Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

The child must be an end in itself. It requires love as its origin; it requires in its mother love’s understanding of the qualities it has inherited from its father, not a surprised coldness or resentment of the unsuspected or unwelcome elements in its nature. The woman who has never loved her child’s father will infallibly injure that child in some way—if in no other, then by her way of loving it. The child needs the joy of brothers and sisters, and not even the tenderest motherly love can take the place of this; and finally the child needs the father as the father the child. That children, both in and out of wedlock, often lose their father or brother or sister through death or life, belongs to the inevitable, in most cases at any rate. But that a woman with full knowledge and purpose should deprive her child of the right of gaining life through love, that she should exclude it in advance from the possibility of a father’s affection, is a piece of selfishness which must avenge itself. The right of motherhood without marriage must not be equivalent to the right of motherhood without love. It is equally degrading to surrender one’s self without love in a free relationship as in marriage. In both cases one can steal one’s child and thereby lose the right of one day proudly assuring it that it has enjoyed the best conditions for its entry into life. Love—it must be constantly repeated—desires the future, not the moment; it desires union, not only at the formation of a new being, but in order that two persons through each other may care for a new and greater being than either of themselves. A woman may be mistaken in this love, as she may be in her suitability for marriage. But this she cannot know in advance. She experiences these things first in loving. If she has misplaced her devotion, then it will not save her to conceal the mistake in a marriage. But to receive her child from a man with whom she knows in advance that she never intends to live, this is having an illegitimate child in the deepest sense of the word. But this is nevertheless the way in which a number of women now think that “the madonna of the future” is to win a mother’s happiness.

Work is always a development of force, and the more it exercises our individual powers, the greater happiness will it give. No part of the old catechism is more valuable than that which is omitted in the new, on the blessings of labour. The path of every cherished and reasonable work might be marked by milestones, on which the good old words should be carved: here “health,” there “welfare”; here “comfort and consolation in adversity,” and there “preventing lapses into sin,”—above all, that of doubting the value of life.

But the man to whom work has given all this has all the more reason to curse the work of women, who are able neither to choose their labour according to their talents nor to proportion their hours of work according to their strength. Greater and greater are the multitudes who move forward upon the road of toil, where the milestones bear the inscriptions: ill-health, uncertainty for the morrow as for the future, joylessness, lethargy of the soul, and the sins that thrive in the shadow, above all that of blaspheming life as meaningless.

For others again work has come to mean in our time drunkenness, vice, and superstition. It has made men and women unscrupulous, empty, hard, restless. It has made them destroy for others the remaining treasures of life—sorrow, love, the home, nature, beauty, books, peace—peace above all, since it is the condition of the full realisation of suffering as of joy. The grand words about the liberty and the joy of labour mean in reality slavery and trouble over labour, the only trouble our time fully experiences.

With thoughtless hymns of praise to this massacring labour, society allows one holy springtime after another to wither without having blossomed—whereas thousands of years ago the cities of antiquity sent their “holy springs” to open up new districts and build new dwellings for men.

Just as true as that the losses of the individual mean the poverty of all, when these losses involve a diminution of health and power; just as certain as that nothing becomes better without the desire to improve it, so is it a healthy sign of the times that starvation wages for conscientious drudgery no longer fill young women with heartfelt gratitude. They know, these young women, that their own nature also can be outraged; that there are other suppressed forces in woman’s being besides only the desire of knowledge and the thirst for activity, and that neither the right to work nor that of citizenship can compensate for trampled possibilities of happiness.

Far from its being the duty of any thoughtful person to lull to rest this despondency of the young, we should render the best service to them and to life by taking from them everyday contentment and the calm of resignation; for only the suffering which is kept awake, the longing which remains alive, can become forces in the revolt against that order of society which has added meaningless pangs, hostile to life, to those that the laws of life and life’s development still necessarily involve in the relations of sex.

All confined forces, which do not find employment, may degenerate; and our time, with its repression of the erotic forces, can show even among women such signs of degeneration.

It is therefore a necessary self-assertion when those who are excluded from love seek to preserve their health and enrich their life with the sources of joy which are at the disposal of every living person. Even he who is chained to an uninteresting work can find some moments to feel his way along some path which leads to a glimpse of the infinite space of science. Almost every kind of work may bring with it an increase of individual capacity, and therewith also of joy at feeling one’s value as a workman and one’s dignity as a personality enhanced. There is no day which may not bring with it a glimpse of delight in beauty. Finally there is no hour—except the heaviest hours of sorrow—in which a human being cannot feel the strength and greatness of his own soul; its independence of all external fortunes; its power of seeking itself, finding itself, enhancing itself through all and in spite of all. The words which Victor Hugo put to a young woman in sorrow: