THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MARRIAGE
Certain feminists believe that the woman movement has accomplished such
meagre results in regard to the reorganisation of family right for the
sole reason that men, who once created the right for their own
advantage, still cling to the injustice out of egoism. These feminists
forget that the family is the social form of life in which tradition has
the greatest power. It speaks here with the voice of the blood; it works
through our deepest instincts, our strongest needs of life, our
innermost feelings, as these have developed through many thousands of
years under the influences which were exercised in and through the
family. To accomplish in this sphere not only reforms upon paper but
also vigorous modifications—that is, new laws and customs which are
rooted in new spiritual conditions of the people as a whole—is more
necessary than that man grant women a share in legislation. Innumerable
individual human vicissitudes must be experienced and repeated in new
forms, entering finally into the universal consciousness, before such
spiritual soil can be formed. The man became and remained the head of
the family because all experiences and social factors once made this
arrangement most advantageous for father, mother, and children. Woman
will be able to realise her new ideas in regard to love-life and
mother-right to the degree in which she demonstrates, not only in speech
and writing but also in vigorous daily living, that these ideals surpass
in vital effect those which now obtain.
* * * * *
In the last half century, among the Germanic peoples, however, the
family life has already undergone essential transformations, while the
Romantic world still continues to exhibit features which in the first
half of the 19th century were typical even among these peoples.
Marriages are arranged by the father, divorce is considered either a sin
or a shame, the paternal power is still absolute, the homogeneous
relationship among all the members of the family—in joy and sorrow—is
inviolable. The feeling of the son for the mother, bordering almost upon
Madonna worship, and the passion of the father for their little
children, must, however, always have been more characteristic of the
Romance peoples than of the Germans.
Among the latter the attainment of individualism, first in the sphere of
legislation, still more in that of customs, most of all in that of mode
of thought and feeling, has altered the position of the individual in
the family. While the family exhibited fifty years ago a tightly closed
unity, in which women had only slight significance, now the wife as well
as the husband, mother as well as father, daughter as well as son,
assert their personality, not only _in_ the family, but often even
_against_ the family. Wives draw the arguments for their self assertion
most frequently from the principles of the woman movement.
Truly, in the course of the century, many married women have succeeded
in finding expression for their significant universal human or feminine
attributes in marriage, and thus have ennobled it. But the
self-conscious effort to elevate the position of the wife began
simultaneously with the demand that no human right could be denied to a
woman upon the ground of her sex, whether within or without marriage.
Individualism has already made personal love, instead of family
interest, decisive for the consummation of a marriage. In the name of
her personality as of her work, woman desires with ever greater right
full majority and legal equality with man in marriage. Against
individualism, the doctrine of evolution now advocates certain
limitations of the personal erotic freedom to consummate marriage, but
advocates at the same time, contrary to the Christian sexual ethics, new
freedom for the sake of the higher development of the race. Here comes
into effect, the new conception of life by which the possibilities of
development and of happiness in the earthly life have acquired a new
value and force.
The ultimate heights of the modern conception of sex life are indicated
by erotic idealism, which since “La Nouvelle Héloise” has by poets and
dreamers been continually elevated, while world-renowned lovers showed
the possibility of this wonderful love. In addition to all these
influences of the spirit of the time upon the transformation of
marriage, come the _indirect_ effects of the woman movement. Thanks to
the vibrations in which this movement has set the “spirit of the time,”
many an ordinary man now accords to his wife that power and authority in
the family which the law still denies her; yes, many commonplace people
of both sexes now desire from their marriage things of which their
equals fifty years ago did not even dream. If one adds also the decisive
influences which the political-economic conditions of the present
exercise upon the family life, one has found some of the threads which
form the woof of the unalterable warp, a woof which makes the marriage
of the present a variegated and unquiet fabric, whose pattern exhibits
primeval oriental motives beside those in newest “modern style.”
Here it is of the greatest importance to indicate the zigzag line which
denotes the alternate repulsion and attraction that under the influence
of the woman movement marriage has had for woman.
First came the little crowd of “masculine women” with their hatred of
marriage and man. Then the great working army that forgot, over the
human rights of woman, that to these also must belong the right to
fulfil her duty as a being of sex, and not alone the right to be
“independent of marriage” through her work. Then came the reaction
against this incompleteness. At this time, the nature of woman was
called an “empty capsule,” which received its content only from man: a
“cry of the blood,” which finds its answer in the child. There was no
other “woman question” than the possibility of living erotically a
complete life. One woman wished this in love without marriage, another
in love without children, a third in children without marriage, a fourth
in children without love—“A work and a child” was the life cry—a fifth
woman wished the man only for the sake of the child, a sixth the child
only for the sake of the man, and the seventh wished both only for her
own sake!
