ELLEN KEY
In these chapters a sincere attempt has been made not so much to show
what a few exceptional women have accomplished as to exhibit through a
few prominent figures the essential nature of women, and to show what
may be expected from a future in which women will have a larger freedom
and a larger influence.
It has been pointed out that the peculiar idealism of women is one that
works itself out through the materials of workaday life, and which seeks
to break or remake those materials by way of fulfilling that idealism;
it has been shown that this idealism, as contrasted with the more
abstract and creative idealism of men, deserves to be called
practicalism, a practicalism of a noble and beautiful sort which we are
far from appreciating; and as complementing these forms of activity, the
play instinct, the instinct of recreation, has been pointed out as the
parallel to the creative or poetic instinct of men.
Woman as reconstructor of domestic economics, woman as a destructive
political agent of enormous potency, woman as worker, woman as dancer,
woman as statistician, woman as organizer of the forces of labor--in
these it has been the intent to show the real woman of today and of
tomorrow.
There have been other aspects of her deserving of attention in such a
series, notably her aspect as mother and as educator. If she has not
been shown as poet, as artist, as scientist, as talker (for talk is a
thing quite as important as poetry or science or art), it has not been
so much because of an actual lack of specific examples of women
distinguished in these fields as because of the unrepresentative
character of such examples.
Here, then, is a man's view of modern woman. To complete that view, to
round off that conception, I now speak of Ellen Key.
Her writings have had a peculiar career in America, one which perhaps
prevents a clear understanding of their character. On the one hand, they
have seemed to many to be radically "advanced"; to thousands of
middle-class women, who have heard vaguely of these new ideas, and who
have secretly and strongly desired to know more of them, her "Love and
Marriage" has come as a revolutionary document, the first outspoken word
of scorn for conventional morality, the first call to them to take their
part in the breaking of new paths.
On the other hand, it must be remembered that America is the home of
Mormonism, of the Oneida Community, of the Woodhull and Claflin
"free-love" movement of the '70s, of "Dianism" and a hundred other
obscure but pervasive sexual cults--in short, of movements of greater or
less respectability, capable of giving considerable currency to their
beliefs. And they have given considerable currency to their beliefs. In
spite of the dominant tone of Puritanism in American thought, our social
life has been affected to an appreciable extent by these beliefs.
And these beliefs may be summed up hastily, but, on the whole, justly,
as materialistic--in the common and unfavorable sense. They have
converged, from one direction or another, upon the opinion that sex is
an animal function, no more sacred than any other animal function,
which, by a ridiculous over-estimation, is made to give rise to
jealousy, unhappiness, madness, vice, and crime.
It is a fact that the Puritan temperament readily finds this opinion,
if not the program which accompanies it, acceptable, as one may discover
in private conversation with respectable Puritans of both sexes. And it
is more unfortunately true that the present-day rebellion against
conventional morality in America has found, in Hardy and Shaw and other
anti-romanticists, a seeming support of this opinion. So that one finds
in America today (though some people may not know about it) an
undercurrent of impatient materialism in matters of sex. To become freed
from the inadequate morality of Puritanism is, for thousands of young
people, to adopt another morality which is, if more sound in many ways,
certainly as inadequate as the other.
So that Ellen Key comes into the lives of many in this country as a
conservative force, holding up a spiritual ideal, the ideal of monogamy,
and defending it with a breadth of view, a sanity, and a fervor that
make it something different from the cold institution which these
readers have come to despise. She makes every allowance for human
nature, every concession to the necessities of temperament, every
recognition of the human need for freedom, and yet makes the love of one
man and one woman seem the highest ideal, a thing worth striving and
waiting and suffering for.
She cherishes the spiritual magic of sex as the finest achievement of
the race, and sees it as the central and guiding principle in our social
and economic evolution. She seeks to construct a new morality which will
do what the present one only pretends, and with the shallowest and most
desperately pitiful of pretenses, to do. She would help our struggling
generation to form a new code of ethics, and one of subtle stringency,
in this most important and difficult of relations.
Thus her writings, of which "Love and Marriage" will here be taken as
representative, have a twofold aspect--the radical and the conservative.
But of the two, the conservative is by far the truer. It is as a
conservator, with too firm a grip on reality to be lured into the
desertion of any real values so far achieved by the race, that she may
be best considered.
And germane to her conservatism, which is the true conservatism of her
sex, is her intellectual habit, her literary method. She is not a
logician, it is true. She lacks logic, and with it order and clearness
and precision, because of the very fact of her firm hold on realities.
The realities are too complex to be brought into any completely logical
and orderly relation, too elusive to be stated with utter precision.
