Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Those already “freed” declare that, by making money, studying, writing, taking part in politics, they feel themselves leading a higher existence with greater emotions than the nursery could have afforded them. They look down upon the “passive” function of bearing children—and rightly, when it remains only passive—without perceiving that it embodies as nothing else does the possibility of putting their whole personality in activity. Every human being has the right to choose his own happiness—or unhappiness.

But what these women have no right to, is to be considered equally worthy of the respect of society with those who find their highest emotions through their children, the beings who not only form the finest subject for human art, but are at the same time the only work by which the immortality of its creator is assured. Another thing that these women who are afraid of children cannot expect is, that their experience should be considered equally valuable with that of women who—after they have fulfilled their immediate duties as mothers—employ for the public benefit the development they have gained in their private capacity.

There is no secret and infallible guide to natural instinct, any more than there is to the tendency of civilisation. Both may lead the individual as well as the race astray with regard to the goal which both, consciously or unconsciously, are seeking: higher forms of life. In motherliness, humanity has attained what is at present its most perfect form of life within the race taken as a whole. Motherhood is a natural balance between the happiness of the individual and of the whole, between self-assertion and self-devotion, between sensuousness and soulfulness. A great love, a power of creation amounting to genius, may in solitary instances attain the same unity. But the immense advantage of the mother is that, with her child in her arms,—without being conscious of a struggle and without belonging to the favoured exceptions,—she possesses that unity between happiness and duty which mankind as a whole will attain in other departments only after endless toil and trouble. But if this personal self-assertion, this personal joy in woman’s consciousness be gradually released from its connection with the child, then this unity will be broken up.

An incidental displacement of it was necessary; for the liberation of woman—like every other movement of the kind—involved precisely the disturbance of that equilibrium which had been produced by the pressure of superior force and by hereditary inertness, an artificial equilibrium, which could be maintained only by pressure on one side and inertness on the other. It was necessary that daughters should rise up against their fathers’ ideals of wives; sisters against the brothers’ share of inheritance, which had increased so greatly to their cost; mothers against the view of their duties which kept them within the sphere of female animals.

They must carry through that emancipation which has already made it possible for them to use their brains—not only their hearts—in fulfilling their eternal mission: that of fostering and preserving new lives.

Already the educated—nay, even the uneducated—mother of the present day makes use in her care of children of double the brain power but of only half the muscular force that her grandmother employed. She knows better how to differentiate between the essential and the unessential; she can by circumspection obviate much toil and trouble. And when all mothers receive the practical and theoretical training in nursing children and the sick, which must be their form of universal service corresponding to the military service of men, then the problem will be even more simplified in the direction of the impersonal and more and more extended in the direction of the personal. The mother must use her intelligence and her imagination, her artistic sense and her feeling for nature, her instincts in physiology and psychology, in order to provide the child with the conditions under which it may develop itself in the best and freest way; but, on the other hand, she must beware of—remoulding the child. She will in this way gain much time which at present is wasted in unnecessary attentions and harmful education.

But avoidance of the personal charge is impossible to the mother without incurring the dishonour of a fugitive.

There are a number of women who think that the feeling of motherhood can exist independently of a mother’s care and responsibility for the child, and that the latter may therefore be taken charge of by the community and still retain the treasure of motherly and fatherly affection. These women can never have reflected that, with human beings as with animals, parental affection is formed by care and self-sacrifice; that it rises with these; that the less demand is made upon it, the poorer it becomes. When a father for a time takes the place of the mother, he becomes as tender as she; when a sick child exhausts its mother’s strength, it is nearest her heart; and as the child grows up, her affection becomes less spontaneously intimate, although instead it may increase through personal intercourse. State care of young children would mean a withering of the intimacy of parental affection. The tenderness evoked by the child’s bodily presence shows, better than any other feeling, the unity of soul and senses. Without the sensuous presence, the psychical impression loses its power, as does the bodily impression without the psychical. The instinct of motherhood, like all others, has been formed through constancy of external conditions. It is acquired through definite sensations and associations of ideas. When certain of these emotions, at first conscious, became unconscious, and were then performed by lower nerve-centres, the higher nerve-centres, which had formerly been occupied, were set at liberty for higher uses. But if the sensations and associations of ideas, which originally formed the instinct, are weakened, then the instinct loses its automatic sureness. What worked easily, “of its own accord,” as popular speech rightly has it, becomes once more laborious. With the displacement of the instinct, corresponding dislocations result, though with extreme slowness, in the organ with which it is connected. Thus nursing was perhaps an acquired faculty, which became “natural.” It has now become so difficult that among the upper classes the majority, even with the best will, can scarcely perform this function for a couple of months, or perhaps not at all. Science is already enquiring into the possibility of the disappearance of the mammary glands and with them of the peculiar character of woman’s breast.

It is often only the future that can decide what is progress and what degeneration. But certainly nothing can be more unscientific than to dismiss all anxiety about the future with the dogma: that the will to live in offspring is so strong that only the degenerate do not possess it, and that with a healthy woman nothing can injure the motherly instinct.

To a thinker of the evolutionist school, everything is subject to possible transformation, and nowhere is there anything at work which can “make no difference.” There is not a brain, not a nervous system which can evade even the involuntary impressions of the street. These sink into the subconscious soul and thence may arise again after many years. Not one person is the same—or will ever be the same,—when, for instance, he comes away from a lecture, as he was when he went to it. Some psychic waves have always been set in motion and this motion is continued to infinity. If this is even true of a notice on a shop-front, or of a momentary feeling of anger or joy, how much more then must it be so of the impressions which dominate our days and years. Our conceptions are forged from the true or false metal of our moods and become in turn the implements by which the bronze or gold of moods is wrought. All sanctity, all self-culture rest upon man’s power of diverting certain thoughts, suppressing certain conceptions, turning aside certain impulses of the will; of introducing other thoughts, intensifying other conceptions, encouraging other impulses; in other words, partly utilising and partly rejecting certain states of mind. In this way, bad habits arise from one class of moods, good habits from another. When these have acquired sufficient strength, new modes of action, new plans of life gradually become “natural”; new instincts are formed, in which willingness and reluctance often stand in an opposite relation to that they occupied at the commencement of the process. Sensuousness and soul are thus both the creations of development, and it is the voluptuousness of many thousands of years that stirs in the mother when she feels her child’s lips at her breast; it is the tenderness of as many ages which bends in the shape of every new mother over her child’s cot.