THE RIGHT OF MOTHERHOOD
Everyone knows that the methods of production of modern society tend
more and more to limit woman’s domestic work to directing consumption,
whereas at earlier stages she used also to produce a great part of the
commodities consumed in the home. Everyone can see too that the most
profoundly influential cause of the woman’s movement has thus not been
the assertion of woman’s political-juridical rights as a human being,
but first and foremost the question of how she is to find employment
for her powers of work which are no longer required in the home, and
be enabled to find that self-maintenance outside the home which the
altered conditions of production have rendered necessary.
Through the ever-increasing connection between the different parts of
society, woman’s work has had profound influence in other quarters
than those of the labour market. Competition between the sexes has
produced—as regards manual labour—for men and women those lower
conditions of labour which are the usual result of an overcrowding of
the labour market, namely, low wages, long hours, and uncertainty of
employment. The possibility of marriage has become dependent on the
bread-winning labour of both husband and wife. Those married women who
are partly maintained by their husbands, have by their supplementary
earnings reduced the wages of the self-supporting unmarried ones, and
when these in their turn are married, they lack the desire and capacity
to look after the home and waste through negligence more than they earn
in the factory. The consequence of the outside employment of wives—as
of children—has furthermore been sterility, a high infant mortality,
and the degeneration of the surviving children, both physically and
psychically; a debased domestic life with its consequences: discomfort,
drunkenness, and crime.
Among the middle classes, again, the competition between the sexes has
directly reduced man’s chances of marriage, and indirectly diminished
the desire of both sexes to contract matrimony.
The apparently inevitable law that one-sidedness alone gives strength
has made the champions of woman’s rights left-handed in their treatment
of all social questions connected with their “cause.” They have pressed
forward woman’s right to work, while overlooking both the conditions
and the effects of her work. Women, actuated by the combined motive
power of the spirit of the age and of necessity, have looked for
employment of any kind and at however low a wage. Among the middle
classes, the result has been that many girls, who were in no need of
supporting themselves entirely by work, have depressed the conditions
of labour for those women who needed it. Thus the latter are held down
to a minimum which is dangerous alike to health and to morality. Girls
living at home, on the other hand, have been able to satisfy their
increased demands, and this has made it still more difficult for a man
to offer them acceptable conditions in marriage.
It has already been pointed out that the self-maintenance of women has
had and still has a profound influence on love in marriage. The Swedish
poet Almquist indicated this when he wrote that only the woman who “_in
glad activity can provide all that is necessary for her living_” makes
it possible for the man to whom she gives herself “_to say rightly to
himself, I am loved_.”
But no one can calculate in advance how a new social force is going to
work in every respect; how even souls are changed with altered needs,
so that new demands and forces arise. The erotic problem of the youth
of the present day is one of the most illuminating pieces of evidence
of this impossibility.
Woman’s competition with man in the field of labour has, in fact,
occasioned a profound ill-feeling between the sexes. Women feel
themselves—rightly or wrongly—cheapened and underestimated, and men,
on the other hand, consider themselves thrust aside, when woman’s lower
demands of wages decide the competition in her favour. But this is
still the external side of the matter.
It is the new woman—the transformed type of soul—that man objects to.
The mannish emancipated ladies will soon, however, have died out. We
can therefore pass them by and consider only the young women who have
preserved or tried to preserve their possibilities of erotic attraction.
These have, however, lost the calm, the equilibrium, the receptivity,
which formerly made of woman a beautiful, easily-comprehended
piece of nature, like nature in her unconditional yielding. When a
man came to the woman he loved with his worries, his fatigue, his
disappointments, he washed himself clean as in a cool wave, found
peace as in a silent forest. Nowadays she meets him with her worries,
her disquiet, her fatigues, her disappointments. _Her_ picture has
been refused, _her_ book is misunderstood, _her_ work is abused, _her_
examination has to be prepared for ... always hers! All this makes the
man think her disturbed, unapproachable, and apt to misunderstand.
