Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Society is confronted by tasks of increasing complexity. A force hitherto unused, that of woman, now become socially conscious, offers its co-operation in dealing with them.

All thinking persons desire new conditions with growing earnestness. But new conditions do not arise, as the socialist is far too willing to believe, through new external relations alone; nor through new ideas and discoveries, as the man of science with his bias is too apt to think. New conditions arise above all through new human beings, new souls, new emotions. Only these form new plans of life, new modes of action; only these revalue the objects which are then pursued day by day by innumerable individuals. A new idea becomes feeling and motive power, at first with one individual, then with a few, then with many, and finally with all. He who has been able to witness this with regard to any particular idea, knows that it comes about as in the spring, when first a solitary birch-tree on the sunny side unfolds its golden-green banner: then the veil of yellow, reddish-brown, and green is drawn closer and closer over the grey, till finally all the tree-tops are rounded and full, all colours subdued to one shade, and one scarcely remembers what it was like in the play of shifting colours, when the wild cherry gleamed white among the green, the dandelions spread themselves in wild profusion among the grass, the lilies of the valley peeped out from the sheath of their leaves, and the cuckoo called in the summer.

Emotions are the sap which rises when the human landscape thus changes colour and form. Therefore no profound spiritual transformation has ever taken place unless women have taken part in it. It is upon this great power of woman, already indirectly effective, that we may with reason base the hope of her direct exertion of force becoming even more effective—if with it she preserves her womanly character.

Precisely as the stricter sexual morality made woman’s love more soulful—till she can now claim love’s freedom, since she has a new contribution to make therewith—so the hindering of woman’s external activity dammed up her emotional life. Under the division of labour into a “manly” and a “womanly” field, woman’s peculiar character became more established; her feeling became intensified in the direction in which she is now ready to use it in the immediate service of humanity. Tenderness distinguishes her whole way of thinking and feeling, of wishing and working. Thus has she reached that dissimilarity to man, which she must now maintain in a public capacity.

It is as natural as it is fortunate that woman should come forward with her claims to participation in social duties and social rights just in our time, when the idea of interconnection, the sense of solidarity, has become increasingly conscious in every nation, as well as between the nations. For a clearer idea of interconnection will have the effect of saving woman from a number of man’s mistakes; a profounder sense of solidarity from a number of woman’s weaknesses—while the best traits of the womanly character will be invaluable for intensifying the sense of solidarity. The man and woman of the present day have become more sensitive to their own sufferings, and this is the first condition for becoming more sensitive to those of others. But now the problem is also really to intensify and to refine the feeling for others to such a degree that the social organism will no longer be able to endure that any of its members should suffer a hindrance to life in any avoidable way. It is in this respect that woman’s deeper sensitiveness, her richer tenderness, are given their great mission. It is true that—as was remarked in connection with the evolution of love—it is becoming more and more impossible to speak of “man” or “woman” in general, since individualisation makes each sex more and more dissimilar within itself, while development makes them more and more mutually alike. Average women and average men have more understanding than feeling. But when feeling is found in a man, it is more violent and more transitory, whereas it is more intimate and more effective in a woman. The majority of men as of women seldom think. But when man and woman think, man’s method is, as a rule, that of deduction and analysis, woman’s that of intuition and synthesis. She unites instinct and reflection as the poet does: the thought of both forms a connected line of light only in the way that a row of lamps seen in perspective does so. Her actions—like his poems—have the unconscious purpose of inspiration.

These general characteristics are reversed, it is true, in many individual cases. It is thus certain that the most conspicuous revelations of Christian charity have occurred in men. This, however, does not alter the fact that “the milk of human kindness” flows more richly in women than in the majority of men.

This superiority is the natural result of motherliness, which has gradually been developed in the female sex into immediate feeling for all that is weak and in want of help, all that is budding and growing.

But it follows from this that if woman, by her participation in public life, is to provide a great, new, progressive element—then not only must she not lose the power of sympathy she already possesses; she must, on the contrary, intensify and extend it. Motherliness is not to be found in all those who are already mothers, and we have arrived indeed at the strange position that—while man is beginning to see how much society needs the motherly feeling—a number of women are no longer willing to become mothers, since their personal development and civil occupation would thus be interfered with. Nothing is more necessary than that woman should be intellectually educated for her new social mission. But if meanwhile she loses her womanly character, then she will come to the social mission like a farmer with a complete set of agricultural implements but no seed.

In all private activity the individuality is the best seed, while, on the other hand, in the social field women will probably for a long time be most valuable owing to their universal-womanly character; for unfortunately it is still true in public life that individuality is frequently a hindrance to co-operation, which takes place rather through partisanship in interests and views than through the working together of diverging characters. It is only in rare cases that a non-party man has the chance of interposing in a decision. At present, woman may be able to influence society not as a single personality, but rather as a new and powerful principle, a great contribution of a hitherto unemployed element. Doubtless individual women—through mental superiority, intellectual development, strength of will, and powers of work—will bring a great increase of general human value to social work. But it will nevertheless be upon the difference in kind between the nature of man and woman that we must base our hope that women’s participation in the work of society will have far-reaching results.

When women think themselves able to accomplish what the whole aggregate of man’s courage, genius, devotion, self-sacrifice, and idealism has hitherto not been able to do; when in every difference of opinion on man’s and woman’s nature they attribute to him every feminine failing in addition to his own, while claiming for themselves all man’s merits, then one can be certain only about woman’s superfluity for the time being.