CHAPTER VII

THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MOTHERHOOD

Because it has increased the culture of woman and her feeling of

personal responsibility, the woman movement has had its influence, both

directly and indirectly, upon the postponement of the legal and

customary marriage age. Since young girls have exercised their brains as

much as the boys have, they are no longer so far in advance of the boys

in physical development. But when modern girls finish their studies they

are physically as well as psychically more universally developed than

their grandmothers were. They know much more of the difficulties and

realities of life, not least of the sexual life. And this knowledge has

instilled in them a reluctance to undertake too early the serious and

difficult task of motherhood. They have greater need of truth and

culture, and less tendency to erotic visionary dreaming than girls of

their age in the middle of the previous century; their desire for work

and their social feeling fix goals, and they work with all their might

to attain them. And because, as already explained, both sexes have for

each other a more many-sided attraction than the merely erotic, young

people are more careful, more choice, in their erotic decisions. The

finest young girls of to-day are penetrated by the Nietzschean idea,

that marriage is the combined will of two people to create a new being

greater than themselves. But their joy does _not_ consist in the fact

“that the man wills”; they are themselves “will,” and above all they

have the will to choose the right father for their children, not only

for their own sake but for the sake of the children.

If it be true that immediate, “blind,” erotic attraction is most

instinctively correct in choice, then the present comrade life of young

people and the increased clear-sightedness which it gives, as well as

the increasing erotic idealism of young girls, are not unconditionally

advantageous to the new race. The question is, however, still undecided.

Here it may only be emphasised that the young girl of to-day, in spite

of all intellectual development, is still won always by powerful

spiritual-sensual love, which the woman movement has too long considered

as a negligible quantity. Under the influence of the doctrine of

evolution, young girls begin to understand that their value as members

of society depends essentially upon their value for the propagation of

mankind; all the more they realise the duty of physical culture which

will enable them to fulfil this function better; they no longer consider

their erotic longing as impure and ugly but as pure and beautiful. It is

out of this soul condition that the different movements for the

protection of mothers and children, theoretically considered, have

proceeded. These are at present the most important “woman movements,”

although unrecognised by the older woman movement. And this older

movement has not yet recognised the fact that, because of present

marriage conditions, the degenerate, uneducated, decrepit, have greater

opportunity for propagating the race, both within and outside of

marriage, than the young, sound, pure-minded, and loving; that it can

therefore _be no sin_, from the point of view of the race, if the latter

become parents without marriage, nor should it be a subject of shame

from the social point of view. All women’s rights have little value,

until this one thing is attained: that a woman who through her

illegitimate motherhood has lost nothing of her personal worth, but on

the contrary has proved it, does not forfeit social esteem.

Our time can point to women who have been typical of the reform

tendencies of the century in this respect. Some of these women, if they

really accomplished the unprecedented task of “a child and a work,” have

drawn their strength for the task out of precisely the commonplace,

homely qualities and sterling virtues, contrary to which they believed

they were acting when they became mothers, driven by a power greater

than their _conscious_ personality. Others again became mothers with the

consent of their whole personality. They were clear that they thus made

use of the masculine rights and freedom which feminism first brought

home to women. And although many advocates of women’s rights refrain

from such consequences of their ideas, the women who in other respects

determine their conduct of life by their own free personal choice

recognise that this, their _real_ “emancipation,” is a fruit of the

woman movement.

In Europe, however, most women under thirty still dare to dream of

motherhood in a love marriage as the greatest happiness and the highest

duty of life.[5]

But, as direct and indirect result of the woman movement, the fact none

the less remains that there is found _among women an increasing

disinclination for maternity_, a reluctance which deprives mankind of

many superior mothers, while at the same time woman’s commercial work

for self-support in all classes increases her sterility or makes her

incapable of the suckling so vitally important for the children.

That the modern woman, because of individual fate or her own choice,

often remains unmarried is no danger in and for itself. This fact, as I

have emphasised above, is connected with a number of cultural and

material conditions, which sometime will be altered, and then woman’s

desire for marriage will again increase. The real danger has appeared

only since women have begun to strengthen the tendency to celibacy by

the amaternal theory, which now confuses the feminine brain and leads

the feminine instinct astray.

The woman movement in and with this influence upon maternity sinks to

the lowest point of the scale according to the criterion of worth

employed here: the elevation of the life of the individual and of the

race. In this we stand in our time before a twofold mystery, which lies

in the circumstance that not only women—women “with breasts made right

to suckle babes”—emphasise this stultifying influence, but that there

are men, each the son of a mother, who also propagate it. These men have

allowed themselves to be blinded by the false logic concerning women,

which declares that since rich mothers do not wish to fulfil the duties

of a mother and the poor cannot fulfil them, superior social

organisations must be created for that purpose; in other words,

instigated by a mere temporary unpleasant discrepancy, we will create a

new, a different order of things. But, if this obtained universally, it

would inflict incomparably greater injury upon mankind than do present

unhappy conditions.

Upon the whole, however, it is precisely as a result of this tendency

that the deepest hostility of men against feminism has developed. The

fact that the idea of evolution is now beginning to enter into the flesh

and blood of man also contributes its share to this feeling. Just as

formerly a man wished heirs for his personal and real estate and for his

name, he now desires inheritors of his being; he desires an eternal

life, which becomes a certainty only by means of parenthood, whereby the

individual as father or mother lives on physically and spiritually, in

body and soul, in his children and grandchildren down to the last of his

descendants. This conception has made the sex instinct again holy, as it

was for the pagans. This new reverence for their duty as beings of sex

now induces many young men to guard their sexual health and strength by

an asceticism the motive of which is the exact opposite of that which

determined the asceticism called forth by Christianity, the asceticism

which was fear of the sex instinct as impure and as a temptation to sin.

Now the innermost aim of young men’s creative desire is the higher

development of mankind. Love becomes for them the condition by which

they can most perfectly redeem their religious certainty of being part

of a great design, their religious longing for harmony with life’s

creative desire, with the infinite.

There are now men who work most zealously for the ennoblement of the

race—“eugenics,” as this effort is called in England—as well as for the

protection of mother and child—“puericulture,” as this endeavour is

called in France. There are men who write excellent works upon the

psychology of the child, and upon sexual instruction; men, who, in art

and poetry, give expression to the new veneration for the sanctity of

generation, for motherhood, for the child. The finest thing written

about the child as a cultural power is written by an American.[6]

Painting has now new devotional pictures of the Mother with her Child,

especially those conceived by a Frenchman and an Italian.[7] The most

beautiful representation of youth’s new desire for love is by a German

sculptor.[8] Likewise a German, Nietzsche, has the most profound

conception of parenthood and education as the means whereby humanity

will cross over the bridge of the men of to-day to the superman.

Only when all this is realised can one conceive what the feelings of

these new men must be when they meet those new women “who are no longer

willing to be slaves of the instinct for the propagation of the race;”

who see in motherhood “a loss of time from their work;” “an attack upon

their beauty;” an obstacle to the refined conduct of life;—a conduct of

life certain to debase woman’s worth as a child-bearing being, but to

elevate her to that exquisite, perfect product of culture, a “woman of

the world;” an obstacle also for woman as creator of other objective

cultural values. If a man with a father’s desires finds himself united

with such a woman, he finds himself in marriage quite as much a

prostitute as innumerable wives have felt themselves to be when they

were mere tools of a man’s desire. On the contrary the desire for the

elevation of mankind on the part of the new woman and the new man, is

evinced in the idea that not the quantity but the quality of the

children they give to humanity is most significant; that a land of fewer

but more perfect men is a higher culture ideal than the principle still

always maintained from the point of view of national competition, that

the inhabitants of a country must only be numerous however inferior they

may be.

To this wholly new evolutionary conception of life the amaternal women

oppose the following train of thought which greatly influences the

feeling and desire of women to-day[9]:

Culture now sets new duties for woman, more significant than exclusively

natural ones. The more the individual life increases in value, the more

the interest for the mere functions of sex declines, and with it also

the value of woman _as woman_ for a society where, because of

motherhood, she has become a being of secondary rank. It evinces lack of

ideality if one censures this tendency of the modern woman to renounce

maternity for the sake of more spiritual interests. While the mother

concentrates herself upon her own child only, the woman who renounces

motherhood can extend her being to embrace children as children in

general. As a mother, woman is only a being of nature. But the

personality, with its multiplicity of feelings and endeavours, demands

an independent activity as well as maternity.