Even if she retains her affectionate attention for him, she has lost
her elasticity. She does not choose the conditions of her work; she
is obliged to overwork herself if she wishes to keep her work. But
love—as has been aptly said—requires peace, love will dream; it
cannot live upon remnants of our time and our personality. And thus
the value of love—like all other personal values—sinks under modern
conditions of work, which drain the vital forces and make people
forget even the meaning of the idea of living. Thus the people of the
present day are excluded from love: not merely from the possibility
of realising it in marriage, but also from the possibility of fully
experiencing it.
Nor have these over-tired young women a chance of preserving their
charm in outward appearance and manner. This is only done nowadays in
a conscious style by ladies of the highest society—and by those of
the _demi-monde_—who perform no other duty to the community than the
more elegant than worthy one of illustrating the parable of the lilies
of the field. But even now few women can afford—and fewer still feel
that they have the right to or the leisure for—this worship of their
own intoxicating and self-intoxicating loveliness. More and more have
to take part in a life of work; while, moreover, women are becoming
less attracted by the ideal of perfection of form, and more by that
of formation of personality. But this movement involves uncertainty
of form, until new forms have been created; and man loves in woman
precisely that sureness, lightness, and repose in her own sense of
power which are generally wanting in the tentative young woman of the
present day. A new kind of young women is, however, already to be met
with, who will neither work nor charm exclusively, and who are solving
the problem of being at the same time active and beautiful.
Thus the deepest conflict of all lies herein, that young men feel young
women to be independent of the love they offer; they feel themselves
weighed and—found wanting. Woman’s capacity for making a living has
thus undoubtedly resulted, as Almquist hoped, in giving man a greater
chance of believing himself loved, but at the same time—a smaller
chance of being so.
We see two groups of the daughters of our time, as new manifestations
of woman’s primitive double nature.
For one group the child is not the immediate end of love, and still
less can the child sanctify all the means for its attainment. If such
a woman has to choose between giving and inspiring a love as great as
that of her dreams, without motherhood, and becoming a mother through
a lesser love, then she will choose the former without hesitation. And
if she becomes a mother, without having attained the full height of her
being in love, she feels it as a degradation; for neither child nor
marriage nor love are enough for her, only great love satisfies her.
This is the most important step in advance that woman has taken since
from the emotional sphere of the female animal she approached that of
the human woman. And—however great may be the sufferings that this
attitude of the soul may involve for the individual—no one who sees
sufficiently deeply can hesitate as to the certainty of this being the
true line of life.
This, on the other hand, will not coincide with the path of those women
who are now demanding liberty for motherhood, not only without wedlock
but also without love.
Those who hoped that woman’s independence through work would assure
man’s knowledge of being loved, did not reckon for woman’s dependence
on man in and for the tenor of her life. This dependence, created by
nature and not by society, still drives many otherwise independent
women into marriage without love; and it drives other women, who wish
to preserve their independence by not contracting marriage, to the
desire of attaining a mother’s happiness without it. The new woman’s
will to live through herself, with herself, for herself, reaches its
limit when she begins to regard man merely as a means to the child.
Woman could scarcely take a more complete revenge for having herself
been treated for thousands of years as a means.
We must hope, however, that woman’s lust for vengeance will not long
retain this form. Woman’s degradation to a means has retarded man’s and
her own development. But a similar degradation of man would have the
same effect, and the children might suffer just as much through woman’s
misuse of man as through his of her.
The child must be an end in itself. It requires love as its origin;
it requires in its mother love’s understanding of the qualities it
has inherited from its father, not a surprised coldness or resentment
of the unsuspected or unwelcome elements in its nature. The woman who
has never loved her child’s father will infallibly injure that child
in some way—if in no other, then by her way of loving it. The child
needs the joy of brothers and sisters, and not even the tenderest
motherly love can take the place of this; and finally the child needs
the father as the father the child. That children, both in and out of
wedlock, often lose their father or brother or sister through death or
life, belongs to the inevitable, in most cases at any rate. But that
a woman with full knowledge and purpose should deprive her child of
the right of gaining life through love, that she should exclude it in
advance from the possibility of a father’s affection, is a piece of
selfishness which must avenge itself. The right of motherhood without
marriage must not be equivalent to the right of motherhood without
love. It is equally degrading to surrender one’s self without love in
a free relationship as in marriage. In both cases one can steal one’s
child and thereby lose the right of one day proudly assuring it that
it has enjoyed the best conditions for its entry into life. Love—it
must be constantly repeated—desires the future, not the moment; it
desires union, not only at the formation of a new being, but in order
that two persons through each other may care for a new and greater
being than either of themselves. A woman may be mistaken in this love,
as she may be in her suitability for marriage. But this she cannot
know in advance. She experiences these things first in loving. If she
has misplaced her devotion, then it will not save her to conceal the
mistake in a marriage. But to receive her child from a man with whom
she knows in advance that she never intends to live, this is having
an illegitimate child in the deepest sense of the word. But this is
nevertheless the way in which a number of women now think that “the
madonna of the future” is to win a mother’s happiness.
