we are here concerned with, though for considerably less than one might
be led to expect. What is specifically known as the "woman's rights'
movement" is in no degree native to Germany, though Hippel is one of the
pioneers of the woman's movement, and it is only within recent years
that it has reached Germany. It is alien to the Teutonic feminine mind,
because in Germany the spheres of men and women are so far apart and so
unlike that the ideal of imitating men fails to present itself to a
German woman's mind. The delay, moreover, in the arrival of the woman's
movement in Germany had given time for a clearer view of that movement
and a criticism of its defects to form even in the lands of its origin,
so that the German woman can no longer be caught unawares by the cry for
woman's rights. Still, however qualified a view might be taken of its
benefits, it had to be recognized, even in Germany, that it was an
inevitable movement, and to some extent at all events indispensable from
the woman's point of view. The same right to education as men, the same
rights of public meeting and discussion, the same liberty to enter the
liberal professions, these are claims which during recent years have
been widely made by German women and to some extent secured, while--as
is even more significant--they are for the most part no longer very
energetically disputed. The International Congress of Women which met in
Berlin in 1904 was a revelation to the citizens of Berlin of the skill
and dignity with which women could organize a congress and conduct
business meetings. It was notable, moreover, in that, though under the
auspices of an International Council, it showed the large number of
German women who are already entitled to take a leading part in the
movements for women's welfare. Both directly and indirectly, indeed,
such a movement cannot be otherwise than specially beneficial in
Germany. The Teutonic reverence for woman, the assertion of the "aliquid
divinum," has sometimes been accompanied by the openly expressed
conviction that she is a fool. Outside Germany it would not be easy to
find the representative philosophers of a nation putting forward so
contemptuous a view of women as is set forth by Schopenhauer or by
Nietzsche, while even within recent years a German physician of some
ability, the late Dr. Möbius, published a book on the "physiological
weak-mindedness of women."
The new feminine movement in Germany has received highly important
support from the recent development of German science. The German
intellect, exceedingly comprehensive in its outlook, ploddingly
thorough, and imperturbably serious, has always taken the leading and
pioneering part in the investigation of sexual problems, whether from
the standpoint of history, biology, or pathology. Early in the
nineteenth century, when even more courage and resolution were needed to
face the scientific study of such questions than is now the case, German
physicians, unsupported by any co-operation in other countries, were the
pioneers in exploring the paths of sexual pathology.[60] From the
antiquarian side, Bachofen, more than half a century ago, put forth his
conception of the exalted position of the primitive mother which,
although it has been considerably battered by subsequent research, has
been by no means without its value, and is of special significance from
the present standpoint, because it sprang from precisely the same view
of life as that animating the German women who are to-day inaugurating
the movement we are here concerned with. From the medical side the late
Professor Krafft-Ebing of Vienna and Dr. Albert Moll of Berlin are
recognized throughout the world as leading authorities on sexual
pathology, and in recent times many other German physicians of the first
authority can be named in this field; while in Austria Dr. F.S. Krauss
and his coadjutors in the annual volumes of _Anthropophyteia_ are
diligently exploring the rich and fruitful field of sexual folk-lore.
The large volumes of the _Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, edited
by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld of Berlin, have presented discussions of the
commonest of sexual aberrations with a scientific and scholarly
thoroughness, a practical competence, as well as admirable tone, which
we may seek in vain in other countries. In Vienna, moreover, Professor
Freud, with his bold and original views on the sexual causation of many
abnormal mental and nervous conditions, and his psycho-analytic method
of investigating and treating them, although his doctrines are by no
means universally accepted, is yet exerting a revolutionary influence
all over the world. During the last ten years, indeed, the amount of
German scientific and semi-scientific literature, dealing with every
aspect of the sexual question, and from every point of view, is
altogether unparalleled. It need scarcely be said that much of this
literature is superficial or worthless. But much of it is sound, and it
would seem that on the whole it is this portion of it which is most
popular. Thus Dr. August Forel, formerly professor of psychiatry at
Zurich and a physician of world-wide reputation, published a few years
ago at Munich a book on the sexual question, _Die Sexuelle Frage_, in
which all the questions of the sexual life, biological, medical, and
social, are seriously discussed with no undue appeal to an ignorant
public; it had an immediate success and a large sale. Dr. Forel had not
entered this field before; he had merely come to the conclusion that
every man at the end of his life ought to set forth his observations and
conclusions regarding the most vital of questions. Again, at about the
same time, Dr. Iwan Bloch, of Berlin, published his many-sided work on
the sexual life of our time, _Das Sexualleben Unserer Zeit_, a work less
remarkable than Forel's for the weight of the personal authority
expressed, but more remarkable by the range of its learning and the
sympathetic attitude it displayed towards the best movements of the day;
this book also met with great success.[61] Still more recently (1912) Dr.
