individual activity
of women could compensate for the extinction of this “instinct,” which
only recently in Messina drove hundreds of mothers to shield their
children with their own bodies; this “instinct,” which recently impelled
a mother, who learned before she gave birth to her child that her own
life must be the price for the saving of that of the child, to cry: “I
have lived, but the life of my child belongs now to mankind—save the
child!” So the mother died without even having seen the beautiful being
for whom she gave her life. In the world of “personally” developed
women, however, after a new Messina catastrophe the mothers would be
found with their manuscripts and their pictures in their arms. And
confronted with a choice like that related above, the mother would
answer: “Let the child die, I will live my personal life to the end.”
The amaternal type must persist for the present. There are in reality in
our time many women who with unresponsive eyes can pass by a lovely
child, among them even mothers who do not feel the pure sensuousness,
the wise madness, the intoxicating delight which such a child awakens in
every motherly woman; mothers who have no conception what a fascinating
subject for study the soul of a child can offer. Jean Paul, who scourged
worthless mothers and tried to awaken the repressed maternal instinct of
his time with the charge that a woman who is bored when she has
children, is a contemptible creature, would find to-day many mothers who
are bored only if they have their children about them.
And these cerebral, amaternal women must obviously be accorded the
freedom of finding the domestic life, with its limited but intensive
exercise of power meagre, beside the feeling of power which they enjoy
as public personalities, as consummate women of the world, as talented
professionals. But they have not the right to _falsify life values_ in
their own favour so that they themselves shall represent the highest
form of life, the “human personality” in comparison with which the
“instinctively feminine” signifies a lower stage of development, a
poorer type of life.
Women who have produced books and works of art, to be compared, as
respects permanence of value, to confetti at a carnival, have, according
to this viewpoint, proved themselves human individualities, while a
mother who has contributed an endless amount of clear thought, rich
understanding, warm feeling, and strong will to the education of a fine
group of children, requires a public office in order to prove herself a
“human personality”! The brain work which a woman employs in a
commercial concern bears witness to her individuality, but the brain
work which a large, well-managed household demands, does not. The woman
physician who delivers a mother expresses her “personality,” but the
mother has put no “personality” into the feelings with which she has
borne the child, the dreams with which she has consecrated it, the ideas
in accordance with which she has educated it! The girl who has passed
her examinations has proved herself a developed human being; but her
grandmother, who is now filled with the kindness and wisdom which she
has won in a life dedicated to domestic duties, a life in which the
restricted sphere of her duties did not prevent the comprehensiveness of
her cultural interests, nor her all-embracing sympathy with
humanity—such a woman is not a personality!
When men advance as an argument against women’s rights the fear that
women will lose their womanliness in public life, the older feminists
answer that womanliness, especially motherliness, is rooted too firmly
in nature to make it possible for this danger to exist. Nothing has,
however, become more clear in this amaternalistic time than that
motherliness is _not_ an indestructible instinct. Just as our time
produces in increasing numbers sterile women and women incapable of
nursing their children, so it produces more and more psychically
amaternal women. We can pass in silence the cases of children martyred
in families or in children’s homes, for sexual perversity and religious
fanaticism often play a rôle in such connections; we can also pass by
the millions of mothers who bring about the abortion of their offspring,
for the poor are driven to such practices largely by necessity, the rich
mostly by love of pleasure. There still remain a sufficient number of
women in whom the mother instinct has faded away because of a course of
thought like that just described. Our time furnishes manifold proofs of
the fact that the mother instinct can easily be weakened, or even
entirely disappear, although the erotic impulse continues to live; that
motherliness is not a spontaneous natural instinct, but the product of
thousands of years not merely of _child-bearing_, but also of
_child-rearing_; and that it must be strengthened in each new generation
by the personal care which mothers bestow upon their children. A woman
learns to love the strange child whom she nurses as if it were her own;
a father who can devote himself to the care of his little children is
possessed by an almost “motherly tenderness” for them, as are also older
brothers and sisters for the little ones whom they care for. But while
those who advocate the cause of the amaternal women draw from such facts
the conclusion that motherliness cannot be used as a criterion of
womanliness, yet an entirely different conclusion forces itself upon
everyone who sees in the united uplift of the individual and of mankind
the criterion of the life-enhancing effect of the woman movement, the
conclusion that the amaternal soul not only confirms the worst
apprehensions of men in regard to the results of the woman movement, but
also constitutes the greatest danger to the woman movement itself. For
the amaternal ideas will evoke a violent reaction _on the part of men_,
in case such a reaction does not appear at an early stage on the part of
women.
This latter reaction might also include a rebellion against the methods
of industrial production, which exhaust the strength of mothers and
children. For the objection of industrialism, that “it cannot exist
without women,” falls to the ground in face of the fact that a race
cannot exist without sound and moral mothers. And “moral” means, here,
mothers capable and willing to bear sound children and to train children
along moral lines. If, on the contrary, Europe and America adhere to the
economic and ethical principles which prevent a number of able and
willing women of this type from becoming mothers, and if numbers of
other women who could be mothers continue unwilling to assume the burden
of motherhood, then this problem will finally become the problem of _a
future for the European-American people_.
The woman movement must now with resolute determination abandon the
narrow, biased attitude, psychologically natural a generation ago when
the zealots of feminism had no other standard of value for an idea, an
investigation, or a book, than whether they _advanced or did not
advance_ the cause of woman; whether they _proved or did not prove_
woman’s equality with man. For woman’s work, studies, and other
accomplishments, no other standard was applied than that of equality
with man’s work, man’s studies, and the accomplishments of man. In a
word, the proposition was that woman should be enabled to perform at the
same time the life-work of a woman and of a man!
It is through these hybrids that the feminine sex transgresses against
the masculine. And this is one reason why our time is so filled with the
tragic vicissitudes of women. Truly, every progressive person must agree
with Goethe’s aphorism, “I love him whom the impossible lures.” For,
thus allured, man has elevated his particular generation above the
generation preceding. But _in action_ every one must go down who is not
imbued with the consciousness that whoever exceeds his limits is liable
to tragic consequences, in the modern psychological view of the guilt
attaching to one who undertakes more than his strength will allow.
