THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MEN AND WOMEN IN GENERAL
In their struggle for freedom for the same opportunities of study, for
the same fields of work, the same citizenship as man, women have
encountered all possible opposition, from that of the Pope, who recently
pronounced the most positive condemnation of the whole movement for the
emancipation of woman, and that of Parliament, to the rough pranks of
students. Man’s attempt to define the boundaries of “woman’s natural
sphere” continues always. The woman physician, for example, had to
struggle, in her student years, against prejudice in the dissecting
room, and, in her practice, against the professional jealousy of men.
The history of emancipation has much shameful conduct on the part of man
toward woman to record. Great reluctance to recognise the results of
woman’s work is still common. When this work, in literature and art for
instance, is compared with man’s, the comparison is made not for the
purpose of getting a finer understanding of woman’s peculiar
characteristics, but only to disparage it. The energy which men of the
present time not infrequently lack they cannot endure to recognise in
women, who often possess it in high degree. In the Romance countries,
self-supporting working women are always looked upon as a special
caste—a caste into which a man does not marry however high respect he
pays, theoretically, to “les vierges fortes.”
And yet how different—and more beautiful—are the present relations
between men and women in general, especially among the Germanic peoples.
A friendly comradeship prevails among the young men and women studying
at the university, in art academies, music schools, business colleges,
etc. In the North, this comradeship often continues from the primary
schools, through the grades to the university, with results advantageous
to both sexes. Especially in the years under twenty, this comradeship
has a significance which cannot be overestimated. Girls, who were,
earlier, confined to a narrow, uninteresting, joyless family circle, now
often find in the circle of masculine and feminine comrades their share
of the joy of youth without which life has no springtime. Youths who
formerly had known no other young women than those with whom they should
never have come in contact, now learn to know soulful, pure-minded
girls, and this gives them a new conception of woman. Both sexes now
experience together the joys of youth in such fresh and significant
forms as folk-dancing, sport, etc. They have opportunity for stimulating
interchange of ideas in a great circle, and quiet discussion with a few
congenial friends. During the last twenty or thirty years, young men and
young women have again begun to discover one another spiritually,
discoveries which since the days of romanticism have been made only
through the stained glass of literature. In the romantic period, men and
women exercised reciprocally upon one another a humanising influence. A
like influence again obtains at the present time, but upon a much
broader basis. The men and women of romanticism formed a group bound
together only by spiritual relationship, in which the women aspired to
the culture of the men and shared their intellectual interests, while
the men promoted the women’s “desire for men’s culture, art, knowledge,
and distinction” (_Geluste nach der Männer Bildung, Kunst, Weisheit und
Ehre._—Schleiermacher). Now, young people studying in different fields
exert a mutual humanising influence and thereby learn to know one
another from the side of intelligence as well as from that of character
and disposition. Thus are dispelled certain illusions and conceptions
almost forced upon them through which both sexes in the years of
adolescence once regarded each other. Men as well as women obtain a
finer criterion for the conception of “womanliness” and of “manliness”;
both discover the innumerable shadings which these conceptions conceal;
both recognise that the sexes can meet not only upon the erotic plane,
but upon a plane that is universally human; finally, both learn that the
more perfect and complete human beings they become, the more they have
to thank one another for it.
