THE UNBORN RACE AND WOMAN'S WORK
There are few factors in the life of the present in which the dualism
between theory and practice is greater and more unconscious than in
questions concerning woman. The protagonists of the feminist movement
are in many cases sturdily Christian. They protest with vigour against
the idea that they could have any share in the sort of emancipation of
personality that includes freedom for all the powers and activities of
the personality. Individualism, and the assertion of self are for them
degrading words with a sinful significance. That the emancipation of
women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth
century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that
history has yet seen, they have no suspicion. Freedom for the powers and
the personality of woman have never appeared to them except as an ideal
struggle for justice, as a noble victory to be won. In its deepest
meaning this is as true of every other effort at self-affirmation, the
end of which is the recognition of the right of human personality to the
full development of capacities in a sphere of freedom, where
responsibility belongs to the self alone. But just as every other such
affirmation of the individual self, of a class, of a race, easily falls
into an unjustifiable egoism, so with the emancipation of woman.
This great, deep, serious movement for woman's emancipation has in the
course of time received a new name, the "Woman Question." The change in
terminology signifies a change in the attitude of thought. From a real
emancipation movement, that is, a movement to free the restricted powers
of woman and her restricted personality, the movement has become a
question, a social institution with officers, a church system with
dogmas. Certainly we still hear in books and speeches that the woman
question is being discussed and urged, in its relation to the happiness
and development of the whole of humanity. But in reality the woman
question, since it became a fact, a cause with an end of its own, since
its champions have lost more and more their appreciation of its
connection with other great questions of the day, is tending to
increase the civil rights and the fields of woman's labour. In both
cases people really have the women of the upper classes in view. This
has been the end, and it is thoroughly justified and justifiable. But,
in striving for this end, those who are aiming at it have come more and
more into opposition to the first and highest of all rights, the rights
of the individual woman to think her own thoughts, to go her own ways,
even when these thoughts and these ways follow other courses than those
of the advocates of woman's rights. While this group is, on one hand,
very far from conceding to the individual woman the freedom which
belongs to her, it is, on the other hand, blind to the results of the
self-assertion of the whole female sex. In taking up work more and more
external in character, they are blind to the profound and revolutionary
effects of this movement, on the conditions of labour in the present
day, on the existence of man and the family, on society as a whole.
Doing away with an unjust paragraph in a law which concerns woman,
turning a hundred women into a field of work where only ten were
occupied before, giving one woman work where formerly not one was
employed,--these are the mile-stones in the line of progress of the
woman's rights movement. It is a line pursued without consideration of
feminine capacities, nature, and environment.
The exclamation of a woman's rights champion when another woman had
become a butcher, "Go thou and do likewise," and an American young lady
working as an executioner, are, in this connection, characteristic
phenomena.
The emancipation of woman has practically ceased to be the freedom which
enlarges soul and heart. It is conducted quite officially, like a
business, and dogmatically, too, without feeling for the pulsating
manifoldness of life, and has become an egoistic self-concentrated
campaign. On this account I, and many others of my generation, with many
more of the younger generation, stand outside of the movement, although
we actively wished, and still wish, for the freedom of woman. The
champions of woman's rights, like the champions of other movements for
rights, illustrate the truth of the old Swedish saying, that "what we
are pursuing is really only a runaway horse attached to our waggon." How
blindly the fanatics of woman's rights have rushed by the other needs of
the time can be best measured by considering their attitude towards the
greatest question of the day--I mean the social question.
The old advocates of woman's rights maintain that the adult woman must
have the same right as the adult man to "protect" herself, and they ask
why the woman is hindered from working because she is married, or
because she has children. Protective legislation drives woman from the
factories and workshops; and this legislation is very far, they tell us,
from meriting the support of women. Women, on the contrary, they say,
should demand the same protective legislation for women as for men. They
ask for technical instruction and an extended field of work for women.
This whole argument is quite logical from the point of view that
limitation of woman's labour is opposed to one of the foremost
principles of our time,--the self-determination of the individual. This
implies the right of the adult woman, as well as the adult man, to
choose her own work. Privileges on the ground of sex only hinder the
woman from being put on an equality with man before the law.
But all these arguments are based on the sophistical notion which
perverts the whole feminist movement. The idea is to free woman from the
limitations of nature. It involves, too, the other sophistical notion
with which capitalistic society meets every demand of protective
legislation for men, women, or children. Such legislation is said to be
an interference with the individual's right of choice.
