Woman Movement — The Influence of the Woman Movement upon Motherhood, Part 2

* * * * * 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.

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This book has gone through more than twenty German Editions and has been published in several European countries.

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Net, . 50. By mail, . 65_ Ellen Key is gradually taking a hold upon the reading public of this country commensurate with the enlightenment of her views.

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* * * * * Ellen Key Her Life and Her Work A Critical Study By Louise Nystrom Hamilton Translated by Anna E. B.

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_With Portrait_ The name of Ellen Key has for years been a target for attacks of various kinds.

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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.