* * * * *
But our time exhibits also other less convulsively strained conditions
of the feminine soul and therefore also brighter fates for woman. It
shows not infrequently wives united with their husbands, not only by the
sympathy which the human personality of each inspires, but also by the
erotic attraction which the sex character of each exercises. And they
have both won thereby that unity through which all the best and highest
powers of their being are liberated and elevated as by religion. And
their parenthood will then be the highest expression of this religion.
Only religious natures are—in the deepest meaning of the word—loving or
faithful or creative. It is the same soul which in one person reveals
itself in ecstasy of belief, in a second in ardour of creation, in a
third in a great erotic passion, in the fourth as parental love, in
others again as love of country, as enthusiasm for freedom, desire for
reform. At times one and the same soul, a woman’s or a man’s, is kindled
by all these passions. But never has the same soul been able _at the
same time_ to feed all these passions in their highest potency. Whether
it be God, a work, or a human being that the soul embraces with its
entire devotion, the religious character of this devotion always evinces
itself in increasing longing, an endless susceptibility, a more
persistent search after means of expression, a continual service, an
inexhaustible patience in waiting for reciprocal activity from the
object of love. The religious strength of a feeling consists in this,
that the soul in every work, every sorrow, every joy,—in a word, in
every spiritual condition, every experience,—is, consciously as well as
unconsciously, more closely united with God, with the work, with the
beloved, until every finest fibre of one’s being reaches down to the
profound depths which the object of love represents for the lover.
In this necessary condition of concentration of the spiritual life is
found the truth of woman’s complaint that the man, absorbed by his work,
“no longer loves her”; the truth of the experience that earthly love
indisputably detracts from the love of God; the truth of the frequent
experience of husband and wife that with children the wealth of their
spiritual life together is in certain respects inevitably diminished;
the truth of man’s fear that woman’s absorption in a life-work
personally dear to her must to a certain degree detract from her
devotion to the home; the truth of the experience that the office of
mother often interferes with the development of woman’s intellectual
power.
Only persons who distinguish themselves by what Heine called “exuberance
of mental poverty,” or what I might call analogously an “abyss of
superficiality,” have not experienced the severe and beautiful psychic
truth of Jesus’ glorification of _simplicity_. The quiet harkening to
the voice of God or to the inspiration of work or to the delicate
vibrations of another soul, which daily, hourly, momentarily, are the
conditions that enable the soul to live wholly in its belief, its work,
its love, so that these feelings may grow stronger and the soul grow
greater through these feelings—all this has “simplicity” as a condition;
in a word, symmetrical unity, longing for completeness, inner poise, the
swift emotion. Fidelity—to a belief, a work, a love—is no product of
duty. It is a process of growth.
These are the conditions to which many modern women, womanly at heart
but divided, restless, groping, attempting much, will not submit. They
could even learn to reverence these conditions in the child for whom
play is such sacred seriousness; but instead they transform the most
sacred earnest into play.
Other women, on the contrary, are beginning to understand these
conditions of growth and to comprehend that it was exactly the protected
position of woman in the home, which has made it possible for her family
feeling to acquire that depth which is to be attained only by
concentration. But if this is no longer possible, then woman will love
those that belong to her with less religious warmth. Nothing can better
illustrate the difference still existing between man and woman in this
respect, than the fact that most men would consider themselves
unfortunate if their entire exercise of power were concentrated upon the
family, while most women still feel themselves fortunate when they have
been given the opportunity to exercise to the uttermost the tendency
inherent in them. For most women love best _personally_ and _in
propinquity_, while the potency of love in man often seeks distant
goals. Woman is happy in the degree to which she can bestow her love
upon a person closely connected with her; if she cannot do that, then
she may be useful, resigned, content, but never happy.[11] The very fact
that woman’s strongest _primitive instinct_ coincided with her
_greatest_ cultural _office_ has been an essential factor in the harmony
of her being.
The modern developed mother feels with every breath a grateful joy in
that she lives the most perfect life when she can contribute her
developed human powers, her liberated human personality, to the
establishment of a home and to the vocation of motherhood. These
functions conceived and understood as social, in the embracing sense in
which the word is now used, give the new mother a richer opportunity to
exercise her entire personality than she could find in modern commercial
work. In one such occupation she must suppress either the intellectual
or the emotional side of her nature; in another, the life either of the
imagination or of the will. In domestic duties, on the contrary, these
powers of the soul can work in unison. This is undoubtedly the deepest
reason why, taken as a whole, women have become more harmonious, and men
stronger in any special crisis, women more soulful, men more gifted. On
this account men offer their great sacrifice more readily for an idea,
or for the accomplishment of a work; women, for persons closely
connected with them. And yet this co-operation of woman’s spiritual
powers was in earlier times partly repressed by man’s demand for
passivity on the part of woman as a thinking and willing personality,
but for her unceasing activity as promoter of his comfort and that of
the entire home. The mother of to-day can, on the contrary, exercise, as
distributer, her culture, her thought, her supervision, her judgment,
and her criticism, in order to make fully effective the faculty of her
sex for foresight and organisation. She applies a great amount of
spiritual energy to the selection of the essentials and the
subordination of secondary things, to the creation of such facilities in
the material work that time and means are left for the spiritual values,
which, alas, are still neglected in the domestic economy of small,
private households, as well as in national housekeeping. And as mother,
modern woman is offered the first fitting opportunity to assert herself
as a thinking and willing personality.
The significance of the vocation of mother has been underrated in its
significance even by moderate feminists. But these were right when they
demonstrated that the “sanctity” of this office had become a mere
phrase, so badly or amateurishly was this vocation fulfilled—an
indictment in which Nietzsche and feminism for one rare moment are on
common ground. Mothers needed the spur of this contempt; it was
necessary that their feeling of responsibility, their universal human
culture, their personal self-reliance, should be aroused by the woman
movement. Only so could the new generation acquire the new type of women
who for the present seek to qualify themselves by self-culture for the
office of mother, in the expectation that for all women an obligatory
education for motherhood will be realised. So long as this vocation
_can_ be practised without any training, nothing can be known of the
possibilities whereby ordinary mothers may become good educators—unless
they place the mother love and the intuitive understanding of the nature
of the child that it affords above even the best outside teachers. Just
as a glorious voice makes a country girl a “natural singer,” so nature
has at all times made certain mothers—and not least the women of the
people—natural educators of children.
The biography of nearly every great man shows the place the mother
through her personality occupied in the life of her son, the atmosphere
which she diffused about her in the home, her direct and indirect
influence. But only the culture of their natural gifts with conscious
purpose will make of mothers artists.