Work is always a development of force, and the more it exercises
our individual powers, the greater happiness will it give. No part
of the old catechism is more valuable than that which is omitted in
the new, on the blessings of labour. The path of every cherished and
reasonable work might be marked by milestones, on which the good old
words should be carved: here “health,” there “welfare”; here “comfort
and consolation in adversity,” and there “preventing lapses into
sin,”—above all, that of doubting the value of life.
But the man to whom work has given all this has all the more reason
to curse the work of women, who are able neither to choose their
labour according to their talents nor to proportion their hours of work
according to their strength. Greater and greater are the multitudes
who move forward upon the road of toil, where the milestones bear the
inscriptions: ill-health, uncertainty for the morrow as for the future,
joylessness, lethargy of the soul, and the sins that thrive in the
shadow, above all that of blaspheming life as meaningless.
For others again work has come to mean in our time drunkenness, vice,
and superstition. It has made men and women unscrupulous, empty, hard,
restless. It has made them destroy for others the remaining treasures
of life—sorrow, love, the home, nature, beauty, books, peace—peace
above all, since it is the condition of the full realisation of
suffering as of joy. The grand words about the liberty and the joy
of labour mean in reality slavery and trouble over labour, the only
trouble our time fully experiences.
With thoughtless hymns of praise to this massacring labour, society
allows one holy springtime after another to wither without having
blossomed—whereas thousands of years ago the cities of antiquity sent
their “holy springs” to open up new districts and build new dwellings
for men.
Just as true as that the losses of the individual mean the poverty
of all, when these losses involve a diminution of health and power;
just as certain as that nothing becomes better without the desire to
improve it, so is it a healthy sign of the times that starvation wages
for conscientious drudgery no longer fill young women with heartfelt
gratitude. They know, these young women, that their own nature also can
be outraged; that there are other suppressed forces in woman’s being
besides only the desire of knowledge and the thirst for activity, and
that neither the right to work nor that of citizenship can compensate
for trampled possibilities of happiness.
Far from its being the duty of any thoughtful person to lull to rest
this despondency of the young, we should render the best service to
them and to life by taking from them everyday contentment and the calm
of resignation; for only the suffering which is kept awake, the longing
which remains alive, can become forces in the revolt against that order
of society which has added meaningless pangs, hostile to life, to those
that the laws of life and life’s development still necessarily involve
in the relations of sex.
All confined forces, which do not find employment, may degenerate; and
our time, with its repression of the erotic forces, can show even among
women such signs of degeneration.
It is therefore a necessary self-assertion when those who are excluded
from love seek to preserve their health and enrich their life with the
sources of joy which are at the disposal of every living person. Even
he who is chained to an uninteresting work can find some moments to
feel his way along some path which leads to a glimpse of the infinite
space of science. Almost every kind of work may bring with it an
increase of individual capacity, and therewith also of joy at feeling
one’s value as a workman and one’s dignity as a personality enhanced.
There is no day which may not bring with it a glimpse of delight
in beauty. Finally there is no hour—except the heaviest hours of
sorrow—in which a human being cannot feel the strength and greatness
of his own soul; its independence of all external fortunes; its power
of seeking itself, finding itself, enhancing itself through all and
in spite of all. The words which Victor Hugo put to a young woman in
sorrow:
_N’avez-vous pas votre âme?_
are addressed to all who have been badly treated by life.