Comprehension in erotic relations is most difficult because, there,
women are far in advance of men. Woman’s ideal of love, however, is
becoming more and more the ideal of young men. Young girls, on their
side, are beginning to understand better the sexual nature of men. The
whole world in which man received his culture, won his victories,
suffered his defeats, is no longer _terra incognita_ to women; they have
lost the blind reverence or the blind hostility with which they formerly
regarded the doings and dealings of men. Men, on the other hand, are
learning that the domestic labours for the comfort of the family, which
they have thus far regarded as the sole duty of woman, cannot engross
her whole soul, that domesticity leaves many wishes unfulfilled. So both
sexes have begun, each on its own side, to build a bridge across the
chasm which law and custom had dug between them. The young still ponder
over the enigmatical antitheses in their natures, yet they find they
have very much that is human in common with one another. In comradeship,
however, that “chivalry” vanishes, which among other things consisted in
the ideal that the young men had always to bear all the burdens and
duties. Now as a rule, the girl carries her own knapsack on excursions
and pays her share of the expenses. But if she really needs help, the
youth is quite as ready as before to grant it to her, just as she also
on her part is ready to assist according to her strength: honest
friendship has replaced rapturous chivalry. This friendly comradeship
often satisfies the young man’s need of feminine kindness and enjoyment
in those dangerous years when, as a young man said, “Three fourths of
the life of a youth, conscious and unconscious, is sex life.” And
nothing can more effectually prevent him from degrading himself than
access to a circle where in quiet and freedom he meets young girls,
without an indelicate, intruding family surveillance, interfering and
asking him about his “intentions.” If between two such comrades an
erotic feeling finally develops, even if the wooing takes place in a
laboratory instead of a romantic arbour, the possibilities always exist,
in the golden haze of love, of making mistakes. But both have, however,
had opportunities of seeing each other in many character-illuminating
situations; they have observed each other, not only with their own eyes,
but also through the more critical glasses of the comrade circle. On the
other hand, it often happens that discussions and interchange of letters
conjure up a congeniality which exists only in opinions and temperament,
not in nature. It is fortunate when this is discovered in time.
Otherwise bitter conflicts may be the result, should a strong individual
nature wish to mould the other after himself or after his ideal of man
or woman. For that anyone loves the individuality of another without
illusions is still very rarely the case. It now happens somewhat more
frequently, since young people in comradeship learn to know mutually
their ideals and dreams, as well in erotic as in universally human
aspects. But if these ideals and dreams do give a hint of character,
comradeship brings a true knowledge of character only when it also
offers an opportunity of seeing others _act_; not only of _hearing_ them
speak of themselves. Such analyses of one’s own soul or the soul of
others in the atmosphere of tea and cigarettes, music and poetry, give
the “interesting” masculine or feminine parasites opportunity to ensnare
a victim, who is then intellectually or erotically, often even
economically, sucked dry.
But even if such an interchange of ideas really enriched all, it can be
carried to excess and become deleterious to energy for work, directness,
and idealism. However beneficial may be the honesty of to-day in sexual
questions, the discussion of the instincts of life which has now become
a commonplace is also dangerous. These discussions are fraught with the
same danger to the roots of human life as is a continual digging up of
the roots of a plant to see how it is growing.
The earlier a marriage can be consummated, the less is the danger of
freshness being lost in this way; the greater the prospect that man and
wife will grow close together, just as do the man and wife of the
people, through the difficulty of the common struggle for existence. But
if this struggle becomes easier before youth has entirely passed, then
there enters often into the life of the man a crisis which the practised
French call “La maladie de quarante ans”: the need of the man for a new
erotic experience. While those on a lower erotic plane, to-day as at all
times, seek this in transient secret alliances, it leads those on a
higher level in our time to the most tragic of all separations, where
the man—after decades of the most intimate life together, of the most
faithful work together, of mutual understanding—drives the wife out of
the home in order to bring in a young wife who has never been to him,
perhaps never can be to him, a fellow fighter and helper, as the
repudiated wife was, but who has for him the charm of the mystery which
the maiden had for the man before the days of coëducation, sexual
discussions, comradeship, and dress-reform!
Women students now escape the earlier danger of the daughter of the
family, falling in love out of lack of occupation. They have not the
time, often also not the means to permit themselves erotic dreams. There
are among them many poor girls who dare lose no single semester, for
they must hasten to earn their livelihood. Moreover, such a girl knows
that if she should yield to the need for tenderness, for support, that
is so strong in her, the same fate could happen to her as to this or
that fellow student who after a short happiness was left alone when the
lover found a good match. And she was left behind not only in her sorrow
but also in her work. And the more a yearning girl buries herself in her
studies, the more science or art unlock their riches to her, the
happier, more full of life she feels herself in spite of loneliness,
scanty means, and shabby dress.