Every human being who is socially alive is aware that this right to
control one's life is the emptiest phrase to describe reality in a
society built up on a capitalistic basis. It is doubly empty where woman
is concerned. I have never heard a woman desire that woman should fulfil
military duties as an equivalent for having civil rights like man. But
this would be the consequence of the argument that woman should have no
privileges on the ground of her sex. The greatest privilege that can be
thought of in modern society is to be spared the discomforts and loss of
time that come from military training, to be exempt from the dangers and
the terrors of war. That women are not absolutely incapable of service
in warfare, women have shown on many occasions, especially in the Boer
War. So when the advocates of women's rights hesitate before this
extreme consequence of their principle, and introduce the functions of
motherhood as a cogent ground for the privilege of being freed from
military service in time of war (even if women at some time should
receive the same civil rights now enjoyed by man), they are in the
highest degree illogical. Other women with more logic declare that on
another battle-field, a still more destructive one, that of the factory
system, the same maternal functions require certain privileges for
woman, and these same functions must result in subjecting her to certain
limitations of her individual right to control her life. That is, she
cannot pass beyond the limits drawn by nature, without interfering with
the rights of another, the potential child.
It lies in the individual sphere of woman's choice as of man's choice
not to choose marriage, or to desire it without parenthood; and for
exemption from the latter, real altruistic as well as real egoistic
reasons can be urged. It lies in the individual choice of the woman, as
well as of the man, to isolate herself from what may be regarded as an
obstacle to her individual development, or to her freedom of movement.
She can do without love or motherhood, if the one or both of these are
regarded from this point of view. Woman has the full right to allow
herself to be turned into a third sex, the sex of the working bees, or
the sexless ant, provided she finds in this her highest happiness.
A good while ago I was ingenuous enough to maintain that motherhood was
the central factor of existence for most women. In the discussion of
this question I considered several facts: woman's work imposed by
necessity, woman's ambition stimulated by the freedom of her power,
woman's intellectual life modified by many other influences of
contemporary thought,--all these have forced the maternal instinct into
the background for the time being. Here was a danger which, it seemed,
was not too late to expose. There are women in whom the feeling of love
is really and absolutely stunted; there are others who do not find in
modern man the soulful and profound harmony in love that they quite
rightly demand; there are others, more numerous, who wish for love but
do not wish for motherhood. They absolutely fear it. The famous German
authoress Gabrielle Reuter has spoken of this fear, this alarm of
motherhood continually vigilant, active, placing woman in an attitude of
self-defence,--a fear which to-day has taken possession of so many
strenuous and creative women. The alarm, the aversion, becomes so
strong, so dominant in them that one might almost believe it a dark
perverse instinct, which, like all unnatural instincts, has been
conceived and born through cruel necessities, and through these
necessities has become overmastering. It is as if a secret voice in the
depths of their nature was telling these women that, by paying their
tribute to their sex, they would lose that power, brilliancy, and
sharpness of intellect by which they have elevated themselves above
their sex; and perhaps certain kinds of women are right in having this
fear.
I am convinced, just as the German writer is, that every actual
phenomenon of disease and of health alike is a necessary result from
given causes; and I am more convinced than the advocates of women's
rights ever were, that it is in the sphere of human freedom to choose
one's own type of development, happiness, or ruin. I am not inclined to
say anything further to the women who do not desire motherhood.
It would be very disastrous if these women, who have never been moved by
tenderness when they felt a soft childish hand in their own, who have
never longed to surrender themselves entirely to another being, were to
become mothers. Their children would be more unfortunate than they
themselves.
Many women like these are to be found to-day, and if things remain as
they are, they are bound to increase in numbers. In some of them,
however, the maternal instinct is not dead, but only dormant. Modern
women with their capacity for psychic analysis, with their physical and
psychical refinement, are often repelled by the crudeness, the
ignorance, or the importunities of man's nature. The whole factor of
love in the being of these women is shrivelled up as a bud that has
never blossomed, and in enthusiasm for a duty, or for a woman friend,
they find an expression for that sacrifice whose real aim they deny or
overlook, a something which ends often by avenging itself in a tragic
way.
I am simply insisting that every woman, who has not yet ceased to desire
motherhood, has duties as a girl, and still more as a woman, to the
unborn generation from which she cannot free herself without absolute
selfishness. This selfishness is often disguised under a great impulse,
an impulse which, like that of the preservation of the species, masters
existence. I mean the impulse of self-protection. But it is just this
that should make the "obligatory" egoism of the modern working woman
appear so terrible to those who are busied with the emancipation of
woman.
To talk of the freedom of woman, of her individual right to control her
actions, when she works like a beast of burden to reach a minimum of
existence, to keep from dying of starvation, to talk of the freedom of
women where conditions are such that the free choice of work, for man as
well as for woman, is an empty phrase--to put it mildly, it is
senseless. I will throw some light on the results of freedom by the
following illustration:
When women in England worked in white lead factories, seventy-seven
women were examined in one factory. It appeared in the time covered by
the investigation that there were among this number ninety miscarriages,
twenty-seven cases of still-born children; beside, forty young children
died of convulsions produced by the poisoning of their mothers. The
effects of this occupation were most harmful in the case of women from
eighteen to twenty-three years of age. Lameness, blindness, and other
infirmities resulted from this kind of work.