The conviction of some women that the common erotic life of man and
woman must have also a spiritual life value for two human souls, filling
out and developing each other, was called “Ibsenism.” And after the
ideal demands which Ibsen pressed upon the consciousness of the time,
many men—and not a few women—found relaxation after their spiritual
over-exertion, if they desired nothing more from one another than “the
sound happiness of the senses.” Woman’s “personality,” “equality,” and
“human right” were old playthings, relegated to the rubbish heap.
The reaction against this reaction is now in progress. Just now—and
equally one-sided as will be shown later—woman’s universal humanity is
emphasised at the expense of the instinct life; her social labour-duty,
at the expense of the domestic life; her personality, at the expense of
the family.
Among all these zigzag movements, more deeply thoughtful women
continually sought to recall that neither the universal human nor the
sexual being of woman must be over-developed at the expense of the other
qualities of her being; that perfect humanity signifies for neither sex
that the spiritual life has suppressed the sex life or sex, the
soul-life, but that both find in a third higher condition their full
redemption and harmony. Through great love, exceptional natures already
create this condition; but what to-day only exceptional natures attain,
culture can gradually make attainable for many.
This great love demands fidelity. But often only one—ordinarily the
woman—experiences this great feeling. And then not even the deepest
devotion on her part suffices to preserve the community of life. To
preserve the form for the purpose of guarding the inner emptiness, as
was done earlier, is repugnant to the erotic consciousness of the modern
woman. This is the deepest reason why the modern woman—even also the
modern developed man—becomes continually more undecided about
contracting marriage. They both know that the passion which attracts two
beings is not synonymous with a sympathy which arises through the
harmony of their natures, which must not be so complete that nothing
remains of the unexpected and mysterious that is so essential an element
of love. The modern woman asks herself, “What can prove to me that an
erotic sympathy is profound, real, decreed by nature, life-long?” And
she asks with good reason. If two lovers who know that they make each
other happy with all the senses, constrained themselves, each in a
corner of a room fettered to a stool, blindfolded, to entertain each
other three hours daily for three months, this test would probably
prevent a great number of marriages void of sympathy. But it would
furnish no guaranty that those who consummated the marriage after such a
concentrated soul interchange, would hold out. For souls which in a
certain stage of development seem inexhaustible can be so transformed
that they experience only satiety for each other. The young wife of
to-day is deeply conscious of what a new problem for each newly married
woman marriage is. She knows how impossible it is to foresee what
difficulties will be encountered and whether good intentions and tactful
adaptation will succeed in overcoming these difficulties. She knows
that, even if the written law made her wholly equal to man, even if she
made herself that equal by entering only into a marriage of the higher,
newer conscience, yet all the inner, most difficult, deepest problems
still remain. This certainly induces many women to become only the
beloved, the mistress, of the man who wishes no community of life, but
only happy hours. Many more women still strike the possibilities of
erotic happiness out of their plan of life, because they have not
experienced the ideal love of which they dreamed, or else could not
realise it.[3]
Sometimes their doubt, in regard to the duration of love and the unity
of souls, decides them, another time the longing for a personal
life-work is the reason for their determination—a life-work for which
these women have suffered so keenly, been deprived of so much, and have
so struggled, that it has become passionately dear to them, and they
feel that a complete renunciation of the erotic life is easier than the
torment of being “drawn and quartered,” as the death penalty of the
Middle Ages was called—a quartering between profession, husband, home,
and children. And the result usually demonstrates that celibacy is wiser
than the compromise. It is most frequently the case,—in Europe at
least,—if the work of the unmarried woman had no personal character, and
if the home is not dependent upon the earnings of the wife, that she
gives up her professional work after her marriage.
Against this sacrifice, however, the higher erotic idealism has begun to
rebel and has, thereby, come into conflict with the conservative
direction of feminism, which while planning to make the wife equal to
the husband, adheres firmly to the present marriage as protection for
wife and children.