To put her entire personality into the education of her children is a

twofold error. First and foremost, most mothers are _bad_ educators and

serve their children better if they entrust them to a born teacher; in

the second place, _gifted_ children educate themselves best and should

be spared all educational arts. The mediocre child, who is more

susceptible to education, has ordinarily also only mediocre parents, who

likewise benefit the children most if they put them in the care of

excellent teachers. Children who are _below_ mediocrity can also be best

educated by specialists. So there remains for the mother, after the

first years’ care and training, no especial task as educator, at least

none in which she can really put her personality. To talk to a mother

about the possibilities of a richer office of mother, as educator of her

children, she calls lulling her into an illusion under which she must

labour only to suffer. A woman who can exercise her personality in

another way should not therefore put it into the education of her

children.

The amaternal advocates deny that motherliness is the criterion of

womanliness; they find this criterion in the form, the external being of

woman, in her manner and physical appearance—in a word, in the _outer_

expression of the inner disposition, which they deny as typical of

womanliness! “Womanliness” is thus reduced to an “æsthetic principle,”

while woman’s spiritual attributes are considered as “universally

human”; and the right is granted to the feminine sex to emancipate

herself from the result of the heresy that _motherliness_ should be the

ethical norm for the “being” or “essence” of womanhood. The suitability

of woman’s _psychic_ constitution for her work as mother is not

acknowledged as proof that motherliness is the distinguishing

characteristic of womanliness. For this constitution is less conspicuous

in the higher stages of differentiation. Its suitability was then a

phenomenon of adaptation and changed with the conditions of life. Thus

this constitution cannot be cited as a reason for limiting woman’s

personal exercise of her powers. Motherliness is no social instinct. How

can motherliness, which we have in common with beasts and savages, be

considered as higher than, for example, justice, truth, and other

gradually won spiritual values, which woman can promote by her personal

activity? The higher the forms of life woman attains, the less will her

personality be determined by motherliness. Why then should women bring

to the domestic life the sacrifice of their personality, while no one

demands this of men? Why shall not woman, just as man, satisfy her

demands as a sex being in marriage and, as for the rest, follow her

profession, attend to her spiritual development, her social tasks? Why

condemn woman to remain a half-being—that is, with unexercised

brain—only because certain of her instincts attract her to man, while he

is not constrained to suppress his personality because he in like manner

felt himself attracted to woman? It is the old superstition of the

family life as “woman’s sphere,” which still confuses the conception. By

the present form of family life woman is “oversexed.” Her higher

development, as well as that of her husband and children, will be

promoted if woman guards her independence by earning her own living, in

commercial work conducted beyond the portal of the home; if housekeeping

becomes co-operative; if the education of the children is carried on

outside the home, in which now the motherly tenderness emasculates the

children and fosters in them family sentiment of an egoistic nature and

not social feelings. Thus are solved the difficulties which are entailed

when the wife’s work is carried on outside the home; equipoise between

her intellectual and emotional, her sexual and social nature follows,

and her worth, as that of a man, will be measured by her human

personality, not by her womanliness, her efficacy in the family, for the

exercise of which she is now constrained to renounce her personality.

So runs in brief the programme of the amaternals.

* * * * *

It has already been indicated that the woman movement, in its

_inception_, could gather strength only by combating with all its power

the prejudice that _woman is incapable of the same kind of activity as

man_. But now the whole woman movement has for a long time been

emphasising the fact that woman is entitled, not only on her own behalf

but more especially in her capacity as home-keeper, wife, and mother, to

the full development of her powers and to equality with man in the

family and in society. In the amaternal programme sketched above,

however, the fanaticism, which characterised the entire woman movement a

generation ago, now evinces itself in the error that _equal rights_ for

the sexes must mean also _equal functions_; that the development of

women’s powers involves also their application in the same spheres of

activity in which man is engaged; that _equality_ of the sexes implies

_sameness_ of the sexes. While moderate feminism begins to see that, if

man and wife compete, this rivalry can benefit[10] neither the woman,

the man, nor the children, amaternal feminism urges the keenest

competition. And if this is once accepted as advantageous to woman’s

personality and to society, then it is obvious that she must, with all

the energy of the attacked, defend herself from the duties of maternity,

because of which she would obviously come off second-best in the

competition.

From the point of view of individualism it is obvious that the _law_

must set no limitations to woman’s practice of a vocation, unless

evident hygienic dangers menace either her or the coming generation.

Women must, for their own sake as well as for that of society, have free

_choice of work_, for life and nature possess innumerable unforeseen

possibilities. Nevertheless, it does happen that a woman who gives

superior children to humanity may, nevertheless, feel herself incapable

of educating them; likewise it sometimes happens that a husband and wife

who have exceptional children, cannot endure to live together. In

neither case has law or custom a right to force upon a mother or a

father a yoke that is intolerable or to demand of a mother or a father

unreasonable sacrifices.

But the right to limit the choice of work, the law does not possess;

nature assumes that right herself: first of all from the axiom that no

one can be in two places at the same time, and in the second place

because no one can respond simultaneously and with full energy to two

different spiritual activities. One cannot, for example, count even to

one hundred and at a certain number give a simple grasp of the hand

without suspending the counting momentarily. Although no one has ever

been denied the privilege of solving a mathematical problem and of

following carefully at the same time a piece of music, yet it is certain

that the effectiveness of both intellectual activities would be thereby

diminished. These extremely simple observations can be continued until

the most complex are reached. If the observation be directed to the

sphere of domestic life, every wife and mother who _is willing to

institute impartial observations of self_, will affirm the difficulty of

working with a divided mind.

If a mother carries on her work at home and must put it away in order to

be beside the sick-bed of her child, or to make those arrangements which

assure domestic comfort, or to help her husband, then she feels that her

book or her picture suffers, that the activity which binds her more

intimately to the home relaxes for a time the intimacy of her connection

with her work. One can by day carry on a dull industrial task, and by

night produce an achievement of the soul; but one cannot let one’s soul

radiate in one direction without impairing its energy in another. A work

needs exclusive devotion. And this is, viewed externally, difficult to

attain in joint action; viewed from within, it requires a renunciation

that in the case of a loving soul evokes a continual inner struggle. For

that reason, also, literature with woman as its subject has for some

decades been filled with the great conflict of modern woman’s life: the

conflict between vocation and parents, between vocation and husband,

between vocation and child. Certainly the family has often been a

torture chamber for individuality, as a consequence of laws and customs,

which the future will regard as we now do the rack and the thumbscrew.

But nature is more severe than law and custom when she confronts us with

a choice which, however it may turn out, tears a piece from our heart.

And now neither custom nor man demands of woman the “sacrifice of the

personality.” This sacrifice is required only by the law of limitations

which rules over us all.

The creative man or the man working objectively must often condemn the

emotional side of his personality to a partial development; he must for

the sake of his work renounce many family values important for this

emotional side of his being. Even if shorter working hours could

partially diminish this cultural offering, the _inner_ conflict, for the

man or the woman, is not settled thereby.

Even if a man, in the consciousness of his wife’s endowment of talent,

assumed a number of domestic duties, especially those pertaining to the

children, the inner conflict would still continue. And this conflict is

in no way solved by the amaternal theory that the personal life must be

placed above the instinct life. For, as has been emphasised, the choice

is not between the personal and the instinct life, but between the

intellectual and the emotional side of woman’s personality. And the

solution of this choice has not been discovered by the amaternals, who

would combine commercial work with marriage and maternity. Women who

remain unmarried or who give up commercial activity which they cannot

carry on in the home, have not _settled the conflict_ either, but have

only reduced its difficulties.

The fundamental error of the amaternal solution of the problem is that

it characterises motherliness as a _non-social_ instinct, but, on the

other hand, defines the “personal” activity of woman as an expression of

the social instinct. _For all social instincts have been developed by

culture out of primitive instincts._ All cultural development lies

between the sex impulse of the Australian negress and the erotic

sentiment of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets. And when the

amaternals assert that motherliness, which “we have in common with

beasts and savages,” cannot be an expression of the personality, their

argument has the same validity as that which would deny to the Sistine

Chapel the quality of an expression of personality because beasts and

savages also exhibit the decorative instinct.

