The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

Such a transformation of the conditions of society and of the individual view of the true worth of life will enable young men and women, between the ages of twenty and thirty, to found their own home and under simple conditions, to secure their happiness. Here would be one of the most essential foundations for the origin of a new race, which would have the ancient feeling for the hearth as an altar, and would have the life of love as the service of a divinity. Only through such a transformation might it be expected that the deepest misery of society, prostitution, could be restrained. Only after such a transformation could we with full right require from our youth that self-mastery which is the best pre-condition of the sound development of the new generation.

As things are at present, it is certain that just as there are really immoral, unmarried mothers, so there are others deeply moral, who would be mothers with a great pure love to the father of their child, but who for various reasons should not be united with them in legal marriage. And even if the contraction of marriage were simplified, such motherhood on the part of single women, should continue to exist.

Bjoernsen, when he gave lectures in Norway on sexual morality, maintained the view that the woman who wished for motherhood, but who was not adapted in her opinion for marriage, should be fully entitled to the first, without the last being regarded as necessary, on condition that she was willing to fulfil to the child her maternal duties. This idea certainly has a future. In Germany there was a well-known case in which a fully mature woman, not a mere girl, saw shortly after her marriage that the temperaments and conditions of both parties to the marriage would make it an unhappiness for both. She separated, therefore, brought her child into the world unmarried, educated it publicly and with self-sacrifice. Now she has along with the peace which comes from work and the happiness of motherhood, the possibility of fulfilling her duty also as daughter, while married life would have destroyed this for all parties. This is one of the many cases out of the great collection of life, that shows how foolish is that requirement of society to press human nature, in its manifold types, into one mould, with a sphere of duty arranged in the same way for all.

But the sphere of duty, an ever-widening one, is the sphere which embraces the right of the child. Yet its lines will be drawn in the future bounded in quite a different way from now. It will then be looked upon as the supreme right of the child that he shall not be born in a discordant marriage. Above everything, therefore, marriage must be free. This means that the two parties can freely separate after mutual agreement. In entering into marriage and in dissolving it, only certain duties towards the children are to be assumed. Such legal provisions might well be superfluous even in this case; in others, they might be important. But in none are they to become an obstacle to the development of this relation to the children. On the other hand, the compulsory marriage laws of to-day, as well in relation to divorce as to the guardianship given the man, have become obstacles to the higher development of the common life of man and woman.

The vigorous drawing together of the bonds of marriage will not protect children from growing up in a destroyed home. This protection will be secured by deeper earnestness in entering upon marriage, but above all by a deeper sense of responsibility to the children themselves. This will make it possible for the parents who see themselves deceived in their married happiness to keep a peaceful resignation, a high character, as they continue to live together, if they feel that this is the best solution of the conflict, for the children who are already born. But this resolution does not mean the continuance of real married life, but parenthood alone. Only so can it be really useful to the children that the marriage should not be dissolved. The parents, who are profoundly and finally alienated must not bestow life on any new being.

Marriages lightly entered into are many; lightly entered into divorces are few, at least where there are children. It is not the prescriptions of the law, but those of blood which work as a restraining influence here even at the present day. The decisive sentence is not spoken by society but by the children. But these deep motives are just as decisive in the case of a free union as in the case of a legal one; if the father or the mother is only kept with the children by compulsion, the children have not much to lose. The important thing for unwritten duties, duties which largely can not be determined by law, is to awaken the conscience of fathers and mothers in order to create a better morality. Perhaps for this, new legislation is necessary for the present. Certainly antiquated legal conceptions should be done away with; they have done good duty as a past training for morality. Now they stand in the way of the higher morality. The man or the woman who plays the rôle of seduction, spoiling the life of a young woman or a young man, or disturbing the peace of a happy marriage, this type of character, is being treated with ever-increasing contempt. The more one learns to distinguish the heartless play of masculine or feminine desire for conquest, the selfish soulless claims of the senses, from those of love, the more does the conception of morality become equivalent to the feeling of responsibility towards the new generation.

The gratification of natural impulses, which act contrary to the real profound intention of nature, is what destroys individuals and peoples. But as has been said, these devastations cannot be successfully restrained by the extermination of man's material nature.

It is a favourable symptom when a poet opposes the mastery of material nature, apart from the feeling of responsibility. But it is harmful when this sensuousness is made, as Tolstoi does, equivalent to the conception of love. Love must not be debased to simple sensuousness, nor must it be etherealised to a simple spiritual quality, if the human race is to be freed from the debasing mastery of impulse. This happens, as I have often shown before, and in an earlier part of this work as well, by the elevation of sensuousness to love. I mean by this that the spiritual unity of beings, the indulgence of tenderness, the sympathy of souls, the community of work, and the happiness of comradeship, will be as really decisive factors in the lofty emotions of love, and in the charm of love, as the attraction of the senses. This wealth in the elements of mutual dependence is what keeps fidelity in love both inwardly and outwardly. This soft current of the soul's depths keeps the sensuous charm fresh; while mere relation, both legal marriage and free union, very soon exhausts happiness and leaves behind ennui, if love has contained only sensuous attraction, and not that mutual feeling of dependence, which involves the union of the soul and the sense, and which unites the spirit and the sympathies.

The duty and responsibility towards the children will be all the more strict as society learns to regard it as one of its principal duties to hinder all thoughtless and undeserved suffering.

The morality of the future will not be found in sacrificing to the holiness of the family so-called illegitimate children, who are often by nature richly endowed, but who by the prevailing legal system receive such treatment, that they often become what they are called, and so are filled with vengeance against society and the perverse conceptions of law whose victims they are. Child murder, phosphorous poisonings, "angel-making"—all these are connected with these perverse legal ideas. But all of these results are still less pernicious than those which society draws upon itself through those "disgraced" children, who go to ruin not physically but psychically. In them, there are not only frequently good powers lost, but socially destructive powers developed. When the whole of Europe shuddered over the murder of the Empress Elizabeth, one fact above every other seemed to me terrible. The murderer confessed, "I know nothing of my parents."