CHAPTER I

_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.