Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Beyond all doubt the first-named would have considered it the ideal of happiness to be able to bring up her child together with its father. The circumstances which prevent her may be many. The man’s liberty, for instance, may be limited by earlier duties or feelings, which bind him, against his will or not. The conditions of life or of work of one of them may prevent a complete union. So may the experience that the personality of one of them is fettered through marriage. Or again, love itself was not what it had promised to be, and the woman was proud enough not to consider herself fallen and in need of being rehabilitated by a marriage which, on the contrary, would under these circumstances be a fall.

Finally, there are exceptional cases, where a superior woman—for it is often the best who are seized by the powerful desire of a child—feels that she cannot combine her motherhood with the claims of love and of intellectual production; that she can suffice for only two duties, and therefore accepts from love the child but renounces marriage.

But there are also destinies entirely contrary to these, where a woman for her own part wished to have a child but renounces it for the man’s sake.

In most cases this is because she surrounds his work with such affection that, when it is asked of her, she sacrifices to it her mother’s happiness in the spirit of Heloïse. And the more love is perfected, the more does woman thus learn to love her husband’s work as her child, while he, on the other hand, loves her work as his own.

But it may also be for other reasons that a woman desires a man to keep his complete freedom; it may be, for instance, that he is the younger, or that she knows she cannot give him a child. Such unions are not unusual in Europe, unions by which two people long make their own lives and the lives of those about them richer. In such a case the woman transforms her motherliness into affection for the man. She gives the best of her powers of production for his use, so that he grows while she stops short. But she thereby enjoys the bliss of a mother with a child at her breast; as the mother feeds herself for the child, so does such a mistress seek the finest intellectual nourishment that she may afterwards impart it: she feels that she steals what she enjoys alone. Perhaps the legend of the pelican, which nourished its young with its own blood, would be a better symbol for these women, who must be prepared sooner or later to see the man choose the young bride who in every respect will answer to his longing. Cases like these, if any, verify Nietzsche’s words that “great love desires more than a return,” and that “it will create.” Here, if ever, woman’s nature reveals that its great genius is for love; that the higher a woman attains, the more certainly will her own honour, her own triumphs, her own future weigh lightly as a feather against the joy of being able to develop in all its fulness her great talent, that of loving. And when does she love more highly than in lavishing the whole superfluity of her developed feminine nature on the perfecting of her lover—for another woman?

What every woman needs, in our time more than in any other, has been expressed by Ricarda Huch in these words: Courage for one’s self, sympathy for others.

Courage for one’s own destiny; courage to bear it or break under it. But also courage to wait for, to choose one’s destiny. Sympathy with the many who have lacked one part or another of the new courage: boldness or vigilance or patience.

Both these courses which woman’s new courage has found out—the man and work without the child, or the child and work without the man—may doubtless be called justified forms of life, when they show themselves life-enhancing. But they cannot be the line of life for the majority. This line follows the direction of the old Indian proverb: that the man is half a human being, and the woman half; only the father and mother with their child can become a whole. And even if women have the right, so far as life is thereby enhanced, to satisfy their erotic longing, they ought never to forget that they never attain their full humanity until through love they have given their husband a child and their child a father.

We have not spoken here of the young women who are unmarried wives of men, while waiting till the latter are able to provide a home for the child and a full domestic life. These women may, it is true, experience the grief of having trusted too much to their own or another’s heart. But they have been pure in their will and their will has been directed towards the future domestic life, not towards “adventures,” whose only value for them has been that they rapidly succeeded each other.

The young women alluded to must, therefore, be carefully distinguished from those who have become the hetairæ of the present day. These neo-Greek women are finely cultured, richly endowed, choice and pure types of the cerebral and polygamous woman. Love for them is an element of enjoyment—somewhat higher than that of the cigarette with which their dainty fingers toy, or of the alcohol which warms their pale cheeks—but decidedly lower than the joy of colour or the intoxication of poetry.