When Nietzsche wrote: “_There will come a time when we shall have no
other thought than education_,” and when he placed this education
specifically in the hands of mothers, least of all did he mean those
“arts of education,” from which amaternals believe they “guard” children
by rejecting an “artistically creative” home training by the mother, as
a violence to the peculiar characteristic of the child!
The _new mother_, as the doctrine of evolution and the true woman
movement have created her, stands with deep veneration before the mystic
depths she calls her child, a being in whom the whole life of mankind is
garnered. The richer the nature of the child is, the more zealously she
endeavours to preserve for him that simplicity which he needs, and at
the same time to provide for him the material that will enable him to
work for himself. She insures to the child the pleasures adapted to his
age, pleasures which at no later time can be enjoyed so intensely. The
effect upon him of his playfellows and books, of nature, art, music,
conversation, of the entire home _milieu_ which the child receives,
above all the influence of the personality and interests of the father
and mother—all these the mother who is an artist in education observes
in order to learn the natural proclivity of the child and then _directly
to strengthen and encourage_ it. At the same time she endeavours to find
out what _restraints_ are necessary _in order that the natural bent be
not impeded in its growth by secondary qualities_. But the new type of
mother does not seek to _eradicate_; she recognises the likeness between
wheat and tares. The Christian education, which has thus far prevailed,
has exercised a restraining oppression or has done violence to the
“sinful nature,” which must be broken and bent; this education was
dermatological, not psychological, in method.
The new mother is especially characterised by the fact that she has
rejected this earlier method. She allows her child, within certain
bounds, full freedom, and demands, beyond those bounds, unconditional
obedience. She helps the child to find for himself ever nobler motives
for repression. This she can do because from the very beginning she has
taken care of him; year by year she has persevered in the effort to
establish good habits; she has tried to enlist as aids, food, bath, bed,
dress, air, and play in the effort to keep him strong, sound, sexually
pure—conditions fundamental to the whole later conduct of life. Such a
methodical physical care _can_ be performed by the mother herself,
while, on the other hand, in the first years of childhood paid hands
might, through carelessness, stupidity, cruelty, laxity, or
over-indulgence, destroy the glorious possibilities. If the prevention
of _the possibilities of nature being warped or destroyed_ constituted
all that a mother could give, this one task would, nevertheless, be more
important than any social relief work.
What characterises the new mother is that she understands the enormous
significance of the _first years_, when the indispensable “training”
takes place, in which the future life of the child is determined by the
methods employed—whether they be those of torture or of culture,
irrational or rational. Then the great problem must be solved of
establishing willing obedience from within in place of the hitherto
_enforced_ obedience from without; of maintaining self-control, won by
self, in place of self-control _imposed_ from without; of evoking
voluntary renunciation in place of enforcing renunciation. For the
capacity for obedience, for self-control, for renunciation, is one of
the qualities fundamental to the whole later conduct of life. The new
mother knows this as well as the mother of former times. But she
endeavours to create this capacity by slow and sure means. The same
thing obtains in regard to physical and psychical courage, which in the
early years can often be so demoralised by fright that it can never
emerge again. The training which hitherto was customary—based on
_compelling_ and _forbidding_—had its effect only upon the surface and
_prevented_ the child from experiencing _the results of his own choice_.
It is this _indirect_ education by results which is the new mother’s
method. Her unceasing vigilance and consistency are required in order
that the child shall actually bear the results of his actions. What she
needs for this is first and foremost, _time, time_, and again _time_.
Apparently good effects can be obtained much quicker by intervening,
preventing, punishing, but thus are turned aside the _real_ results. By
this method the child is deprived of the _inner_ growth, which only the
fully experienced reality with its components of bitter and sweet can
give; and this growth the new mother endeavours to advance. Much more
time still is necessary to play the psychological game of chess, which
consists in the checkmating of black by white; in other words, the
conquest of negative characteristics by positive, through the child’s
own activity—a task in which the child at first must be guided, just as
in the assimilation of the elements of every other accomplishment, but
in which he can later perfect himself. Modern investigation in the realm
of the soul enables us to see the dangers which sometime will demand
quite as new methods in spiritual hygiene as bacteriology has created in
the hygiene of the body. But we still leave unexercised powers of the
soul, still misunderstand spiritual laws which sometime will radically
transform the means of education. At some future day the new mothers
will institute legal protection for children to an extent
incomprehensible to us and therefore provocative only of smiles. For
example, legal prohibition of corporal punishment by parents as well as
teachers; legal prohibition of child labour, of certain tenement
conditions, certain “amusements,” certain improper uses of the press.
For the present every individual educator must _set these laws over
himself_; must sedulously create counter influences to cope with the
destructive influences which great cities, especially, exert upon
children.[12] The new mothers lead children out into nature and
endeavour to satisfy their zeal for activity by appropriate tasks as
well as to encourage by suitable means their love of invention and their
impulse for play. In the country children provide much for themselves.
But what both city and country children need is a mother familiar with
nature, who can answer the questions which the child is by his own
observations prompted to ask; and the number of such mothers is
continually increasing. Both city and country children need also a
mother who can tell stories. Just as the settlement gardens most clearly
demonstrate how sundered the working people of the great cities are from
nature, so the “story evenings,” which are now established for children,
show how far children have been permitted to stray from the mother, who
formerly gathered them about her for the hour of story, play, and song.
What, finally, children need is the mother’s delicate revelation of the
sexual “mystery,” which often early exercises the thoughts of the child
and in which he should be initiated quietly and gradually by the mother.
All the educational influences here outlined emanate not only from the
enlightened, exceptional mother; they are exercised by the average
mother of to-day to better advantage than by the spiritually significant
mother of fifty years ago. And they are _quite as essential_, in order
that the highest possibility within the reach of each may be attained,
in the education of the genius as in that of the ordinary child. Such
influences in like degree strengthen the innate bent of the genius and
raise the average, from generation to generation, to a level where man
can live according to higher standards than those of the present time.
The new mothers understand that for the utilisation of all these
opportunities that make their appearance in the first seven years of the
child’s life, their motherly tenderness, gentleness, and patience do not
suffice; that they need in addition all the intelligence, imagination,
fine feeling, scientific methods of observation, ethical and æsthetic
culture and other spiritual acquisitions they possess, as direct and
indirect fruits of the woman movement.
