The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

So strong has the conviction of the meaning of heredity become that young men, who have themselves borne a burden, imposed by generations of one character or another, have begun to see that it is their duty rather to abstain from marriage than to transmit their unfortunate inheritence to a new generation. I knew a woman in whose family on her father's and mother's side, mental disease was inherited. Therefore, though healthy herself, she refused to marry the man she loved. I know of another who broke her engagement, because she was convinced that the man whom she loved was a drinker, and she did not want to give her children such a father. It is especially on this point that women sin in marrying from ignorance, because they do not know that epilepsy and other diseases, especially alcoholism, are often caused because the child has had a drunkard for a father. A young woman could have no more certain test for the continuance of her feelings for a man, than whether she feels exalted joy or tormenting distress, at the thought of seeing his characteristics transmitted to their child.

Men sin against the coming race not only by excessive drinking, but in other respects where the results are still more destructive.

Besides the conscience of men must begin to awaken. This will express itself partly in the requirement to abstain from marriage when they know that they have to transmit a bad inheritance, partly in other spheres of morality as in the following examples:

A young man, himself a physician, thought he was healthy when he married. He discovered his mistake and found himself confronting the choice of wronging his wife or separating from her. As they were deeply in love, the only possible way was separation. He chose death which he inflicted on himself in such a way that his wife thought it was caused by accident.

Another man acted in the same way after he had been married several years and had three children; he found out that he was his wife's half-brother.

But these incidents as the one before mentioned, where women are concerned, are notoriously only isolated examples. It will require the development of several generations before it will be the woman's instinct, an irresistibly mastering instinct, to allow no physically or psychically degenerated or perverted man to become the father of her children. The instinct of the man is far stronger in this direction, but it is dulled too by an antiquated legal conception, according to which the woman must subject herself as a duty to requirements against which her whole being revolts. In this respect a woman has only one duty, an unmistakable one, against which every transgression is a sin, namely that the new being to which she gives life, must be born in love and purity, in health and beauty, in full mutual harmony, in a complete common will, in a complete common happiness. Until women see this as a duty, the earth will continue to be peopled by beings, who in a moment of their existence have been robbed of the best pre-conditions of their life's happiness and their life's efficiency. Occasionally they show plainly at an early age the sign of degeneration or of discord. Occasionally they seem for a long time to be healthy and powerful specimens of humanity, until in some critical moment they go to pieces through an insufficient supply of physical and psychical vitality caused by their very origin.

As to marriages between healthy and active individuals, legislation can do nothing. Ethics alone can exert an influence for betterment. Children must be taught from their earliest years about their existence and their future duties as men and women. So mothers and fathers together can impress on the conscience of the children not any abstract conception of purity, but the concrete commandment of chastity in letters of fire. So they will keep their health, their attractiveness, their guilelessness, for the being they are to love; for the children who from this love will receive their life.

The impulse to preserve the species, it is true, makes human beings low, small, or laughable; as poets like Maupassant, Tolstoi, and others have depicted from quite different points of view; but it only does so when the impulse appears without relation to the end given it in nature, or when this end is attained without consideration for the production of an offspring qualified to live. The kind of love which disturbs life is that which diminishes the value of an individual as a creator of life. This type of love really degrades human beings, is immoral from the standpoint of the modern view, which wills life to be, but above all, wills the progress of life to ever higher forms.

Young people must therefore learn to reverence their future duties. These they altogether miss, if they squander their spiritual and bodily obligations, in unions formed and dissolved thoughtlessly, without any intention of fidelity, without the worth of responsibility. But they must also know that it is a still greater transgression of their duty if the life of a child is called forth with cold hearts and cold temper, whether this happens in a marriage based on worldly motives or one maintained on moral grounds in which the previously existing discord is transmitted to a new being.

Mothers made apathetic and unresponsive, by the consciousness of numerous breaches of faith, towards their youthful dreams, their ideal convictions, are often precisely those, who in their children, struggle against the pure instincts of love, its chaste and strong feelings, its higher aims. They often teach that love as a rule ends after marriage, that marriages can be made without love. This is a process of thought resembling the conclusion that a vessel can quite well go into the sea with some defect, since it is possible in any event that it will be damaged. They speak of the impurity of the senses, of the advantages of a marriage based on friendship and reason, of the calming power of duty. All of these are chilly processes of reason by which souls, filled with the warmth of life, are killed. Daughters must be helped by their mothers, wisely and delicately, in order to be protected from hasty acts, in order to distinguish with open eyes, when their feelings themselves are uncertain. It must be branded upon their souls and their nerves that they will be fallen beings if they give themselves from other reasons than from reciprocated love. Under these convictions alone, will there be a great transformation of present ethical standards. Men think that they can do with marriage what they will; that they can enter upon it with any kind of motive; they think that they must marry from feelings of duty, to fulfil some given engagement, or to atone for some fault; that they have the right to enter upon a marriage without love because they long for home life. While these things are regarded as legitimate, men stand on the same ethical level as the person who commits murder because he has first stolen, or has stolen because he was hungry. The great crime against the holiness of generation is believing that one can treat arbitrarily, the most sensitive sphere of life, the sphere where innumerable secret influences order the destiny of a new generation.