An English doctor has shown from exact investigations conducted during
a number of years, that the enormous mortality among young children in
factory districts arises chiefly because the child is deprived of a
mother's care a few weeks after birth. A child needs its mother's milk
at least six months, and the mother's milk cannot be substituted by
artificial means, least of all when the substitutes are used with
carelessness. In certain textile factory districts, in Nottingham, for
example, where lace is produced, and where people have complained of the
law limiting women's work, out of each thousand children, two hundred
die annually. Mortality in factory districts is four to five times
greater than in country districts; and yet the death of children is,
relatively speaking, a lesser evil. More unfortunate still is it that
those who survive always suffer partial weakness from the lack of a
mother's care at a tender age.
In Silesia, where children and quite young girls are employed in the
glass industry, the work has so distorted their bodily structure that
when they bear children, their sufferings are intense. Such unique
material do they offer for the study of obstetrics, that doctors make
pilgrimages to Silesia to learn from their cases.
Before women have reached maturity, when they can, according to the
advocates of women's rights, protect themselves, they are ruined
physically. If it is said that the facts mentioned above belong to the
question of the protection of children, not to that of the protection of
women, the answer lies close at hand. The physical and moral interest of
children and of women are so mutually related, that they cannot be
separated. Crippled women have children who are stunted at the time of
their birth. The burden of toil they take up with weakened power of
resistance and they transmit this weakness to their offspring. Cause and
effect are so intimately associated here, that they cannot be accurately
apportioned between the work of women and the work of children.
Even the advocates of women's rights must, allow that the limit of their
claims to right is to be found where the right of another begins. They
cannot suppose that the individual right of the woman to control her
life should go so far that a woman could take a piece of a neighbour's
property to lay out a garden, or use for an industrial scheme a part of
the water power belonging to some one else.
Can they not see that woman's individual freedom is limited by the
rights of another, by the rights of the potential child? The potential
child has its own proper rights, its own vital power. This property, the
woman has not the right to encroach upon in advance.
A woman, who from one motive or another, great or small, permanently
keeps outside of the marriage relation, has complete right to ruin
herself by work, provided she does not, as a result of so doing, become
a burden to others through incapacity.
But the woman who looks forward to motherhood as a possibility for
herself, or the woman who is expecting to become a mother, should not,
through an unlimited amount of voluntary work or of work forced upon her
contrary to her will, sacrifice the capacities for life and work of an
unborn generation, in such a way that she will bring into the world
weak, invalid, or physically incapable children, who will later on be
neglected.
It does not occur to the dogmatic advocates of women's rights that their
talk about the individual freedom of the woman to control her career,
their contention that no limitation need restrict woman's power of
deciding her own vocation, because they are married or are mothers,
mean the most crying injury, not only to children, but to women
themselves. For the demand of equality, where nature has made
inequality, brings about the injury of the weaker factor. Equality is
not justice. Often it is just the opposite, the most absolute injustice.
The strongest reasoning will not convince those advocates of women's
rights who discuss woman's labour from the old-fashioned level of
individualism, unaffected by the social feeling of solidarity, which is
the solution offered by our age. But fortunately protective legislation
does not depend on the women who advocate the rights of women. The
workingmen's movement, aided by women and men of all classes who are
active in it, will carry through this legislation. The movement for the
normal working day is steadily gaining ground.
Experience has shown that, because of the greater intensity of the work
done, just as much can be accomplished in a shorter as in a longer time.
The first concern has been the work of children and of younger adults.
The effect of factory life on the health of women themselves, as well as
on their children, has excited general attention. In England first,
then in other European countries, it has become recognised as necessary
that a normal period of work should be laid down for women as well. The
programme was and continues to be threefold:--a maximum working time for
women's work; limitation, or, better still, the cessation of night work
on the part of women; the prevention, too, of the work of women in mines
and in certain other industries dangerous to health; finally the
protection of women who are about to become mothers. In most European
countries there is now a maximum working time fixed at eight to eleven
hours. Night work, work in mines, and extra work, is either forbidden or
considerably limited, and a rest period of three to eight weeks is
established for women at childbirth.
From all points of view, an eight-hour working day should be the highest
limit for woman's work. There are more reasons for it in her case than
for man's work. The eight-hour day means not only for the woman as for
the man the possibility of enjoying her life in permanent health; it
secures time for improving recreation. For the married woman it is an
indispensable requirement. Without it her home cannot be kept in order
and comfort, her children cannot be physically cared for; without it
she is not able to co-operate in their education. The normal working day
is, therefore, more necessary for the woman than for the man, because on
her, rather than on him, comes the burden of household work. The dangers
of night work, as of work in mines, are from the standpoint of health
and morality so plain, that no further reason need be urged to defend
protective legislation in this case.