When student and comrade life begin to claim the children, when the
influence of the mother—that is of the new mother who has respect for
the peculiar characteristic, the human worth, and the right of the child
to live his own life—becomes more indirect, she nevertheless bears in
mind that it is of the utmost importance that the son and the daughter
should _find the mother_, when they return to the parental roof; that
they should be able to breathe there an atmosphere of peace and warmth;
that they should find the attentive eye, the listening ear, the helpful
hand; that the mother should have the repose, the fine feeling, the
observation requisite for following, without interfering with, the
conflicts of youth; that she should not demand confidences but be always
at hand to receive them; that she should show vital sympathy for the
plans of work, the disappointments, the joys, of the young people; that
she should always have time for caresses, tears, smiles, comfort, and
care; that she should divine their moods, and anticipate their desires.
By all these means the mother perpetuates in the soul of the child,
unknown to him and to herself, her own personality. The talent which she
has not redeemed by a productive work of her own, perhaps often for that
very reason, benefits mankind in a son or a daughter, in whose soul the
mother has implanted the social ideas, the dreams, the rebellion, which
later become in them social deeds or works of art. Above all, in the
restless, sensitive, life-deciding years when the boy is becoming a
youth and the little girl a maiden, the mother needs quiet and leisure
to be able to give the ineffably needy children “the hoarded, secret
treasure of her heart,” as the beautiful saying of Dürer runs.
When such a mother is found, and such mothers are already found, she is
the most splendid fruit of the woman movement’s sowing upon the field of
woman’s nature.
Because the new mother created for herself an open space about her own
personality, she understands her son or her daughter when they in their
turn push her aside in order to create that same open space about
themselves. For in every generation the young renounce the ideals and
the aims of their parents. The knowledge of this does not prevent the
new mother, any more than it did the mother of earlier times, from
feeling the pain incident to being set aside. But the former looks
forward to a day when the son and daughter will freely choose her as a
friend, having discovered what a significant pleasure the mother’s
personality can afford them.
As the bird’s nest is made of nothing but bits of straw and down, so the
feeling of home is fashioned out of soft, simple things; out of little
activities that are neither ponderable nor measurable as political or as
economic factors. When Segantini painted the two nuns looking wistfully
into the bird’s nest, he gave expression to the deepest pain that many
modern women experience, the pain resulting from the consciousness that
their life, notwithstanding its freedom, is lonely, because it has
denied them the privilege of making a home and as a consequence has
failed to afford them the joy of creation, which nature intended they
should have, and of continuity of life in children to whom they gave
birth.
Here we stand at a point where the woman movement parallels the other
social revolutions, undeviatingly as the rails of a track, and leads to
the same objective. Modern men and women, and especially women, have
forfeited an opportunity for happiness in the loss of the feeling of
homogeneity and security. Just as formerly the property-holding family
felt a secure sense of proprietorship in the ancestral estate, so every
member of the home group felt himself safe in the family. Now the
children cannot depend with certainty upon the parents, nor the parents
upon the children; the wife upon the husband, nor the husband upon the
wife. Each in extremity relies only upon himself. The character of man
is thus altered quite as much as trees are changed when they are left
standing alone in the denuded forest of which they once formed a part.
If they can withstand the storms, they have produced more “character”
than they had when they stood close together, under a mutual protection
that nevertheless enforced uniformity.
From their earliest youth innumerable women must now care for
themselves, as well as decide for themselves. Thus the feeling of
independence of modern woman has increased through the sacrifice of her
peace; her individual characteristics, at the expense of her harmony.
Her feeling of loneliness is mitigated to a certain degree by the
growing feeling of community with the whole. But this feeling cannot
compensate certain natures for the forfeiture of the advantages which
women of earlier times possessed, when they sat secure and protected
within the four walls of the home, sucked the juice from family
chronicles, guarded family traditions, maintained the old holiday
customs, lived at the same time in the past and in the present.
The new woman lives in the present, sometimes even in the future—her
land of romance! The enthusiasm of the old romanticism about a “hut and
a heart” has little charm for her. For she knows reality and that
prevents her from giving credence to the feminine illusion that twice
two can be five. What she does know, on the contrary, is that out of
fours she can gradually work out sixteen. While the women of former
times could only save, the new woman can acquire. Woman’s beautiful,
foolish superstition regarding life has vanished, but her eagerness to
achieve can still remove mountains, her daring has still often the
splendour of a dream. Intellectual values are for her no longer pastimes
but necessities of life; with her culture has developed her feeling for
truth and justice. This does not secure the new woman immunity at all
times from new illusions and errors of feeling, nor does it prevent her
developing passions whose value, to say the least, is questionable. But
in and through her determination “to be some one,” to have a
characteristic personality, she has acquired a love of life, in its
diverse manifestations, both good and evil; a new capacity to enjoy her
own and others’ individuality, as well as a new joy—sometimes an
unblushing, insolent joy—in expressing her own being. In place of the
earlier resignation toward society, the expression of rebellion is found
even in the sparkling eye of the school-girl, with red cap upon her
curly hair.
The young women of to-day, married or single, mothers as well as those
who are childless, are still more vigorous in soul, more courageous,
more eager for life than are men. Because all that which for men has so
long been a matter of course, is for women new, rich, enchanting,
comprising, as it does, free life in nature, scientific studies, serious
artistic work economic independence. Even in a fine and soulful woman
there is found something of the inevitable hardness toward herself and
others of which an observer is instinctively conscious when he speaks of
some woman as one who “will go far” upon the course she has chosen. The
modern young woman desires above all else the elevation of her own
personality. She experiences the same feeling of joy a man is conscious
of when she realises that her strength of will is augmented, her ability
becoming more certain, her depth of thought greater, her association of
ideas richer. She stands ready to choose _her_ work and follow _her_
fate; in sorrow as in joy she experiences the blessedness of growth, and
she loves her view of life and the work to which she has dedicated
herself, often as devotedly as man loves his.
If we compare the seventeen-year-old girl of to-day with her progenitor
living in the middle of the foregoing century, we find that the girl of
earlier times was to a larger extent swayed by feeling, and that the
modern girl is to a larger extent determined by ideas. The former was
directed more to the centre of life, the latter remains often nearer the
periphery; the former was warmer, the latter is more intelligent; the
former was better balanced, the latter is more interesting.