It is this point of view that is condemned by the new idealism. For it
“protection” signifies, in its innermost meaning, that the man buys love
and the woman sells it, which is considered “moral,” while it is
considered immoral for a man to sell love and for a woman to buy it. The
“protection” in this relationship has as result that the “virtue” of the
maid is synonymous with untouched sexual nature, and that of the wife,
with physical fidelity; while the “virtue” of the youth and the man is
judged from an entirely different point of view.
The relationship affording “protection” has also brought with it the
idea that a woman could not show her love as openly as a man, except
when he was proud and poor and she was rich. Only when the duty of
support on the part of the man ceases, will woman be able to demand the
same chastity and fidelity from him as he demands from her; she will
then be able, quite as proudly and naturally as he, to show the
flowering of her being—her love—instead of as now increasing her demand
in the marriage market by artful dissimulation. As long as maintenance,
within or outside of marriage, is the price for “possession” of the
woman, the man will consider the woman as “his,” and the more submissive
she is the more fully she satisfies his feeling of ownership. Now
marriage has become only an affair of custom, a common death or comatose
condition, because neither party needs trouble himself to keep the love
of the other. Only when woman, through her work, can lead an existence
worthy of a human being, when no woman will sell her love but every
woman can freely give it, will man experience what perfect womanly
devotion is. And when no man can “possess” love but must remain worthy
of love in order to be loved then only will women, on their side,
experience what tenderness and fine feeling masculine devotion can
attain.
This, the purest and warmest erotic idealism, is the morality of the
future. But the way to its realisation is not, as many women believe
to-day, that mothers, even, should continue their work of earning a
livelihood, but that way whose direction I have elsewhere pointed
out.[4]
Here we have to do, however, only with the spiritual conditions which
arise in the marriage of to-day, whether the wife has retained her work
or has given it up.
* * * * *
Even the cultivated modern man, who brings to the human personality of
his wife admiration and sympathy, seeks in her always that “womanliness”
to which Goethe has given the classic expression: the finely reserved,
quiet, strong, self-contained woman, reposing harmoniously in the
fulness of her own nature, a maternally lovely being, wholly “natural,”
a “beautiful soul,” observing, creative, but using these gifts only to
create a home. These creative offices the modern man who loves desires
to assure, when he wishes to “maintain” his wife, and begs her to
abandon the outside commercial work in which he foresees a danger to the
beautiful life together of which both dream. The woman who along with
her new self-conscious individuality and her profound culture has
guarded the “old” devotion, understands ordinarily this desire of the
man. She chooses, in spite of her idealism, as he wishes, in cases where
her work has not been very personal. If she has worked in the same field
as the man, then she converts her gifts into comprehension of him, into
personal interest for all his interests; and these marriages in which
the wife has enjoyed the same education as the man, but later has
devoted herself entirely to the home, are, as a rule, the happiest
marriages of the present time. But in the proportion in which her work
was creative, is the difficulty of the choice. In the case where the
productive power has the strength of genius, the modern man will
scarcely utter such a wish and in those circumstances the modern woman
will not grant it. And because the woman of genius is generally a
complete human being, with strong erotic as well as universal human
demands, she chooses often compromise. She finds in love, in motherhood,
new revelations; and in the mysterious depths of her nature, the
productive element of the maternal function has an elevating influence
upon her gift of creative power. Thus the energy temporarily diminished
by motherhood is restored. And her uneasy conscience, because she must
entrust to others much of the care and education of the children, is
appeased by the consciousness that she has often given to mankind richer
natures, and so more significant children, than more devoted mothers,
and that her own nature, because of the double creative activity, has
attained a ripeness and richness which make her personality more
significant for husband and children than if she had given up her
calling to please them. These thoughts cannot, however, prevent the
daily conflict between her feelings of love and the impossibility, in
times of strong spiritual production, of giving expression to it. The
very proximity of the children consumes at such times too much nervous
energy. And since all creation requires selfishness—in the sense of
concentration upon one’s _own needs_ in order to be able to work
creatively and to sink oneself in the work—while all love’s solicitude
requires active _attention_ to the _needs of the loved ones_, the
conflict must remain permanent and _insoluble_.
In this conviction, many women of genius choose the lesser conflict:
marriage without children. Such a relationship occurs not infrequently
in our time in this way: a man of feeling through the work of a woman is
first moved by her being. The man is in that case often the younger or
the less developed. At first, marriage brings both a rich happiness. But
later comes a time when the power of the personality of the woman of
genius becomes too strong for the man; when he feels himself exhausted
by all the sensitiveness and impatience which charge the air about a
creative personality with electricity. He has now had enough of the rich
spiritual exchange and longs for a woman who is only fresh richness,
sunny quiet, easy docility; the now vanished “ingénue” would be the type
of woman who most of all could entrance him.