The development of the mother instinct into motherliness is one of the

greatest achievements in the progress of culture, a development by which

the maternal functions have continually become more complex and

differentiated. Already in the case of the higher animals maternity

involves much more than the mere act of giving birth; an animal not only

faces death for her young, she gives them also a training which often

indicates power of judgment. A cat, for instance, which sought in vain

to prevent her kitten from entering the water and which finally threw

the kitten in and then pulled it out, thus obtaining the desired result

of her pedagogy, had not, as have so many modern mothers, read Spencer,

but could, nevertheless, put many of these mothers to shame. Even the

initial maternal functions, nursing and physical care, involve a culture

of the spiritual life of the mother, not only through an increase in

tenderness, but also in observation, discrimination, judgment,

self-control; a woman’s character often develops more in a month during

which she is occupied with the care of children, than in years of

professional work. Mother love and the reciprocal love which it awakens

in the child, not only exercise the first deep influence upon the

individual’s life of feeling, but this love is _the first form of the

law of mutual help—it is the root of altruism, the cotyledon_ of a now

widely ramified tree of “social instincts.”

Although woman through the mere _physical_ functions of motherhood makes

a great social contribution, the importance of her contribution is

greatly enhanced if one also takes into consideration her _spiritual_

nature. And notwithstanding the fact that fatherhood has also, to a

certain degree, developed in man the qualities of tenderness,

watchfulness, patience, yet the enormous predominance of woman’s

_physical_ share in parenthood, in comparison with man’s, is in itself

enough to create, in course of time, the intimate connection which still

exists to-day between mother and child, as well as the difference

between the personality of woman and man. The physical functions of

motherhood were the fundamental reasons for the earliest division of

labour. And this division of labour, the aim of which, next to

self-preservation, was for both sexes the protection of posterity,

augmented and strengthened the qualities which each sex employed for its

special functions. All human qualities lie latent in each. But they have

been so specialised by this division of labour, or, on the other hand,

suppressed by it, that they now appear in varying proportions: in woman,

a careful, managing, supervising, lifeguarding, inward-directed sense of

love; in man, courage, desire for action, force of will, power of

thought, an activity subduing nature and life, became the distinguishing

characteristics; and fatherhood became psychologically, as it is

physiologically, something different from motherhood. Even if culture

continues to efface the sharp lines of demarcation, so that it becomes

more and more impossible to generalise about “woman” and “man,” and

increasingly more necessary for each and every woman to solve the “woman

question” individually, yet from the point of view of the race, the

_division of labour must on the whole remain the same as that which

hitherto existed_, if the higher development of mankind shall continue

in uninterrupted advance to more perfect forms. It is necessary for

_these higher ends of culture_ that woman _in an ever more perfect

manner shall fulfil what has hitherto been her most exalted task_: the

bearing and rearing of the new generation.

The amaternal assertion, that motherliness can be no higher than justice

and truth, is an infuriating antithesis. It is as if one should assert

that “air is better than water, or both better than bread.” Both

assertions place the fundamental condition of life counter to other

needs of life! Who shall exercise justice and truth when no new men are

born? And, moreover, how shall justice and truth increase in mankind if

children are not trained to a greater reverence for justice and a deeper

love of truth? In order to fulfil this one office _of education_ well,

mothers need their _universal human culture in its entirety_. But even

if this were not so, if motherhood did not require the concentration of

woman’s personality; even if motherliness remained only “primitive

instinct,” yet this instinct, in the women who have guarded it, is more

valuable for mankind than the universal human development of power of

the women who have lost this instinct. No social nor individual activity

of women could compensate for the extinction of this “instinct,” which

only recently in Messina drove hundreds of mothers to shield their

children with their own bodies; this “instinct,” which recently impelled

a mother, who learned before she gave birth to her child that her own

life must be the price for the saving of that of the child, to cry: “I

have lived, but the life of my child belongs now to mankind—save the

child!” So the mother died without even having seen the beautiful being

for whom she gave her life. In the world of “personally” developed

women, however, after a new Messina catastrophe the mothers would be

found with their manuscripts and their pictures in their arms. And

confronted with a choice like that related above, the mother would

answer: “Let the child die, I will live my personal life to the end.”

The amaternal type must persist for the present. There are in reality in

our time many women who with unresponsive eyes can pass by a lovely

child, among them even mothers who do not feel the pure sensuousness,

the wise madness, the intoxicating delight which such a child awakens in

every motherly woman; mothers who have no conception what a fascinating

subject for study the soul of a child can offer. Jean Paul, who scourged

worthless mothers and tried to awaken the repressed maternal instinct of

his time with the charge that a woman who is bored when she has

children, is a contemptible creature, would find to-day many mothers who

are bored only if they have their children about them.

And these cerebral, amaternal women must obviously be accorded the

freedom of finding the domestic life, with its limited but intensive

exercise of power meagre, beside the feeling of power which they enjoy

as public personalities, as consummate women of the world, as talented

professionals. But they have not the right to _falsify life values_ in

their own favour so that they themselves shall represent the highest

form of life, the “human personality” in comparison with which the

“instinctively feminine” signifies a lower stage of development, a

poorer type of life.

Women who have produced books and works of art, to be compared, as

respects permanence of value, to confetti at a carnival, have, according

to this viewpoint, proved themselves human individualities, while a

mother who has contributed an endless amount of clear thought, rich

understanding, warm feeling, and strong will to the education of a fine

group of children, requires a public office in order to prove herself a

“human personality”! The brain work which a woman employs in a

commercial concern bears witness to her individuality, but the brain

work which a large, well-managed household demands, does not. The woman

physician who delivers a mother expresses her “personality,” but the

mother has put no “personality” into the feelings with which she has

borne the child, the dreams with which she has consecrated it, the ideas

in accordance with which she has educated it! The girl who has passed

her examinations has proved herself a developed human being; but her

grandmother, who is now filled with the kindness and wisdom which she

has won in a life dedicated to domestic duties, a life in which the

restricted sphere of her duties did not prevent the comprehensiveness of

her cultural interests, nor her all-embracing sympathy with

humanity—such a woman is not a personality!

When men advance as an argument against women’s rights the fear that

women will lose their womanliness in public life, the older feminists

answer that womanliness, especially motherliness, is rooted too firmly

in nature to make it possible for this danger to exist. Nothing has,

however, become more clear in this amaternalistic time than that

motherliness is _not_ an indestructible instinct. Just as our time

produces in increasing numbers sterile women and women incapable of

nursing their children, so it produces more and more psychically

amaternal women. We can pass in silence the cases of children martyred

in families or in children’s homes, for sexual perversity and religious

fanaticism often play a rôle in such connections; we can also pass by

the millions of mothers who bring about the abortion of their offspring,

for the poor are driven to such practices largely by necessity, the rich

mostly by love of pleasure. There still remain a sufficient number of

women in whom the mother instinct has faded away because of a course of

thought like that just described. Our time furnishes manifold proofs of

the fact that the mother instinct can easily be weakened, or even

entirely disappear, although the erotic impulse continues to live; that

motherliness is not a spontaneous natural instinct, but the product of

thousands of years not merely of _child-bearing_, but also of

_child-rearing_; and that it must be strengthened in each new generation

by the personal care which mothers bestow upon their children. A woman

learns to love the strange child whom she nurses as if it were her own;

a father who can devote himself to the care of his little children is

possessed by an almost “motherly tenderness” for them, as are also older

brothers and sisters for the little ones whom they care for. But while

those who advocate the cause of the amaternal women draw from such facts

the conclusion that motherliness cannot be used as a criterion of

womanliness, yet an entirely different conclusion forces itself upon

everyone who sees in the united uplift of the individual and of mankind

the criterion of the life-enhancing effect of the woman movement, the

conclusion that the amaternal soul not only confirms the worst

apprehensions of men in regard to the results of the woman movement, but

also constitutes the greatest danger to the woman movement itself. For

the amaternal ideas will evoke a violent reaction _on the part of men_,

in case such a reaction does not appear at an early stage on the part of

women.

This latter reaction might also include a rebellion against the methods

of industrial production, which exhaust the strength of mothers and

children. For the objection of industrialism, that “it cannot exist

without women,” falls to the ground in face of the fact that a race

cannot exist without sound and moral mothers. And “moral” means, here,

mothers capable and willing to bear sound children and to train children

along moral lines. If, on the contrary, Europe and America adhere to the

economic and ethical principles which prevent a number of able and

willing women of this type from becoming mothers, and if numbers of

other women who could be mothers continue unwilling to assume the burden

of motherhood, then this problem will finally become the problem of _a

future for the European-American people_.