And whatever belief or unbelief a person may profess, it is in the last
resort this consciousness of his own soul’s worth which saves him when
no other help is to be found—and there is no other help.
In this sense it is doubtless true that the human being, woman as well
as man, is an end in herself; that she has fulfilled her task if she
has not suffered injury to her soul, even if she has gained nothing
else from life; if she has increased the power of her soul, discovered
her own individuality and realised it; for this alone is saving one’s
soul. In this sense it is true that the “mission” of woman as of man
cannot be the sexual mission, which does not depend upon our own will
alone; nor, therefore, can he who has not fulfilled this be said to
have lived in vain. In this sense also there is at bottom a certain
agreement between the feeling of self-glorification just described and
that of those who think that neither woman’s nor man’s highest destiny
can be love, but only the life of an eternal being above all earthly
and social considerations; that the highest reality of every human
being is within himself, and that his highest happiness can be only to
grow in holiness and godliness.
But for the shaping of life the difference is immeasurable. Here we
are confronted once more by the dualist and monist views of life, the
belief in the soul as supersensuous, and the belief in the soul as
dwelling in the senses; the belief that the soul can attain its highest
development and happiness independently of—instead of by means of—its
earthly conditions.
According to the latter view man and woman are determined by their
sexual life even in the greatest emotions of their soul. Sexual
emotions pulsate in the age of puberty’s dreams of heroic deeds and
martyrdom; they are the warm undercurrent in the religious needs
which awaken at that time. Every woman who has afterwards performed
a brilliant achievement of love, who has become a great Christian
character—like St. Bridget of Sweden, like St. Catherine of Siena, or
like St. Teresa—has had the fire of great love in her soul; her blood
has been on fire with the longing to serve the race with body and soul.
And therefore also her charity had warmth in it, while the victims of
so much other benevolence freeze like shorn sheep.
A woman’s essential ego must be brought out by love before she can
do anything great for others or for herself. She whose existence has
been erotically blank seldom finds the way to what is human in a
great sense, while, on the other hand, she to whom life has denied
the opportunity of manifesting her erotic being in the usual sense,
transforms it into an Eros that embraces all life, the Eros of whom
Plato had the intuition when he made Diotima proclaim him: a touch of
infinite delicacy; for may it not possibly be only woman who—since
her whole nature is erotic—can thus satisfy her love-longing from the
whole of existence?
But this sense of oneness with the universe—which the theosophist, the
mystic, the pantheist, and the evolutionist express each in his own
way, but which they all feel alike—is, above all, the gift of a great
happiness in love. It is this way of loving of which it is especially
true to say, that only he who loves knows God, the great word for
unity in the all, in which we live and move and have our being. Not
because God created mankind to increase and inhabit the earth, but
because they were fruitful and filled the earth with beings and with
work, did they give the Creator’s name to life and worshipped in the
likeness of gods their own creative power, on account of which they
also dreamed that they were eternal.
Because fruitfulness, the power of production in all its forms, is the
divine part of man, it is impossible for anyone without it to attain
“holiness and communion with God” in the meaning of the religion of
life, or, in other words, full humanity. Even in its limited form,
that of creating a family, it is the unerring means of extending the
ego beyond its own limits, the simplest condition for humanisation.
It can transform the egoist into a generous man, merely by giving him
something to live for. For this reason love has taken the place of
religion with innumerable people, because it has the same power of
making them good and great, but a hundredfold greater power of making
them happy. Therefore all great and beautiful resignation—flowing with
sweetness and benevolence—is like a vineyard, made upon the slope of a
crater.
But therefore also it is true of all who have quenched the warmth
of fruitfulness in themselves, that they have committed the one
unpardonable sin, that against the holy spirit of life. These women
have received their condemnation in Lessing’s fable of Hera, who sent
Iris to earth to seek out three virtuous, perfectly chaste maidens,
unsoiled by any dreams of love. And Iris certainly found them, but
did not bring them back to Olympus; for Hades had already made Hermes
fetch them for the infernal regions—there to replace the superannuated
Furies.