Among women students there are also many of the cerebral type, mentioned
above, women who need tenderness neither in the form of friendship nor
of love; yes, who fear in both a bond for their “free individuality.”
These take part in sports, discuss, jest, with their fellow men
students, openhearted and unconcerned, without thinking whether they
please or not. All these young girls now go about with perfect freedom;
even in the Romance countries, a young woman can now go alone with her
bag of books or her racquet. For in circles where study has not yet
exercised its freeing influence, sport has brought this about.
In America, student life, because of the early entrance of the men into
the professions, becomes more a one-sided, feminine comrade life. There,
the women have to develop their arts of the toilet for each other, whom
they find more interesting, more worthy of pleasing than the masculine
sex. Even in Europe, feminine comradeship in the student years is at
times most intimate. For a friendship between a young girl and a young
man often ends with love—on one side. Or in an intimate circle A has
fallen in love with B, but B with C, etc. Such eventualities the wise
girl will avoid for they can bring both suffering and obstruction to her
work. With women comrades, she has, without this risk, an interchange of
ideas which promotes study, deepens culture, opens up new views, and
gives to all new impulses. There exists, at least at the present time, a
difference between the masculine and feminine method of inquiry, of
solving problems, of apprehending ideas, which results in the fact that
comradeship between women cannot take the place of comradeship between
men and women. It is, however, for deep and beautiful natures often
impossible at the beginning of life to be capable, in a spiritual sense,
of more than a single friendship with their own sex; for each new
spiritual contact becomes a new and difficult problem. For such men or
women a friendship with a comrade of their own sex is often the richest
advantage of their student time. Often a student in good circumstances
finds her joy in taking care of some lonely comrades. They find at her
apartments, in a friendly welcome, a few flowers and pictures, a
teakettle, a fireplace, that feeling of homely warmth for which the
shivering students have longed,—a longing which has often driven a
lonely, impressionable youth from the dreary students’ room to “rough
pleasures.” Now when he leaves the little comrade circle, his sweetest
memories of home, his finest dreams, vibrate in him. And the timid girl
goes in the certainty that there is another girl who is concerned about
her wretched fate.
In such a quiet as also in a more lively comrade life both sexes learn
to know not only each other but also different classes and, in certain
European universities, the several nations. It is not unusual for nine
or ten races to be found represented in one small group of comrades.
Life thus becomes everywhere enriched by strong manifestations or fine
shades of congeniality; spiritual attractions and repulsions cross one
another; inspiring or restraining impressions radiate in all directions.
It would be quite as impossible to estimate the fructifying influence of
such a friendly intercourse as to measure the life which comes into
existence on a spring day filled with the sigh of the wind, the
fluttering of butterflies, and humming of bees.
In such a circle of comrades, devotion and capacity for sacrifice are
past belief, especially in the nation where “the girls wear short hair
and the young men long hair,” as a wag characterised the young Russians
studying abroad. That a couple of Russian girls, for a whole winter,
possessed together but a single pair of shoes and so could never go out
at the same time, is one of the innumerable small and great expressions
of the feeling of solidarity among the poorest students of the
university.
When the comrade life assumed the form exclusively of coffee-house
visits, then the women had to revolt against it. But they often, alas,
allowed themselves to be carried with the stream. Because the
coffee-house life at first really gave a certain polish to the
intelligence, it could for a short time have its justification. But when
a blade is worn out, the artist of life should cease grinding; if on the
contrary he allows the grindstone to go on continually, then at last he
has only the haft in his hand. Formerly, it was only the young men but
now even the girls wear out thus their weapons or tools before they ever
use them seriously.