There is a whole universe in "Love and Marriage"; and it resembles the
universe in its wildness, its tumultuousness, its contradictory quality.
Her book, like the universe, is in a state of flux--it refuses to remain
one fixed and dead thing. It is a book which in spite of some attempt at
arrangement may be begun at any point and read in any order. It is a
mixture of science, sociology, and mysticism; it has a wider range than
an orderly book could possibly have; it touches more points, includes
more facts, and is more convincing, in its queer way, than any other.
"Love and Marriage" is the Talmud of sexual morality. It contains
history, wisdom, poetry, psychological analysis, shrewd judgments,
generous sympathies, ... and it all bears upon the creation of that new
sexual morality for which in a thousand ways--economic, artistic, and
spiritual--we are so astonishing a mixture of readiness and unreadiness.
Ellen Key is fundamentally a conservator. But she is careful about what
she conservates. It is the right to love which she would have us
cherish, rather than the right to own another person--the beauty of
singleness of devotion rather than the cruel habit of trying to force
people to carry out rash promises made in moments of exaltation. She
conserves the greatest things and lets the others go: motherhood, as
against the exclusive right of married women to bear children; and that
personal passion which is at once physical and spiritual rather than any
of the legally standardized relations. Nor does she hesitate to speak
out for the conservation of that old custom which persists among peasant
and primitive peoples all over the world and which has been reintroduced
to the public by a recent sociologist under the term of "trial
marriage"; it must be held, she says, as the bulwark against the
corruption of prostitution and made a part of the new morality.
It is perhaps in this very matter that her attitude is capable of
being most bitterly resented. For we have lost our sense of what is old
and good, and we give the sanction of ages to parvenu virtues that are
as degraded as the rococo ornaments which were born in the same year. We
have (or the Puritans among us have) lost all moral sense in the true
meaning of the word, in that we are unable to tell good from bad if it
be not among the things that were socially respectable in the year 1860.
Ellen Key writes: "The most delicate test of a person's sense of
morality is his power in interpreting ambiguous signs in the ethical
sphere; for only the profoundly moral can discover the dividing line,
sharp as the edge of a sword, between new morality and old immorality.
In our time, ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost by the
condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their destinies.
The majority does not perceive the advance in morality which this
implies in comparison with the code of so many men who, without
responsibility--and without apparent risk--purchase the repose of their
senses. The free union of love, on the other hand, gives them an
enhancement of life which they consider that they gain without injuring
anyone. It answers to their idea of love's chastity, an idea which is
justly offended by the incompleteness of the period of engagement, with
all its losses in the freshness and frankness of emotion. When their
soul has found another soul, when the senses of both have met in a
common longing, then they consider that they have a right to full unity
of love, although compelled to secrecy, since the conditions of society
render early marriage impossible. They are thus freed from a wasteful
struggle which would give them neither peace nor inner purity, and which
would be doubly hard for them, since they have attained the
end--love--for the sake of which self-control would have been imposed."
It is almost impossible to quote any passage from "Love and Marriage"
which is not subject to further practical modification, or which does
not present an incomplete idea of which the complement may be found
somewhere else. Even this passage is one which states a brief for the
younger generation rather than the author's whole opinion. Still, with
all these limitations, her view is one which is so different from that
commonly held by women that it may seem merely fantastic to hold it up
as an example of the conservative instinct of women. Nevertheless, it is
so. It must be remembered that the view which holds that the chastity of
unmarried women is well purchased at the price of prostitution, is a
masculine view. It is a piece of the sinister and cruel idealism of the
male mind, divorced (as the male mind is so capable of being) from
realities. No woman would ever have created prostitution to preserve the
chastity of part of her sex; and the more familiar one becomes with the
specific character of the feminine mind, the more impossible does it
seem that women will, when they have come to think and act for
themselves, permanently maintain it. Nor will they--one is forced to
believe--hesitate long at the implications of that demolition.
No, I think that with the advent of women into a larger life our
jerry-built virtues will have to go, to make room for mansions and
gardens fit to be inhabited by the human soul.
It will be like the pulling down of a rotten tenement. First (with a
great shocked outcry from some persons of my own sex) the facade goes,
looking nice enough, but showing up for painted tin what pretended to be
marble; then the dark, cavelike rooms exposed, with their blood-stained
floors and their walls ineffectually papered over the accumulated filth
and disease; and so on, lath by lath, down to the cellars, with their
hints of unspeakable horrors in the dark.
It is to this conclusion that these chapters draw: That women have a
surer instinct than men for the preservation of the truest human values,
but that their very acts of conservation will seem to the timid minds
among us like the shattering of all virtues, the debacle of
civilization, the Goetterdaemmerung!