In another case, it is the wife who becomes wearied, when the man can no
longer keep pace with her development nor afford her new inspiration.
The erotic life of the woman as well as of the man of genius exhibits
two phases: in one they are attracted by their opposite, in the other by
a congeniality of souls; in one phase they have sought sentiment,
intimacy, nature; in the other, soul, passion, culture. The order
changes in different cases, but the phenomenon repeats itself. What both
consciously or unconsciously desire of love is not another individuality
to love but only a means of inspiration.
Yet one thing may be emphasised: the richer the nature of a woman is and
the greater her talents, the more life-determining love will be for her;
at one time making her existence desolate, at another time making it
fruitful. For the woman of genius is less able than the man to renounce
her own fate. This the man is capable of doing, in the midst of passion,
without his work suffering thereby in vigour and strength; the woman on
the contrary—even the genius—loses more easily her creative impulse in
happiness, her creative power in unhappiness.
In this connection it may be recalled that many of the most gifted, most
highly developed woman personalities of to-day have produced nothing,
but have been what a Frenchman has called “les grandes inspiratrices.”
These have not, indeed, like the “Ladies” of the Middle Ages, been
worshipped at a distance by knights and poets; but they have had an
influence similar to that of Beatrice, through the power of
communication of their rich personality in a relationship which had now
the character of an “amitié amoureuse,” now that of a love imbued with
sympathy, which in some cases, infrequently however, led to marriage. I
need only mention the name Richard Wagner for the forms of two such
women to appear, one of whom, who was his wife, surpassed in personal
greatness all independently creative women of her time. But there have
always been less unusual women who had significance as propagandists of
the ideas of a great man through their specifically feminine gifts of
convincing, of diffusing ideas, of modifying views, etc. If the future,
because of the wife’s zeal for production on her own part, should lose
this element of culture, it would be deplorable.
One of the favourite arguments of the woman movement has been that two
married people working in the same profession had the best opportunities
for understanding each other and consequently also for being happy. And
truly they can best talk shop with each other. But that is what the
working man needs least of all in his home; there he seeks rather
relaxation from his calling, or at least a quite disinterested,
immediate sympathy with its annoyances or joys. When one of the married
fellow-workmen needs exactly this sympathy, the other is perhaps busy or
too tired to be capable of such lively interest as the other expects. Or
one has experienced disappointments, the other joys, and then a real
sympathy is still more difficult. To these crossings of mood is added
also the unintentional, involuntary competition, which the similarity of
vocation brings with it. The wife gains patients, the husband does not;
his picture is praised, hers is pulled to pieces; she comes home from
the theatre victorious, he after a defeat. During work, the criticism of
one often disturbs the other; after the work, the criticism of the press
disturbs the harmony of both. Love wishes to fuse them into one being,
the outer world compels them always to feel themselves separate. In the
beginning they think: “Nothing can come between us.” But if both do not
possess a rare tenderness as well as rare fineness of soul, soon needles
of ice fly through the air between them. Only when the wife, as is the
case so often in France, puts her ability into her husband’s affairs
does this common interest prevent rivalry.
Whether the province of the husband and wife is the same or not,
difficulty always results from the wife’s commercial or professional
work in that she rarely finds a good substitute for the domestic and
maternal duties. And when the husband sees the house badly managed and
the children ill-bred, he tries according to his strength to render
assistance or, as more frequently happens, seeks his comfort outside the
home. But even if these stumbling-blocks may be cleared away by other
feminine hands, the fact still remains that the wife because of her work
must demand sacrifices on the part of the man such as his work has
required at all times from the wife. She is often compelled to forego
much of the society of her husband, of his solicitude and tenderness
because he has no available time. Now each of the married people has
consideration for the leisure of the other and for all other severe
conditions of the work. But beside these favourable results stands also
the detrimental fact that each suppresses his claims upon the sympathy
of the other, as well as the wish to express his own, whenever this
receiving and giving would interfere with the work. If this has become
for one or for both a real passion, then the passion blinds him to
everything that does not concern the work, and causes alternately joy or
suffering. Each of the married couple then disturbs the other by moods,
and each needs to be cherished by the other. The tenderness which
neither can give to the other, they find perhaps in a third.