* * * * *
The darkest side of coëducational life has been that women could
demonstrate their equal capability with men in no other way than by the
same courses and examinations as those of the men. The eagerness of
women to prove their like proficiency with men in study and in sport has
often had disastrous physical results. These are continually becoming
more infrequent, thanks to the decreasing prudery in regard to the
sexual functions and to the increasing hygienic conscience. The
intellectual results, however, continue to exist and are disastrous
alike for both sexes; but because of the ambition and conscientiousness
of girls, perhaps still more disastrous for them. The examinations which
they pass are often dearly bought. This was not noticed in the
beginning, when a woman doctor was still looked at with wonder as a
noteworthy product of culture, and regarded herself also with wonder.
Truly she had sacrificed to grinding and cramming for examinations a
multitude of youthful joys, but she had, as was thought, won in this way
much greater values. This, however, is not always really the case.
Ethically, the conscientious girl is certainly above the boy who, not
infrequently in the unconscious instinct of self-preservation, idles
away his time. But the mental strength of the latter may frequently be
better preserved in any determined direction. Girls, conscientious and
zealous in their work, have filled their heads full of lessons to which
the coming examination and not their own choice has urged them. What is
thus crammed in is not assimilated and consequently has not promoted
spiritual or mental growth. But it has taken up room and has thereby
impaired the intellectual freedom of motion and compelled the natural
individuality to compress itself so that it is long before the space
conditions in the brain permit it to extend again—in case it is not
simply choked by all the chaotic mass that has been absorbed. How many
young girls have come to the university or to the art academy full of
thirst for knowledge and energy for work! But after a few years they
feel the disgust of surfeit, unless they have found a teacher who has
been to them a leader to the essentials in science or in art. Then their
joy in study could really be as rich as they had once dreamed it—yes, as
perhaps even their grandmothers had dreamed it when they had to content
themselves with their little text-books written for “girls.” Many young
girls maintain to-day, through some teacher or some masculine comrade,
that spiritual development which only an exceptional relationship
between a father and daughter, a brother and sister, could give in
earlier times.
* * * * *
When men and women can study together, then the relationship later
between masculine and feminine fellow-workmen will, as a rule, be better
than when the sexes work independently in the student days. It is true
masculine competitors still have recourse to the weapon of spreading
reports of the incapacity of their feminine competitors—at times
honestly convinced of it themselves. The same weapon is of course turned
also against masculine competitors. Yet there it is a question of the
_individual_, while in regard to women, the _sex_ is often the only
proof the man thinks he need assign for the inferiority of their work.
It can be said, however, upon the whole, that the relationship between
men and women professional colleagues exhibits the same good side as the
common student life, although naturally to a lesser degree. The joint
work does not often leave much time for significant interchange of
ideas, and after working hours each usually longs for new faces. The
influence of joint labour is often limited to the refining effect that
the presence of one sex exercises upon the other. Small services are
mutually rendered and each worker learns also to respect the
achievements of the other; or one is provoked because the work which
should have been dispatched by the other now falls to his share!
If the woman performs the same work as the man, then she is often
indignant because she must do it for smaller compensation than he. All
too easily, the feminists forget that this injustice is equalised if a
man who wishes to establish a family cannot obtain a post which he seeks
because a woman retains it who can be satisfied with a smaller wage
since she remains in her parents’ home. For this disparity, raising
bitterness on both sides, there is no remedy under the present economic
system. Feminists can _demand_ the same compensation, but working women
will not obtain it so long as the supply of workers is to the demand as
one hundred to one in the professional occupations to which women flock.
In vain underpaid women will call to the agitators of the woman
movement, “Help us to obtain endurable conditions of life.” The only
honest answer is, “Help one another, just as the working men have helped
one another, by union and solidarity!”
The competition of the sexes in the labour field is only indirectly
connected with the woman movement; it is a part of the social question
and will therefore only be touched upon here.