But not only the theoretical principles of women's rights are urged
against this legislation. Socialists as well as the advocates of women's
rights are responsible for different objections of a more solid
character. It is urged that legislation will increase the number of
unemployed women who, in order to live, will be forced into
prostitution, but it is forgotten that the same result comes from low
wages in many occupations, and that these low wages are caused by an
over-supply of working women. It is said, also, that if protective
legislation hinders or prevents women from working, they will not be
able to care for their children and the children will be employed in the
factory in their stead. The way out of the last difficulty is absolutely
plain: the complete prohibition of all work by children under fifteen
years of age.
It is urged also that if women are hindered by legislation from
fulfilling the demands of their occupation, the result will be, not that
they are protected in their occupation, but that the occupation is
protected against them. The remedy in this case is certainly difficult,
but not impossible to find. Let only the tenth part of the energy now
used in agitation for the free right of women to labour be employed in
preparing women for such labour as they are suited to undertake. But
even when this cannot be done protective legislation carries with it its
own corrective. It is always urged that the occupation will be destroyed
by protective legislation. Then new methods and new machines will be
invented to replace cheap labour power. Those who are protected often
themselves complain that they suffer economically under protective
legislation, but a long experience will show them how, through the
reciprocal effects of all factors in production, the temporary failures
will be balanced. A potent remedy for this effect of protective
legislation may be looked for in the assertion, found in the programmes
of all labour parties, of the right of the unemployed to have work, and
a fixed minimum wage. These demands along with that for a normal working
day, in which is included rest at night and rest on Sunday, and other
measures for the protection of workingmen against accident and old age,
are the chief methods by which the labour question, both for men and
women, will be solved. Until these aims are realised Ruskin's judgment
on modern industrialism which kills the real humanity in man holds good
both for men and for women. We make, he says, everything except real
men; we bleach cotton; we harden and improve steel; we refine sugar; we
make porcelain and print books; but to refine a single living soul, to
reform it, to improve it never enters into our reckoning of profit.
The women of the working classes must continue to endure the suffering,
to bear the dangers, to subject themselves to the forces which
solidarity in this great struggle implies. Only under these conditions
can men as well as women elevate themselves, partly by their own
combination, partly by the extension of the principle, more and more
coming to be recognised, that society, through its legislation, can
determine the conditions under which its members work. So will be
produced conditions of life and of work worthy of mankind,--a
healthier, stronger, and more beautiful race. In this ever continuing
progress every part is related to every other part.
Unorganised, ordinary and therefore badly paid work, done by woman,
diminishes the wages of man and his opportunity of work. Work in a
factory unfits the woman for the conduct of the household, for her
duties as a mother. In the turmoil, heat, and rush of the factory her
nerves are destroyed and with them her finer emotions. The woman loses
not only the right hand, but also the right heart for family life. Badly
conditioned women make marriage more difficult for the man; through
celibacy, his mortality is increased. Low wages, or times of lack of
employment, cause bad dwellings, bad clothes, and bad nourishment. The
tortured or ill-conditioned woman is not able to prepare anything good
with the small amount of money which the man may earn. From all of this
come intemperance and disease. Through these causes, combined with those
already noted, the population of factory districts degenerates, in
republican Switzerland, not less than in absolutistic Russia.
It is true that such limitations of work in many cases are felt, as
well by the single woman as by the family. The restriction of child
labour may bring immediate discomfort. But all this is a passing evil.
It can be corrected, as soon as it is clearly seen in what direction the
advance along all the line is being made. This kind of progress moves in
zigzag fashion. What decides whether temporary limitation of freedom
makes for progress or not is whether one finds, in turning from the
individual, or small groups, to the great whole, that the last is
gaining, that in the future, freedom and happiness for all will be
increased by this temporary limitation of freedom.
In other relations of life it is a just law that he who goes into a game
must abide by its rules. But this rule cannot be applied to that very
cruel game which we call life. We do not go into it of our own will.
Children have the right not to be obliged to suffer for the mistakes and
errors of their parents. How this suffering can be best avoided in case
of an inharmonious marriage must be decided by the different
individuals, as a question belonging to them alone. As I have already
shown, change of custom in relation to the time, age, and motives for
marriage is the surest protection for the children, a protection that
will gradually be extended. Under a serious conviction of woman's duty
as a member of her sex, it will be regarded as a crime for a young wife
voluntarily to ill-treat her person, either by excessive study, or
excessive attention to sports, by tight-lacing, or consumption of
sweets, by smoking or the use of stimulants, by sitting up at night,
excessive work, or by all the thousand other ways by which these
attractive simpletons sin against nature, until nature finally loses all
patience with them.
