Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Women must be prepared to find that their participation in public life will cost them, not only various unjustified prejudices, but also many hardships. They must, moreover, understand that it will take much time away from their home; for the whole thing is not so simple as merely handing in one’s voting-paper, reading the leading article instead of the feuilleton, and going to an election meeting instead of to supper. If one hands in a voting-paper without knowing how one has voted, one’s participation is of no great importance. If one wants to know how one is voting, this involves the sacrifice of time; and when once one has begun to take part in public affairs, one is often forced by circumstances further and further into their vortex.

Fathers of families, who “take up” politics, are even now the despair of those families. And what if mothers of families begin likewise?

This is the kernel of the question. As mother of a family the woman who takes part in politics must make her choice between an outward direction of her activities which will be unfortunate for the home and children and a lack of independence which will be personally painful to her. She can sacrifice her private pleasures, not her private duties. But it is this latter temptation which will present itself to the woman of the poorer classes. The wife of a working man wants to go to an election meeting with her husband—but what of the little children? There is no servant. The neighbour’s wife? She too wants to go to the meeting. The crèche? It is closed in the evening, for its manageress also takes an interest in public affairs! There is therefore no way out of it but that the wife must be content with her husband’s judgment.

In the suffrage question—as always when it was a question of woman’s rights—attention has been too one-sidedly directed to the point of view of the unmarried woman of the upper class. But these are so far from being the most important that we might rather assert that a mother of the working class, who—with all the trouble and privations this involves for her—has cared well for her children both bodily and spiritually, has made a happy home for them and her husband and therewithal has acquired for herself education and insight in social questions, affords so extraordinary a social power, that the most just of proportional suffrage methods would be to give her—and all other mothers of remarkable children—a double vote.

We are here again faced by the difficulty already pointed out: that it is precisely the most excellent women, the most indispensable for the task, who will have to choose between the duties of collective motherliness and those of motherhood, as well as between the latter and those of individual development. During her children’s earlier years no mother can well fulfil both these motherly calls. She will be forced to acknowledge that, if anyone could be said to cross the river to fetch water—and with one of the Danaids’ pitchers at that—then it would be one who should set aside her children for her social mission.

Here and there we already meet one or another of these strong, proud, and beautiful mothers of the twentieth century, who have lost nothing of their full-blooded womanliness, but rather doubled it through a personal quality which year by year embraces the kernel of their being more closely.

Human being and woman, citizen and personality—less than this the social mother of the future cannot be. She has destroyed all bridges which might take her back to the womanly ideal of older times: the powerful but narrow-minded housekeeper, the thoughtlessly devoted wife. But at the same time she has nothing in common with the short-sighted woman’s rights woman, who takes pride in being a restless working-machine or a specialist rewarded by diplomas but otherwise half-educated.

She has learned something from the older as well as from the new type. But she resembles neither, for only completeness of life is to her the meaning of life.

Many a little girl, leaning over her history book, must have been indignant at the way humanity used to be reckoned in past times: so many men—“besides women and children”!