The woman movement must now with resolute determination abandon the

narrow, biased attitude, psychologically natural a generation ago when

the zealots of feminism had no other standard of value for an idea, an

investigation, or a book, than whether they _advanced or did not

advance_ the cause of woman; whether they _proved or did not prove_

woman’s equality with man. For woman’s work, studies, and other

accomplishments, no other standard was applied than that of equality

with man’s work, man’s studies, and the accomplishments of man. In a

word, the proposition was that woman should be enabled to perform at the

same time the life-work of a woman and of a man!

It is through these hybrids that the feminine sex transgresses against

the masculine. And this is one reason why our time is so filled with the

tragic vicissitudes of women. Truly, every progressive person must agree

with Goethe’s aphorism, “I love him whom the impossible lures.” For,

thus allured, man has elevated his particular generation above the

generation preceding. But _in action_ every one must go down who is not

imbued with the consciousness that whoever exceeds his limits is liable

to tragic consequences, in the modern psychological view of the guilt

attaching to one who undertakes more than his strength will allow.

* * * * *

But our time exhibits also other less convulsively strained conditions

of the feminine soul and therefore also brighter fates for woman. It

shows not infrequently wives united with their husbands, not only by the

sympathy which the human personality of each inspires, but also by the

erotic attraction which the sex character of each exercises. And they

have both won thereby that unity through which all the best and highest

powers of their being are liberated and elevated as by religion. And

their parenthood will then be the highest expression of this religion.

Only religious natures are—in the deepest meaning of the word—loving or

faithful or creative. It is the same soul which in one person reveals

itself in ecstasy of belief, in a second in ardour of creation, in a

third in a great erotic passion, in the fourth as parental love, in

others again as love of country, as enthusiasm for freedom, desire for

reform. At times one and the same soul, a woman’s or a man’s, is kindled

by all these passions. But never has the same soul been able _at the

same time_ to feed all these passions in their highest potency. Whether

it be God, a work, or a human being that the soul embraces with its

entire devotion, the religious character of this devotion always evinces

itself in increasing longing, an endless susceptibility, a more

persistent search after means of expression, a continual service, an

inexhaustible patience in waiting for reciprocal activity from the

object of love. The religious strength of a feeling consists in this,

that the soul in every work, every sorrow, every joy,—in a word, in

every spiritual condition, every experience,—is, consciously as well as

unconsciously, more closely united with God, with the work, with the

beloved, until every finest fibre of one’s being reaches down to the

profound depths which the object of love represents for the lover.

In this necessary condition of concentration of the spiritual life is

found the truth of woman’s complaint that the man, absorbed by his work,

“no longer loves her”; the truth of the experience that earthly love

indisputably detracts from the love of God; the truth of the frequent

experience of husband and wife that with children the wealth of their

spiritual life together is in certain respects inevitably diminished;

the truth of man’s fear that woman’s absorption in a life-work

personally dear to her must to a certain degree detract from her

devotion to the home; the truth of the experience that the office of

mother often interferes with the development of woman’s intellectual

power.

Only persons who distinguish themselves by what Heine called “exuberance

of mental poverty,” or what I might call analogously an “abyss of

superficiality,” have not experienced the severe and beautiful psychic

truth of Jesus’ glorification of _simplicity_. The quiet harkening to

the voice of God or to the inspiration of work or to the delicate

vibrations of another soul, which daily, hourly, momentarily, are the

conditions that enable the soul to live wholly in its belief, its work,

its love, so that these feelings may grow stronger and the soul grow

greater through these feelings—all this has “simplicity” as a condition;

in a word, symmetrical unity, longing for completeness, inner poise, the

swift emotion. Fidelity—to a belief, a work, a love—is no product of

duty. It is a process of growth.

These are the conditions to which many modern women, womanly at heart

but divided, restless, groping, attempting much, will not submit. They

could even learn to reverence these conditions in the child for whom

play is such sacred seriousness; but instead they transform the most

sacred earnest into play.

Other women, on the contrary, are beginning to understand these

conditions of growth and to comprehend that it was exactly the protected

position of woman in the home, which has made it possible for her family

feeling to acquire that depth which is to be attained only by

concentration. But if this is no longer possible, then woman will love

those that belong to her with less religious warmth. Nothing can better

illustrate the difference still existing between man and woman in this

respect, than the fact that most men would consider themselves

unfortunate if their entire exercise of power were concentrated upon the

family, while most women still feel themselves fortunate when they have

been given the opportunity to exercise to the uttermost the tendency

inherent in them. For most women love best _personally_ and _in

propinquity_, while the potency of love in man often seeks distant

goals. Woman is happy in the degree to which she can bestow her love

upon a person closely connected with her; if she cannot do that, then

she may be useful, resigned, content, but never happy.[11] The very fact

that woman’s strongest _primitive instinct_ coincided with her

_greatest_ cultural _office_ has been an essential factor in the harmony

of her being.

The modern developed mother feels with every breath a grateful joy in

that she lives the most perfect life when she can contribute her

developed human powers, her liberated human personality, to the

establishment of a home and to the vocation of motherhood. These

functions conceived and understood as social, in the embracing sense in

which the word is now used, give the new mother a richer opportunity to

exercise her entire personality than she could find in modern commercial

work. In one such occupation she must suppress either the intellectual

or the emotional side of her nature; in another, the life either of the

imagination or of the will. In domestic duties, on the contrary, these

powers of the soul can work in unison. This is undoubtedly the deepest

reason why, taken as a whole, women have become more harmonious, and men

stronger in any special crisis, women more soulful, men more gifted. On

this account men offer their great sacrifice more readily for an idea,

or for the accomplishment of a work; women, for persons closely

connected with them. And yet this co-operation of woman’s spiritual

powers was in earlier times partly repressed by man’s demand for

passivity on the part of woman as a thinking and willing personality,

but for her unceasing activity as promoter of his comfort and that of

the entire home. The mother of to-day can, on the contrary, exercise, as

distributer, her culture, her thought, her supervision, her judgment,

and her criticism, in order to make fully effective the faculty of her

sex for foresight and organisation. She applies a great amount of

spiritual energy to the selection of the essentials and the

subordination of secondary things, to the creation of such facilities in

the material work that time and means are left for the spiritual values,

which, alas, are still neglected in the domestic economy of small,

private households, as well as in national housekeeping. And as mother,

modern woman is offered the first fitting opportunity to assert herself

as a thinking and willing personality.

The significance of the vocation of mother has been underrated in its

significance even by moderate feminists. But these were right when they

demonstrated that the “sanctity” of this office had become a mere

phrase, so badly or amateurishly was this vocation fulfilled—an

indictment in which Nietzsche and feminism for one rare moment are on

common ground. Mothers needed the spur of this contempt; it was

necessary that their feeling of responsibility, their universal human

culture, their personal self-reliance, should be aroused by the woman

movement. Only so could the new generation acquire the new type of women

who for the present seek to qualify themselves by self-culture for the

office of mother, in the expectation that for all women an obligatory

education for motherhood will be realised. So long as this vocation

_can_ be practised without any training, nothing can be known of the

possibilities whereby ordinary mothers may become good educators—unless

they place the mother love and the intuitive understanding of the nature

of the child that it affords above even the best outside teachers. Just

as a glorious voice makes a country girl a “natural singer,” so nature

has at all times made certain mothers—and not least the women of the

people—natural educators of children.

The biography of nearly every great man shows the place the mother

through her personality occupied in the life of her son, the atmosphere

which she diffused about her in the home, her direct and indirect

influence. But only the culture of their natural gifts with conscious

purpose will make of mothers artists.

When Nietzsche wrote: “_There will come a time when we shall have no

other thought than education_,” and when he placed this education

specifically in the hands of mothers, least of all did he mean those

“arts of education,” from which amaternals believe they “guard” children

by rejecting an “artistically creative” home training by the mother, as

a violence to the peculiar characteristic of the child!

