Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

And it is the consciousness of this which in her innermost heart makes the new woman shy of the love for which she longs. A little emotion she will not give; the great one would swallow up all the forces of her soul, and what would then become of the revelation of her personality, of the word she alone among all beings has within her, the word for the pronouncement of which she was born?

Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile—interpreted by Barrès as une clairvoyance sans tristesse—expresses, as someone has said, the feminine individualism of the Renaissance. It is certain, on the other hand, that the feminine individualism of the present day has a clairvoyance that is sorrowful even to death.

Never has the earth seen a more complicated and contradictory being than this woman, melancholy and wistful, cold and sensitive, thirsting for life and tired of life at the same time. The blood dances otherwise in her veins, sings another song in her ears, than it has in those of any other woman since time began. She sees through her husband and is a stranger to him; his desire seems brutal to her finely-shaded and contradictory moods: she is not won, even when she allows herself to be embraced. She fears the child, since she knows she cannot fulfil its simple demands. When fate attempts to tune these fragile beings to their full pitch, they break like harp-strings under a rough touch. They are only able to live partially—but thus they do not find life worth living.

Even if such a woman chooses this partial life and gives herself entirely to work, she will nevertheless be still disturbed, in the domain of personal self-assertion, by the woman’s nature she has in the main suppressed; for she will often be confronted by the choice of not succeeding at all or of succeeding by the means of man, the means she abhorred in him before she herself discovered that it is the struggle for existence which gives the bird of prey its beak and claws.

She is forced to lament in the choice between relentlessly seeking her own or failing; between the necessity of being hammer or anvil, of dividing herself in order to give, or collecting herself in order to create. Until woman took up a position in the world of public competition, she did not suffer from this necessity. It was thus that—in a literal as well as a spiritual sense—she could afford to develop affection, sympathy, goodness. It is therefore a melancholy truth that woman’s nature, as it has become when removed from the struggle for existence, is profoundly opposed to the condition which in the present economical and psychological circumstances brings success in this struggle, the condition, namely, of forcing one’s way over others.

This conflict often begins in a field where woman cannot renounce her relation to motherhood—that is, where she herself is the daughter. Even in this character she has a choice to make, pain to inflict and to suffer.

When we thus see the woman of the present day placed between insoluble conflicts on every side—or agonising, if solved—we are no longer tempted to agree with the poet’s dictum that woman’s name is weakness. For in every fibre we feel that her name is pain.

Those men who, from the observation that woman’s professional and brain work seems to stand in inverse proportion to her fecundity, have drawn the conclusion that woman must “return to nature,” leave her brain unemployed and exclusively bear children, are easily refuted. There is no satisfactory evidence that mental work in itself need injure woman’s capacity for easy and happy motherhood. In the animal world, as among savages, the females easily bear motherhood together with other great burdens. In civilised communities, on the other hand, it is partly through a lower class, whose bodies are overworked, partly through an upper class, who overwork their brains—or else do not work at all,—that the physical difficulties of motherhood have arisen. That the world’s greatest female geniuses have had few children or none, is in full analogy with the great male geniuses—while these men as a rule have had gifted and distinguished mothers, an experience which alone is sufficient proof that woman’s “weak-mindedness” may not be the most favourable state of mind for the enhancement of the race. No conclusive evidence can be adduced against the statement that, when brainwork is moderate and combined with proper care of the health, it may have good effects also in women. The same is true of bodily labour. But as both are carried on at present, the woman, no more than the man, has been able to keep within the limit of her powers. Therefore at present woman’s studies and bread-winning labour involve dangers which have been increased under the spur of the dogma of equality, which has driven woman on to show that she could bear everything that man bears—that is to say, more than man or woman can endure.

But when once studies and labour have been somewhat organised, they do not in themselves involve anything that will make the unmarried woman any less fit to be a mother of the race; on the contrary, they are certain to involve much that will make her more valuable. It is thus not for the unmarried woman that the conflict is presented in the form of a choice between renouncing—even in the uncertain possibility of motherhood—the development or use of one’s purely human powers. And when perfect candour as regards the sexual life has become the custom between the sexes even from childhood, it will also be possible for women, during work, study, or exercise, to have those considerations for health which modesty has hitherto led them to neglect. In this way, but not through the employment itself, many a woman has lost her chances of motherhood.