Because the means of life must never eclipse the meaning of life—which
is to live with one’s whole being, and thus to be able to impart an
ever greater fulness of life—it is immoral to live solely either for
sanctity or for work, fatherland or humanity, or even love, for man is
to live by all these. His exclusion from one of these means of full
humanity can never be compensated by his participation in any of the
others, just as little as one of his senses can be replaced by another,
even though the latter be perfected under the necessity of serving
in the place of the lost one. And the resignation which prematurely
contents itself with part of the rights of its human nature instead of
aspiring to the whole, such resignation is a falling to sleep in the
snow. It is undeniably a calmer state than that of keeping one’s soul
on the stretch for new experiences; for in that case one must also be
prepared for new wounds; and he who keeps his suffering awake can be
sure of more pain than he who puts it to sleep with an opiate. But
no criterion is meaner than that of suffering or not suffering. The
question is only what a man suffers from, and what he becomes—for
himself and others—or does not become as the result of his pain.
Life holds in one hand the golden crown of happiness, in the other the
iron crown of suffering. To her favoured ones she hands them both. But
only he is an outcast whose temples have felt the weight of neither.
A woman of feeling once said that, although love was acknowledged by
the majority as life’s greatest treasure, mankind has not yet been able
to prepare a place for love in life. Outside of marriage it is called
sin; within it—as marriage now is—love can seldom live, and if it
arises for another than the partner in marriage, then for the sake of
the children it must be sacrificed.
It is this observation which made the new women all the more decided to
prepare a place for love outside matrimony.
Women—and men too—have begun to examine the ideas of morality in
which the small and the great values are mixed together like the
cards in a shuffled pack. As far as woman is concerned, all morality
has become synonymous with sexual morality; all sexual morality
synonymous with the absence of sensuality and the existence of a
marriage certificate. In speech and in poetry woman’s mission as “wife
and mother” is glorified, but at the same time the mission is not
considered honourable until it is attained, but, on the contrary,
dishonourable so long as it is sought after with the healthy strength
which is the condition of its complete fulfilment. A woman may be proud
and strong, good and active, courageous and generous, honourable and
trustworthy, faithful and loyal—in a word, she may possess all the
virtues prized by man—and yet be called immoral if she gives a new
life to the race. On the other hand, a woman, irreproachable from the
point of view of sexual morality, may be as cowardly, slanderous, and
untruthful as she can be without being denied the respect of society.
This confusion of thought is to such an extent one with the feelings,
that it may take centuries for new ideas of justice to work a change.
In spite of all, however, it remains a truth that a woman’s morality
in other respects is more profoundly connected with her sexual
morality than is the case with a man. Nature herself established this
connection, when she made love and the child more closely bound up
with woman’s existence than with man’s. It must always be a matter of
paramount importance to a woman’s whole personality to abandon herself
to the possibility of creating a new life; and therefore a woman’s
attitude, not with regard to marriage, but certainly with regard to
motherhood, will be decisive evidence of her moral development in other
respects and of her spiritual culture.
The same sexual freedom for woman as for man is to every profoundly
womanly woman a demand contrary to nature. But this does not mean
either that man ought to continue to misuse his freedom or that woman
must continue to confine hers within “lawful” bounds; nor yet does it
mean that women ought to go on lying to themselves, to men, and to
each other concerning their nature as sexual beings. It is true that
many women exist who have no feeling of this kind, and that other
married women deny the claims of the senses—because they have had
them satisfied before they became conscious. But when the development
of love has introduced a purer and healthier view, neither women nor
men will consider it a merit or superiority in a woman to develop
in herself the character of “the third sex.” Then everyone will
acknowledge that human life, to be in the fullest sense healthy and
rich, must imply fulfilment of the sexual destiny, and that even if
a restriction of the vital forces in this respect does not entail
physical suffering, then it must involve profound psychical injury
resulting in diminished powers. Nor will one then wilfully blink at
the fact that—among many strong, well-balanced, active unmarried
women—others are to be found who are equally worthy of respect,
although they cannot attain harmony without motherhood. And the cause
is not want of self-discipline or seriousness in work, but simply
the fact already stated: that sexual life in a woman—when it has
become strong and healthy—dominates her in a far more intimate way
than it does a man. She seldom suffers acutely, often unconsciously or
half-consciously, from restriction in this direction; but to make up
for this she suffers in a far more radical way, which slowly exhausts
her vital forces; and many cases of madness, hysteria, etc., are due to
this cause.