It must be demanded of the laws of society that they hinder involuntary
crimes of unprotected women against their feminine nature.
This is the great work of woman's emancipation; everything else compared
with it is non-essential. Through their failure to see this the present
representatives of women's rights are working against progress, though
they themselves apply the word reactionary to all who assert that the
only way by which the woman question as a whole can be solved is through
the social revolution. In this revolution protective legislation is an
important factor.
According to my method of thinking, and that of many others, not woman
but the mother is the most precious possession of the nation, so
precious that society advances its own highest well-being when it
protects the functions of the mother. These functions are not limited to
birth nor to the nourishment of the child; but they go on during the
whole time of its training. I believe that in the new society where all
women and men alike will be compelled to work (not children, not
invalids, and not the aged) people will regard the maternal function as
so important for the whole social order, that every mother under fixed
conditions, subject to certain control, during a certain period, and for
a certain number of children, will obtain from society an allowance for
education. She will receive this during the time in which her children
require all her care, while she herself is freed from work outside the
home. Naturally this does not exclude the case of mothers who from one
or another reason cannot devote themselves to the care and training of
their children; they can by their own productive work secure a
substitute. But for the majority of women, the proposal made above would
undoubtedly be the real solution of many problems which now seem
insoluble. I do not believe that social development will maintain the
old ideal of the father as the one who takes care of the family. I
hope, rather, that the new conception of having every individual look
after himself will gain more ground. The father will then be, in the
real sense of the word, the educator, when the care for the maintenance
of the family does not press him down to the ground. A woman will then,
as mother of the family, not be in dependence on the man,--a position
she feels as humiliating, if as a girl she earned her own living. People
are bound to return to this new form of matriarchy, when they begin to
consider care of the new generation, as the great business the mother
takes over for society. During its progress society must guarantee her
existence. In many cases, the answer of the married woman who works
outside the home would be as follows: That her happiness would consist
in quietly looking after her children, and in being able to keep house,
but that she must have an income that would make her independent of her
husband. A Swedish evening paper, the special organ of the feminist
movement, two years ago started an investigation on the productive work
of married women. The answers, contrary to the expectations of the
paper, were nearly unanimous in showing what dangers for children, and
what interference with household comfort, were caused by the woman
working outside the home. An impartial investigation of the causes of
the increasing brutality of the young would show certainly that the
rapid increase in crime in several countries among the young is caused
partly by their prematurely taking up productive work, and partly by
early lack of home life, the result of the mother working outside the
home.
If the world is agreed that children must still continue to be born and
that a home furnishes generally the best means for training them during
the first years of their life, the present consequences of woman's work
done outside the home must cause pessimism; such work must be stopped.
After we have thought over the matter, it is plain that nothing is now
more needed than such plans of social order, such programmes of
education, as will give the mother back to her children and to her home.
Everything that philanthropy now does to heal the injurious and
disintegrating effects of the capitalistic industrial system is on the
whole wasted power. Children's crèches, kindergartens, providing meals
for children, hospitals, vacation homes, cannot with all their noble
efforts replace a hundredth part of the life energy, taken directly or
indirectly from the new generation by women working outside the home.
There are some people who expect the problem of domestic life to be
solved by collective institutions which will take care of the children,
and give them meals. Just as brewing, baking, slaughtering, making
candles and clothes, have more and more ceased to be done in the home,
much of the work which now absorbs the greatest part of household
activity, cooking, washing, mending and cleaning clothes, will, I firmly
believe, finally be done by collective effort, by the help of
electricity and machines. But I hope the tendency of man towards
individualisation will overcome the tendency towards impersonal, uniform
application of power _en masse_, in everything by which the innermost
relations of life and private habits are deeply affected. A strong
family life will, I hope, be regarded as the basis for true happiness
and for the development of personality. When women are free from the
barbarous relics of present methods of housekeeping,--the market basket,
the kitchen utensils, the scrubbing brush gone from every house,
electricity everywhere spreading warmth and life,--they will still be
forced to do a certain amount of work. This cannot be avoided even by
the help of the most perfect apparatus and by co-operative methods,
provided the house is not to be replaced by the barrack. And since the
custom of keeping servants will soon cease because, probably, there will
be no servants to keep, all women will be forced to do housework, or
find the remedy already discovered in America where bureaus supply
domestic help for a fixed time for a fixed price. In London, too, there
is at present a guild for general houseworkers who are trained for
occupation and work under regularly established conditions. In the
country, not only wives but daughters will be needed for agricultural
labour, when there are no more hired labourers to be had. This will be a
natural corrective against that pressure towards outside fields of
labour, that has taken the daughters in multitudes away from home, and
has crowded and overflowed the cities with them.
