The Morality of Woman, and Other Essays

by Ellen Key

The depreciation for mankind of the significance of the sex relation and of the significance of love in the sex relation brings into it all the immorality still imposed by conventionalism as morality.

We no longer consider, as in our mother's youth, ignorance of the side of life which concerns the propagation of the race the essential condition of womanly purity. But the conventional idea of purity still maintains that the untouched condition of the senses belongs to this conception. And it would be right, if the distinction were made between purity and chastity. Purity is the new-fallen snow which can be melted or sullied; chastity is steel tempered in the fire by white heat. For chastity is only developed together with complete love; this not only excludes equally all partition among several but also makes a separation between the demands of the heart and the senses impossible. The essence of chastity is, according to George Sand's profound words: "to be able never to betray the soul with the senses nor the senses with the soul" ("de ne pouvoir jamais tromper ni l'ame avec les sens ni les sens avec l'ame"). And as absolute consecration is its distinctive mark, so is it also its demand. This alone is the chastity which must characterize the family life and form in the future the basis of foundation for the happiness of the people.

Literature was, therefore, wholly justified when in the name of nature it attacked the hyperidealistic subtlety which raised the love of the heart to the highest rank and made that of the senses the lowest; and when it desired that the woman should not only know what complete love was but that she should also when she loved desire that completeness.

Because from time to time powerful voices were raised, like George Sand's or Almquist's, calling without consideration not only that marriage immoral which was consummated without mutual love but also that marriage immoral which was continued without mutual love—a purer consciousness has awakened in questions regarding the conditions of the genesis of the unborn race and elevated the conditions of the personal dignity of man and woman. So eventually it will come to pass that no finely sensitive woman will become a mother except through mutual love; that this motherhood sanctioned legally or not so sanctioned shall be considered the only true motherhood, and every other motherhood untrue. Thus will mankind awaken to such a feeling of the "Sanctity of the generation," and to such an understanding of the conditions of the health, strength and beauty of the race, that every marriage which has its source in worldly or merely sensual motives, or in reasons of prudence or in a feeling of duty shall be considered as Almquist calls it: "A criminal counterfeiting of the highest values of life." And the same criminal counterfeit obtains in every married life which is continued under the compulsion, the distaste or the resignation of one of the two. Man will be penetrated with the consciousness that the whole ethical conception which now in and with marriage gives to a husband or a wife rights over the personality of the other, is a crude survival of the lower periods of culture; that everything which is exchanged between husband and wife in their life together, can only be the free gift of love, can never be demanded by one or the other as a right. Man will understand that when one can no longer continue the life in love then this life must cease; that all vows binding forever the life of feeling are a violence of one's personality, since one cannot be held accountable for the transformation of one's feeling. Even though this new moral ideal should in the beginning dissolve many untrue marriages and thus cause much suffering, yet all this suffering is necessary. It belongs to the attainment of the new erotic ethics which will uplift man and woman in that sphere where now the spirit of slavery and of obtuseness under a holy name degrade them; where social convention sanctions prostitution alongside monogamy, and vouchsafes to the seducer but not to the seduced, social esteem, calling the unmarried woman ruined who in love has become a mother, but the married woman respectable who without love gives children to the man who has bought her!

The erotic-ethical consciousness of mankind cannot be uplifted until the new idea of morality with all its consequences is clearly established.

This ideal has two types of adversary. One is the adherent of the conventional morality; the other the supporter of the transitory union to which the name of "free love" is erroneously applied.

Those of the first type demand quite the same morality for the man as for the woman. They assert that celibacy for either sex brings with it serious difficulties. They maintain that the social feeling of duty, not mutual love, must be the ground of conjugal fidelity. They call "pure love" love untouched by all that which they call "sensuality."

These same moral dogmas in recent years have manifested themselves in the effort to quench all fire, whiten all burning red coals, and drape all nudity in literature and art. The supporters of this dogma certainly understand—since, to begin at the beginning they have surely glanced into the Bible and Homer—that the undertaking would be too vast were it to extend to classic literature. But all the more ardently they have directed their zeal against modern literature and art. And if they do not encounter energetic opposition the fig leaf will soon among us also attest the fall of taste and of the soul.

"Free love" has also its fanatics who are guilty of quite as crass excess. They have no conception of soulful and true devotion, which they consider an absurdity or a conventionality under which human nature cannot bow without hypocrisy. For since experience shows that lifelong love is frequently an illusion, so, they say, one must not begin by expecting it! The so-called Bohemians have shown as great monomania in their rotation around this one point, the right of the senses, as have the zealots of traditional morality in their rotation around their point, the suppression of the senses. The extreme result of both would be retrogression to a lower degree of culture; in one case to the asceticism of the Middle Ages, in the other to the promiscuity of the savage. Both forget the reality of life. On the one side they ignore this reality in their absolute demands without consideration of temperament or circumstances; in their assertion of the unqualified moral superiority of woman and in depreciation of the significance of love for the full harmony of man and woman. On the other side they ignore this reality when they try to make woman as unrestrained morally as man has hitherto been; when they forget all the suffering of the new generation born and reared in such an unrestrained existence; when they learn nothing of the nature of woman from the many younger and older women who live solitary and yet sound and useful lives in the deep conviction that, since they have not found the great, mutual love, which decides existence, any union with a man would be degrading and unhappy. Development has, because of multifarious influences made entirety and continuity in love a greater life necessity for the woman of culture in general than for the man of the same intellectual level. A man, therefore, ordinarily dissolves an erotic relation without bitterness when he has ceased to love, while a woman, even after her love has ceased, often suffers because the relationship has not endured a lifetime.

It is this ever increasing peremptory demand for erotic completeness of the woman of developed individuality of the present time, which causes her always to wish to more fervently cherish the personality of the man as entirely as it is her happiness and her pride to be able to give her own. It is this demand for entirety which, among Germanic peoples, at least, makes woman neither desirous nor psychologically fitted for the so-called "free love." This is evidently to be concluded from the vicissitudes of those who have tried it.