The _new mother_, as the doctrine of evolution and the true woman

movement have created her, stands with deep veneration before the mystic

depths she calls her child, a being in whom the whole life of mankind is

garnered. The richer the nature of the child is, the more zealously she

endeavours to preserve for him that simplicity which he needs, and at

the same time to provide for him the material that will enable him to

work for himself. She insures to the child the pleasures adapted to his

age, pleasures which at no later time can be enjoyed so intensely. The

effect upon him of his playfellows and books, of nature, art, music,

conversation, of the entire home _milieu_ which the child receives,

above all the influence of the personality and interests of the father

and mother—all these the mother who is an artist in education observes

in order to learn the natural proclivity of the child and then _directly

to strengthen and encourage_ it. At the same time she endeavours to find

out what _restraints_ are necessary _in order that the natural bent be

not impeded in its growth by secondary qualities_. But the new type of

mother does not seek to _eradicate_; she recognises the likeness between

wheat and tares. The Christian education, which has thus far prevailed,

has exercised a restraining oppression or has done violence to the

“sinful nature,” which must be broken and bent; this education was

dermatological, not psychological, in method.

The new mother is especially characterised by the fact that she has

rejected this earlier method. She allows her child, within certain

bounds, full freedom, and demands, beyond those bounds, unconditional

obedience. She helps the child to find for himself ever nobler motives

for repression. This she can do because from the very beginning she has

taken care of him; year by year she has persevered in the effort to

establish good habits; she has tried to enlist as aids, food, bath, bed,

dress, air, and play in the effort to keep him strong, sound, sexually

pure—conditions fundamental to the whole later conduct of life. Such a

methodical physical care _can_ be performed by the mother herself,

while, on the other hand, in the first years of childhood paid hands

might, through carelessness, stupidity, cruelty, laxity, or

over-indulgence, destroy the glorious possibilities. If the prevention

of _the possibilities of nature being warped or destroyed_ constituted

all that a mother could give, this one task would, nevertheless, be more

important than any social relief work.

What characterises the new mother is that she understands the enormous

significance of the _first years_, when the indispensable “training”

takes place, in which the future life of the child is determined by the

methods employed—whether they be those of torture or of culture,

irrational or rational. Then the great problem must be solved of

establishing willing obedience from within in place of the hitherto

_enforced_ obedience from without; of maintaining self-control, won by

self, in place of self-control _imposed_ from without; of evoking

voluntary renunciation in place of enforcing renunciation. For the

capacity for obedience, for self-control, for renunciation, is one of

the qualities fundamental to the whole later conduct of life. The new

mother knows this as well as the mother of former times. But she

endeavours to create this capacity by slow and sure means. The same

thing obtains in regard to physical and psychical courage, which in the

early years can often be so demoralised by fright that it can never

emerge again. The training which hitherto was customary—based on

_compelling_ and _forbidding_—had its effect only upon the surface and

_prevented_ the child from experiencing _the results of his own choice_.

It is this _indirect_ education by results which is the new mother’s

method. Her unceasing vigilance and consistency are required in order

that the child shall actually bear the results of his actions. What she

needs for this is first and foremost, _time, time_, and again _time_.

Apparently good effects can be obtained much quicker by intervening,

preventing, punishing, but thus are turned aside the _real_ results. By

this method the child is deprived of the _inner_ growth, which only the

fully experienced reality with its components of bitter and sweet can

give; and this growth the new mother endeavours to advance. Much more

time still is necessary to play the psychological game of chess, which

consists in the checkmating of black by white; in other words, the

conquest of negative characteristics by positive, through the child’s

own activity—a task in which the child at first must be guided, just as

in the assimilation of the elements of every other accomplishment, but

in which he can later perfect himself. Modern investigation in the realm

of the soul enables us to see the dangers which sometime will demand

quite as new methods in spiritual hygiene as bacteriology has created in

the hygiene of the body. But we still leave unexercised powers of the

soul, still misunderstand spiritual laws which sometime will radically

transform the means of education. At some future day the new mothers

will institute legal protection for children to an extent

incomprehensible to us and therefore provocative only of smiles. For

example, legal prohibition of corporal punishment by parents as well as

teachers; legal prohibition of child labour, of certain tenement

conditions, certain “amusements,” certain improper uses of the press.

For the present every individual educator must _set these laws over

himself_; must sedulously create counter influences to cope with the

destructive influences which great cities, especially, exert upon

children.[12] The new mothers lead children out into nature and

endeavour to satisfy their zeal for activity by appropriate tasks as

well as to encourage by suitable means their love of invention and their

impulse for play. In the country children provide much for themselves.

But what both city and country children need is a mother familiar with

nature, who can answer the questions which the child is by his own

observations prompted to ask; and the number of such mothers is

continually increasing. Both city and country children need also a

mother who can tell stories. Just as the settlement gardens most clearly

demonstrate how sundered the working people of the great cities are from

nature, so the “story evenings,” which are now established for children,

show how far children have been permitted to stray from the mother, who

formerly gathered them about her for the hour of story, play, and song.

What, finally, children need is the mother’s delicate revelation of the

sexual “mystery,” which often early exercises the thoughts of the child

and in which he should be initiated quietly and gradually by the mother.

All the educational influences here outlined emanate not only from the

enlightened, exceptional mother; they are exercised by the average

mother of to-day to better advantage than by the spiritually significant

mother of fifty years ago. And they are _quite as essential_, in order

that the highest possibility within the reach of each may be attained,

in the education of the genius as in that of the ordinary child. Such

influences in like degree strengthen the innate bent of the genius and

raise the average, from generation to generation, to a level where man

can live according to higher standards than those of the present time.

The new mothers understand that for the utilisation of all these

opportunities that make their appearance in the first seven years of the

child’s life, their motherly tenderness, gentleness, and patience do not

suffice; that they need in addition all the intelligence, imagination,

fine feeling, scientific methods of observation, ethical and æsthetic

culture and other spiritual acquisitions they possess, as direct and

indirect fruits of the woman movement.

When student and comrade life begin to claim the children, when the

influence of the mother—that is of the new mother who has respect for

the peculiar characteristic, the human worth, and the right of the child

to live his own life—becomes more indirect, she nevertheless bears in

mind that it is of the utmost importance that the son and the daughter

should _find the mother_, when they return to the parental roof; that

they should be able to breathe there an atmosphere of peace and warmth;

that they should find the attentive eye, the listening ear, the helpful

hand; that the mother should have the repose, the fine feeling, the

observation requisite for following, without interfering with, the

conflicts of youth; that she should not demand confidences but be always

at hand to receive them; that she should show vital sympathy for the

plans of work, the disappointments, the joys, of the young people; that

she should always have time for caresses, tears, smiles, comfort, and

care; that she should divine their moods, and anticipate their desires.

By all these means the mother perpetuates in the soul of the child,

unknown to him and to herself, her own personality. The talent which she

has not redeemed by a productive work of her own, perhaps often for that

very reason, benefits mankind in a son or a daughter, in whose soul the

mother has implanted the social ideas, the dreams, the rebellion, which

later become in them social deeds or works of art. Above all, in the

restless, sensitive, life-deciding years when the boy is becoming a

youth and the little girl a maiden, the mother needs quiet and leisure

to be able to give the ineffably needy children “the hoarded, secret

treasure of her heart,” as the beautiful saying of Dürer runs.

When such a mother is found, and such mothers are already found, she is

the most splendid fruit of the woman movement’s sowing upon the field of

woman’s nature.

Because the new mother created for herself an open space about her own

personality, she understands her son or her daughter when they in their

turn push her aside in order to create that same open space about

themselves. For in every generation the young renounce the ideals and

the aims of their parents. The knowledge of this does not prevent the

new mother, any more than it did the mother of earlier times, from

feeling the pain incident to being set aside. But the former looks

forward to a day when the son and daughter will freely choose her as a

friend, having discovered what a significant pleasure the mother’s

personality can afford them.

As the bird’s nest is made of nothing but bits of straw and down, so the

feeling of home is fashioned out of soft, simple things; out of little

activities that are neither ponderable nor measurable as political or as

economic factors. When Segantini painted the two nuns looking wistfully

into the bird’s nest, he gave expression to the deepest pain that many

modern women experience, the pain resulting from the consciousness that

their life, notwithstanding its freedom, is lonely, because it has

denied them the privilege of making a home and as a consequence has

failed to afford them the joy of creation, which nature intended they

should have, and of continuity of life in children to whom they gave

birth.