Every victim of this kind makes life the poorer; for it is often the
warmest feminine natures, the richest in goodness and in soul, the most
fruitful in every sense, that go under in this way. And in them the
race loses not only directly, but also indirectly, in their children
that were never born.
For the present it can be only by an altered criterion of morality
that these losses can be avoided, at least so long as there is not one
man for every woman. For we can look only for a very slow operation of
the measures which may restore the balance that nature seems to intend
by an actual excess in the birth-rate of boys over girls; measures,
that is, for the better protection of the lives of male children and
men. A proposal which was put forward a few years ago in one of the
leading civilised countries undoubtedly deserves consideration as an
incidental remedy; namely, to arrange an organised and well-supervised
emigration of capable women from the countries where they are in excess
to others where the reverse is the case; for while their proficiency
in work would make these women independent of marriage, they would thus
be afforded increased possibilities of marrying, as would the surplus
men—at present, in the countries referred to, left to the alternatives
of celibacy or prostitution.
In the main it is, however, only the awakening of the consciousness of
society that can provide a remedy. But until youth itself awakens the
conscience of the time with the tocsin of action, that remedy is likely
to be long in coming.
In one respect young working men and women might take their destiny
in their own hands, namely, in the purely external point of providing
themselves with the opportunities they lack—which in the case of young
people of the student class now form the foundation of many a life’s
happiness—opportunities of getting to know each other under pleasant
and worthy conditions of comradeship.
In those cases again where a woman’s destiny from one cause or another
has rendered the realisation of love impossible, she ought—like the
wife in a childless marriage—oftener than at present to enrich her
life and partly satisfy her motherly feeling by choosing one among
the destitute children, who are unfortunately still to be found in
abundance, to provide for and love. Such grafts upon one’s own stem
often give splendid fruit. The lonely woman thereby avoids falling
a victim to that hardness and bitterness, which are not necessary
consequences of a checked sexual life, but are all the more so of a
frozen life of the heart.
In those cases where a woman suffers a lasting and unendurable clogging
of her life through the want of motherhood, she must choose the lesser
evil, that of becoming a mother even without love, in or out of
wedlock. Necessity is its own law—and he who steals to save his life
ought to go free. But she must not be made an example for others who
are not placed in the same necessity.
The solution of the right of motherhood, therefore, ought not to be the
encouragement of the majority of unmarried women to provide themselves
with children without love; not even the encouragement of the majority
to obtain them through love when they know in advance that a continued
community of life with the child’s father is impossible.
But, on the other hand, the unmarried woman, from her own point of view
as well as from that of the race, has a right to motherhood, when she
possesses so rich a human soul, so great a mother’s heart, and so manly
a courage that she can bear an exceptional lot. She has all the riches
of her own and her lover’s nature to leave through the child as a
heritage to the race; she has the whole development of her personality,
her mental and bodily vital force, her independence won through labour,
to give to the child’s bringing-up. In her occupation she has had use
only for a part of her being: she desires to manifest it fully and
wholly, before she resigns the gift of life. She therefore becomes a
mother with the full approval of her conscience.
All this, however, seldom applies to a woman before she has reached
or exceeded the limit of _la seconda primavera_; not till then will
she feel fully sure of her longing and her courage, nor will she have
reason to know that life has no higher destiny for her. And even she
must not be taken as an example of a final solution of the problem.
But in times like ours, when the hindrances to life in this direction
have become unendurable, bold experiments are justified—when they are
successful.
In order that such an experiment shall succeed, the woman must be not
merely as pure as snow, she must be as pure as fire in her certainty of
giving her own life a bright enhancement and a new treasure to the race
in the child of her love.
If she is this—then indeed there is a gulf, deep as the centre of the
earth, fixed between this unmarried woman, who presents her child to
the race, and the unmarried woman, who “has a child.”