Finally if we weigh the economic loss occasioned by the fact that women
after five or ten years' preparation have to give up work or study as a
result of marriage, it is easy to see that the modern work of women has
had results which must soon lead to earnest thought, in balancing up the
accounts for or against the system. From the point of view of the woman
herself, from the children's point of view, from the man's point of
view, and finally, from the productive point of view, it has become
pretty plain that society must either change the conditions of woman's
labour or see a progressive disintegration in home life. Society must
either transform the conditions of life and work, or it will witness the
degeneration of the sexes.
All philanthropy--no age has seen more of it than our own--is only a
savoury fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer. This incense
offering makes the air more endurable for passers-by, but it does not
hinder the infection in the sewer from spreading.
Selfishness, the instinct of self-preservation, will perhaps end by
forcing the leaders of society to direct their actions from the social
point of view. Then the woman question will become a question of
humanity; then will its champions perhaps come to see that there can be
no enduring good for the woman, if she works under conditions injurious
to men and to children. It will be seen that the old axiom can be justly
applied to the demands made in the name of woman's individuality;
supreme right becomes supreme injustice. Justice is not to be reached
by having the woman work under conditions which ruin both her and the
whole generation physically. In other respects she must be able to use
her free choice, and be educated enough to make good use of it. Justice
consists in protecting innumerable women, who are not able as yet to
protect themselves, against the abuses of which capital is guilty in
employing their labour power.
It is an instructive feature in the history of class conflict, and of
the movement for women's progress, that as women began by driving men
out of certain fields of labour, so now unmarried women try to force
married women from the labour market. In America, where everything goes
at full speed, an association has been founded among unmarried women
with this intention. These and similar phenomena belong to the system of
free competition, the creation of the "leading thought of our time, the
right of the individual to determine his own vocation." Perhaps when the
war of women against women becomes the rule, the women's rights women
will see that the problem of woman's work is more complicated than they
imagine. They have continued to look at it till now only from the point
of view of a woman's right to take care of herself. Perhaps they will
then understand that individualism, apart from the feeling of
solidarity, leads to social conflict, class against class, sex against
sex, unmarried against married, young against old. So it will be seen
that only in the transformation of the whole of society can woman attain
her full rights without impairing, through her advance, the rights of
others.
The sooner the women's rights party understands this, the better.
Instead of fighting protective legislation, they should advocate it;
instead of regarding unions and strikes with disfavour, they should help
labouring women to organise unions, and support strikes where strikes
are justified.
Our century, which has opened up to women new fields of labour, has made
life very hard for her by forcing her in the competitive struggle. As
wives, as married or unmarried mothers, as divorced women, as widows,
women often not only have the burden of their own support to bear, but
they have frequently the rôle of guardian of a family, working for an
invalid or intemperate husband; for children, or sisters, or aged
parents. These women, whether they belong to those who labour with the
brain or with the hand, are worn out, partly by earning their own
living, partly by household tasks. While the man goes from home to his
work, refreshed by rest, the woman often goes already tired out, and she
comes back to the house perhaps to work at night. It is as clear as day
that by so doing she loses her bodily health and mental equanimity, both
needed by her children. It is astonishing how many working women despite
all this have enough energy for intellectual effort in reading and
thinking. They soon see, women like these, that an occupation is not
emancipation. The best that can be said is that it is only a means to
emancipation. Those who work with their hands are not the worst off in
this respect. Bookkeepers, telephone and telegraph operators,
post-office employees, shop girls, waiters in public establishments, and
servants in private houses, who must often serve the public standing,
and who are often deprived of rest at night and on Sunday, are
practically labour's worst slaves. Who can wonder if the possible income
obtained by an immoral life is reckoned by the employer, when he secures
for his establishment, at low wages, the services of attractive young
girls? Small wonder it is that such employees, worried to death in
shops, telephone bureaus, post and telegraph offices, should often be
driven to hysteria, insanity, and suicide.
The advocates of women's rights are not blind to all these
incongruities. They ask equal salaries for men and women, and claim,
often with justice, and often without, that women's work is too
inadequately compensated. But they do not see that they have contributed
to the evil by constantly urging women to work in all possible
occupations, and that a low rate of wages and an overcrowding of all
fields of labour is the result. It is far more necessary to pay
attention to these things than to open up new fields of labour to women,
if their vital energy is not to be dried up, if they are not to lose
their youthful freshness and attractiveness prematurely, and their
possibilities for development and happiness as human beings, wives, and
mothers.
A loss of freedom accomplished gradually, this is, on the whole, the sad
result of the so-called emancipation of women in our century, if the
subject is looked at broadly, apart from the few thousand women of the
upper classes in good paying positions. For several decades, I have felt
strongly against the importance given by the advocates of women's rights
to the work of women outside of the home, for the reasons I have given
above. I have applied to such work the objection formulated by Feuerbach
in these words: "Mediocrity always weighs correctly, only its weight is
false."