The hostility which the competition between the sexes has evoked
is a factor in the social war; and if—_by reason of this
competition_—marriage decreases, then such competition is a form
of social danger. If the cause is sought in the woman movement,
then the question is begged completely, because the women with
sufficient income _to be able_ to live at home without industrial
work, after the loss of a husband or a father, are constantly
becoming more rare. There is the additional fact that in many
positions where man and woman have equal salary, the woman is
preferred because of her greater honesty and faithfulness to duty.
Further it must be emphasised that, even in middle-class
vocations, women with increasing frequency earn their _whole_
livelihood, not merely a supplementary remuneration, when if they
did not thus work they would be a burden to some man and so
perhaps prevent him from marrying. Many of these women would wish
nothing better than to enjoy the warmth of “the domestic hearth”
to which men in theory relegate them; but since no man offers this
warmth, they must at least be allowed to procure fuel for their
lonely hearth fire.
When men declare that “the only duty which has life value for a woman is
to be man’s helpmeet,” then they ought not to forget that this task is
more and more rarely assigned to a woman, because men prefer to do
without her aid, and even find a richer life in bachelorhood than in
marriage. They should not dare to forget also that a great number of men
disinclined or disqualified for work compel their sisters, daughters,
wives, to undertake the task of family provider, and these women also
must forego being, “in the quiet of the home, man’s helpmeet.”
However weak the feminist logic often may be, it is not so weak as the
anti-feminist logic of man. Masculine vacuity has found there an arena
where it performs the most incredible gymnastics. The hysteria of
literary fanatics, the crude lordly instincts of the mediocre man, the
irritation of the masculine good-for-nothing at the increasing ability
of women, the rage, confounding cause and effect, over the competition
of women—these are some of the reasons for the present antagonism
between men and women. The deepest reason is this: the more woman is
compelled to maintain the struggle for existence under the same social
conditions as those under which men have been thus far compelled to
struggle, the more she loses that character by which she gives happiness
to man and receives it from him. A diminished erotic attraction is
frequently the result, not of the work of women, but of their work under
such conditions that the drudging, worn-out women comrades finally
appear to their masculine colleagues only as “sexless ants.” Sometimes
they really exhibit that obliteration of all characteristic marks of sex
which Meunier has indicated to us in his _Woman Miner_, a great
thought-inspiring work of art.
Many a woman of the present time, deeply feminine, suffers under this
compulsory neutralising of her womanly being. Others again consider this
a path to complete humanity.
But the complete personality is only that man or woman who has
cultivated and exercised the strength which he or she as a human being
possessed without having neutralised thereby the characteristic of sex.
It is tragic when nature herself creates deviations from normal
sexuality, but criminal when the ideas of the time weaken sound
instincts and inculcate unsound ones. It is not woman nature but the
denatured woman who is beginning to grow through the ultra-feminism
which looks down upon woman’s normal sexual duty as only a low, animal
function.
That sound men abominate this tendency is justifiable. On the other
hand, it is unwarrantable to confuse a variation of feminism with the
woman movement in its entirety, a movement which includes in itself a
great earnest desire to work for the welfare of both mothers and
children. As a manifestation of womanliness in its most complete,
perfect form, many men still elect the woman whose entire life-content
consists in the cult of her own beauty, a cult whose attendant
phenomenon is the æsthetic culture which raises the temple about the
altar. Under this perfect and apparently inspired form there is,
however, rarely anything to be found of that which the man seeks: the
longing and the power of true womanhood to give happiness by erotic and
motherly devotion. Such women, like those cerebral women engrossed by
their studies and their work, allow a real love to pass them by; men are
only sacrificial servants of the cult, and the high priest is chosen not
upon the ground of motives of feeling. This type is said to be more
common in America than in Europe. But it existed thousands of years ago
on the Tiber as well as on the Nile. That Cleopatra in the language of
feminism now speaks of the “right of the personality,” and means thereby
her right to represent no other value in life than that of the white
peacock and the black orchid—the value of rarity—that does not make her
a “product of the woman movement.”
