The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

No, we must on the basis of natural science attain, in a newer and nobler form, the whole antique love for bodily strength and beauty, the whole antique reverence for the divine character of the continuation of the race, combined with the whole modern consciousness of the soulful happiness of ideal love. Only so can the demand for real chastity save mankind from the torments which sexual divisions and degradations now bring with them. It is profoundly significant that in the world of the past, divinity was associated with woman on the ground of observations concerning the continuation of the race; while in Christianity, woman became divine as the Virgin Mother. Through heathen and Christian thought, reunited and ennobled, the woman will receive a new reference for herself as a sexual being. Antique and modern love, the love of the senses and the love of soul, will, united and ennobled, induce human beings, men and women alike, to adore again Eros the All-powerful.

To diminish the significance of love, to oppose it as a lowering sensualism, does not mean the elevation of mankind; it means, on the other hand, working for its debasement. For as lowering as sexual life would be if it were continued in man accompanied by a feeling of shame as a characteristic of animal life, it would be just the same if it were regarded as a degrading duty, reluctantly carried out for the preservation of the species.

Antiquity stood higher than the present day, for example when Lycurgus' laws asserted that a people's strength lies in the breast of blooming womanhood. Accordingly in Sparta, the physical development of the woman was watched over as well as of the man, and the age of marriage was determined with reference to a healthy offspring. Higher, too, stood Judaism in relation to the conception of the seriousness of bearing children. This conviction expressed itself in the strictest hygienic legislation known to history. Jewish, like other Oriental legislation, depended, in relation to sexual morality as in relation to diet, on sharp-sighted observations of natural law and disease. The foundation to a new ethic in these questions cannot be laid, until men begin with Old Testament shrewdness and Old Testament seriousness to handle the life questions which the idealism of Christianity has indeed spiritualised but at the same time debased.

This new ethic will call no other common living of man and woman immoral, except that which gives occasion to a weak offspring, and produces bad conditions for the development of their offspring. The Ten Commandments on this subject will not be prescribed by the founders of religion, but by scientists.

Up to the present day, partly as a result of a perverted modesty in such things, science has only been able to offer incomplete observations on the physical and psychical conditions for the improvement of the human type in its actual genesis.

Ontogeny is really a new science in our century, introduced by Von Leeuwenhock, de Graaf, and others. It was founded in 1827, by von Baer. The differences of opinion and the discovery of different theories are very far from being ended. Purely scientific points of view are being combined with social, physiological, or ethical ones. It is maintained that by changing the diet of the mother the sex of the child can be determined. Attempts have been made to show that about three fifths of all men of genius were first-born children.

People are studying what influence the age of parents has on the child; extreme youth of parents seems unfavourable for the offspring as well as extreme age. The first child of a too youthful mother is often weak, and besides ordinarily the joys of motherhood are not desired, because she feels that physically and psychically a child is too great a burden to her, who herself is only a child. The conditions of a strong, well-nourished offspring require the postponement of the marriage age for women. In northern countries it should be established, if not by law at least by custom, at about twenty years. This is all the more necessary because then the young woman can have behind her some years of careless youthful joy, an undisturbed self-development, and will also have reached the physical development necessary for motherhood. While twenty years should be regarded as the earliest period of marriage it should actually be often postponed some years still for the well-being of the woman, the man, and the children, and married life as a whole, in which most conflicts arise because women have decided about their fate before their personality was definitely formed, before their heart was able to find its choice. The love of the man chooses and the young girl often confuses the happiness of being loved with the happiness of loving, an experience which later on is gone through in a tragic way. To the many questions which are related to heredity and natural selection, belongs one which notices the significance of nature's purpose to cause strong opposites to exert upon one another the strongest attraction. This attraction often during married life changes into antipathy; it almost results in impatience against the characteristics which originally had so deep an attraction. Nature in this case seems to wish to reach its end with the greatest lack of consideration for the happiness of the individual. So often the contradictions of parents seem really to be moulded in full in the child. Occasionally these contradictions are expressed as a deep discord, but in both cases there often arises an exceptional being. To attain correct results in this case, belongs to the numerous still open possibilities.

Differences of opinion are most apparent in the theory of heredity, where there is a struggle between Darwin's view, that even acquired characteristics are inherited, and Galton's and Weissmann's conviction that this is not the case. In connection with this stands, also, the question of the marriage of consanguineous relations; some regard these marriages as dangerous, per se, for the posterity; others only as dangerous from the point of view that the same family trait is often found in both parents, and so becomes strongly impressed on the children. For example, congenital shortsightedness of both parents develops into blindness of the children, their stupidity becomes idiocy, their melancholy, insanity.

The Occident has gradually abolished the Oriental marriage law to which Moses gave validity, while other Oriental legislators, for example, Manes and Mohammed, are still followed to a great extent. In China, too, similar prohibitions have a binding power. Here and there the feeling of the significance of heredity has vaguely appeared in some Occidental writers. Sir Thomas More, like Plato, required a physical examination before entering into marriage. It was not until the nineteenth century that the question of the rights of the child in this respect began to be noticed. It was Robert Owen who in one way awakened the general right feeling in favour of children, by investigations begun in 1815. They showed that children under eight years old were forced to work by blows from leather whips, to work from fifteen to sixteen hours a day, with the result that a fourth or fifth of them ended as cripples. Another Englishman, Malthus, published in 1798 an essay on the Principle of Population, and directed the attention of society to the conditions which had caused him to write his work. He pointed to the deficiency of food supply produced by over-population and the obstacles it offered to legitimate marriages. Again, these conditions, he showed, resulted partly in great mortality among children, partly in the murder of children. Malthus saw the significance of selection and the danger of degeneration. With perfect calmness of conscience he met the storm he had evoked. Personally a blameless and tender hearted man, Malthus, as all other reformers of moral ideas, had to allow the shameless accusations of corruption and immorality to pass over his head. Harriet Martineau, who advocated Malthus's views, had the same experience. When she wrote her novels on this subject she knew very well to what she was exposing herself; but this remarkable woman, who died unmarried and childless, was at an early period of her life filled with a feeling for the holiness of the child. When nineteen years old, at the time of the birth of a small sister, she fell on her knees and devoutly thanked God that she had been allowed to be the witness of the great wonder of the development of the human being from the beginning. The same feeling caused her in her novels to expound the duty of voluntary limitation of population. She was pained by the thought of the fate endured by children, when they were so numerous that their parents were unable to maintain and educate them. This part of the subject of the right of the child called forth in all countries books for and against it. Everywhere the question is discussed. I shall briefly handle the differences of opinion about other sides of the right of the child.

In Francis Galton's celebrated work, Hereditary Genius, almost all has been said that is required to-day from the point of view of the improvement of the race. Galton, as early as the seventies, opposed Darwin's view that acquired characteristics were inherited. In this respect he had a fellow-champion in the German Weissmann, who on his side was opposed, among others, by the English Darwinian Romanes.