But in those cases where the work is not passionately absorbing or where
both husband and wife are persons of understanding, rather than of
feeling, marriages of colleagues turn out well. Each has in the other an
intelligent, appreciative friend; the common work together is rich, and
neither gives nor requires more than the other is able to reciprocate.
The education of the wife makes her a good organiser in the home, which
is comfortable without the work’s suffering thereby. When this is not
too strenuous for either, but after the close of a reasonable working
time, the two meet spiritually free in the home, the duties of which
they often share—then the domestic life is happy and the work progresses
easily, as long as there are no children. When children arrive, then
there begins for the wife, even in such marriages, a life beyond her
strength.
But since nature, in the interest of the race, often makes opposites
attractive to each other, one may find a husband, full of feeling, who
loves children, united to a wife for whom science is the greatest value
of life, while she relegates feeling to a lower plane and considers
motherhood an animal function. In place of the tenderness and of the
children for which the husband longed, he has to participate in the
victories and defeats of a woman of science. Or we see a wife who
dreamed of an intimate life with her husband and who sacrificed her work
to it; but the life together was wrecked upon the husband’s artist
concentration, and the wife had to suffer under a twofold emptiness: the
lack of her work and the lack of happiness. Then one sees instances
where the wife retained her work because it was economically necessary
and because she hoped out of the richness of her young strength to be
able to fulfil all duties. And all this she was able to do except one
thing—to preserve under the excessive strain her beauty, her power of
charm, the elasticity of her nature. Perhaps she belonged to the very
highest among the new women who are so undivided, so proud, who think so
highly of themselves, of man, of love, that they are beyond a wholly
justified coquetry and rest blindly upon the uniting power of spiritual
congeniality. But the day comes perhaps when these strong and, in all
other respects, wise women have nothing other than freedom to give to
the man whose senses, whose fancy, need that charm which the wife no
longer possesses. In case, however, the man’s nature is not of those for
whom the silken threads of daily domestic comfort form the strong band,
but on the contrary is of the sort which needs renewal, then the very
absence of the wife, occasioned temporarily by the work, can keep the
relationship long fresh. This is upon the assumption that she
understands what some of these women do not understand: to give, but in
such a way that the man always longs for more; to remain sweetheart, not
only friend; to be able to jest, not only to talk seriously. The modern
wife of to-day, tested upon so many subjects, is often deeply mistaken
in regard to the _kind_ of “ministry” the man needs. The simple wisdom
of their grandmothers consisted in this: to give much and to require
nothing, always to subordinate themselves to the man with gentleness and
humility, never to assert themselves before him as a free,
self-determining personality. The wives of to-day, sacredly convinced of
the right and freedom of women, succeed better in asserting their
personality than in pleasing their husbands, and the quantity of their
demands is often more noteworthy than the quality of their gifts. That
many modern marriages turn out well shows that the adaptability of the
modern husband is beginning to be even as great as that of the wife in
former times!
The marriage is absolutely wrecked when the wife brings to it all the
new demands of woman, but the husband all the primeval instincts of his
sex. What in each sex relationship most intimately unites or most deeply
sunders is and remains the erotic depth of nature in each. And the
difference in this respect between the men and women of the present ever
more widely separates them, and this division becomes fatal to
innumerable individual lovers of to-day, as well as for the attitude of
the sexes toward marriage in general. The erotically symmetrical woman
views with hostility the dualism in the erotic nature of the modern man.
This dualism evinces itself, with innumerable nuances it is true, in
three typical ways: infinite erotic discussion, but inability to be
stirred by it either with the soul or with the senses; ability to love
only with the senses, not with the soul; and finally looking down upon
the senses and desiring “spiritual love” only. For the modern completely
developed woman the chattering vacuity, the animal instinct, the ascetic
spirituality, are equally repellent. And yet it happens that the rosy
mist of love can bring such a woman to a point where she creates for
herself an illusion out of one of the above mentioned types. Most
frequently this occurs in the case of the vigorous man who divines
nothing of the spiritual content of the woman whose outer appearance has
charmed him. The tragedy of the modern woman is then like that which
Hebbel has revealed in _Judith_, that the sex being in her is attracted
by the muscular masculinity, which her human personality hates as her
mortal enemy. For as a personality she admires in man only the spiritual
strength of the man. The man on his part regrets his mistake that he did
not choose a pretty amiable girl “of the old sort,” who would punctually
lay his table and willingly share his bed; a woman “into whose head
Ibsen had put no fancies,” who “had not allowed herself to be talked
into some folly by feminism.”
