Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Thus the conflict does not commence until marriage; and for the exceptionally gifted, as we have already said, it may be tragic. For the majority it will not become so unless the wife is obliged to earn her living outside the home and at the same time wishes fully to perform her duties as mother, or when she wishes to attend to her personal business but is prevented by a large family from so doing.

The question is thus for the majority: either the abandonment of the work which produces a living, or the limitation of the number of children.

The first alternative will be dealt with later. As for the second, it is here that the main conflict takes place.

It is from the point of view of the ennobling of the race, as well as from that of the nation, that men implore women to “return to nature”[4]; it is from that of civilisation that women now refuse nature their allegiance.

Nothing—even from the national point of view—is more justified than woman’s unwillingness to produce children by the dozen or score. The former consumption of wives, for a man between fifty and sixty, was seldom less than three wives in succession and as a rule half the children of each of them. Limitation of the number of children—apart from other sociological points of view—has above all the advantage, that many children of poor quality return a low interest upon the capital of working-powers and other expenses that their birth and bringing-up cost, while a smaller number of fully efficient children return a high rate of interest in the shape of increased working-powers, as is sufficiently shown by the prosperity of France.

But when we turn to the question, up to what point the limitation may be unattended with danger either to the nation or to the individual, then opinion is so sharply divided that to any unprejudiced examination it must seem premature at present to lay down the line of development of the woman’s question as coinciding with the limitation of the number of children. Even if it be finally agreed that a nation’s welfare demands of the women who ought and can be mothers, the birth and upbringing of but three or four children, it is not decided that the enhancement of the race is thereby sufficiently provided for.

Besides which, the new woman does not want three or four children, but only one or at most two.

Besides the danger, in this case incontestable, from the point of view of the nation, and the possible danger from that of the race, there is here a great danger for the children themselves. Their childhood’s happiness demands a circle of brothers and sisters and the difference in age between the children should preferably not be more than two years. Not only their happiness but their development is aided by this. The position of an only child, or of only son or daughter, usually results in childhood in great selfishness, while in later years, on the other hand, it produces frequently a heavy burden of duty, and thus, in both cases, brings danger to harmonious development.