Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Thus it is the mothers who are not good enough to bring up their own children, that are expected to provide the new illustrious leaders of the community. It is the parents who themselves lack the talent and inclination for bringing up children, that—directly or indirectly—will have to superintend and select the persons who, in their place, will perform the duties of parents. In other words, they are to discover and appreciate qualities that they do not themselves possess. The trouble that a woman cannot take for the children to whom she has herself given life, is to be borne by other women for ten, twenty, or thirty children, who are not their own.

Even to-day, there is sometimes to be found a kind of primitive type of womanliness, so widely maternal, with such a superfluity of strength, of tenderness, of talent for organisation that it is too powerful for a single home; a type which really possesses the immense wealth of spiritual elasticity, joy, and warmth, that is necessary in order that every such child should have its full share of these. But most women probably do not possess any more of these things than is just sufficient for their own children. And with these “elected mothers,” quickly worn out as they would be, ten, twenty, or thirty children would be as badly off mentally as they would be bodily if a single mother’s milk had to be divided among them all. It is even now a serious loss to society that so many human beings are enfeebled for life by insufficient nourishment in childhood. But according to the plan we have been discussing, which now has so many adherents, everyone would be starved in childhood as regards affection. It is even now a serious loss to culture that school-life makes children uniform. Still more irreparable would be the harm if their fashioning were in the hands of a thorough-going State care of children.

The danger of uniformity is inseparable from the present tendency to a hard-and-fast organisation of society, with an ever greater need of co-operation, an ever closer connection, an ever more intimate feeling of relationship between its component parts. The organisation must go on, because, amongst other reasons, it is only in this way that the individual can now gain increased freedom for development and the use of his personal powers. But if these increased possibilities of satisfying personal needs and using personal powers are to be of value to the individual—and through him to the whole community—then we must also have some individualities left who will be capable of taking advantage of their possibilities.

And now it is certain that the home—with its changing conditions of good and evil—is first and foremost the best means of forming an organically developing sense of solidarity with the whole community. Life itself creates in the home an inter-dependence among its members, a sympathy for others’ destiny, a contact with the realities of life, and with the seriousness of work, which no institution can create. It is by the efforts of a father and a mother that the joys of home are provided; it is affection for all which counter-balances the mutual rights of all; which gives to each his weight and his counterpoise in a way so natural that the methodical arrangements of an institution would never be able to imitate it. And furthermore, different homes, with the variety of different impressions they offer, are the best means of forming different characters and peculiarities. However straitened and poor in every sense a home may be, it nevertheless, as a rule, provides more personal freedom of movement and results in less uniformity than a collective system of bringing-up.

If this is even true of those homes where there can be no question of education in a higher sense, then in better homes the watchfulness and warmth of affection, its understanding and sensitiveness, will be the forces which will induce and protect individuality of character, and which will most surely discover what ought to be counteracted and what left alone for self-development. To this must be added the insight which the parents’ knowledge of themselves and of each other gives into their children’s character, an insight which no stranger can possess.

To this it is objected that, if every quarter of a town and every few square miles of country had its “State nursery,” parents would often be able to see to their children, as well as to take them home and thus have an opportunity of using their influence. But apart from the circumstance that the relationship would then in most cases resemble that of the French petite bourgeoisie visiting their children en nourrice—that is to say, that affection would be shown in a desire to amuse and deck out the child, to caress and play with it—the most important point is forgotten. This is that time, more time, and still more time, is one condition of education, and quiet the other. Souls are not to be tended like maladies, in fixed hours of treatment.

There is no sphere—as parents are still too apt to forget—in which the psychological moment is more important than in education. The action which a mother has seen in the morning, should often be first mentioned by the child’s bedside at night; the confidence which at the right moment might have burst from the child’s lips, will never be given if the father has not availed himself of that moment; the words which pained the mother this week, must perhaps wait till next before a natural opportunity of effectively combating them occurs. The caress for which a little head feverishly longs this evening, will perhaps to-morrow leave it indifferent. The word of affection which might have been all-powerful at one moment, is powerless a couple of hours later. And above all, direct advice or correction is worthless in comparison with the unpremeditated words that parents let fall in the course of the day, with the result that the child simply sees the full human life of its parents.

Only living together on week-days and holidays deepens the immediate influence of parents; only this makes it possible for the parents to distinguish in the child the accidental from the essential, the newly-acquired from the intrinsic in its changing moods.

And finally, when we think we have found that children receive too much warmth at home, and that they ought rather to be hardened against life—have we then not observed such “hardened” ones? Have we not seen how they are beautified when they are admitted to a corner in a home; have we not discovered that, though in intelligence they may be far in advance of their time, their feelings are still on a level with those of the savage?