Beyond all doubt the first-named would have considered it the ideal of
happiness to be able to bring up her child together with its father.
The circumstances which prevent her may be many. The man’s liberty,
for instance, may be limited by earlier duties or feelings, which
bind him, against his will or not. The conditions of life or of work
of one of them may prevent a complete union. So may the experience
that the personality of one of them is fettered through marriage. Or
again, love itself was not what it had promised to be, and the woman
was proud enough not to consider herself fallen and in need of being
rehabilitated by a marriage which, on the contrary, would under these
circumstances be a fall.
Finally, there are exceptional cases, where a superior woman—for it is
often the best who are seized by the powerful desire of a child—feels
that she cannot combine her motherhood with the claims of love and of
intellectual production; that she can suffice for only two duties, and
therefore accepts from love the child but renounces marriage.
But there are also destinies entirely contrary to these, where a woman
for her own part wished to have a child but renounces it for the man’s
sake.
In most cases this is because she surrounds his work with such
affection that, when it is asked of her, she sacrifices to it her
mother’s happiness in the spirit of Heloïse. And the more love is
perfected, the more does woman thus learn to love her husband’s work as
her child, while he, on the other hand, loves her work as his own.
But it may also be for other reasons that a woman desires a man to keep
his complete freedom; it may be, for instance, that he is the younger,
or that she knows she cannot give him a child. Such unions are not
unusual in Europe, unions by which two people long make their own lives
and the lives of those about them richer. In such a case the woman
transforms her motherliness into affection for the man. She gives the
best of her powers of production for his use, so that he grows while
she stops short. But she thereby enjoys the bliss of a mother with a
child at her breast; as the mother feeds herself for the child, so
does such a mistress seek the finest intellectual nourishment that she
may afterwards impart it: she feels that she steals what she enjoys
alone. Perhaps the legend of the pelican, which nourished its young
with its own blood, would be a better symbol for these women, who must
be prepared sooner or later to see the man choose the young bride who
in every respect will answer to his longing. Cases like these, if any,
verify Nietzsche’s words that “great love desires more than a return,”
and that “it will create.” Here, if ever, woman’s nature reveals that
its great genius is for love; that the higher a woman attains, the more
certainly will her own honour, her own triumphs, her own future weigh
lightly as a feather against the joy of being able to develop in all
its fulness her great talent, that of loving. And when does she love
more highly than in lavishing the whole superfluity of her developed
feminine nature on the perfecting of her lover—for another woman?
What every woman needs, in our time more than in any other, has been
expressed by Ricarda Huch in these words: _Courage for one’s self,
sympathy for others_.
Courage for one’s own destiny; courage to bear it or break under it.
But also courage to wait for, to choose one’s destiny. Sympathy with
the many who have lacked one part or another of the new courage:
boldness or vigilance or patience.
Both these courses which woman’s new courage has found out—the man
and work without the child, or the child and work without the man—may
doubtless be called justified forms of life, when they show themselves
life-enhancing. But they cannot be the line of life for the majority.
This line follows the direction of the old Indian proverb: that the man
is half a human being, and the woman half; only the father and mother
with their child can become a whole. And even if women have the right,
so far as life is thereby enhanced, to satisfy their erotic longing,
they ought never to forget that they never attain their full humanity
until through love they have given their husband a child and their
child a father.
We have not spoken here of the young women who are unmarried wives
of men, while waiting till the latter are able to provide a home
for the child and a full domestic life. These women may, it is
true, experience the grief of having trusted too much to their own
or another’s heart. But they have been pure in their will and their
will has been directed towards the future domestic life, not towards
“adventures,” whose only value for them has been that they rapidly
succeeded each other.
The young women alluded to must, therefore, be carefully distinguished
from those who have become the hetairæ of the present day. These
neo-Greek women are finely cultured, richly endowed, choice and pure
types of the cerebral and polygamous woman. Love for them is an element
of enjoyment—somewhat higher than that of the cigarette with which
their dainty fingers toy, or of the alcohol which warms their pale
cheeks—but decidedly lower than the joy of colour or the intoxication
of poetry.
