Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Demands its nature’s pangs, its rightful throes,

And I implore with vehemence these pains!

(Stephen Phillips.)

When this ceases to be the desire and the choice of woman, then the prophecies of pessimistic thinkers of the voluntary extinction of the human race will be in a fair way to be realised. But in that case women would not possess the nobility which a logical reading of the world’s processes implies: they would only operate like a wheel unconsciously rolling towards the abyss.

To every thoughtful person, it is becoming increasingly evident that the human race is approaching the parting of the ways for its future destiny. Either—speaking generally—the old division of labour, founded in nature, must continue: that by which the majority of women not only bear but also bring up the new generation within the home; that men—directly in marriage or indirectly through a State provision for motherhood—should work for women’s support during the years they are performing this service to society; and that women, during their mental and bodily development, should aim, in their choice of work and their habits of life, at preserving their fitness for their possible mission as mothers.

Or, on the other hand, woman must be brought up for relentless competition with man in all the departments of production—thus necessarily losing more and more the power and the desire to provide the race with new human material—and the State must undertake the breeding as well as the rearing of children, in order to liberate her from the cares which at present most hinder her freedom of movement.

Any compromise can only relate to the extent, not to the kind, of the division of labour; for no hygiene, however intelligent, no altered conditions of society with shorter hours of labour and better pay, no new system of study with moderate brainwork can abolish the law of nature: that woman’s function as a mother, directly and indirectly, creates a need of caution, which at times interferes with her daily work if she obeys the need; while if, on the other hand, she disregards it, it revenges itself on her and on the new generation. Nor could any improvements in the care of children and domestic arrangements prevent what always remains above these things—if the home is to be more than a place for eating and sleeping—from taking up time and thought, powers and feelings. If, therefore, we are to retain the old division of labour, under which the race has hitherto progressed, then woman must be won back to the home.

But this involves more than a thorough transformation of the present conditions of production; for we are here face to face with the profoundest movement of the time, woman’s desire of freedom as a human being and as a personality, and in this we are confronted with the greatest tragic conflict the world’s history has hitherto witnessed. For if it is tragic enough for an individual or a nation relentlessly to seek out its innermost ego and to follow it even to destruction—how tragic will it not be, when the same applies to half of humanity? Such a tragedy is profound even when it occurs in the struggle between what are usually called the “good” and “evil” powers in man—a form of speech which followers of the religion of Life have given up, since they know that so-called crime may also increase human nature and human worth; that what is profoundly human may appear as evil and yet be healthy and beautiful, since it involves the enhancement of life. But infinitely greater will be the tragedy when the conflict arises between powers unquestionably good—those in the highest sense life-enhancing—and not even between secondary powers of this order, but between the very highest, the fundamental powers themselves, the profoundest conditions of being.

That is how woman’s tragic problem now stands, if we leave out of consideration the egoists just alluded to and turn our eyes to the majority: woman’s nature against man’s nature, exercise of power in order to satisfy the claims of the member of the race or those of the personality. If Shakespeare came back to earth, he would now make Hamlet a woman, for whom the question “to be or not to be” would be full of a double pathos: the eternal terror of the human race and the new terror of the female sex before its own riddle; the bearer of the most refined spiritual consciousness of the time, and therefore—while forced by circumstances to make a decision—a victim of hesitancy, doubt, and fortuity. As true as that all life is a development of force, so is it that happiness is an ever more complete use of one’s powers, ever richer in promise for the future, in the direction of their greatest aptitude. But when these aptitudes lead in two contrary directions, then the soul is in the same position as the wanderers in the legend of Theseus, whom the “pine-benders” bound to the tops of two trees.

The struggle that woman is now carrying on is more far-reaching than any other; and if no diversion occurs, it will finally surpass in fanaticism any war of religion or race.