Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

There must then be something, not only in man’s nature but in woman’s also, which hinders perfection and delays progress.

If such be the case—and the supposition need not be considered too bold—then also we may perhaps wonder whether mankind would really have progressed so far, if women had had the lead during past centuries. And if we have ventured thus far, we may also be bold enough to ask: whether these same women—who have been so far from perfecting their own work—when they come to take part in the organisation of society, will immediately perfect what man has bungled; twist the sword into a ploughshare and bring about the Messianic kingdom, where peace and righteousness shall kiss one another.

It is not until she has renounced all communion with the glorification of woman and the assertion of woman’s superiority, that a woman with a sense of intellectual propriety can occupy herself with the question of the social work of her sex.

Those who conduct the woman’s movement form in every country a “right” and a “left,” each with an extreme wing.

The particular cult of the right is woman as an ideal being. In addition, its dogmas include Christianity, monogamy, and the rest of the existing arrangements of society. It seeks to place woman on an equal footing with man within the old forms. To the extremists of this group, duty, labour, and utility are the great words of life; love and beauty do not come within the scope either of woman’s rights or of her obligations. To whitewash the stains on the existing social edifice; to give themselves more space by building out a wing on the right—this is their chief concern; the main building itself they would preserve unaltered.

The left has also its deities—but “woman” is not one of them. Its view of life is radical; that is to say, evolutionist and social. It seeks to reform the existing institution of marriage by a new morality, and existing society by a higher organisation, which will express a deeper sense of solidarity. It thus looks at the rights and liberty of woman and of man in connection with the welfare of the whole community. From this point of view, it regards woman’s freedom to love and right to motherhood as of equal importance with her right to vote and liberty to work.

Here, however, a difference comes in between this and the extreme left, which would give woman complete personal freedom of movement by leaving the children in charge of the State.

Thus the extreme wing of the old feminism meets that of the new on this point, that to both woman’s activity is an end in itself to the extent that her right is independent of whether this activity raises or lowers the vital efficiency of the whole organism.

In everything else the opposition is diametrical, except on the plane where all the groups meet: in the demand for woman’s juridical and political equality with man.

Those who demand political rights for woman in return for her liability to taxation and her cares as a mother, have a well-founded claim. But the position becomes still stronger when the claim is based upon the need of society that every member of it should co-operate to further the satisfaction of his own requirements. For modern society corresponds more and more to the idea of an organism increasing in complexity, every part of which becomes more and more important to the whole, determines more and more by its needs and powers the welfare or failure of the whole, and itself receives more and more profit or harm from the condition of the whole organism.