The restlessness, the uncertainty, the feeling of emptiness, the
suffering, that is sometimes experienced by the young woman of to-day,
is primarily traceable to the disintegration of religious belief, which
gave to the older generation of emancipated women an inner stability,
resignation, and self-discipline. Scientific study has deprived many
modern women of their belief and those who can create a new one, suited
to their needs, are still very few. Thus to the outer homelessness an
inner estrangement is added. The woman movement has, it is true,
contributed indirectly to this spiritual distress by making the road to
man’s culture accessible to woman. For men also suffer in like manner,
and suffer above all perhaps because our culture is unstable, aimless,
and lacks style, owing to the very fact that it is at present without a
religious centre. And even the future can give to mankind no such new
centre as the Middle Ages had, for example, in Catholicism. The
attainment of individualism has shut out that possibility forever.
But _one_ factor in the religion of the past, the adoration of
motherhood as divine mystery; _one_ factor in the religion of the Middle
Ages, the worship of the Madonna, has meanwhile been given back to the
present by the doctrine of evolution, with that universal validity which
the thought must possess which seeks to give again to culture a centre.
Great, solitary individuals—prophets more often than sibyls—have
proclaimed the religion of this generation. But the word will become
flesh only when fathers and mothers instil into the blood and soul of
children their devout hope for a higher humanity. When women are
permeated by this hope, this new devout feeling, then they will recover
the piety, the peace, and the harmony which for the present, and partly
owing to feminism, have been lost.
The innumerable new relations which the woman movement has established
between woman and the home, between woman and society, and all of the
interchanges of new spiritual forces which have been put in operation
because of these relations, cannot possibly take fixed form, at least
not so long as the woman movement remains “a movement”; in other words,
as long as everything is in a condition of flux, in a state of becoming,
all spiritual relationships between individuals must change their form.
Continual new, fine shades of feeling, not to be expressed in words,
determine every woman’s soul and every woman’s fate. And even ancient
feelings receive continually different nuances, different intonations. I
am, therefore, laying down no laws but merely recapitulating certain
suggestions based on what has previously been said in regard to the soul
of the modern woman, as seen in that portion of the present generation
whose age ranges between twenty and thirty years—that is to say, that
part of the generation which is decisive for the immediate future.
Since co-education is becoming more and more general, each sex is
beginning to have more esteem for the other, and woman, as well as man,
is beginning to found self-respect upon work. When all women by culture
and capacity for work have finally become strong-willed, self-supporting
co-workers in society, then no woman will give or receive love for any
extraneous benefit whatsoever. No outward tie and no outward gain
through love—this is the ultimate aim of the new sex morale as the most
highly developed modern young woman sees it.
The new woman is deeply convinced that the relation between the sexes
attains its true beauty and sanctity only when every external privilege
disappears on both sides, when man and woman stand wholly equal in what
concerns their legal right and their personal freedom.
She demands that the contrasts between legal and illegal, rich and poor,
boy and girl, shall disappear, and that society shall show the same
interest in the complete human development of all children. She knows
that when both sexes awake to a feeling of responsibility toward the
future generation, then the real concern of sexual morale becomes the
endeavor to give the race an ever more perfect progeny. And in order to
feel in its fulness this command, maidens as well as youths must
henceforth demand scientific instruction in sexual duties toward
themselves and their possible children.
The new woman is also deeply convinced that only when she feels
happy—and happiness signifies the development of the powers inherent in
the personality—can she properly fulfil her duties as daughter, wife,
and mother. She can consciously sacrifice a part of her personality, for
example forego the development of a talent, but she can never subjugate
nor surrender her whole personality and at the same time remain a
strong-willed member of the family or of society, in the broadest
meaning of the word. She must assert her conception of life, her feeling
of right, her ideals. And no social considerations for children,
husband, or family life are, for her, above the consideration which, in
this respect, she owes to her own personality. When conflicts arise, she
seeks, wherever possible, a solution that will permit her to fulfil her
duty without annihilating herself. But if this is not possible, then she
feels that it is her first duty not to fall below her ideal, either
physically or spiritually. For this would prevent her from fulfilling
precisely those duties for which she has so sacrificed herself; duties
which she can perhaps perform later under other conditions, provided she
has saved herself from being extinguished by brutality or despotism.
But along with this individualism there exists in the new woman a
feeling for the unity of existence, the unity in which all things are
parts and in which nothing is lost. She does not, then, look upon
husband and children as continually demanding sacrifice and upon herself
as being always sacrificed; she sees herself and them, as in the
antiquity of the race, always existing _by means of one another_. She is
not consumed by her love, for she knows that under such circumstances
she would deprive her loved ones of the wealth of her personality. But
although she will not, like the women of earlier times, abandon her ego
_absolutely_, she will not, on the other hand, like certain modern
feminists, keep it _unreservedly_. She will preserve upon a higher plane
the old division of labour which made man the one who felled the game,
fought the battles, made conquests, achieved advancement through
victories; and which made woman the one who rendered the new domains
habitable, who utilised the booty for herself and hers, who transmitted
what was won to the new generation—all that of which woman’s ancient
tasks as guardian of the fire and cultivator of the fields are beautiful
symbols. She feels that when each sex pursues its course for the
happiness of the individual and of mankind, but at the same time and as
an equal helps the other in the different tasks, then each is most
capable, then society is most benefited.
The fact that there is still so much masculine brutality and despotism,
and that there are so many legal means at man’s disposal whereby he may
put into practice with impunity this brutality and despotism, is the
reason why the new woman is still always a “feminist,” why she still
maintains the fundamental tenets of the woman movement. But she is not a
feminist in the sense that she turns _against_ man. Her solution is
always that of Mary Wollstonecraft: “We do not desire to rule over men
but to rule over ourselves.” She often exhibits now in deliberation and
in determination the characteristics which were formerly called
“masculine”: practical knowledge, love of truth, courage of conviction;
she desists more and more from unjust imputations and empty words; she
proposes a greater number of well-considered suggestions for
improvements. The woman movement has now in a word a more universally
human, a less one-sidedly feminine character. It emphasises more and
more the fact that the right of woman is a necessity in order that she
may fulfil her duties in the small, individual family, and exercise her
powers in the great, universal human family for the general good. The
new woman does not wish to displace man nor to abolish society. She
wishes to be able to exercise _everywhere_ her most beautiful
prerogative to help, to support, to comfort. But this she cannot do so
long as she is not free as a citizen and has not fully developed as a
human personality. She knows that this is the condition not only of her
own happiness, but also, in quite as high a degree, of the happiness of
man. For every man who works, struggles, and suffers there is a mother,
a wife, a sister, a daughter, who suffers with him. For every woman who
in her way works and struggles, there is a father, a husband, a brother,
or a son for whom her contribution directly or indirectly has
significance. Above all, the modern woman understands that in every
marriage wherein a wife still suffers under man’s misuse of his legal
authority, it is in the last analysis _the man who sustains the greatest
injury_, for under present conditions he needs exercise neither kindness
nor justice nor intelligence to be ruler in the family. These humane
characteristics he must, therefore, begin to develop when the wife is
legally his equal.
