Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

It is the new woman—the transformed type of soul—that man objects to. The mannish emancipated ladies will soon, however, have died out. We can therefore pass them by and consider only the young women who have preserved or tried to preserve their possibilities of erotic attraction.

These have, however, lost the calm, the equilibrium, the receptivity, which formerly made of woman a beautiful, easily-comprehended piece of nature, like nature in her unconditional yielding. When a man came to the woman he loved with his worries, his fatigue, his disappointments, he washed himself clean as in a cool wave, found peace as in a silent forest. Nowadays she meets him with her worries, her disquiet, her fatigues, her disappointments. Her picture has been refused, her book is misunderstood, her work is abused, her examination has to be prepared for ... always hers! All this makes the man think her disturbed, unapproachable, and apt to misunderstand. Even if she retains her affectionate attention for him, she has lost her elasticity. She does not choose the conditions of her work; she is obliged to overwork herself if she wishes to keep her work. But love—as has been aptly said—requires peace, love will dream; it cannot live upon remnants of our time and our personality. And thus the value of love—like all other personal values—sinks under modern conditions of work, which drain the vital forces and make people forget even the meaning of the idea of living. Thus the people of the present day are excluded from love: not merely from the possibility of realising it in marriage, but also from the possibility of fully experiencing it.

Nor have these over-tired young women a chance of preserving their charm in outward appearance and manner. This is only done nowadays in a conscious style by ladies of the highest society—and by those of the demi-monde—who perform no other duty to the community than the more elegant than worthy one of illustrating the parable of the lilies of the field. But even now few women can afford—and fewer still feel that they have the right to or the leisure for—this worship of their own intoxicating and self-intoxicating loveliness. More and more have to take part in a life of work; while, moreover, women are becoming less attracted by the ideal of perfection of form, and more by that of formation of personality. But this movement involves uncertainty of form, until new forms have been created; and man loves in woman precisely that sureness, lightness, and repose in her own sense of power which are generally wanting in the tentative young woman of the present day. A new kind of young women is, however, already to be met with, who will neither work nor charm exclusively, and who are solving the problem of being at the same time active and beautiful.

Thus the deepest conflict of all lies herein, that young men feel young women to be independent of the love they offer; they feel themselves weighed and—found wanting. Woman’s capacity for making a living has thus undoubtedly resulted, as Almquist hoped, in giving man a greater chance of believing himself loved, but at the same time—a smaller chance of being so.

We see two groups of the daughters of our time, as new manifestations of woman’s primitive double nature.

For one group the child is not the immediate end of love, and still less can the child sanctify all the means for its attainment. If such a woman has to choose between giving and inspiring a love as great as that of her dreams, without motherhood, and becoming a mother through a lesser love, then she will choose the former without hesitation. And if she becomes a mother, without having attained the full height of her being in love, she feels it as a degradation; for neither child nor marriage nor love are enough for her, only great love satisfies her.

This is the most important step in advance that woman has taken since from the emotional sphere of the female animal she approached that of the human woman. And—however great may be the sufferings that this attitude of the soul may involve for the individual—no one who sees sufficiently deeply can hesitate as to the certainty of this being the true line of life.

This, on the other hand, will not coincide with the path of those women who are now demanding liberty for motherhood, not only without wedlock but also without love.

Those who hoped that woman’s independence through work would assure man’s knowledge of being loved, did not reckon for woman’s dependence on man in and for the tenor of her life. This dependence, created by nature and not by society, still drives many otherwise independent women into marriage without love; and it drives other women, who wish to preserve their independence by not contracting marriage, to the desire of attaining a mother’s happiness without it. The new woman’s will to live through herself, with herself, for herself, reaches its limit when she begins to regard man merely as a means to the child. Woman could scarcely take a more complete revenge for having herself been treated for thousands of years as a means.

We must hope, however, that woman’s lust for vengeance will not long retain this form. Woman’s degradation to a means has retarded man’s and her own development. But a similar degradation of man would have the same effect, and the children might suffer just as much through woman’s misuse of man as through his of her.