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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Woman Movement, by Ellen Key
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: The Woman Movement
-
-Author: Ellen Key
-
-Contributor: Havelock Ellis
-
-Translator: Mamah Bouton Borthwick
-
-Release Date: December 3, 2019 [EBook #60840]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN MOVEMENT ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed
-Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
-produced from images generously made available by The
-Internet Archive)
-
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-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-                             _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.
-
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-
-
-                         _A Selection from the
-                             Catalogue of_
-
-                          G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
-
-                                   ❧
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-                        Complete Catalogue sent
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-
-                  *       *       *       *       *
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-
-                             _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
-
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-
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-
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-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
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-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
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-about this much discussed Swedish author, will be interested in this
-critical study by Louise Hamilton. The author is one who has been
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-
-The volume gives an admirable survey of the purpose and character of
-Ellen Key’s teachings and of her books.
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-                           Counsellor-at-Law
-
-             _Second Revised Edition.  Octavo.  392 pages.
-                      $2.00 net.  By mail, $2.20_
-
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-
-
-
-“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_.
-
-
-
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-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Woman Movement, by Ellen Key
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