The sacred conviction of the new woman is that man and woman _rise
together_, just as they _sink together_.
The antique sepulchres, on which man and wife stand hand in hand before
the eternal farewell, could quite as well be the symbol of the entrance
of modern man and modern woman into the new life, where they work
together in order that the highest ideals of both—the ideals of justice
and of human kindness—may assume form in reality. The motherly qualities
of women are applied for the good of children as well as of the weak and
the suffering. The arrival of the day when woman shall be given
opportunity to exercise social motherliness in its full and popularly
representative extent, can be only a question of time. In a century they
will smile at our time, in which it was still the practice to debate
about such obvious matters. And those who to-day ridicule the woman
movement will be ridiculed most of all.
* * * * *
Then we shall attain such an outlook on the great forces of the
time,—the emancipation movements of labouring men and of women,—that we
shall see how necessary both were in order that society should come to
understand that not the mass of material production, but the higher
cultivation of the race is the social-political end, and that for this
end the _service of mother_ must receive the honour and oblation that
the state now gives to _military service_.
And women themselves, whom nature has made creators and protectors of
the tender life—the task for which nature even in the plant world has
made such wonderful provision—will no longer resist being more
intimately associated with nature, nearer to earth, more like plants,
more restrained in outer sense and therefore, in inner respects, less
active than man, who always had more of the freedom of movement of the
forest animal. The woman of the future will not, as do many women of the
present time, _wish to be freed from her sex_; but she will be freed
from sexual hypertrophy, freed to _complete humanity_. For the
universal, human characteristics, forced to _remain latent_ in the
primitive division of labour, because the father was obliged to exert
all his strength in one direction and the mother in another, can now,
through the facilities for culture in the struggle for existence, be
developed on both sides: woman can develop the latent quality which
became active in man as “manliness”; man can develop the latent quality
which became active in woman as “womanliness.” But the _proportional
ratio_ of these characteristics, which development has already
strengthened, will _on the whole_ remain fixed—the proportional ratio
which, in the progress of evolution, gave to woman the ascendency in
regard to inward creative powers, and to man the ascendency in regard to
outward creative powers—a proportional ratio which for the present has
made woman more gifted in the sphere of feeling, man more potent in the
sphere of ideas; which has made her the listener and yearner in the
sphere of the spiritual life, and him the pioneer investigator and
founder of systems, that has given her more of the Christian, and him
more of the pagan virtues. The improvement of the universal, human
characteristics of both sexes elevates also the plane upon which they
exercise their especial functions, valuable alike for culture. With
increasing frequency the one sex may, when so desired, assume the
culture function of the other.
A perfect fusion of the two spiritual sex-characters would, on the
contrary, have the same result as physical hermaphroditism—sterility.
Genius—and in using the term we limit its meaning to poetic genius, for
real feminine genius has thus far appeared only in that domain—embraces,
as emphasised above, both man and woman, but not harmoniously blended.
For such a genius would be unproductive, as we imagine those celestial
forms to be which are neither “man nor woman.” The masculine and the
feminine characteristics, which exist side by side in the poet soul,
produce work in co-operation. Alternately, however, they seek to usurp
the entire power, whereby is occasioned the disharmony which enters into
the life of those who endeavour to fulfil at one and the same time the
universal, human duties as well as those of sex. Indeed it may be that
one of the reasons why great poetic geniuses, masculine as well as
feminine, have often had no progeny at all, and in other cases one of
little significance, is that their nature was not capable of a double
production, that poetic creation received the richest part of their
physical and psychical power.
Whether the opinion of genius expressed here is correct or not, does
not, however, affect the general situation. For the genius will always
go his own way, which is never that of the average man. From the point
of view of the ordinary individual an effacement of the spiritual sex
character would be in still higher degree a misfortune for culture and
nature. For it is the difference in the spiritual as well as in the
physical sex-characteristics that makes love a fusion of two beings in a
higher unity, where each finds the full deliverance and harmony of his
being. With the elimination of the _spiritual_ difference _psychical_
love would vanish. There would be left, then, upon the one side, only
the mating instinct, in which the same points of view as in animal
breeding must obtain; on the other, only the same kind of sympathy which
is expressed in the friendship between persons of the same sex, the
sympathy in which the human, individual difference instead of sexual
difference forms the attraction. In love, on the other hand, sympathy
grows in intensity, the more universally human and at the same time
sexually attractive the individual is: the “manly” in man is charmed by
the “womanly” in woman, while the “womanly” in man is likewise
captivated by the “manly” in woman, and _vice versa_. But when neither
needs the _spiritual sex_ of the other as his complement, then man, in
erotic respects, returns to the antique conception of the sex
relationship, of which Plato has drawn the final logical conclusion.
The “humanity” in the soul of man was strengthened when he felt himself
necessary to mother and child. When woman by sweetness and tenderness
taught man to love, not only to desire, then his humanity increased
immeasurably.
In our time the average man is beginning to learn that woman does not
desire him as man, that she looks down upon him as a lower kind of
being, that she does not need him as supporter. He does not at all grasp
what it is the woman of highest culture seeks, demands, and awaits from
his sex. But he learns that even the mediocre woman rejects the best he
has to give her erotically; that imbued as she is with ideals of
“universal humanity,” she no longer needs him as the supplement to her
sexual being. Then brutality awakes in him anew; then his erotic life
loses what humanity it had won; then he begins to hate woman. And not
with the imaginative, theoretical hatred of thinkers and poets; but with
the blind rage which the contempt of the weaker for the stronger arouses
in him. And here we encounter what is, perhaps, the deepest reason for
the present war between the sexes, appearing already in the literary
world as well as in the labour market.
