The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

A loss of freedom accomplished gradually, this is, on the whole, the sad result of the so-called emancipation of women in our century, if the subject is looked at broadly, apart from the few thousand women of the upper classes in good paying positions. For several decades, I have felt strongly against the importance given by the advocates of women's rights to the work of women outside of the home, for the reasons I have given above. I have applied to such work the objection formulated by Feuerbach in these words: "Mediocrity always weighs correctly, only its weight is false."

Wherever we look, in Europe or America, we find new and injurious results from the new conditions, from the free activity of women's work through the development of industry on a large scale, through the transformation of home work, and the growing conviction on the part of women that "celibacy is the aristocracy of the future," to quote the words of a distinguished supporter of woman's rights.

Yet it would be foolish to wish a change in these unhappy results through a reaction that would again rob the woman of her essential freedom in relation to her choice of work, and the control of her life.

The line of progress is tending towards a new society, where all will be compelled to work and all will find work; where all will work moderately under healthy conditions for an adequate wage. Then neither the unmarried nor the married woman will lose her strength by exhausting work done to earn a living, or impair the powers she needs for motherhood. If she becomes a mother, in most cases she will really rejoice at the possibility offered to her by society of working for society, as a mother and an educator.

We are yet very far from such a society, but every social regulation should, as we have said, be tested as to whether it brings us nearer this ideal or leads us farther away from it. The question should be asked whether the direction of thought is encouraged or restricted, that will in the end transform everything, the conviction I mean that economic production is here in the world for the sake of men, not, as now, men for the sake of production; that work is to be done for the sake of freedom, not, as now, freedom created for the sake of work.

When I tried in my book called The Misuse of the Power of Woman to urge women to test the consequences of this process, my thesis was as follows: In our programme of civilisation, we must start out with the conviction that motherhood is something essential to the nature of woman and the way in which she carries out this profession is of value for society. On this basis we must alter the conditions which more and more are robbing woman of the happiness of motherhood and are robbing children of the care of a mother. Or, we must begin with the assumption that motherhood is not essential: then everything must continue to go on as it is going on now, and work directed towards external spheres with its satisfaction in the joy of creation, of ambition, of gain, of enjoyment, of independence, will be more and more the end towards which women will arrange their plan of life. For this end they will modify their fundamental habits and remould their feelings. The naïve belief that every woman, who has the liberty to do so, is following her own nature, shows a complete ignorance of psychology and history. Some ideal considered worth striving for, the prevailing view of a period, will obtain supremacy over nature. This is shown best in the stunted feeling of motherhood peculiar to the eighteenth century, by the plain results of mediæval asceticism. By a new ideal innumerable women are now driven from a life directed inwards to a life directed outwards.

I am in favour of real freedom for woman; that is, I wish her to follow her own nature, whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary woman. But the opinion held by the feminine advocates of woman's emancipation, in regard to the nature and the aims of the everyday woman, does violence to the real nature of most women. It is one of the most remarkable manifestations of the times that, while women preach about the rights of woman and her will to work and to act unrestrained by family ties, men like Ibsen, for example, in When We Dead People Awake, show that the real Fall of Man in life is transgression of the law of love, meaning that man through this transgression not only diminishes his personality, but lessens his creative capacity.

It would appear as though men were approaching the conception of love once held by women, while women were beginning to regard love as a petty episode in life compared with what are really its true concerns, an episode which gives life the colour of a sensual, sentimental, psychological, or sportsmanlike adventure, an episode which she treats as a game which she can get into, and just as easily get out of. From this new position in which extremes meet, suffering, previously undreamed of, must arise. Such results coming to the emancipated woman will I hope reveal to her the eternal laws of her own being, laws from which she cannot be freed without destroying herself.

I would not put the slightest hindrance, however, in the way of a single isolated woman pursuing her own path freely, if it leads her even to the most unusual forms of labour and attempts to make a living. But for the sake of women themselves, for the sake of children, for the sake of society, I wish men as well as women to think earnestly over the present position of things. They will see that in the near future, one of two things must be chosen. Either there must be such a transformation of the way in which modern society thinks and works that the majority of women will be restored to motherhood, or the disintegration of the home and the substitution of general institutions will inevitably result. There is no alternative.

Undoubtedly it required the whole egoistic self-assertion of woman, all her efforts towards individuality, her temporary separation from home and from family, her independent efforts to make a living to convince man and society of the following truths: that woman is not solely a sexual being, not solely dependent on man, the home and the family, no matter in what form these may exist. Only in this way could woman fulfil her destiny as wife and mother with really free choice. Only in this way could she secure the right of being regarded as man's intellectual equal in the field of the home and the family, the recognition that in her way she was just as complete a being as he.