* * * * *
Among such “follies,” similar men, and many others as well, include the
demand advanced by the woman movement for the married woman’s property
right, as well as a specified income for the wife working in the home,
who however has to contribute from her property or her “remuneration” as
housekeeper to the common household—a corollary which is always
forgotten by the anti-feminist writers who assert that “the man becomes
a slave when he has to work for the whole, but the wife may retain
everything of hers.” (_Strindberg._)
The modern woman who before her marriage was independent, owing to her
work, abhors the thought of a request for money—this most painful moment
even in the happiest marriages—to so great a degree that this aversion
determines the wife in some cases to keep up her own work. If on the
contrary she has given this up, the consciousness of her earlier
independence makes her often so sensitive that she feels herself injured
by a protest however delicate in regard to the expenditure of money.
More than one man has regretted, in consequence of the unreasonable
demands of his wife, that he ever begged her to give up her own work.
There are women, on the other hand, who continue their work and thereby
only increase the incapability of a good-for-nothing man. In such cases,
it avails little that in many countries the law now allows the wife free
disposal of the income from her labour. Notwithstanding this, the
assertion is ridiculous that “if the man drinks up the money of his wife
it is with her consent,” and “it is therefore of no avail to alter the
law.” For it makes a significant difference in the relative position of
the man and wife whether the law gives him the _right_ to it, or whether
he takes it by force. But in this as in other cases, the woman movement
obviously cannot free women so long as they are impelled by unconscious
forces from within to actions and sacrifices at variance with their
conscious personality. The one thing which the woman movement has
already achieved and can continue to achieve, is that the undue
encroachment of the men ceases to have legal protection.
It is undeniable, on the other hand, that the unmarried woman’s personal
and economic independence fashions wives who in marriage show themselves
in a high degree egotistic, but who yet incessantly scold about man’s
egotism, wives who themselves exhibit very little devotion and fine
feeling, but place very great importance upon consideration. These wives
were the ones whom fifty years ago men called “graters.” But the lack of
amiability, which in certain women was usually due to childbirth, has
nevertheless in modern woman, at least during the freedom of her
girlhood, been unrestrained habit. Her firm—and just—decision not to be
“subservient” to her husband has resulted in, first, an armed peace,
later, a war, in which the wife’s work is one of the projectiles. “I
have my work, why should I stay here to be used up and tormented?” she
asks herself. And when such questions begin, there is usually but one
answer.
There is one decided advantage in giving to the woman the opportunity to
earn her living: she has again acquired thereby significance in the
home, while the generation of women, who neither co-operated
_productively_ in the home nor assumed all the duties of the mother,
were regarded by man with less respect than, on the one side, their
grandmothers who _produced_ all of the household requisites, on the
other side, their now independent self-supporting granddaughters. Only
when society _recompenses the vocation of mother_, can woman find in
this a full equivalent for self-supporting labour.
Another typical group of our time is formed by the numerous women for
whom no choice remains in regard to their work, since it is of a kind
that they must give up because of the removal to another place, or more
frequently because they find so much work in the new home that every
thought of anything further outside must cease. Those who think that
industry has made the work of the wife in the home to-day superfluous,
speak only of the _great cities_, and usually only of _opulent families
in the great cities_, where they are in a position to buy cheaper
everything that the labour of the wife could produce. But in the
country, among all classes, the mother must be the director of the work;
and in all country homes in moderate circumstances—as in countless poor
or not very well-to-do city families—the work of the mother is still
frequently indispensable, and in addition is more economical than her
earnings out of the house could be, especially since the developed
modern woman is usually capable of a more rational housekeeping than the
woman of earlier times.
But while the mothers of that time knew nothing except housework, those
of to-day have often, as unmarried and self-supporting women, enjoyed a
freedom of movement and opportunities of development which, now that
they are over-burdened with household cares, they may seriously miss.
The work of the mother is now still further increased by the difficulty
of getting servants—at least capable ones—and also by the demands of
luxury. The result of this again is that hospitality in the home
decreases, that the watchword of the time, “the windows of the house
wide open to the world, fresh air in the home, no creeping into the
chimney corner,” is so interpreted that warmth and intimacy vanish. Yes,
the overworked mother often herself insists that the family leave the
house and seek some place of recreation for the annual festivals, which
were once the children’s happiest and brightest recollections of home.