But certain men characterise a woman thus, if they have been deceived in
her: a psychology which equals in value that of the feminist when she
speaks of man as the “oppressor,” the “corrupter,”—without noting that
the world is full of poor men corrupted or tormented by women! Amid such
mutual accusations, just or unjust—whereby _gifted_ men maintain
generalisations about “woman’s” being which are quite as ingenuous as
those which _silly_ women propose about “man’s” being—the sexes, in the
days of the woman movement, have been almost as much alienated from each
other as drawn together. The estrangement has taken place in the erotic
field and through labour competition; the reconciliation has been
effected—leaving out coëducation—by common industry and the social
activity of both sexes.
The middle-class women of Europe have still so little share in the
control of production that one cannot determine whether or not they have
even awakened to the understanding that the fundamental condition of a
universal life-enhancing issue of the woman movement must be new social
conditions. One cannot yet predicate anything at all in regard to their
desires to promote more humane labour conditions and a more just
distribution of profit. Under the system now prevailing they must, like
men, either conform to it or be destroyed economically. It is even so in
public offices and similar fields of labour. Just as so many young men
do, at the beginning of their career, a great number of women attempt to
abolish the abuses and mitigate the formalism. But they meet such
obstacles that, like the young men, they are obliged to abandon the
effort; or they are compelled to give up the position whereby they win
their scanty bread.
In this way, principally, the work of women in the sphere of charitable
activity has given to men the opportunity for a correct valuation of the
social working power of woman. Men have then in a wider sphere than that
of the family circle, so often overlooked by them, learned to appreciate
feminine enthusiasm and capacity for organisation, energy and devotion,
initiative and endurance. Innumerable men—from the soldiers up, who in
the hospitals of the Crimea literally kissed Florence Nightingale’s
shadow on the floor of the hospital ward—have learned in the last half
century that life has become more kindly for them since social
motherliness has obtained for itself a certain elbow-room. The more
women lose their present fear of appearing, in coöperation with men,
“womanly” impulsive, savage in face of injustice and cruelty, the more
will they signify in that joint work where, at least to-day, they still
have a more fortunate hand—the hand of the mother.
And since a single fact is more convincing than a thousand words, so the
facts gained in the social activity of woman have won, in later years,
many men supporters of woman suffrage. The arguments derived from
abstract right—however obvious they may be for every tax-paying,
law-abiding woman—go to the rear to make way for the argument of “social
utility.”
Not only women themselves but men also refer now to what women have
accomplished when they are allowed to work in the service of society;
they point to the reforms which were retarded or bungled because women
had no immediate influence there where appropriations were granted and
laws were enacted.
Especially significant for the reconciliation of the sexes is the joint
social work of young people. The temperance cause or the education of
the masses or socialism now brings together a host of young men and
girls, who learn thereby that the social as well as the private life of
labour gains in strength and wealth if men and women participate in it
together.
* * * * *
The men who fear political life for woman are, however, right. Just as
this life has injured the best qualities in the manhood of many men, so
will it impair the womanhood of many women. Neither the spiritual
personality of woman nor of man, nor even their secondary physical sex
characteristics can withstand the influences of their private _milieu_,
of their private labour conditions. Why should women better resist the
influences of the public life? When the man is compelled, in political
work for the state, to neglect in the highest degree the foundation of
the state—the home—how should women be able to do otherwise than the
same thing? The political work of both can benefit the home _in general_
but _their own_ home must always suffer for it, for a time at least.
Women will learn, as so many men have already learned, that the fresh
enthusiasm, the unexhausted optimism with which they entered the
political life soon vanish before party pressure, general prejudice,
opportunism, and the demands of compromise. And just as now so many men
for these reasons withdraw from Parliament, many women will do likewise
when they learn that what they can accomplish there with the
characteristics peculiar to them, is so insignificant that it does not
compensate for the injury which ensues because these characteristics are
missing in the home.