Here we stand at a point where the woman movement parallels the other

social revolutions, undeviatingly as the rails of a track, and leads to

the same objective. Modern men and women, and especially women, have

forfeited an opportunity for happiness in the loss of the feeling of

homogeneity and security. Just as formerly the property-holding family

felt a secure sense of proprietorship in the ancestral estate, so every

member of the home group felt himself safe in the family. Now the

children cannot depend with certainty upon the parents, nor the parents

upon the children; the wife upon the husband, nor the husband upon the

wife. Each in extremity relies only upon himself. The character of man

is thus altered quite as much as trees are changed when they are left

standing alone in the denuded forest of which they once formed a part.

If they can withstand the storms, they have produced more “character”

than they had when they stood close together, under a mutual protection

that nevertheless enforced uniformity.

From their earliest youth innumerable women must now care for

themselves, as well as decide for themselves. Thus the feeling of

independence of modern woman has increased through the sacrifice of her

peace; her individual characteristics, at the expense of her harmony.

Her feeling of loneliness is mitigated to a certain degree by the

growing feeling of community with the whole. But this feeling cannot

compensate certain natures for the forfeiture of the advantages which

women of earlier times possessed, when they sat secure and protected

within the four walls of the home, sucked the juice from family

chronicles, guarded family traditions, maintained the old holiday

customs, lived at the same time in the past and in the present.

The new woman lives in the present, sometimes even in the future—her

land of romance! The enthusiasm of the old romanticism about a “hut and

a heart” has little charm for her. For she knows reality and that

prevents her from giving credence to the feminine illusion that twice

two can be five. What she does know, on the contrary, is that out of

fours she can gradually work out sixteen. While the women of former

times could only save, the new woman can acquire. Woman’s beautiful,

foolish superstition regarding life has vanished, but her eagerness to

achieve can still remove mountains, her daring has still often the

splendour of a dream. Intellectual values are for her no longer pastimes

but necessities of life; with her culture has developed her feeling for

truth and justice. This does not secure the new woman immunity at all

times from new illusions and errors of feeling, nor does it prevent her

developing passions whose value, to say the least, is questionable. But

in and through her determination “to be some one,” to have a

characteristic personality, she has acquired a love of life, in its

diverse manifestations, both good and evil; a new capacity to enjoy her

own and others’ individuality, as well as a new joy—sometimes an

unblushing, insolent joy—in expressing her own being. In place of the

earlier resignation toward society, the expression of rebellion is found

even in the sparkling eye of the school-girl, with red cap upon her

curly hair.

The young women of to-day, married or single, mothers as well as those

who are childless, are still more vigorous in soul, more courageous,

more eager for life than are men. Because all that which for men has so

long been a matter of course, is for women new, rich, enchanting,

comprising, as it does, free life in nature, scientific studies, serious

artistic work economic independence. Even in a fine and soulful woman

there is found something of the inevitable hardness toward herself and

others of which an observer is instinctively conscious when he speaks of

some woman as one who “will go far” upon the course she has chosen. The

modern young woman desires above all else the elevation of her own

personality. She experiences the same feeling of joy a man is conscious

of when she realises that her strength of will is augmented, her ability

becoming more certain, her depth of thought greater, her association of

ideas richer. She stands ready to choose _her_ work and follow _her_

fate; in sorrow as in joy she experiences the blessedness of growth, and

she loves her view of life and the work to which she has dedicated

herself, often as devotedly as man loves his.

If we compare the seventeen-year-old girl of to-day with her progenitor

living in the middle of the foregoing century, we find that the girl of

earlier times was to a larger extent swayed by feeling, and that the

modern girl is to a larger extent determined by ideas. The former was

directed more to the centre of life, the latter remains often nearer the

periphery; the former was warmer, the latter is more intelligent; the

former was better balanced, the latter is more interesting.

The restlessness, the uncertainty, the feeling of emptiness, the

suffering, that is sometimes experienced by the young woman of to-day,

is primarily traceable to the disintegration of religious belief, which

gave to the older generation of emancipated women an inner stability,

resignation, and self-discipline. Scientific study has deprived many

modern women of their belief and those who can create a new one, suited

to their needs, are still very few. Thus to the outer homelessness an

inner estrangement is added. The woman movement has, it is true,

contributed indirectly to this spiritual distress by making the road to

man’s culture accessible to woman. For men also suffer in like manner,

and suffer above all perhaps because our culture is unstable, aimless,

and lacks style, owing to the very fact that it is at present without a

religious centre. And even the future can give to mankind no such new

centre as the Middle Ages had, for example, in Catholicism. The

attainment of individualism has shut out that possibility forever.

But _one_ factor in the religion of the past, the adoration of

motherhood as divine mystery; _one_ factor in the religion of the Middle

Ages, the worship of the Madonna, has meanwhile been given back to the

present by the doctrine of evolution, with that universal validity which

the thought must possess which seeks to give again to culture a centre.

Great, solitary individuals—prophets more often than sibyls—have

proclaimed the religion of this generation. But the word will become

flesh only when fathers and mothers instil into the blood and soul of

children their devout hope for a higher humanity. When women are

permeated by this hope, this new devout feeling, then they will recover

the piety, the peace, and the harmony which for the present, and partly

owing to feminism, have been lost.

The innumerable new relations which the woman movement has established

between woman and the home, between woman and society, and all of the

interchanges of new spiritual forces which have been put in operation

because of these relations, cannot possibly take fixed form, at least

not so long as the woman movement remains “a movement”; in other words,

as long as everything is in a condition of flux, in a state of becoming,

all spiritual relationships between individuals must change their form.

Continual new, fine shades of feeling, not to be expressed in words,

determine every woman’s soul and every woman’s fate. And even ancient

feelings receive continually different nuances, different intonations. I

am, therefore, laying down no laws but merely recapitulating certain

suggestions based on what has previously been said in regard to the soul

of the modern woman, as seen in that portion of the present generation

whose age ranges between twenty and thirty years—that is to say, that

part of the generation which is decisive for the immediate future.

Since co-education is becoming more and more general, each sex is

beginning to have more esteem for the other, and woman, as well as man,

is beginning to found self-respect upon work. When all women by culture

and capacity for work have finally become strong-willed, self-supporting

co-workers in society, then no woman will give or receive love for any

extraneous benefit whatsoever. No outward tie and no outward gain

through love—this is the ultimate aim of the new sex morale as the most

highly developed modern young woman sees it.

The new woman is deeply convinced that the relation between the sexes

attains its true beauty and sanctity only when every external privilege

disappears on both sides, when man and woman stand wholly equal in what

concerns their legal right and their personal freedom.

She demands that the contrasts between legal and illegal, rich and poor,

boy and girl, shall disappear, and that society shall show the same

interest in the complete human development of all children. She knows

that when both sexes awake to a feeling of responsibility toward the

future generation, then the real concern of sexual morale becomes the

endeavor to give the race an ever more perfect progeny. And in order to

feel in its fulness this command, maidens as well as youths must

henceforth demand scientific instruction in sexual duties toward

themselves and their possible children.

The new woman is also deeply convinced that only when she feels

happy—and happiness signifies the development of the powers inherent in

the personality—can she properly fulfil her duties as daughter, wife,

and mother. She can consciously sacrifice a part of her personality, for

example forego the development of a talent, but she can never subjugate

nor surrender her whole personality and at the same time remain a

strong-willed member of the family or of society, in the broadest

meaning of the word. She must assert her conception of life, her feeling

of right, her ideals. And no social considerations for children,

husband, or family life are, for her, above the consideration which, in

this respect, she owes to her own personality. When conflicts arise, she

seeks, wherever possible, a solution that will permit her to fulfil her

duty without annihilating herself. But if this is not possible, then she

feels that it is her first duty not to fall below her ideal, either

physically or spiritually. For this would prevent her from fulfilling

precisely those duties for which she has so sacrificed herself; duties

which she can perhaps perform later under other conditions, provided she

has saved herself from being extinguished by brutality or despotism.