Albert Moll, with characteristic scientific thoroughness, has edited,
and largely himself written, a truly encyclopædic _Handbuch der
Sexualwissenschaften_. The eminence of the writers of these books and
the mental calibre needed to read them suffice to show that we are not
concerned, as a careless observer might suppose, with a matter of supply
and demand in prurient literature, but with the serious and widespread
appreciation of serious investigations. This same appreciation is shown
not only by several bio-sociological periodicals of high scientific
quality, but by the existence of a journal like _Sexual-Probleme_,
edited by Dr. Max Marcuse, a journal with many distinguished
contributors, and undoubtedly the best periodical in this field to be
found in any language.
At the same time the new movement of German women, however it may arise
from or be supported by political or scientific movements, is
fundamentally emotional in its character. If we think of it, every great
movement of the Teutonic soul has been rooted in emotion. The German
literary renaissance of the eighteenth century was emotional in its
origin and received its chief stimulus from the contagion of the new
irruption of sentiment in France. Even German science is often
influenced, and not always to its advantage, by German sentiment. The
Reformation is an example on a huge scale of the emotional force which
underlies German movements. Luther, for good and for evil, is the most
typical of Germans, and the Luther who made his mark in the world--the
shrewd, coarse, superstitious peasant who blossomed into genius--was an
avalanche of emotion, a great mass of natural human instincts
irresistible in their impetuosity. When we bear in mind this general
tendency to emotional expansiveness in the manifestations of the
Teutonic soul we need feel no surprise that the present movement among
German women should be, to a much greater extent than the corresponding
movements in other countries, an emotional renaissance. It is not, first
and last, a cry for political rights, but for emotional rights, and for
the reasonable regulation of all those social functions which are
founded on the emotions.[62]
This movement, although it may properly be said to be German, since its
manifestations are mainly exhibited in the great German Empire, is yet
essentially a Teutonic movement in the broader sense of the word.
Germans of Austria, Germans of Switzerland, Dutch women, Scandinavians,
have all been drawn into this movement. But it is in Germany proper that
they all find the chief field of their activities.
If we attempt to define in a single sentence the specific object of this
agitation we may best describe it as based on the demands of woman the
mother, and as directed to the end of securing for her the right to
control and regulate the personal and social relations which spring from
her nature as mother or possible mother. Therein we see at once both the
intimately emotional and practical nature of this new claim and its
decisive unlikeness to the earlier woman movement. That was definitely a
demand for emancipation; political enfranchisement was its goal; its
perpetual assertion was that women must be allowed to do everything
that men do. But the new Teutonic woman's movement, so far from making
as its ideal the imitation of men, bases itself on that which most
essentially marks the woman as unlike the man.
The basis of the movement is significantly indicated by the title,
_Mutterschutz_--the protection of the mother--originally borne by "a
Journal for the reform of sexual morals," established in 1905, edited by
Dr. Helene Stöcker, of Berlin, and now called _Die Neue Generation_. All
the questions that radiate outwards from the maternal function are here
discussed: the ethics of love, prostitution ancient and modern, the
position of illegitimate mothers and illegitimate children, sexual
hygiene, the sexual instruction of the young, etc. It must not be
supposed that these matters are dealt with from the standpoint of a
vigilance society for combating vice. The demand throughout is for the
regulation of life, for reform, but for reform quite as much in the
direction of expansion as of restraint. On many matters of detail,
indeed, there is no agreement among these writers, some of whom approach
the problems from the social and practical side, some from the
psychological and philosophic side, others from the medical, legal, or
historical sides.
This journal was originally the organ of the association for the
protection of mothers, more especially unmarried mothers, called the
_Bund für Mutterschutz_. There are many agencies for dealing with
illegitimate children, but the founders of this association started from
the conviction that it is only through the mother that the child can be
adequately cared for. As nearly a tenth of the children born in Germany
are illegitimate, and the conditions of life into which such children
are thrown are in the highest degree unfavourable, the question has its
actuality.[63] It is the aim of the _Bund für Mutterschutz_ to
rehabilitate the unmarried mother, to secure for her the conditions of
economic independence--whatever social class she may belong to--and
ultimately to effect a change in the legal status of illegitimate
mothers and children alike. The Bund, which is directed by a committee
in which social, medical, and legal interests are alike represented,
already possesses numerous branches, in addition to its head-quarters in
Berlin, and is beginning to initiate practical measures on the lines of
its programme, notably Homes for Mothers, of which it has established
nearly a dozen in different parts of Germany.