Here the extreme feminists play unconsciously about an abyss,—the
depths in the nature of man out of which the elementary,
hundred-thousand-year-old impulses arise, the impulses which all
cultural acquisitions and influences cannot eradicate, so long as the
human race continues to subsist and multiply under present conditions.
The feminism which has driven individualism to the point where the
individual asserts her personality in opposition to, instead of within,
the race; the individualism which becomes self-concentration,
anti-social egoism, although the watchword inscribed upon its banner is
“Society instead of the family,”—this feminism will bear the blame
should the hatred referred to lead to war.
* * * * *
It would be a pity to conclude a survey of the influence of the woman
movement with an expression of fear lest this extreme feminism should be
victorious. I believe not; no more than I believe that the sun will for
the present be extinguished or streams flow back to their sources.
No “culture” can annul the great fundamental laws of nature; it can only
ennoble them; and motherhood is one of these fundamental laws. I hope
that the future will furnish a new and a more secure protection for
motherhood than the present family and social organisation affords. I
place my trust in a new society, with a new morality, which will be a
synthesis of the being of man and that of woman, of the demands of the
individual and those of society, of the pagan and Christian conceptions
of life, of the will of the future and reverence for the past.
When the earth blooms with this beautiful and vigorous flower of
morality, there will no longer be a woman movement. But there will
always be a woman question, not put by women to society but by society
to women: the question whether they will continue in a higher degree to
prove themselves worthy of the great privilege of being the mothers of
the new generation.
In the degree in which this new ethics permeates mankind, women will
answer this question in life-affirmation. And the result of their
life-affirmation will be an enormous enhancement of life, not only for
women themselves but for all mankind.
THE END
-----
Footnote 1:
In the summer of 1909 I sat in a Swedish home where the grandmother,
for this reason, had never learned to write but where the
granddaughter read aloud the thesis for her bachelor’s examination.
One hears even to-day of customs and points of view in certain farms
and manses which faithfully imitate those of the time of the
Reformation.
Footnote 2:
Next to the textile industry, the tobacco industry employs the most
women.
Footnote 3:
This idealism has naturally part also in the fact that, for example,
two-thirds of the women who have gone through college in America do
not marry, and find in club life a compensation for domestic life. But
other motives also must often play a part here, from the desire to
devote herself entirely to one of the lifeworks serviceable to
mankind, to the egoism of spiritually barren young girls with its
distaste for burdens and restraint.
A keen-sighted observer who recently spent a half year in North
America corroborated what many have already stated: that the student
and working young American girls devote themselves with true passion
to the cultivation of their beauty, their toilette, their flirtations.
All this belongs for her to the “Fine Arts” and as such is an end
sufficient in itself, while for European women these arts, as a rule,
are still means for alluring men to marriage. While study or work
often makes European women in outer sense less “womanly,” although her
soul always guards its full power to love, in America the reverse is
the case: the outer appearance is bewitchingly womanly, but the soul
no longer vibrates for love. The sexual sterility which Maudsley
already prophesied thirty years ago, when he spoke about the “sexless
ants,” has been partly realised, partly chosen voluntarily. In Europe
it still frequently happens that a young woman who has put love aside
for the sake of study or work is suddenly seized by an irresistible
passion; in America, on the contrary, this is extremely rare. Women
students look down upon the less cultured men, who ordinarily finish
their studies earlier in order to earn a livelihood. The sympathy
which they need, women find more easily in their own sex. The
unmarried have quite the same social position as the married and do
not desire children. If they finally marry, it is ordinarily because a
more brilliant position is offered them than the one which they could
create themselves, and the man is then considered and treated as a
money-getter.
My authority emphasises also that the young students or working girls
are ordinarily less original, of less personal significance, less
individually developed, than the older women, especially women’s
rights women, who often have not studied but have grown grey in
marriage and motherhood, in self-development and in social work. The
interesting significant American feminists were women between the ages
of fifty and ninety; the woman of the present generation, however,
which now enjoys the fruits of the work of the older generation, is,
in spite of excellent scholarship and great working proficiency, less
a woman and less a human being, less a personality.
These wholly fresh observations, which were communicated to me during
the printing of my book, seem to me to confirm so strongly my point of
view that I wish to repeat them here.
But in France and elsewhere mothers tell us how clear, intelligent,
and universally interested their daughters are, and at the same time
how critical, how free from ardour and enthusiasm. It is not the hasty
love marriage that many mothers now fear for their daughters, but a
worldly-wise marriage without love.
Footnote 4:
See _Love and Ethics_, Ralph Fletcher Seymour, Chicago, and also
_Mutter und Kind_, published in Germany only, Pan-Verlag. My plan is a
paternity assessment upon society as a contribution to the maintenance
of children and a compensation of motherhood by the state.
Society has already shown by a series of institutions, maternity
assurance, infants’ milk distribution, clothing and feeding of
children, and many kindred social efforts, that the maintenance
afforded by the father is not sufficient for the young generation;
quite as little is the mother’s care, which is supplemented by other
means, crèches, etc. But when the _child_ finally becomes the
unconscious “head of the family,” then it will be the affair of
society to requite maternity. Marriage will then signify only the
living together of two people upon the ground of love and the common
parenthood of children. _Maternal right_ will _in law_ take the place
of _paternal right_, but _in reality_ the father will continue to
retain all the influence upon the children which he _personally_ is
able to exert, just as has been hitherto the case with the mother.
In such circumstances there will be no more illegitimate children; no
mothers driven out from the care of tender children to earn their
daily bread; no fathers who avoid their economic duties toward their
children, and who cannot be compelled by society to perform at least
that paternal duty which animals perform now better than men: that of
contributing their part to the maintenance of their progeny. There
will be no mothers who for the sake of their own and their children’s
maintenance need to stay with a brutal man; no mothers who, in case of
a separation, can be deprived of their children on any ground except
that of their own unworthiness. In a word, society must—upon a higher
plane—restore the arrangement which is already found in the lower
stages of civilisation, the arrangement which nature herself created:
that mother and child are most closely bound together, that they
together, above all, form the family, in which the father enters
through the mother’s or his own free will.
Footnote 5:
An inquiry instituted among English women as to whether they would
prefer to be men or women gave as a result the fact that, out of about
7000 who answered, two-thirds wished to remain women and this above
all in order to be mothers, while a third wished to be men. This
indicated probably the highest figure of the disinclination for
maternity which such a _European_ inquiry could elicit. But even these
women who wish to marry and to become mothers feel the pressure of the
idea created by the zealots of the woman movement which finds
expression often in the following conversation between two former
schoolmates about a third: “And A—— what is she doing
now?”—“Nothing—she is married and has children.”