But along with this individualism there exists in the new woman a

feeling for the unity of existence, the unity in which all things are

parts and in which nothing is lost. She does not, then, look upon

husband and children as continually demanding sacrifice and upon herself

as being always sacrificed; she sees herself and them, as in the

antiquity of the race, always existing _by means of one another_. She is

not consumed by her love, for she knows that under such circumstances

she would deprive her loved ones of the wealth of her personality. But

although she will not, like the women of earlier times, abandon her ego

_absolutely_, she will not, on the other hand, like certain modern

feminists, keep it _unreservedly_. She will preserve upon a higher plane

the old division of labour which made man the one who felled the game,

fought the battles, made conquests, achieved advancement through

victories; and which made woman the one who rendered the new domains

habitable, who utilised the booty for herself and hers, who transmitted

what was won to the new generation—all that of which woman’s ancient

tasks as guardian of the fire and cultivator of the fields are beautiful

symbols. She feels that when each sex pursues its course for the

happiness of the individual and of mankind, but at the same time and as

an equal helps the other in the different tasks, then each is most

capable, then society is most benefited.

The fact that there is still so much masculine brutality and despotism,

and that there are so many legal means at man’s disposal whereby he may

put into practice with impunity this brutality and despotism, is the

reason why the new woman is still always a “feminist,” why she still

maintains the fundamental tenets of the woman movement. But she is not a

feminist in the sense that she turns _against_ man. Her solution is

always that of Mary Wollstonecraft: “We do not desire to rule over men

but to rule over ourselves.” She often exhibits now in deliberation and

in determination the characteristics which were formerly called

“masculine”: practical knowledge, love of truth, courage of conviction;

she desists more and more from unjust imputations and empty words; she

proposes a greater number of well-considered suggestions for

improvements. The woman movement has now in a word a more universally

human, a less one-sidedly feminine character. It emphasises more and

more the fact that the right of woman is a necessity in order that she

may fulfil her duties in the small, individual family, and exercise her

powers in the great, universal human family for the general good. The

new woman does not wish to displace man nor to abolish society. She

wishes to be able to exercise _everywhere_ her most beautiful

prerogative to help, to support, to comfort. But this she cannot do so

long as she is not free as a citizen and has not fully developed as a

human personality. She knows that this is the condition not only of her

own happiness, but also, in quite as high a degree, of the happiness of

man. For every man who works, struggles, and suffers there is a mother,

a wife, a sister, a daughter, who suffers with him. For every woman who

in her way works and struggles, there is a father, a husband, a brother,

or a son for whom her contribution directly or indirectly has

significance. Above all, the modern woman understands that in every

marriage wherein a wife still suffers under man’s misuse of his legal

authority, it is in the last analysis _the man who sustains the greatest

injury_, for under present conditions he needs exercise neither kindness

nor justice nor intelligence to be ruler in the family. These humane

characteristics he must, therefore, begin to develop when the wife is

legally his equal.

The sacred conviction of the new woman is that man and woman _rise

together_, just as they _sink together_.

The antique sepulchres, on which man and wife stand hand in hand before

the eternal farewell, could quite as well be the symbol of the entrance

of modern man and modern woman into the new life, where they work

together in order that the highest ideals of both—the ideals of justice

and of human kindness—may assume form in reality. The motherly qualities

of women are applied for the good of children as well as of the weak and

the suffering. The arrival of the day when woman shall be given

opportunity to exercise social motherliness in its full and popularly

representative extent, can be only a question of time. In a century they

will smile at our time, in which it was still the practice to debate

about such obvious matters. And those who to-day ridicule the woman

movement will be ridiculed most of all.

* * * * *

Then we shall attain such an outlook on the great forces of the

time,—the emancipation movements of labouring men and of women,—that we

shall see how necessary both were in order that society should come to

understand that not the mass of material production, but the higher

cultivation of the race is the social-political end, and that for this

end the _service of mother_ must receive the honour and oblation that

the state now gives to _military service_.

And women themselves, whom nature has made creators and protectors of

the tender life—the task for which nature even in the plant world has

made such wonderful provision—will no longer resist being more

intimately associated with nature, nearer to earth, more like plants,

more restrained in outer sense and therefore, in inner respects, less

active than man, who always had more of the freedom of movement of the

forest animal. The woman of the future will not, as do many women of the

present time, _wish to be freed from her sex_; but she will be freed

from sexual hypertrophy, freed to _complete humanity_. For the

universal, human characteristics, forced to _remain latent_ in the

primitive division of labour, because the father was obliged to exert

all his strength in one direction and the mother in another, can now,

through the facilities for culture in the struggle for existence, be

developed on both sides: woman can develop the latent quality which

became active in man as “manliness”; man can develop the latent quality

which became active in woman as “womanliness.” But the _proportional

ratio_ of these characteristics, which development has already

strengthened, will _on the whole_ remain fixed—the proportional ratio

which, in the progress of evolution, gave to woman the ascendency in

regard to inward creative powers, and to man the ascendency in regard to

outward creative powers—a proportional ratio which for the present has

made woman more gifted in the sphere of feeling, man more potent in the

sphere of ideas; which has made her the listener and yearner in the

sphere of the spiritual life, and him the pioneer investigator and

founder of systems, that has given her more of the Christian, and him

more of the pagan virtues. The improvement of the universal, human

characteristics of both sexes elevates also the plane upon which they

exercise their especial functions, valuable alike for culture. With

increasing frequency the one sex may, when so desired, assume the

culture function of the other.

A perfect fusion of the two spiritual sex-characters would, on the

contrary, have the same result as physical hermaphroditism—sterility.

Genius—and in using the term we limit its meaning to poetic genius, for

real feminine genius has thus far appeared only in that domain—embraces,

as emphasised above, both man and woman, but not harmoniously blended.

For such a genius would be unproductive, as we imagine those celestial

forms to be which are neither “man nor woman.” The masculine and the

feminine characteristics, which exist side by side in the poet soul,

produce work in co-operation. Alternately, however, they seek to usurp

the entire power, whereby is occasioned the disharmony which enters into

the life of those who endeavour to fulfil at one and the same time the

universal, human duties as well as those of sex. Indeed it may be that

one of the reasons why great poetic geniuses, masculine as well as

feminine, have often had no progeny at all, and in other cases one of

little significance, is that their nature was not capable of a double

production, that poetic creation received the richest part of their

physical and psychical power.

Whether the opinion of genius expressed here is correct or not, does

not, however, affect the general situation. For the genius will always

go his own way, which is never that of the average man. From the point

of view of the ordinary individual an effacement of the spiritual sex

character would be in still higher degree a misfortune for culture and

nature. For it is the difference in the spiritual as well as in the

physical sex-characteristics that makes love a fusion of two beings in a

higher unity, where each finds the full deliverance and harmony of his

being. With the elimination of the _spiritual_ difference _psychical_

love would vanish. There would be left, then, upon the one side, only

the mating instinct, in which the same points of view as in animal

breeding must obtain; on the other, only the same kind of sympathy which

is expressed in the friendship between persons of the same sex, the

sympathy in which the human, individual difference instead of sexual

difference forms the attraction. In love, on the other hand, sympathy

grows in intensity, the more universally human and at the same time

sexually attractive the individual is: the “manly” in man is charmed by

the “womanly” in woman, while the “womanly” in man is likewise

captivated by the “manly” in woman, and _vice versa_. But when neither

needs the _spiritual sex_ of the other as his complement, then man, in

erotic respects, returns to the antique conception of the sex

relationship, of which Plato has drawn the final logical conclusion.

The “humanity” in the soul of man was strengthened when he felt himself

necessary to mother and child. When woman by sweetness and tenderness

taught man to love, not only to desire, then his humanity increased

immeasurably.

In our time the average man is beginning to learn that woman does not

desire him as man, that she looks down upon him as a lower kind of

being, that she does not need him as supporter. He does not at all grasp

what it is the woman of highest culture seeks, demands, and awaits from

his sex. But he learns that even the mediocre woman rejects the best he

has to give her erotically; that imbued as she is with ideals of

“universal humanity,” she no longer needs him as the supplement to her

sexual being. Then brutality awakes in him anew; then his erotic life

loses what humanity it had won; then he begins to hate woman. And not

with the imaginative, theoretical hatred of thinkers and poets; but with

the blind rage which the contempt of the weaker for the stronger arouses

in him. And here we encounter what is, perhaps, the deepest reason for

the present war between the sexes, appearing already in the literary

world as well as in the labour market.

Here the extreme feminists play unconsciously about an abyss,—the

depths in the nature of man out of which the elementary,

hundred-thousand-year-old impulses arise, the impulses which all

cultural acquisitions and influences cannot eradicate, so long as the

human race continues to subsist and multiply under present conditions.

