Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

But the best thing for the children—especially if by the prohibition of home work they were rescued from earning a livelihood to the advantage of their school and home life—would be the liberation of married women from outside labour through the higher wages of their husbands, while in return their home work would acquire the character of spiritual care. This would be brought about in the fullest sense by the mothers being allowed the above-mentioned subsidy from the community for bringing up the children. In such an arrangement, approved by the community, the majority might find that agreement between their occupation and their powers which constitutes the true joy of work. For it can scarcely be doubted that even now the wife, as a rule, finds more employment in her home work, however heavy, for her special talents, and thus finds a greater satisfaction than the husband, who often slaves, not at the work he has chosen, but at that he has been able to obtain.

But what, in spite of this, now makes women more and more unwilling to undertake the duties of the home and to prefer outside work, is that they carry out their domestic work under conditions derogatory to themselves.

First and foremost, women are determined to enjoy the facilities in their domestic work which here and there are already beginning to be provided. These, however, will probably not become general until women make more use of their capacity for thinking out the most convenient and agreeable methods, both for labour-saving co-operation and for the performance of domestic duties, which will in any case always remain; and this again necessitates their educating themselves to a real knowledge of the questions of consumption and other details of modern household management. This will be the more necessary as the servant problem within a short time will have reached that point at which women of all classes will have to choose between doing the work themselves and the complete dissolution of the home. Woman’s domestic work and the care of children will be facilitated for all women only in so far as the educated agree in making new and higher demands in the matter of domestic arrangements as well as in practical and ornamental appliances. They would thus not only further their own work, but also evoke a higher culture as regards beauty and appropriateness, both in architecture and industry.

But this is not enough to enable domestic work to regain its dignity.

This will not take place until society shows such appreciation of woman’s domestic work as shall remove her present sense of being kept by her husband to perform a subordinate work, a work which does not receive the appreciation which at the present time has become the absolute standard of the economical value of labour, that of a money wage.

The existing institution of marriage came into being when woman had no real field of employment outside the home, since its income was for the most part received in kind, and the wife was thus indispensable for turning it to account. Her domestic activity was of great value from the point of view of national economy, and under these circumstances the joint estate was natural. Furthermore, the mistress of the house possessed at this time—as manager of the consumption of the commodities she had prepared from raw materials—a freedom of action and an authority which she now quite naturally lacks in her own eyes and those of her husband. It is of no avail that she has a legal right to be supported by her husband according to his position and circumstances; for if her task frequently consists simply in asking her husband for money and keeping an account of its expenditure through the cook and the needlewoman, she has reason to feel herself kept in a humiliating way. Neither indirectly nor directly is it through her work that the food comes to the table or the clothes are fitted to the body, since the husband alone earns the means wherewith she—efficiently or otherwise—keeps house.

For this reason wives are becoming increasingly desirous of personally earning a livelihood. They see how their husbands are developed through devotion to a profession, through the patience, the accumulation, and tension of forces which this demands. And only professional training, in the opinion of modern woman, can give her the same energy, only a direct income can give her the same certainty of her fitness for work.

But there is another expedient which would afford these advantages without, however, driving women away from home, namely, that their special training for, and their work in, the field of housekeeping and the care of children should be as serious as in any other occupation. Not until she has a sense of the new value of her domestic work will the wife be able to demand that it shall be economically estimated like any other efficient work.

When wives speak of the humiliation of being kept by their husbands—since they have more and more frequently been self-supporting before marriage—their husbands always become profoundly idealistic. They use fine words about the wife’s important mission, the adapting power of love, until one asks some particular man: whether any love could make it pleasant for him, instead of drawing his own income, to be obliged to ask his wife for what she considered necessary for their joint expenditure or for his own. In spite of the consciousness of having herself brought wealth, or in spite of the knowledge of constantly making important contributions of work in the home, the necessity of asking for money is the wife’s unbearable torment. For the husband in his heart has often the same feeling as she; that work nowadays means earning money outside, since the management of an income—in spite of its immense importance to the strength, health, and comfort of the workers and thus indirectly to the whole national economy—is more and more overlooked. In part this idea of the husband is due to the very fact that women have not acquired the new kind of domesticity which is necessary for the efficient conduct of expenditure, and that the husband is, therefore, often right in thinking that his wife neither works nor saves, but only wastes.

However touchingly idealistic a girl may be in this question before marriage; however confidingly she allows her husband to handle her fortune, after a few years of married life experience will turn her into a complete realist. However happy she has otherwise been, she will, nevertheless, remember more than one occasion when she has bitterly regretted the absence of the freedom of action a separate income gives; when, for instance, her husband has refused to allow her to use—for some ideal purpose or other—the means which in many cases she herself brought him, and how perhaps this for the first time really made a division between them.