They share with man the joy of work, the desire of creation, delight
in beauty, ideas, and freedom in love. Nothing would be more unwelcome
to them than possible consequences of their “love,” which passes from
one relation to another, with a growing sense of emptiness, fatigue,
and prostration. Unfruitfulness in every respect, that is their lot and
their condemnation; for life has no use for the solitary unfruitful.
Sometimes indeed they are not even capable of continuing to live—only
to prove again and again that their soul cannot love, cannot create,
cannot suffer, and has no other will but to free itself from the tree
of life like a damaged bud, a spoilt fruit.
The right to an exceptional destiny belongs only to one whose
happiness it provides for; in other words, one whom it places in such
an agreement between the needs of his own life and the surrounding
conditions that the powers of the individual thus attain their
highest possible development. And as this is seldom the case when the
individual creates for himself a position which places him in conflict
with society, no thoughtful person can thus refer to an exceptional
destiny the majority of young women now oppressed by compulsory labour,
who wish to improve their lot. The most immediate possibility to begin
with is to improve the character and conditions of their labour.
Women must be more eager to discover or invent for themselves
departments of work which will give them the opportunity of expressing
something of their feminine nature, their human personality. It is
one of the gladdening signs of the times that this is beginning
to be done. Thus, for instance, in Denmark a distinguished lady
mathematician—determined by precisely the reasons given above—has
abandoned her science and become the first female inspector of
factories in Scandinavia. Thus in Germany a lady chemist, for the
same reasons, has chosen the same career. A lady lawyer in the same
country is devoting herself entirely to the protection of children;
another—in France—to the profession of advocate for the assistance
of poor women. But there are still to be found far too many women
whose fortunate situation has given them free choice in their work and
who, nevertheless, have sought the profession which offers them the
surest income or the largest pension, not the most liberal use of their
personal powers.
But even the possibility of the choice belongs to exceptional ability
or exceptional circumstances. The majority of women, who must work or
wish to work, have difficulty in finding a calling which really gives
them a backbone, not merely a stick to hold them up. To render possible
a greater organic connection between woman and her work, nothing is
more necessary than a business and professional agency or exchange, to
which reports would be sent from different places as to local needs
of practical or ideal work, and then, in connection therewith, a new
kind of mortgage bank, but one in which the mortgages would be upon
young women’s courage, industry, and invention; a bank, in fact, which
would advance on easy terms of repayment the loans which would be
necessary to enable these at present unutilised assets to be invested
in the wealth of the nation. The sum of happiness of unmarried women
would rise if their creative instinct were thus at least directed into
a strong and healthy activity, by means of which they could in some
measure satisfy their need of having something to care for, of evoking
around them comfort and beauty.
No fund would be more worthy of the subscriptions of enlightened
patrons than such a one as this.
It is important, again, that all those women who are forced to continue
working for wages should enter into the social question at least as
much as is necessary to make them understand the duty of solidarity and
the need of organisation if they would obtain the higher wages, the
shorter hours, the summer holiday, and the better conditions in other
respects which they must win in order to preserve in some degree their
spiritual and bodily powers and with them that measure of joy in life
which everyone may thus possess. The first condition for this is that
girls who live with their parents should cease to take work at other
rates of pay than those which the wholly self-supporting can live on;
and that women in general should cease to think themselves meritorious
merely because they work—without troubling about the harm their
underpaid labour may do to the whole community.
But it is not only the will to elevate their own lives, but above all
a more lively feeling for social organisation as a whole that these
working women need. Their personal demands for education, rest, beauty,
love, motherhood, must be placed in connection with those of everyone
else, so that they may begin to claim also for others what they
desire for themselves. Instead of making their own existence poorer by
unfortunate experiments, they ought to fill the souls of other women
with their dreams of a more beautiful life. And to be able to do this
they must be constantly active and on the watch, giving and taking on
every hand.
Thus innumerable little streams swell the flood of wills, which shall
one day remove the old landmarks between the power to wish and the
compulsion to renounce. Thus shall the woman deprived of love be able
to forget her own little lot in the destiny of the many, and in spite
of the limitations of her own life to feel that she lives by feeling
the beat of humanity’s heart in her own.