The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

But all these arguments are based on the sophistical notion which perverts the whole feminist movement. The idea is to free woman from the limitations of nature. It involves, too, the other sophistical notion with which capitalistic society meets every demand of protective legislation for men, women, or children. Such legislation is said to be an interference with the individual's right of choice.

Every human being who is socially alive is aware that this right to control one's life is the emptiest phrase to describe reality in a society built up on a capitalistic basis. It is doubly empty where woman is concerned. I have never heard a woman desire that woman should fulfil military duties as an equivalent for having civil rights like man. But this would be the consequence of the argument that woman should have no privileges on the ground of her sex. The greatest privilege that can be thought of in modern society is to be spared the discomforts and loss of time that come from military training, to be exempt from the dangers and the terrors of war. That women are not absolutely incapable of service in warfare, women have shown on many occasions, especially in the Boer War. So when the advocates of women's rights hesitate before this extreme consequence of their principle, and introduce the functions of motherhood as a cogent ground for the privilege of being freed from military service in time of war (even if women at some time should receive the same civil rights now enjoyed by man), they are in the highest degree illogical. Other women with more logic declare that on another battle-field, a still more destructive one, that of the factory system, the same maternal functions require certain privileges for woman, and these same functions must result in subjecting her to certain limitations of her individual right to control her life. That is, she cannot pass beyond the limits drawn by nature, without interfering with the rights of another, the potential child.

It lies in the individual sphere of woman's choice as of man's choice not to choose marriage, or to desire it without parenthood; and for exemption from the latter, real altruistic as well as real egoistic reasons can be urged. It lies in the individual choice of the woman, as well as of the man, to isolate herself from what may be regarded as an obstacle to her individual development, or to her freedom of movement. She can do without love or motherhood, if the one or both of these are regarded from this point of view. Woman has the full right to allow herself to be turned into a third sex, the sex of the working bees, or the sexless ant, provided she finds in this her highest happiness.

A good while ago I was ingenuous enough to maintain that motherhood was the central factor of existence for most women. In the discussion of this question I considered several facts: woman's work imposed by necessity, woman's ambition stimulated by the freedom of her power, woman's intellectual life modified by many other influences of contemporary thought,—all these have forced the maternal instinct into the background for the time being. Here was a danger which, it seemed, was not too late to expose. There are women in whom the feeling of love is really and absolutely stunted; there are others who do not find in modern man the soulful and profound harmony in love that they quite rightly demand; there are others, more numerous, who wish for love but do not wish for motherhood. They absolutely fear it. The famous German authoress Gabrielle Reuter has spoken of this fear, this alarm of motherhood continually vigilant, active, placing woman in an attitude of self-defence,—a fear which to-day has taken possession of so many strenuous and creative women. The alarm, the aversion, becomes so strong, so dominant in them that one might almost believe it a dark perverse instinct, which, like all unnatural instincts, has been conceived and born through cruel necessities, and through these necessities has become overmastering. It is as if a secret voice in the depths of their nature was telling these women that, by paying their tribute to their sex, they would lose that power, brilliancy, and sharpness of intellect by which they have elevated themselves above their sex; and perhaps certain kinds of women are right in having this fear.

I am convinced, just as the German writer is, that every actual phenomenon of disease and of health alike is a necessary result from given causes; and I am more convinced than the advocates of women's rights ever were, that it is in the sphere of human freedom to choose one's own type of development, happiness, or ruin. I am not inclined to say anything further to the women who do not desire motherhood.

It would be very disastrous if these women, who have never been moved by tenderness when they felt a soft childish hand in their own, who have never longed to surrender themselves entirely to another being, were to become mothers. Their children would be more unfortunate than they themselves.

Many women like these are to be found to-day, and if things remain as they are, they are bound to increase in numbers. In some of them, however, the maternal instinct is not dead, but only dormant. Modern women with their capacity for psychic analysis, with their physical and psychical refinement, are often repelled by the crudeness, the ignorance, or the importunities of man's nature. The whole factor of love in the being of these women is shrivelled up as a bud that has never blossomed, and in enthusiasm for a duty, or for a woman friend, they find an expression for that sacrifice whose real aim they deny or overlook, a something which ends often by avenging itself in a tragic way.

I am simply insisting that every woman, who has not yet ceased to desire motherhood, has duties as a girl, and still more as a woman, to the unborn generation from which she cannot free herself without absolute selfishness. This selfishness is often disguised under a great impulse, an impulse which, like that of the preservation of the species, masters existence. I mean the impulse of self-protection. But it is just this that should make the "obligatory" egoism of the modern working woman appear so terrible to those who are busied with the emancipation of woman.

To talk of the freedom of woman, of her individual right to control her actions, when she works like a beast of burden to reach a minimum of existence, to keep from dying of starvation, to talk of the freedom of women where conditions are such that the free choice of work, for man as well as for woman, is an empty phrase—to put it mildly, it is senseless. I will throw some light on the results of freedom by the following illustration:

When women in England worked in white lead factories, seventy-seven women were examined in one factory. It appeared in the time covered by the investigation that there were among this number ninety miscarriages, twenty-seven cases of still-born children; beside, forty young children died of convulsions produced by the poisoning of their mothers. The effects of this occupation were most harmful in the case of women from eighteen to twenty-three years of age. Lameness, blindness, and other infirmities resulted from this kind of work.