Wherever we look, in Europe or America, we find new and injurious
results from the new conditions, from the free activity of women's work
through the development of industry on a large scale, through the
transformation of home work, and the growing conviction on the part of
women that "celibacy is the aristocracy of the future," to quote the
words of a distinguished supporter of woman's rights.
Yet it would be foolish to wish a change in these unhappy results
through a reaction that would again rob the woman of her essential
freedom in relation to her choice of work, and the control of her life.
The line of progress is tending towards a new society, where all will be
compelled to work and all will find work; where all will work moderately
under healthy conditions for an adequate wage. Then neither the
unmarried nor the married woman will lose her strength by exhausting
work done to earn a living, or impair the powers she needs for
motherhood. If she becomes a mother, in most cases she will really
rejoice at the possibility offered to her by society of working for
society, as a mother and an educator.
We are yet very far from such a society, but every social regulation
should, as we have said, be tested as to whether it brings us nearer
this ideal or leads us farther away from it. The question should be
asked whether the direction of thought is encouraged or restricted, that
will in the end transform everything, the conviction I mean that
economic production is here in the world for the sake of men, not, as
now, men for the sake of production; that work is to be done for the
sake of freedom, not, as now, freedom created for the sake of work.
When I tried in my book called _The Misuse of the Power of Woman_ to
urge women to test the consequences of this process, my thesis was as
follows: In our programme of civilisation, we must start out with the
conviction that motherhood is something essential to the nature of woman
and the way in which she carries out this profession is of value for
society. On this basis we must alter the conditions which more and more
are robbing woman of the happiness of motherhood and are robbing
children of the care of a mother. Or, we must begin with the assumption
that motherhood is not essential: then everything must continue to go
on as it is going on now, and work directed towards external spheres
with its satisfaction in the joy of creation, of ambition, of gain, of
enjoyment, of independence, will be more and more the end towards which
women will arrange their plan of life. For this end they will modify
their fundamental habits and remould their feelings. The naïve belief
that every woman, who has the liberty to do so, is following her own
nature, shows a complete ignorance of psychology and history. Some ideal
considered worth striving for, the prevailing view of a period, will
obtain supremacy over nature. This is shown best in the stunted feeling
of motherhood peculiar to the eighteenth century, by the plain results
of mediæval asceticism. By a new ideal innumerable women are now driven
from a life directed inwards to a life directed outwards.
I am in favour of real freedom for woman; that is, I wish her to follow
her own nature, whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary woman. But
the opinion held by the feminine advocates of woman's emancipation, in
regard to the nature and the aims of the everyday woman, does violence
to the real nature of most women. It is one of the most remarkable
manifestations of the times that, while women preach about the rights of
woman and her will to work and to act unrestrained by family ties, men
like Ibsen, for example, in _When We Dead People Awake_, show that the
real Fall of Man in life is transgression of the law of love, meaning
that man through this transgression not only diminishes his personality,
but lessens his creative capacity.
It would appear as though men were approaching the conception of love
once held by women, while women were beginning to regard love as a petty
episode in life compared with what are really its true concerns, an
episode which gives life the colour of a sensual, sentimental,
psychological, or sportsmanlike adventure, an episode which she treats
as a game which she can get into, and just as easily get out of. From
this new position in which extremes meet, suffering, previously
undreamed of, must arise. Such results coming to the emancipated woman
will I hope reveal to her the eternal laws of her own being, laws from
which she cannot be freed without destroying herself.
I would not put the slightest hindrance, however, in the way of a single
isolated woman pursuing her own path freely, if it leads her even to
the most unusual forms of labour and attempts to make a living. But for
the sake of women themselves, for the sake of children, for the sake of
society, I wish men as well as women to think earnestly over the present
position of things. They will see that in the near future, one of two
things must be chosen. Either there must be such a transformation of the
way in which modern society thinks and works that the majority of women
will be restored to motherhood, or the disintegration of the home and
the substitution of general institutions will inevitably result. There
is no alternative.
Undoubtedly it required the whole egoistic self-assertion of woman, all
her efforts towards individuality, her temporary separation from home
and from family, her independent efforts to make a living to convince
man and society of the following truths: that woman is not solely a
sexual being, not solely dependent on man, the home and the family, no
matter in what form these may exist. Only in this way could woman fulfil
her destiny as wife and mother with really free choice. Only in this way
could she secure the right of being regarded as man's intellectual equal
in the field of the home and the family, the recognition that in her
way she was just as complete a being as he.