In 1911 the first International Congress for the Protection of Mothers
and for Sexual Reform was held at Dresden, in connection with the great
Exhibition of Hygiene. As a result of this Congress, an International
Union was constituted, representing Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden, and
Holland, which may probably be taken to be the countries which have so
far manifested greatest interest in the programme of sexual reform based
on recognition of the supreme importance of motherhood. This movement
may, therefore, be said to have overcome the initial difficulties, the
antagonism, the misunderstanding, and the opprobrium, which every
movement in the field of sexual reform inevitably encounters, and often
succumbs to.
It would be a mistake to regard this Association as a merely
philanthropic movement. It claims to be "An Association for the Reform
of Sexual Ethics," and _Die Neue Generation_ deals with social and
ethical rather than with philanthropic questions. In these respects it
reflects the present attitude of many thoughtful German women, though
the older school of women's rights advocates still holds aloof. We may
here, for instance, find a statement of the recent discussion
concerning the right of the mother to destroy her offspring before
birth. This has been boldly claimed for women by Countess Gisela von
Streitberg, who advocates a return to the older moral view which
prevailed not only in classic antiquity, but even, under certain
conditions, in Christian practice, until Canon law, asserting that the
embryo had from the first an independent life, pronounced abortion under
all circumstances a crime. Countess von Streitberg takes the standpoint
that as the chief risks and responsibilities must necessarily rest upon
the woman, it is for her to decide whether she will permit the embryo
she bears to develop. Dr. Marie Raschke, taking up the discussion from
the legal side, is unable to agree that abortion should cease to be a
punishable offence, though she advocates considerable modifications in
the law on this matter. Dr. Siegfried Weinberg, summarizing this
discussion, again from the legal standpoint, considers that there is
considerable right on the Countess's side, because from the modern
juridical standpoint a criminal enactment is only justified because it
protects a right, and in law the embryo possesses no rights which can be
injured. From the moral standpoint, also, it is argued, its destruction
often becomes justifiable in the interests of the community.
This debatable question, while instructive as an example of the radical
manner in which German women are now beginning to face moral questions,
deals only with an isolated point which has hardly yet reached the
sphere of practical politics.[64] It is more interesting to consider the
general conceptions which underlie this movement, and we can hardly do
this better than by studying the writings of Ellen Key, who is not only
one of its recognized leaders, but may be said to present its aims and
ideals in a broader and more convinced manner than any other writer.
Ellen Key's views are mainly contained in three books, _Love and
Marriage_, _The Century of the Child_, and _The Women's Movement_, in
which form they enjoy a large circulation, and are now becoming well
known, through translations, in England and America. She carefully
distinguishes her aims from what she regards as the American conception
of progress in woman's movements, that is to say the tendency for women
to seek to capture the activities which may be much more adequately
fulfilled by the other sex, while at the same time neglecting the far
weightier matters that concern their own sex. Man and woman are not
natural enemies who need to waste their energies in fighting over their
respective rights and privileges; in spiritual as in physical life they
are only fruitful together. Women, indeed, need free scope for their
activities--and the earlier aspirations of feminism are thus
justified--but they need it, not to wrest away any tasks that men may be
better fitted to perform, but to play their part in that field of
creative life which is peculiarly their own. Ellen Key would say that
the highest human unit is triune: father, mother, and child. Marriage,
therefore, instead of being, as it is to-day, the last thing to be
thought of in education, becomes the central point of life. In Ellen
Key's conception, "those who love each other are man and wife," and by
love she means not a temporary inclination, but "a synthesis of desire
and friendship," just as the air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. It
must be this for both sexes alike, and Ellen Key sees a real progress in
what seems to her the modern tendency for men to realize that the soul
has its erotic side, and for women to realize that the senses have. She
has no special sympathy with the cry for purity in masculine candidates
for marriage put forward by some women of the present day. She observes
that many men who have painfully struggled to maintain this ideal meet
with disillusion, for it is not the masculine lamb, but much more the
spotted leopard, who fascinates women. The notion that women have higher
moral instincts than men Ellen Key regards as absurd. The majority of
Frenchwomen, she remarks, were against Dreyfus, and the majority of
Englishwomen approved the South African war. The really fundamental
difference between man and woman is that he can usually give his best as
a creator, and she as a lover, that his value is according to his work
and hers according to her love. And in love the demand for each sex
alike must not be primarily for a mere anatomical purity, but for
passion and for sincerity.
