CHAPTER II THE UNBORN RACE AND WOMAN'S WORK
There are few factors in the life of the present in which the dualism between theory and practice is greater and more unconscious than in questions concerning woman. The protagonists of the feminist movement are in many cases sturdily Christian. They protest with vigour against the idea that they could have any share in the sort of emancipation of personality that includes freedom for all the powers and activities of the personality. Individualism, and the assertion of self are for them degrading words with a sinful significance. That the emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen, they have no suspicion. Freedom for the powers and the personality of woman have never appeared to them except as an ideal struggle for justice, as a noble victory to be won. In its deepest meaning this is as true of every other effort at self-affirmation, the end of which is the recognition of the right of human personality to the full development of capacities in a sphere of freedom, where responsibility belongs to the self alone. But just as every other such affirmation of the individual self, of a class, of a race, easily falls into an unjustifiable egoism, so with the emancipation of woman.
This great, deep, serious movement for woman's emancipation has in the course of time received a new name, the "Woman Question." The change in terminology signifies a change in the attitude of thought. From a real emancipation movement, that is, a movement to free the restricted powers of woman and her restricted personality, the movement has become a question, a social institution with officers, a church system with dogmas. Certainly we still hear in books and speeches that the woman question is being discussed and urged, in its relation to the happiness and development of the whole of humanity. But in reality the woman question, since it became a fact, a cause with an end of its own, since its champions have lost more and more their appreciation of its connection with other great questions of the day, is tending to increase the civil rights and the fields of woman's labour. In both cases people really have the women of the upper classes in view. This has been the end, and it is thoroughly justified and justifiable. But, in striving for this end, those who are aiming at it have come more and more into opposition to the first and highest of all rights, the rights of the individual woman to think her own thoughts, to go her own ways, even when these thoughts and these ways follow other courses than those of the advocates of woman's rights. While this group is, on one hand, very far from conceding to the individual woman the freedom which belongs to her, it is, on the other hand, blind to the results of the self-assertion of the whole female sex. In taking up work more and more external in character, they are blind to the profound and revolutionary effects of this movement, on the conditions of labour in the present day, on the existence of man and the family, on society as a whole.
Doing away with an unjust paragraph in a law which concerns woman, turning a hundred women into a field of work where only ten were occupied before, giving one woman work where formerly not one was employed,—these are the mile-stones in the line of progress of the woman's rights movement. It is a line pursued without consideration of feminine capacities, nature, and environment.
The exclamation of a woman's rights champion when another woman had become a butcher, "Go thou and do likewise," and an American young lady working as an executioner, are, in this connection, characteristic phenomena.
The emancipation of woman has practically ceased to be the freedom which enlarges soul and heart. It is conducted quite officially, like a business, and dogmatically, too, without feeling for the pulsating manifoldness of life, and has become an egoistic self-concentrated campaign. On this account I, and many others of my generation, with many more of the younger generation, stand outside of the movement, although we actively wished, and still wish, for the freedom of woman. The champions of woman's rights, like the champions of other movements for rights, illustrate the truth of the old Swedish saying, that "what we are pursuing is really only a runaway horse attached to our waggon." How blindly the fanatics of woman's rights have rushed by the other needs of the time can be best measured by considering their attitude towards the greatest question of the day—I mean the social question.
The old advocates of woman's rights maintain that the adult woman must have the same right as the adult man to "protect" herself, and they ask why the woman is hindered from working because she is married, or because she has children. Protective legislation drives woman from the factories and workshops; and this legislation is very far, they tell us, from meriting the support of women. Women, on the contrary, they say, should demand the same protective legislation for women as for men. They ask for technical instruction and an extended field of work for women.
This whole argument is quite logical from the point of view that limitation of woman's labour is opposed to one of the foremost principles of our time,—the self-determination of the individual. This implies the right of the adult woman, as well as the adult man, to choose her own work. Privileges on the ground of sex only hinder the woman from being put on an equality with man before the law.