The Morality of Woman, and Other Essays

by Ellen Key

Many indeed still doubt that marriage can become this highest form of existence in life, in which the surrender of the ego and the self-seeking of the ego reach a perfect harmony. It is asserted that this ideal condition can be attained perhaps by exceptional people, but never by ordinary people, and that the morality of the latter can be kept sound only by legal and social restraint.

My belief, however, is that, just as the Children of Israel followed the pillar of fire, so ordinary men follow at a distance exceptional men, and in this way mankind as a whole advances. Ordinary men are just now determined upon certain conceptions which at the end of the previous century were not conclusive even for exceptional people. The marriage of reason, for example, is already considered ignoble by many. The authority of the parents is very seldom in evidence either to coerce the children into a marriage without love or to restrain them from it. Even the superficial erotic emotion of our day is serious in comparison with the shallow and frivolous or vulgar and cruel gallantry of the eighteenth century. In the geological deposits of legislation and still more in those of literature we can study these risings of the levels of the erotic sentiments. So we are thereby convinced that the demands and conflicts of the exceptional men become gradually those of the ordinary men also, even though the ordinary men are always some generations behind the men who are stirred by new emotions, new conflicts, when the many have reached the problems which some decades before occupied only the few.

Certainly it may, under present imperfect conditions, often be a duty not to destroy the outward form of marriage for the sake of the children. But by no means can this duty be preached as universally binding. Only the individual himself can in each separate case determine the dissolution best, both for the children and for the married couple themselves, of a marriage which has fallen asunder within. When we consider the development in its entirety, the sooner people cease to sanction the present marriage the more fortunate it will be; for the sooner will the transformation be forced upon us by which marriage will maintain its permanence only from within. Only then will man be wholly able to have the experiences and to find the new, delicate means by which fidelity can be strengthened and happiness assured. But man will not seek this expedient so long as he can rely upon the power of legal right and social opinion to hold together that which love does not unify.

The ever increasing individualization of love indicates that mono-marriage will doubtless remain the form of erotic union between man and woman. But this rule will have, in the future, as in the past, many exceptions, since the feelings can change. The conflicts which will thus arise will bring suffering as a consequence, but not the bitterness nor the contention which the property sense in marriage now so often occasions. The deep consciousness that love belongs not to the sphere of duty but only to that of freedom will cause the one who has lost the love of the other to feel the same resignation before the inevitable, as if he were separated from the other by death.

And in cases where the individual is not capable of this resignation, then the law as well as custom shall make it impossible for the one to hold back the other against his will. Each of the twain shall be master of his own person and of his property, of his work and of his mode of life; the union shall in each especial case be arranged by the agreement of the individuals, and the law shall decide only the rights and duties of the husband and wife in regard to the children.

When in this way it shall come to pass that neither the husband nor wife shall have in outward sense, in external things, anything to gain or to lose by the consummation or dissolution of marriage, then only the erotic problem appears in all its seriousness.

Many mistakes, many caricatures, many tragic failures will naturally be the result of freedom. Great waves have great combers. A new principle cannot be put into effect without bringing with it new mistakes. But we may, however, be convinced that the laws of life—to which belongs the law that suffering follows the misuse of freedom—will finally be able to bring everything within its right limits. Nothing indeed has occasioned more suffering as an indirect consequence than Christianity, and although Jesus knew that, yet he did not hesitate to give to mankind this new creative force which destroyed in order to create. But it is above all His ideality which His present followers lack, the great ideality which dares to believe in the might of the spirit rather than that of the form.

It is, therefore, quite natural that these Christians, the upholders of society, oppose the new ideal of morality with vain apprehensions. They believe that a woman whose conscious aim is "Self-assertion in self-surrender" will forfeit the immediate, fresh originality in this surrender. They believe marriage must be destroyed when the support of its development is no longer bond and injunction, but is its own vital force. They believe morality will lose in the struggle if youth learns to consider the love between man and woman as the central condition of life. These, and a hundred similar apprehensions have all one and the same source.

This source is the Christian conception of life which has displaced the great, sound, strong conviction of antiquity of the holiness of nature. Mary was the "Virgin Mother;" Jesus, celibate. Paul regarded marriage as the lesser of two evils. Thus man first learned to regard the unmarried state as the higher and the married as the lower state. The result of the Christian conception of life then was that the sex relation was regarded in and for itself as unholy, human nature in and for itself as base and the earthly demand for happiness as the greatest egotism.

Therefore the Christian conception of life is now, since it has accomplished its great task of culture, the development of altruism—an obstacle to the unified conception out of which the happiness of mankind will finally develop.