The fact that most modern women of culture devote themselves to some
branch of social work, often to several, contributes still further to
the over-exertion of the mother. Even when this occurs from pure
altruism, the motive cannot prevent such altruism from becoming
sometimes a disease of which one may die quite as surely as of other
diseases. This death is quite as immoral as any other resulting from
neglected hygiene. No one has the right to perish from altruism, except
when destruction is the _condition_ of his fulfilling his duty. But in
many cases the occasion is the widely ramified social activity of the
woman for whom the home now often falls short; not a result of altruism,
but a manifestation of that desire for power which once was satisfied in
the family. Or it may be a form of the hysteria characteristic of the
present time. In the sixteenth century, the hysterical were burned as
witches; now they “sacrifice” themselves to an activity which offers
them in reality the variety, the intoxication of publicity—in a word,
the life stimulus they need. But even sound, sincere, and conscientious
women are driven by the woman movement and by social work to assume
pseudo duties, for which the real duties are pushed aside. If instead of
instituting official inquiries among wives and mothers as to what they
can accomplish, one should direct the same questions to their husbands
and children, these would, if they dared be honest, testify that _they_
must pay the price for the altruistic activity.
Since the work of married women outside the home, the woman movement,
and the social work began, one seldom finds a wholly sound, joyous,
harmonious wife and mother. The constant complaint of the modern woman
is that she “never has time.” The minority who live a life of luxury,
wholly free from work, while the husband works feverishly to provide the
luxury which neither will forego, telephone away a quarter of the day
making appointments concerning the toilette, visits, and amusements,
which take up the remaining three quarters of the day. And others,
loaded down with household work or divided between this and work for
their livelihood, how shall they find time!
Least of all have they the time necessary for the countless little
tokens of tenderness which intensify all relationships between people. A
French mother who became a widow and brought up her children by means of
her own work received from her son, grown to a youth, the judgment:
“Thou hast never loved us.” Too late, it became clear to her that “it
requires time to love,” that it is not enough to feel love, and, looked
at as a whole, to act with love—no, love must be expressed. And for this
the harassed mother of to-day lacks time and quiet.
Formerly, it was only the husband and father who had no time; the wife
and mother had it and could thus preserve the warmth of the home. But
now?
There are now, it is true, many women with so few claims that they think
they have fulfilled the fourfold task. In reality, they have fulfilled
all their duties imperfectly, or eliminated one task for a time in order
to be able to accomplish the others. _No woman has ever been at the same
time all_ that a wife can be to her husband, a mother to her children, a
housewife to her house, a working woman to her work. In the last
capacity the difficulty of the married woman is still further increased
by the present competition, as also by the fact that the better a person
works the more work falls to her, so that an exact and reasonable
division of time between work and home is often rendered quite
impossible.
In addition to all these difficulties arising through actualities, there
are finally also those evoked by the “spirit of the time.” A wife has,
for example, decided to give up a vocation which she saw was not
compatible with her home. But she stills finds no rest. She is harassed
by the demand of the “spirit of the time” that a married woman should be
able to take care of the house as well as to accomplish outside personal
work. The husband, also influenced by the “spirit of the time,” thinks
the same or feels painfully the fact that his wife, for love of him, has
sacrificed the exercise of a talent, in which he perhaps has felt a
personal interest; the longing for the vocation awakens in her, and she
resumes her work, with the result that, if she has energetically
resisted the lassitude that comes with beginning motherhood, she and the
child must suffer later. Or she lives in a permanent state of
over-exertion which finally culminates in nervous conditions under which
the whole family must share her suffering. Had she been able to follow
in peace her instinct to strike deep root in the home soil and to
enlarge and enrich her being by the annual growth of ring after ring of
her production of love, then the essential values would have been
increased for all. Now, she is led astray by a biased opinion of the
time, which owes its effectiveness to the single fact that the
opinionated resolutely turn their back upon all facts.
Thanks to these ideas of the time propagated by certain feminists, we
see increasing numbers of women who perform their “social duty” as the
telegraph poles perform their function; while such duty could have been
fulfilled as the tree grows in a garden: blooming, fruit-bearing,
joyful, joy-bringing.