Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Thus even in public life woman must preserve the belief in miracles, the courage of apparent foolhardiness which her love gives her; that courage of which the most beautiful images are already to be found in national legends. What private life has taught her, she must now teach in turn to public life.

This is the most difficult of all tasks; for here she must preserve the sudden anger or enthusiasm of her feeling, but purge it of arbitrariness and injustice. She must trust to her feeling’s unconscious sureness of direction, but secure it against the risks of foolhardiness. She must allow her feeling its mobility, but free it from the connection with caprice and untrustworthiness. She must keep her eyes for the individual, but yet be capable of lifting them to the universal.

To be able to do all this, woman must be willing to learn of man where he is the stronger, without letting man’s scorn of womanly weaknesses or his pretensions to superiority mislead her into seeking a kind of strength which cannot be hers; for she could thus lose only what is already her own.

Unfortunately, all the signs are not favourable to the hope that woman will pass through academies and carry on the service of the State without injury to her rapidity of view, delicacy of observation, and liberality of soul. “The conclusions of science,” “the laws of history,” “the demands of social security,” “the opportunity of compromise,” and all the other things that men pile up in the way of reform, are also alarming to woman’s courage, make her too ask for proofs instead of feeling strong in her intuition.

In the university, the government department, and the business office the soul of woman also may run the risk of becoming tied by red tape, officially dry, amenable to public injustice, sober in the face of enthusiasm. Such official and business women will be as apprehensive as men of being suspected to be dreamers and agitators; they will be as logical in proving the unreasonableness of those who think for the future. In a word: when women bear men’s burdens they will also get their bent backs; when they earn their bread in the general field of work, their hands will also be hardened. But we may hope—and everything depends upon this hope—that woman will attain her social power before she has yet lost her special characteristics, and that she will then give her whole mind to bringing about new conditions, in which she will be able to keep her hands soft and her attitude upright.

If this hope fails, then woman’s entrance into public life will not change, for a thousand years to come, its tendency to put safety before boldness; to allow prudence to chill enthusiasm, facts to clip the wings of inspiration, and practical considerations to quench ideas. The demands of humane feeling will continue to be blunted by the sharing of responsibility among many; nay, we shall even see woman uniting herself with the majority in curing the madness of idealists or—if this is impossible—in rendering them harmless.

It is thus not by hymns of praise in honour of her sex, but by great and inexorable claims on herself and on all other women, that each individual woman can best co-operate in the education of her sex for public life. Only the spiritual education that each one gives herself will prevent in the political field false estimates of value and a confused sense of justice; for in truth political life in this respect gives nothing to him who has nothing; on the contrary, it is there, if anywhere, that the words of the Bible are applicable: from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Public life in itself widens neither the view nor the heart of anyone; of this our parish and district councils, our municipalities and our parliament give sufficient evidence.

It is not only want of education, but in an equal degree half-education, that has the peculiar shady side; and such is the education still provided for the majority by school and high-school: ability to pass examinations without formation of personality, specialised knowledge without spiritual culture. The sign of this half-education is that it swallows up the individuality and makes the instincts shallow.

This evil will above all be fraught with danger to woman’s peculiar gift, intuition. The whole existing plan of education aims at rendering more acute the characteristics of man, and is successful therein, so that he is strong though one-sided in his half-education. Woman, on the other hand, becomes weak in hers, since it detracts from her characteristics without giving her, however, those of man. We often find in an unlettered woman an instinct for essentiality which the half-educated have lost or to which at least they no longer dare to trust themselves. And, above all, this is true of the qualities essential to woman herself. Thus women who are working in the service of the community often show their resentment of the gladdening power of other, young and attractive, women even within the sphere of social activity. Only the form and contents of the long catechism could convince them of a young girl’s seriousness. Whether these beauty-haters belong to the pietists of Christianity or to those of the woman’s movement, they are agreed in the opinion that the attractive woman is also the less valuable, and that men show their lack of discernment in so easily allowing themselves to be charmed by her. Man’s sense is, however, not so far wrong, even though he often takes appearance for reality. For what man looks for above all in woman—and loves most deeply, when he finds it—is the joy of goodness. It is this which is made visible in all real charm and gains its rightful victory; and only when women possess this joy of goodness and know how to communicate some of its charm to public life, will their participation in the latter tend to beautify it.