The aim of love, as understood by Ellen Key, is always marriage and the
child, and as soon as the child comes into question society and the
State are concerned. Before fruition, love is a matter for the lovers
alone, and the espionage, ceremony, and routine now permitted or
enjoined are both ridiculous and offensive. "The flower of love belongs
to the lovers, and should remain their secret; it is the fruit of love
which brings them into relation to society." The dominating importance
of the child, the parent of the race to be, alone makes the immense
social importance of sexual union. It is not marriage which sanctifies
generation, but generation which sanctifies marriage. From the point of
view of "the sanctity of generation" and the welfare of the race, Ellen
Key looks forward to a time when it will be impossible for a man and
woman to become parents when they are unlikely to produce a healthy
child, though she is opposed to Neo-Malthusian methods, partly on
æsthetic grounds and partly on the more dubious grounds of doubt as to
their practical efficiency; it is from this point of view also that she
favours sexual equality in matters of divorce, the legal assimilation of
legitimate and illegitimate children, the recognition of unions outside
marriage,--a recognition already legally established under certain
circumstances in Sweden, in such a way as to confer the rights of
legitimacy on the child,--and she is even prepared to advise women under
some conditions to become mothers outside marriage, though only when
there are obstacles to legal marriage, and as the outcome of deliberate
will and resolution. In these and many similar proposals in detail, set
forth in her earlier books, it is clear that Ellen Key has sometimes
gone beyond the mandate of her central conviction, that love is the
first condition for increasing the vitality alike of the race and of the
individuality, and that the question of love, properly considered, is
the question of creating the future man. As she herself has elsewhere
quite truly pointed out, practice must precede, and precede by a very
long time, the establishment of definite rules in matters of detail.
It will be noticed that a point with which Ellen Key and the leaders of
the new German woman's movement specially concern themselves is the
affectional needs of the "supernumerary" woman and the legitimation of
her children. There is an excess of women over men, in Germany as in
most other countries. That excess, it is said, is balanced by the large
number of women who do not wish to marry. But that is too cheap a
solution of the question. Many women may wish to remain unmarried, but
no woman wishes to be forced to remain unmarried. Every woman, these
advocates of the rights of women claim, has a right to motherhood, and
in exercising the right under sound conditions she is benefiting
society. But our marriage system, in the rigid form which it has long
since assumed, has not now the elasticity necessary to answer these
demands. It presents a solution which is often impossible, always
difficult, and perhaps in a large proportion of cases undesirable. But
for a woman who is shut out from marriage to grasp at the vital facts of
love and motherhood which she perhaps regards, unreasonably or not, as
the supreme things in the world, must often be under such conditions a
disastrous step, while it is always accompanied by certain risks.
Therefore, it is asked, why should there not be, as of old there was, a
relationship established which while of less dignity than marriage, and
less exclusive in its demands, should yet permit a woman to enter into
an honourable, open, and legally recognized relationship with a man?
Such a relationship a woman could proclaim to the whole world, if
necessary, without reflecting any disesteem upon herself or her child,
while it would give her a legal claim on her child's father. Such a
relationship would be substantially the same as the ancient concubinate,
which persisted even in Christendom up to the sixteenth century. Its
establishment in Sweden has apparently been satisfactory, and it is now
sought to extend it to other countries.[65]
It is interesting to compare, or to contrast, the movement of which
Ellen Key has been a conspicuous champion with the futile movement
initiated nearly a century ago by the school of Saint-Simon and Prosper
Enfantin, in favour of "la femme libre."[66] That earlier movement had no
doubt its bright and ideal side, but it was not supported by a sound and
scientific view of life; it was rooted in sand and soon withered up. The
kind of freedom which Ellen Key advocates is not a freedom to dispense
with law and order, but rather a freedom to recognize and follow true
law; it is the freedom which in morals as well as in politics is
essential for the development of real responsibility.
People talk, Ellen Key remarks, as though reform in sexual morality
meant the breaking up of a beautiful idyll, while the idyll is
impossible as long as the only alternative offered to so many young men
and women at the threshold of life is between becoming "the slave of
duty or the slave of lust." In these matters we already possess licence,
and the only sound reform lies in a kind of "freedom" which will correct
that licence by obedience to the most fundamental natural instincts
acting in harmony with the claims of the race, which claims, it must be
added, cannot be out of harmony with the best traditions of the race.
Ellen Key would agree with a great German, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who
wrote more than a century ago that "a solicitude for the race conducts
to the same results as the highest solicitude for the most beautiful
development of the inner man." The modern revolt against fossilized laws
is inevitable; it is already in progress, and we have to see to it that
the laws written upon tables of stone in their inevitable decay only
give place to the mightier laws written upon tables of flesh and blood.
Life is far too rich and manifold, Ellen Key says again, to be confined
in a single formula, even the best; if our ideal has its worth for
ourselves, if we are prepared to live for it and to die for it, that is
enough; we are not entitled to impose it on others. The conception of
duty still remains, duty to love and duty to the race. "I believe in a
new ethics," Ellen Key declares at the end of _The Women's Movement_,
"which will be a synthesis growing out of the nature of man and the
nature of woman, out of the demands of the individual and the demands
of society, out of the pagan and the Christian points of view, out of
the resolve to mould the future and out of piety towards the past."