Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Because the means of life must never eclipse the meaning of life—which is to live with one’s whole being, and thus to be able to impart an ever greater fulness of life—it is immoral to live solely either for sanctity or for work, fatherland or humanity, or even love, for man is to live by all these. His exclusion from one of these means of full humanity can never be compensated by his participation in any of the others, just as little as one of his senses can be replaced by another, even though the latter be perfected under the necessity of serving in the place of the lost one. And the resignation which prematurely contents itself with part of the rights of its human nature instead of aspiring to the whole, such resignation is a falling to sleep in the snow. It is undeniably a calmer state than that of keeping one’s soul on the stretch for new experiences; for in that case one must also be prepared for new wounds; and he who keeps his suffering awake can be sure of more pain than he who puts it to sleep with an opiate. But no criterion is meaner than that of suffering or not suffering. The question is only what a man suffers from, and what he becomes—for himself and others—or does not become as the result of his pain.

Life holds in one hand the golden crown of happiness, in the other the iron crown of suffering. To her favoured ones she hands them both. But only he is an outcast whose temples have felt the weight of neither.

A woman of feeling once said that, although love was acknowledged by the majority as life’s greatest treasure, mankind has not yet been able to prepare a place for love in life. Outside of marriage it is called sin; within it—as marriage now is—love can seldom live, and if it arises for another than the partner in marriage, then for the sake of the children it must be sacrificed.

It is this observation which made the new women all the more decided to prepare a place for love outside matrimony.

Women—and men too—have begun to examine the ideas of morality in which the small and the great values are mixed together like the cards in a shuffled pack. As far as woman is concerned, all morality has become synonymous with sexual morality; all sexual morality synonymous with the absence of sensuality and the existence of a marriage certificate. In speech and in poetry woman’s mission as “wife and mother” is glorified, but at the same time the mission is not considered honourable until it is attained, but, on the contrary, dishonourable so long as it is sought after with the healthy strength which is the condition of its complete fulfilment. A woman may be proud and strong, good and active, courageous and generous, honourable and trustworthy, faithful and loyal—in a word, she may possess all the virtues prized by man—and yet be called immoral if she gives a new life to the race. On the other hand, a woman, irreproachable from the point of view of sexual morality, may be as cowardly, slanderous, and untruthful as she can be without being denied the respect of society.

This confusion of thought is to such an extent one with the feelings, that it may take centuries for new ideas of justice to work a change.

In spite of all, however, it remains a truth that a woman’s morality in other respects is more profoundly connected with her sexual morality than is the case with a man. Nature herself established this connection, when she made love and the child more closely bound up with woman’s existence than with man’s. It must always be a matter of paramount importance to a woman’s whole personality to abandon herself to the possibility of creating a new life; and therefore a woman’s attitude, not with regard to marriage, but certainly with regard to motherhood, will be decisive evidence of her moral development in other respects and of her spiritual culture.

The same sexual freedom for woman as for man is to every profoundly womanly woman a demand contrary to nature. But this does not mean either that man ought to continue to misuse his freedom or that woman must continue to confine hers within “lawful” bounds; nor yet does it mean that women ought to go on lying to themselves, to men, and to each other concerning their nature as sexual beings. It is true that many women exist who have no feeling of this kind, and that other married women deny the claims of the senses—because they have had them satisfied before they became conscious. But when the development of love has introduced a purer and healthier view, neither women nor men will consider it a merit or superiority in a woman to develop in herself the character of “the third sex.” Then everyone will acknowledge that human life, to be in the fullest sense healthy and rich, must imply fulfilment of the sexual destiny, and that even if a restriction of the vital forces in this respect does not entail physical suffering, then it must involve profound psychical injury resulting in diminished powers. Nor will one then wilfully blink at the fact that—among many strong, well-balanced, active unmarried women—others are to be found who are equally worthy of respect, although they cannot attain harmony without motherhood. And the cause is not want of self-discipline or seriousness in work, but simply the fact already stated: that sexual life in a woman—when it has become strong and healthy—dominates her in a far more intimate way than it does a man. She seldom suffers acutely, often unconsciously or half-consciously, from restriction in this direction; but to make up for this she suffers in a far more radical way, which slowly exhausts her vital forces; and many cases of madness, hysteria, etc., are due to this cause.

Every victim of this kind makes life the poorer; for it is often the warmest feminine natures, the richest in goodness and in soul, the most fruitful in every sense, that go under in this way. And in them the race loses not only directly, but also indirectly, in their children that were never born.