If the eligibility of woman is really to benefit society, then the right
of resignation must be unconditioned for mothers, and they themselves
must understand that the parliamentary mandate is incompatible with
motherhood so long as the children are still in the home; in like manner
during the same period, the franchise of the mother of a family must not
result in rushing into electioneering. The ballot in and of itself does
not injure the fineness of a woman’s hand any more than a cooking
receipt.
* * * * *
Because woman’s motherhood must be preserved, if she is to bring to the
social organism a really _new_ factor, so she must always continue to be
found and to work in private life, in order to be, meanwhile, useful in
public life. The genius of social reform which women will develop can
complement that of man only if this genius is of a new order; if it
originates thoughts which bring new points of view to the social
problems, wills which seek new means, souls which aspire to new ends.
Women could, if they received their full civic right before they lost
their intuitive and instinctive power through masculinisation, effect
the progress of culture as, for example, the entrance of the Germans
influenced the antique world.
The sooner woman receives her political franchise, the more, on the
whole, can be expected from it. The generation which has now fought the
fight for suffrage is wholly conscious of the reforms that await woman
for their final realisation. And this generation of women would
introduce into the political life a new, fresh current. In any event, we
can hope to secure from women new impulses and better organisation in
political life, as has already been the case in social life. But every
new generation of parliamentary women, who together with the men have
been “politically trained,” would have—as long as the present economic
conditions obtain—continually greater economic interests to advocate
“parliamentarily,” and would also for other reasons evince the same
parliamentary maladies as the men evince now. And as little as evil men
lose their evil characteristics because of the franchise, quite as
little will bad women lose theirs. The entrance of women into politics
cannot therefore—as certain feminists maintain—signify the victory of
the noble over the ignoble. But it signifies a great increase in noble
as well as ignoble powers hitherto inactive in political life, which in
the wider sphere that they there maintain oppose one another, now
conquering, now yielding. Men and women _together_, however, will be
able to enact more humane laws than men alone can enact. Questions
concerning women and children can be treated with deeper seriousness by
men and women _together_ than is now the case. Men and women _together_
will consider the social life from more significant points of view than
can one sex alone. Government consisting of men and women _together_
will be more profound than heretofore. No one who has observed the
effects of masculine and feminine coöperation in fields already
mentioned can doubt this. Who can deny that with the civic right of
woman her feeling of social responsibility will increase and that her
horizon will widen? And therewith her value as wife and mother of men
will also increase? But she will increase in value for the men closely
connected with her as well as in social respects. The woman of earlier
times, for all of whom society might go to pieces if only _her_ home and
family prospered, was only in a restricted sense man’s help. In certain
great crises she usually betrayed him simply because she wholly lacked
the social feeling.
Obviously, the female member of Parliament cannot confine herself solely
to questions which concern the protection of the weaker and the
education of the new race. The more women concentrate upon the cause of
justice against power, and of public spirit against self-interest, the
more advantageous it will be for her herself and for the public life.
But concentration is, unfortunately, exactly what modern parliamentarism
does not promote; what it does promote is disintegration.
Woman has, however, where she has entered into parliamentary life as
elector and eligible, shown thus far exactly this tendency toward
concentration. She has worked for moral, temperance, and hygienic
questions; for questions concerning schools and education of the masses;
for mother and child protection; reform of marriage laws, and kindred
subjects. What thinking man can maintain that all this does not belong
to “woman’s sphere” or can say that these and similar social interests
have been sufficiently attended to by an exclusively masculine
government? Already the opposite danger appears in certain social
spheres: an exclusively “feminine government.”
In the present forms of public life, however, much feminine power will
without doubt be wasted. Only when man, upon a higher plane, has created
a new kind of representation “of the people,” where professional
interests in every sphere are represented, can the highest vocation of
woman—motherhood—come into its rights.