The old folk legend about the girl who trampled on the bread she was
carrying to her mother because she wished to go dry-shod, can serve as
symbol of many modern women zealots: life’s great, sound values are
offered for the meal; vanity sits down alone to partake of them.
Footnote 6:
Bret Harte, _The Luck of Roaring Camp_.
Footnote 7:
E. Carrière and Segantini.
Footnote 8:
Max Kruse, _Liebesgruppe_.
Footnote 9:
This amaternal idea is advanced with great ability in some works of
Charlotte Perkins Stetson and Rosa Mayreder. The word amaternal coined
by me is used to characterise the theory subsequently advanced,
because the word unmaternal (unmotherly) signifies a _spiritual
condition_, the antithesis to “motherliness.” The maternal as opposed
to the amaternal theory is this: that a woman’s life is lived most
intensively and most extensively, most individually and most socially;
she is for her own part most free, and for others most fruitful, most
egoistic and most altruistic, most receptive and most generous, in and
with the _physical and psychic exercise of the function of maternity,
because of the conscious desire, by means of this function, to uplift
the life of the race as well as her own life_.
Footnote 10:
It can even be shown that, if man invades the so-called woman’s
spheres (for example the art of cooking or of dress-making), it is
most frequently he who makes new discoveries and attains great
success!
Footnote 11:
The best proof of this is that many women who, in a life free from
care in an outward sense, were comparable only to geese or peacocks,
nevertheless, when hard times came and gave them opportunity to
develop their power of love, not only proved themselves heroines, but
asserted that their “happy” years were those in which they had so
“sacrificed” themselves.
Footnote 12:
How many children have had their idea of right debased by the manner
in which the “Captain of Köpernick” was received at his liberation—to
cite only one example.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_A Selection from the
Catalogue of_
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
❧
Complete Catalogue sent
on application
* * * * *
_By Ellen Key_
The Century of the Child
_Cr. 8vo. With Frontispiece. Net, $1.50. By mail, $1.65_
CONTENTS: The Right of the Child to Choose His Parents, The Unborn Race
and Woman’s Work, Education, Homelessness, Soul Murder in the Schools,
The School of the Future, Religious Instruction, Child Labor and the
Crimes of Children. This book has gone through more than twenty German
Editions and has been published in several European countries.
“A powerful book.”—_N. Y. Times._
The Education of the Child
Reprinted from the Authorized American Edition of “The Century of the
Child.” With Introductory Note by EDWARD BOK.
_Cr. 8vo. Net, 75 cents. By mail, 85 cents_
“Nothing finer on the wise education of the child has ever been brought
into print. To me this chapter is a perfect classic; it points the way
straight for every parent, and it should find a place in every home in
America where there is a child.”—EDWARD BOK, Editor of the _Ladies’ Home
Journal_.
Love and Marriage
_Cr. 8vo. Net, $1.50. By mail, $1.65_
Ellen Key is gradually taking a hold upon the reading public of this
country commensurate with the enlightenment of her views. In Europe and
particularly in her own native Sweden her name holds an honored place as
a representative of progressive thought.
* * * * *
Ellen Key
Her Life and Her Work
A Critical Study
By Louise Nystrom Hamilton
Translated by Anna E. B. Fries
12º. _With Portrait_
The name of Ellen Key has for years been a target for attacks of various
kinds. Friends have in connection with the issues that have arisen in
regard to the influence of her work become enemies and friction has been
caused in many homes. Her ideals and her purposes have been misquoted
and misinterpreted until the very convictions for which she stood have
been twisted so as to appear to be the evils that she was attempting to
combat. Her critics, not content with decrying and distorting the
message that she had to give to the world, have even attacked her
personal character; and as the majority of these had no direct knowledge
in the matter, strange rumors and fancies have been spread abroad about
her life. The readers of her books, who are now to be counted throughout
the world by the hundreds of thousands, who desire to know the truth
about this much discussed Swedish author, will be interested in this
critical study by Louise Hamilton. The author is one who has been
intimate with Ellen Key since her youth. She is herself the wife of the
founder of the People’s Hospital in Stockholm, where for over twenty
years Ellen Key taught and lectured.
The volume gives an admirable survey of the purpose and character of
Ellen Key’s teachings and of her books.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Packed with information about actual present-day business conditions
and methods.”—REVIEW OF REVIEWS.
* * * * *
The American Business Woman
A Guide for the Investment, Preservation and Accumulation of Property,
Containing Full Explanations and Illustrations of all Necessary
Methods of Business
By
John Howard Cromwell, Ph.B., LL.B.
Counsellor-at-Law
_Second Revised Edition. Octavo. 392 pages.
$2.00 net. By mail, $2.20_
“Mr. Cromwell’s book is without doubt one of the valuable publications
of the year ... thoroughly well written and carefully thought out....
Fascinating as is the subject of mortgages, it is necessarily but one
phase of the book.... The book, as before stated, is extremely valuable,
and will be found a good investment, not only for women for whom it was
primarily intended, but for many men.”—_New York Times._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“The most complete and compact study that Has yet been made of the
evolution of women’s rights.”—_N. Y. Evening Globe._
* * * * *
A Short History of Women’s Rights
From the days of Augustus to the Present Time
With Special Reference to England and the United States
By Eugene A. Hecker
Master in the Roxbury Latin School, Author of “The Teaching of Latin in
Secondary Schools”
_Crown 8vo. $1.50 net. (By mail, $1.65)_
Mr. Hecker, an authoritative scholar, has set himself the task of
telling the story of women’s progress, and has done it with much
painstaking and thoroughness, and with a manifestation of a high order
of talent for discriminating as to materials and presenting them
convincingly and interestingly.... One feels the studiousness of the
author in every page. The matter presented is not only carefully
arranged, but it is in a manner digested too; and thus the work becomes
literature in a true sense, and not an unenlightened assembly of details
and facts from the pages of the past.
_St. Louis Times._
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. P. 175, added an anchor for the third footnote.
2. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
3. Anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as
printed.
4. Footnotes have been re-indexed using numbers and collected together
at the end of the last chapter.
5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Woman Movement" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.