The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

If the world is agreed that children must still continue to be born and that a home furnishes generally the best means for training them during the first years of their life, the present consequences of woman's work done outside the home must cause pessimism; such work must be stopped. After we have thought over the matter, it is plain that nothing is now more needed than such plans of social order, such programmes of education, as will give the mother back to her children and to her home.

Everything that philanthropy now does to heal the injurious and disintegrating effects of the capitalistic industrial system is on the whole wasted power. Children's crèches, kindergartens, providing meals for children, hospitals, vacation homes, cannot with all their noble efforts replace a hundredth part of the life energy, taken directly or indirectly from the new generation by women working outside the home.

There are some people who expect the problem of domestic life to be solved by collective institutions which will take care of the children, and give them meals. Just as brewing, baking, slaughtering, making candles and clothes, have more and more ceased to be done in the home, much of the work which now absorbs the greatest part of household activity, cooking, washing, mending and cleaning clothes, will, I firmly believe, finally be done by collective effort, by the help of electricity and machines. But I hope the tendency of man towards individualisation will overcome the tendency towards impersonal, uniform application of power en masse, in everything by which the innermost relations of life and private habits are deeply affected. A strong family life will, I hope, be regarded as the basis for true happiness and for the development of personality. When women are free from the barbarous relics of present methods of housekeeping,—the market basket, the kitchen utensils, the scrubbing brush gone from every house, electricity everywhere spreading warmth and life,—they will still be forced to do a certain amount of work. This cannot be avoided even by the help of the most perfect apparatus and by co-operative methods, provided the house is not to be replaced by the barrack. And since the custom of keeping servants will soon cease because, probably, there will be no servants to keep, all women will be forced to do housework, or find the remedy already discovered in America where bureaus supply domestic help for a fixed time for a fixed price. In London, too, there is at present a guild for general houseworkers who are trained for occupation and work under regularly established conditions. In the country, not only wives but daughters will be needed for agricultural labour, when there are no more hired labourers to be had. This will be a natural corrective against that pressure towards outside fields of labour, that has taken the daughters in multitudes away from home, and has crowded and overflowed the cities with them.

Finally if we weigh the economic loss occasioned by the fact that women after five or ten years' preparation have to give up work or study as a result of marriage, it is easy to see that the modern work of women has had results which must soon lead to earnest thought, in balancing up the accounts for or against the system. From the point of view of the woman herself, from the children's point of view, from the man's point of view, and finally, from the productive point of view, it has become pretty plain that society must either change the conditions of woman's labour or see a progressive disintegration in home life. Society must either transform the conditions of life and work, or it will witness the degeneration of the sexes.

All philanthropy—no age has seen more of it than our own—is only a savoury fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer. This incense offering makes the air more endurable for passers-by, but it does not hinder the infection in the sewer from spreading.

Selfishness, the instinct of self-preservation, will perhaps end by forcing the leaders of society to direct their actions from the social point of view. Then the woman question will become a question of humanity; then will its champions perhaps come to see that there can be no enduring good for the woman, if she works under conditions injurious to men and to children. It will be seen that the old axiom can be justly applied to the demands made in the name of woman's individuality; supreme right becomes supreme injustice. Justice is not to be reached by having the woman work under conditions which ruin both her and the whole generation physically. In other respects she must be able to use her free choice, and be educated enough to make good use of it. Justice consists in protecting innumerable women, who are not able as yet to protect themselves, against the abuses of which capital is guilty in employing their labour power.

It is an instructive feature in the history of class conflict, and of the movement for women's progress, that as women began by driving men out of certain fields of labour, so now unmarried women try to force married women from the labour market. In America, where everything goes at full speed, an association has been founded among unmarried women with this intention. These and similar phenomena belong to the system of free competition, the creation of the "leading thought of our time, the right of the individual to determine his own vocation." Perhaps when the war of women against women becomes the rule, the women's rights women will see that the problem of woman's work is more complicated than they imagine. They have continued to look at it till now only from the point of view of a woman's right to take care of herself. Perhaps they will then understand that individualism, apart from the feeling of solidarity, leads to social conflict, class against class, sex against sex, unmarried against married, young against old. So it will be seen that only in the transformation of the whole of society can woman attain her full rights without impairing, through her advance, the rights of others.

The sooner the women's rights party understands this, the better. Instead of fighting protective legislation, they should advocate it; instead of regarding unions and strikes with disfavour, they should help labouring women to organise unions, and support strikes where strikes are justified.

Our century, which has opened up to women new fields of labour, has made life very hard for her by forcing her in the competitive struggle. As wives, as married or unmarried mothers, as divorced women, as widows, women often not only have the burden of their own support to bear, but they have frequently the rôle of guardian of a family, working for an invalid or intemperate husband; for children, or sisters, or aged parents. These women, whether they belong to those who labour with the brain or with the hand, are worn out, partly by earning their own living, partly by household tasks. While the man goes from home to his work, refreshed by rest, the woman often goes already tired out, and she comes back to the house perhaps to work at night. It is as clear as day that by so doing she loses her bodily health and mental equanimity, both needed by her children. It is astonishing how many working women despite all this have enough energy for intellectual effort in reading and thinking. They soon see, women like these, that an occupation is not emancipation. The best that can be said is that it is only a means to emancipation. Those who work with their hands are not the worst off in this respect. Bookkeepers, telephone and telegraph operators, post-office employees, shop girls, waiters in public establishments, and servants in private houses, who must often serve the public standing, and who are often deprived of rest at night and on Sunday, are practically labour's worst slaves. Who can wonder if the possible income obtained by an immoral life is reckoned by the employer, when he secures for his establishment, at low wages, the services of attractive young girls? Small wonder it is that such employees, worried to death in shops, telephone bureaus, post and telegraph offices, should often be driven to hysteria, insanity, and suicide.

The advocates of women's rights are not blind to all these incongruities. They ask equal salaries for men and women, and claim, often with justice, and often without, that women's work is too inadequately compensated. But they do not see that they have contributed to the evil by constantly urging women to work in all possible occupations, and that a low rate of wages and an overcrowding of all fields of labour is the result. It is far more necessary to pay attention to these things than to open up new fields of labour to women, if their vital energy is not to be dried up, if they are not to lose their youthful freshness and attractiveness prematurely, and their possibilities for development and happiness as human beings, wives, and mothers.