It belongs to the necessary course of historical development that women
also go through the stage of party-power politics in order together with
man to reach the stage of social politics and finally that of culture
politics.
But women cannot wait until this development has been attained; they
must accomplish it together with man. Just as the best masculine powers
sooner or later must be concentrated to transform increasingly untenable
parliamentary conditions, so the best feminine powers will also work in
the same direction, especially if the will becomes intense in mothers
not only to awaken in their children the social spirit, but also to
create for them better social conditions.
In later years, the movement for the suffrage of woman has not only
filled the world with suffrage societies but the agitation has even
achieved popular representation in eighteen European countries, in the
legislative assemblies of a number of American States, in Australasia,
in legislative assemblies in Canada and in the Philippines. In Iceland
as well as in Italy, in Japan as in South Africa, the movement is in
progress, and whoever thinks it will not attain its goal is politically
blind.
When anti-feminist men prophesy that men will love their mothers,
sisters, wives, and daughters less when pitted against them as political
opponents or competitors, they prophesy certainly in many cases the
truth. Politics have already estranged fathers from sons, brothers from
brothers. But this demonstrates only either that the personal feelings
were weaker than the political passions or that these latter have
destroyed the attributes which made the personality lovable. But if men
are really able to love and women remain lovable, even as political
personalities, then a man will not cease to love a woman, even if she
votes for a different congressional candidate! Such prophecies have not
been verified in other spheres from which men sought to intimidate women
by similar warnings. For woman retains her power over man. if she
retains her womanly charm, created out of peace, harmony, and kindness.
Not that _of which_ a woman speaks, not that _for which_ she works,
determines man’s feeling and conduct; but _how_ she does it. A woman may
charm a man by a political speech, and drive him away by her table talk.
A poor working woman can, without a word, induce the same man to give
her his seat in a street car who the next minute can be brutal to an
assuming and incapable fellow workwoman. In a word, what a woman makes
of her rights and what they make of her—that alone determines the
measure of veneration, sympathy, love, which she may expect from a man.
That women have lost their equilibrium cannot be denied. How could it be
otherwise? Not only have they in the last half century experienced,
together with man, Naturalism and the New Romantic movement,
Neo-Kantianism, the Higher Criticism, Bismarck and Bebel, Darwin and
Spencer, Wagner and Nietzsche, Ibsen and Tolstoi, Haeckel and von
Hartmann, and still many, many more, but they themselves in dizzy haste
have been hurled out of their position in society, protected by the
family, which they had occupied for centuries. It is obvious that at the
present moment the spiritual mobility of women must be greater than
their harmony; that the raw culture material which they possess must be
richer than that which they can utilise; their life experiences more
significant than their art of life. The modern woman must appear for the
present less symmetrical, more uncertain, than man’s ideal woman in
earlier times. But enduring cultural progress cannot be measured by
comparison with the ideal figures of the poetry or of the life of
earlier times. It must be estimated according to the _average type_ in a
certain period. And the average woman of our time is, in the fullest
significance of the word, more full of vitality and adaptability, more
individually developed, more beneficial socially, than the average woman
of fifty years ago. With the freedom of movement the social feeling has
increased; with the participation in universal human culture, the
richness of content: the spiritual life has become more complex, and the
possibilities of expression of this new soul-life, more numerous.
But since the average man, in the meantime, has undergone no comparable
development, he is estranged, has lost his bearings, and consequently
repudiates a movement which, directly and indirectly, makes such great
demands for the development of his own higher spiritual qualities.
Heretofore men could force women to endure undue interference, and so
have deprived them of the education wherein the possible consequences of
action are considered at the same time with the thought of the action.
But the woman movement has now raised a partition between the sexes such
as is found in the aquarium where it becomes necessary to teach the pike
to allow the carp, also, to live: every time the pike makes a dash at
the carp he strikes his head against the obstruction, until the motive
of repression becomes so strong that the glass wall can be taken away
and both carp and pike live together in peace.