The feminism which has driven individualism to the point where the

individual asserts her personality in opposition to, instead of within,

the race; the individualism which becomes self-concentration,

anti-social egoism, although the watchword inscribed upon its banner is

“Society instead of the family,”—this feminism will bear the blame

should the hatred referred to lead to war.

* * * * *

It would be a pity to conclude a survey of the influence of the woman

movement with an expression of fear lest this extreme feminism should be

victorious. I believe not; no more than I believe that the sun will for

the present be extinguished or streams flow back to their sources.

No “culture” can annul the great fundamental laws of nature; it can only

ennoble them; and motherhood is one of these fundamental laws. I hope

that the future will furnish a new and a more secure protection for

motherhood than the present family and social organisation affords. I

place my trust in a new society, with a new morality, which will be a

synthesis of the being of man and that of woman, of the demands of the

individual and those of society, of the pagan and Christian conceptions

of life, of the will of the future and reverence for the past.

When the earth blooms with this beautiful and vigorous flower of

morality, there will no longer be a woman movement. But there will

always be a woman question, not put by women to society but by society

to women: the question whether they will continue in a higher degree to

prove themselves worthy of the great privilege of being the mothers of

the new generation.

In the degree in which this new ethics permeates mankind, women will

answer this question in life-affirmation. And the result of their

life-affirmation will be an enormous enhancement of life, not only for

women themselves but for all mankind.

THE END

-----

Footnote 1:

In the summer of 1909 I sat in a Swedish home where the grandmother,

for this reason, had never learned to write but where the

granddaughter read aloud the thesis for her bachelor’s examination.

One hears even to-day of customs and points of view in certain farms

and manses which faithfully imitate those of the time of the

Reformation.

Footnote 2:

Next to the textile industry, the tobacco industry employs the most

women.

Footnote 3:

This idealism has naturally part also in the fact that, for example,

two-thirds of the women who have gone through college in America do

not marry, and find in club life a compensation for domestic life. But

other motives also must often play a part here, from the desire to

devote herself entirely to one of the lifeworks serviceable to

mankind, to the egoism of spiritually barren young girls with its

distaste for burdens and restraint.

A keen-sighted observer who recently spent a half year in North

America corroborated what many have already stated: that the student

and working young American girls devote themselves with true passion

to the cultivation of their beauty, their toilette, their flirtations.

All this belongs for her to the “Fine Arts” and as such is an end

sufficient in itself, while for European women these arts, as a rule,

are still means for alluring men to marriage. While study or work

often makes European women in outer sense less “womanly,” although her

soul always guards its full power to love, in America the reverse is

the case: the outer appearance is bewitchingly womanly, but the soul

no longer vibrates for love. The sexual sterility which Maudsley

already prophesied thirty years ago, when he spoke about the “sexless

ants,” has been partly realised, partly chosen voluntarily. In Europe

it still frequently happens that a young woman who has put love aside

for the sake of study or work is suddenly seized by an irresistible

passion; in America, on the contrary, this is extremely rare. Women

students look down upon the less cultured men, who ordinarily finish

their studies earlier in order to earn a livelihood. The sympathy

which they need, women find more easily in their own sex. The

unmarried have quite the same social position as the married and do

not desire children. If they finally marry, it is ordinarily because a

more brilliant position is offered them than the one which they could

create themselves, and the man is then considered and treated as a

money-getter.

My authority emphasises also that the young students or working girls

are ordinarily less original, of less personal significance, less

individually developed, than the older women, especially women’s

rights women, who often have not studied but have grown grey in

marriage and motherhood, in self-development and in social work. The

interesting significant American feminists were women between the ages

of fifty and ninety; the woman of the present generation, however,

which now enjoys the fruits of the work of the older generation, is,

in spite of excellent scholarship and great working proficiency, less

a woman and less a human being, less a personality.

These wholly fresh observations, which were communicated to me during

the printing of my book, seem to me to confirm so strongly my point of

view that I wish to repeat them here.

But in France and elsewhere mothers tell us how clear, intelligent,

and universally interested their daughters are, and at the same time

how critical, how free from ardour and enthusiasm. It is not the hasty

love marriage that many mothers now fear for their daughters, but a

worldly-wise marriage without love.

Footnote 4:

See _Love and Ethics_, Ralph Fletcher Seymour, Chicago, and also

_Mutter und Kind_, published in Germany only, Pan-Verlag. My plan is a

paternity assessment upon society as a contribution to the maintenance

of children and a compensation of motherhood by the state.

Society has already shown by a series of institutions, maternity

assurance, infants’ milk distribution, clothing and feeding of

children, and many kindred social efforts, that the maintenance

afforded by the father is not sufficient for the young generation;

quite as little is the mother’s care, which is supplemented by other

means, crèches, etc. But when the _child_ finally becomes the

unconscious “head of the family,” then it will be the affair of

society to requite maternity. Marriage will then signify only the

living together of two people upon the ground of love and the common

parenthood of children. _Maternal right_ will _in law_ take the place

of _paternal right_, but _in reality_ the father will continue to

retain all the influence upon the children which he _personally_ is

able to exert, just as has been hitherto the case with the mother.

In such circumstances there will be no more illegitimate children; no

mothers driven out from the care of tender children to earn their

daily bread; no fathers who avoid their economic duties toward their

children, and who cannot be compelled by society to perform at least

that paternal duty which animals perform now better than men: that of

contributing their part to the maintenance of their progeny. There

will be no mothers who for the sake of their own and their children’s

maintenance need to stay with a brutal man; no mothers who, in case of

a separation, can be deprived of their children on any ground except

that of their own unworthiness. In a word, society must—upon a higher

plane—restore the arrangement which is already found in the lower

stages of civilisation, the arrangement which nature herself created:

that mother and child are most closely bound together, that they

together, above all, form the family, in which the father enters

through the mother’s or his own free will.

Footnote 5:

An inquiry instituted among English women as to whether they would

prefer to be men or women gave as a result the fact that, out of about

7000 who answered, two-thirds wished to remain women and this above

all in order to be mothers, while a third wished to be men. This

indicated probably the highest figure of the disinclination for

maternity which such a _European_ inquiry could elicit. But even these

women who wish to marry and to become mothers feel the pressure of the

idea created by the zealots of the woman movement which finds

expression often in the following conversation between two former

schoolmates about a third: “And A—— what is she doing

now?”—“Nothing—she is married and has children.”

The old folk legend about the girl who trampled on the bread she was

carrying to her mother because she wished to go dry-shod, can serve as

symbol of many modern women zealots: life’s great, sound values are

offered for the meal; vanity sits down alone to partake of them.

Footnote 6:

Bret Harte, _The Luck of Roaring Camp_.

Footnote 7:

E. Carrière and Segantini.

Footnote 8:

Max Kruse, _Liebesgruppe_.

Footnote 9:

This amaternal idea is advanced with great ability in some works of

Charlotte Perkins Stetson and Rosa Mayreder. The word amaternal coined

by me is used to characterise the theory subsequently advanced,

because the word unmaternal (unmotherly) signifies a _spiritual

condition_, the antithesis to “motherliness.” The maternal as opposed

to the amaternal theory is this: that a woman’s life is lived most

intensively and most extensively, most individually and most socially;

she is for her own part most free, and for others most fruitful, most

egoistic and most altruistic, most receptive and most generous, in and

with the _physical and psychic exercise of the function of maternity,

because of the conscious desire, by means of this function, to uplift

the life of the race as well as her own life_.

Footnote 10:

It can even be shown that, if man invades the so-called woman’s

spheres (for example the art of cooking or of dress-making), it is

most frequently he who makes new discoveries and attains great

success!

Footnote 11:

The best proof of this is that many women who, in a life free from

care in an outward sense, were comparable only to geese or peacocks,

nevertheless, when hard times came and gave them opportunity to

develop their power of love, not only proved themselves heroines, but

asserted that their “happy” years were those in which they had so

“sacrificed” themselves.

Footnote 12:

How many children have had their idea of right debased by the manner

in which the “Captain of Köpernick” was received at his liberation—to

cite only one example.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Ellen Key is gradually taking a hold upon the reading public of this

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* * * * *

Ellen Key

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. P. 175, added an anchor for the third footnote.

2. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.

3. Anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as

printed.

4. Footnotes have been re-indexed using numbers and collected together

at the end of the last chapter.

5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.