But it is clear that this fragment of feminine egoism must have a
further consequence. With the rights of sex the feeling of solidarity
must be awakened. The woman must see that her emancipated and developed
human personality will lead to this solidarity by the realisation of her
especial vocation as woman. Women in parliament and in journalism, their
representation in the local and general government, in peace congress
and in workingmen's meetings, science and literature, all this will
produce small results until women realise that the transformation of
society begins with the unborn child, with the conditions for its coming
into existence, its physical and psychical training. It must be the
general conviction that the new instincts, the new feelings, the new
thoughts, the new ideas, which mothers and fathers pass on into the
flesh and blood of their children, will transform existence. When, after
many successive generations, the new spiritual kingdom of this world has
arisen, there will come into being these greater ideas through which
life may be renewed.
Until that time secular misdeeds, political injustice, economic
struggles,--all these socially destructive abuses will go on from
generation to generation. Mankind remains the same though its acts may
take different shapes. Thinkers will always find new ideas, scholars new
methods and systems, artists new æsthetic creations, but on the whole
everything must remain the same. Only when woman heeds the message which
life proclaims to her, that, through her, salvation must come--will the
face of the earth be renewed. Oratorical talk of the high task of
mothers and of the great profession of education are empty phrases,
until we see that the possibility of humanity and civilisation winning
some day the victory over savagery depends on the physiological and
psychological transformation of man's nature. This transformation
requires an entirely new conception of the vocation of mother, a
tremendous effort of will, continuous inspiration. Those who believe
they can fulfil their duties as mothers and at the same time can
accomplish other valuable work have never made the experiment of
education. The long continued habit of alternately caressing and
striking one's children is not education. It needs tremendous power to
do one's duty to a single child. This by no means signifies giving up to
the child every hour of one's time, but it does mean that our soul is
to be filled by the child, just as the man of science is possessed by
his investigations and the artist by his work. The child should be in
one's thoughts when one is sitting at home or walking along the road,
when one is lying down or when one is standing up. This devotion, much
more than the hours immediately given to one's children, is the
absorbing thing; the occupation which makes an earnest mother always go
to any external activity with divided soul and dissipated energy.
Therefore the mother, if she gives her children the share they need, can
devote to social activities only her occasional attention. And for the
same reason she should be entirely free from working to earn her living
during the most critical years of the children's training.
Neither in the upper nor in the lower classes, have I ever heard of any
mother forced to do work of this kind or one engaged in artistic
productions through the stimulus of her talents, who was able to satisfy
her children in the period when they were growing up.
Adele Gerhard and Helen Simon under the title of _Motherhood and
Intellectual Work_ published a very interesting investigation in which I
found my own observations substantiated. The book showed that a mother
who wished to train her children and at the same time engage in an
occupation, or take part in some public activity, could give to neither
her whole personality. The result is a mediocre education for the
children and for herself; mediocre work done with a divided soul. This
is allowed to be true by all of those really conscientious mothers who
have maintained a high aim in their work and in the bringing up of their
children. They are dilettantes in both directions; what they do is half
done owing to the effort to unite two separate fields of work.
From the point of view of women's rights, it is said, in reply to these
opinions of mine, that motherhood can be made infinitely easier by a
natural method of life, that work can be very well combined with it. It
is said that children soon grow out of needing the protection of their
mother, that the mothers can then devote themselves entirely to their
work. They contend besides that motherhood is no unconditional
obligation; that people are fully justified in making different
individual arrangements; one woman wishes to become a mother, another
not. The one gets married with the hope of becoming a mother; the other
with the resolution of avoiding maternity. The third does not marry at
all. Attempts to generalise on this matter in which individual freedom
has every right to be recognised, they consider reactionary. Full
freedom for the woman, married or unmarried, to choose her work and to
continue it; full freedom to choose motherhood or to do without it, this
they say is the way to free woman, this is the line of progress. Here
woman is subject to that economic law which has made it necessary for
her to work for her own living. Just as woman's household work has been
superseded by factory work, so too, they say, will the maternal
obligations of woman be fulfilled collectively, and the difficulties on
which the so-called reactionary members of the women's rights movement
base their arguments, will in the future only arise in exceptional
cases. As regards these arguments, I have already shown that I recognise
fully the right of the feminine individual to go her own way, to choose
her own fortune or misfortune. I have always spoken of women
collectively and of society collectively.
From this general, not from the individual standpoint, I am trying to
convince women that vengeance is being exacted on the individual, on the
race, when woman gradually destroys the deepest vital source of her
physical and psychical being, the power of motherhood.
But present-day woman is not adapted to motherhood; she will only be
fitted for it when she has trained herself for motherhood and man is
trained for fatherhood. Then man and woman can begin together to bring
up the new generation out of which some day society will be formed. In
it, the completed man--the Superman--will be bathed in that sunshine
whose distant rays but colour the horizon of to-day.