Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Woman’s right to participate in public life would, however, be in a bad way, if she could not bring to it something really indispensable, new, and peculiar to herself.

This new thing is her idealism and enthusiasm, however finely and easily they may blaze up, since woman is so much more inflammable than man, so much more eager to translate her enthusiasm into action.

For only such an enthusiast and idealist is of account who can carry the flame of his zeal in his bare hand, in spite of burns, keep it alight in spite of gusts of wind, and thus step by step come nearer his ideal. But such enthusiasts and idealists—whether male or female—are rare, much rarer than genius. They are the wine and the salt of life, whereas the virtues that the majority can show are only the daily bread on the table of society.

If then we look at the majority, the sense of justice in man and the feeling of tenderness in woman may be the greatest virtues. This does not mean that men do not both submit to and commit immense injustices, or women immense cruelties. But it means that the feeling which has been the strongest motive power in man’s public actions—in revolts and in revolutions—is the sense of justice, while the feeling of tenderness sets a hundred women in motion for one that is moved by an outraged sense of justice. Nothing is more common than to hear even from the lips of a boy the words: “It served him right”; while from a girl we should hear: “I’m sorry for him anyhow!”

It is the masculine feeling alone which has decided the structure of society. Not until woman’s feeling has the same scope as man’s; not until each can counterbalance what is extreme in the other—his what is too weak in hers, hers what is too hard in his—will society in its fatherliness and motherliness really provide for the rightful needs of all its children.

Someone has maintained that the social brain in the course of ages has developed more than the individual: by thinking and feeling more in common, the capacity has also been increased of finding means for furthering the common weal.

It is probable that women’s brains will show their efficiency above all in finding means of enhancing and preserving life, which has so much greater significance for woman than for man; for every life has cost some woman infinitely more than any man; every mangled body on the field of battle or of labour has once made some woman happy with its child’s smile, and leaves some woman in tears.

But in order thus to become inventive, women must remain what they now are: passionate in the force of their love, rapidly vibrating; otherwise they will not counterbalance the partialities of man in the work of civilisation. There are perhaps no more remarkable pages in J. S. Mill’s book, On the Subjection of Women, than those in which he maintains the faculty of woman—guided by her individual observation—for intuitively finding a general truth and, unfettered by theorising, for unhesitatingly and clear-sightedly applying it in a particular case. Woman, he says, keeps to reality, while man loses himself in abstractions; she sees what a decision will mean in an individual case, while he loses sight of this in face of the general truths he has abstracted from reality, which he tries to force into abstraction. These qualities of woman make her more unflinching, more rapid, and more immediate in her actions, while at the same time her more intimate and passionate feeling gives her more perseverance and patience in the face of trouble, disappointment, and suffering.

And this opinion of Mill is confirmed by that of Ibsen, whose fundamental view of woman is precisely that she becomes stronger in self-assertion and tenacity of purpose when it is a question of values of personality, but at the same time more devoted and self-sacrificing in the personal sphere. He regards her as less fettered by religious or social dogmas, but with greater piety and a deeper sense of community than man; he sees in her more unity between thought and action, a surer grasp of life and more courage to live it. In a word: he thinks that woman more often is something, because she has not tried to be it; that she more often attempts the unreasonable, because she cannot be satisfied with the possible.

Thus woman became, not more perfect, but—fortunately for the fulness of life—different, when first life differentiated the natural function of mother and father; made them into separate beings, neither being superior or inferior to the other, merely incomparable. It is this differentiation which must continue—not least in politics; for otherwise women’s votes would only double the poll, without altering the result, and their participation in politics would thus only be a waste of their precious powers.