Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

The fear of socialism now hinders the leading women of the upper classes from supporting the others in conflicts which can result only in the victory of the cause they themselves wish to further. They are alarmed at the mere word claims, behind which they see the great hosts of the labouring classes streaming on with their red flags. They therefore prefer to speak of the duty of voting rather than of the right to vote. They hope it may be possible to carry on politics as peacefully as a college of teachers, that a public meeting may be as amenable to discipline as a school class. But this lack of a sense of proportion misses both the end and the means.

Women are thus desirous—and with full reason—of abolishing prostitution. But the first condition is a wholesale raising—for at least fifty per cent. a doubling—of the present wages of working women and shop assistants. This increase can take place only by means of trade-unions, and then strikes will be necessary. But the Christian champions of the woman’s movement have a horror of both these things.

The latter desire—and with full reason—to stop the abuse of intoxicating liquors. But they do not see that this is not to be brought about by prohibitions and tea-meetings; that only by better opportunities and an increased appetite for the joys of home comfort, education, beauty, and nature can the intoxication of life take the place of the intoxication of alcohol. But these enhanced possibilities of life will result only from the stubbornly waged class-war, of which Christian women in general disapprove.

A number of women wish to abolish war. But the same women are not able in education to renounce those kinds of forcible methods which keep alive crude passions and low ideas of justice; they still believe that the souls of children are to be cleansed like mats, by beating. It is in vain that all the most eminent educationalists, as well as many of the foremost criminologists of our time, have again and again condemned corporal punishment—which one of the greatest contemporary authorities on jurisprudence has called the “fruitless bloodshed” of the centuries—since experience has incontrovertibly shown that physical fear never produces morality in the true sense of the term. Women, however, continue to lighten their work in the nursery by employing fear. In other words, they themselves practise—and train their children in—acts of violence, such as correspond in the life of nations to the wars these very women wish to abolish.

These examples might be multiplied. They do not prove that woman is more ignorant or more inconsistent than man in her social activity. But they prove that women, like men, will be of very little value in their public capacity, so long as they follow the methods of piece-work rather than of continuity.

To begin with, therefore, it would seem that individual women, and not the majority of the sex, will represent that collective motherliness which is to be at the same time far-seeing and warm-hearted. And these women can no more expect to go on from one victory to another, than can individual men. Those who—with their souls glowing against all injustice, their hearts warm and anxious with sympathy—enter into cold reality, must be prepared to experience what has been the lot of innumerable reformers in thought and action among the other sex: that they have won the best for themselves—martyrdom; but not the best for society—victory. And it is a poor consolation that it is often the best who become martyrs and the next best who are victorious. The former are those who throw themselves into the fight, urged by justice or love of humanity or passion for liberty—without asking themselves whether they will conquer, or at least without knowing what will be the answer to this question. The latter again are usually those who within themselves have answered it in the affirmative; for this conviction of success gives them the power of arraying an army behind them, and the courage to inspire it.

The precursors among women will also find out how unspeakably difficult it is to aristocratise the democracy, which does not mean simply cleaner hands and better manners, but purer actions and finer thoughts. And if they retain their sensitiveness—as they must—the leading women will thus have to suffer not only from their own wounds, but from the shame of seeing so many of their own sex as incapable as the men of sacrificing their own advantage—or the imaginary advantages of their country—when humanity and justice demand it. And it will be the fate of these women—as of so many men before them—that the pure will, the rich personality, which cannot bend, will be forced to break.

Everyone who has had anything to do with politics must have seen something of these tragedies in which a noble heart is broken piece by piece, and know how cruel these bloodless struggles really are.

Will the best women endure to witness such tragedies? Will they endure to see how year by year politics and the press—indirectly, if not directly, under the sway of financial interest—succeed in producing the greatest possible number of half-measures and the greatest possible amount of stagnation, accompanied by inevitable self-surrender on the part of the best, and unconditional self-satisfaction on the part of the others? Will they endure seeing how in questions of culture, where selfishness can mean nothing, omniscient stupidity decides the great vital interests of the nation?

A gathering of people on great national festivals can together feel and act more greatly than each individual for himself. But in the everyday life of nations the individual is often better than he becomes in co-operation with others. What collective stupidity, collective cowardice, and collective untruthfulness together produce without shame in public life, would cause almost everyone who makes up the mass to hesitate in his private life. To rescue the effectiveness of the private conscience—but at the same time to preserve the power of the collective conscience for great moments—this should be the great task of political morality.