Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

The woman’s movement circles round the periphery of the question without finding any radius to its centre, which is the limitation of human existence to time and space; the limitation of the soul in the power of simultaneously giving itself up to different spheres of thought and feeling, and the limitation of the body in the capacity for bearing a constantly increased burden.

The heaviest cause of degeneration at the present time—the necessity for millions of women of earning their bread under miserable conditions, and the risk that they may lose, some the possibility, some the wish, for motherhood—may disappear, and nevertheless the chief problem will remain unsolved for any woman who has attained individually-human development.

In however high degree a woman may be bodily and mentally competent, this can never prevent the time her outdoor work occupies being a deduction from the time she can bestow on her home, since she cannot simultaneously be in two places; she cannot have her thoughts and feelings simultaneously centred upon and absorbed by her work and her home. And all that is personal in her home life, all that cannot be left to another, will thus necessarily interfere with her individual freedom of movement, in an inward as well as an outward sense.

If the child and the husband mean anything at all in a woman’s life, she cannot allow another to have the affection, the care, and the anxiety about them: she must give her own soul to this.

But then, on the other hand, it will interfere with her book, her picture, her lecture, her research, just as infallibly as would the trouble of in her own person nursing and taking care of the child— a trouble which she is really able to renounce, though with a great loss of happiness and of insight into the child’s character.

In a word, the most momentous conflict is not between health and sickness, development or degeneration, but between the two equally strong, healthy, and beautiful forms of life: the life of the soul or the life of the family.

Many women, who see the necessity of deciding for one or the other, choose the former and thus avoid or limit their motherhood, since they believe themselves to have another, richer contribution to make to civilisation. But would not the race have gained more by the talents of which these gifted women might have been the mothers?

We may pity for their own sake the barren women of the aristocracy or plutocracy, who from pure selfishness have refused to become mothers. But they do an involuntary service to the race, in that fewer degenerate children are born.

Full-blooded women, in a mental or bodily sense, are, on the other hand, the most valuable from the standpoint of generation. When these are content with one child or none, because they wish to devote themselves to their individual pursuits, then it is their work, not the race, which receives the richness of their blood, the fire of their creative joy, the sap of their thought, and the beauty of their feelings.

But it may be—according to a very moderate calculation—that there are annually produced by the women of the world a hundred thousand novels and works of art, which might better have been boys and girls!