But nothing is more certain than that the feminine personality, whether her innermost desire be spiritual creative instinct, erotic happiness, maternal bliss, or universal human goodness, will acquire ever new forms of expression: forms of expression which the once liberal, now more conservative feminists and the modern socialistic feminists partly do not divine and partly—divining—deplore! For the present even the “emancipated” woman follows as a rule the paths which social custom has marked out for her sex, as well as the cultural ideas which have been, thus far, those of man. But if, in the coming thousand years, a feminine culture shall really supplement the masculine, then this will be exactly in the measure in which women have the courage to create and to act as most feminists now do not even dare think. Then it will be evident that all social movements of the present time, especially the woman movement and socialism, are only the work of the path finder for the masculine and feminine superman or, if you prefer the older expression, complete man.
Like other “old guards,” the veterans of feminism will not surrender but will fall upon the field of battle. The little girls there below will one day celebrate their memory. For through their struggles the way became free for youth, the way which leads out to the wide sea where perhaps shipwreck awaits the one who ventures out into the darkness with her fragile skiff. But many will brave the voyage and bide their fate, strong, proud, and composed as the maiden in Schwind’s Wasserfahrt—that splendid symbol of the woman of the future.
CHAPTER II
THE INNER RESULTS OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT
If I now start out to consider the woman soul as it has developed itself under the influence of all the circumstances mentioned above, perhaps many will expect a theory about the character of the feminine soul life. But, at present, when the greatest problems of psychology are in revolution and undecided, such a theory would be as scientifically impossible as aphorisms are unanswerable. Likewise, conclusions, based upon experience, concerning the psychic peculiarity of woman would be in this chaotic transition period, superficial, if they attempted to be absolute. Only one decided opinion about the spiritual life of woman I cannot—in consequence of my monistic-evolutionary conception of the spiritual and physical life—refrain from expressing. This opinion is that, in the one hundred thousand years at least in which woman has practised the physical maternal functions, the spiritual attributes essential for motherhood must have been so strongly developed by her that this development has had, and still has always, as a result a pronounced difference between the feminine and masculine soul—that is to say, everywhere where the soul, as well as the body of a woman, is adapted and desirous of motherhood—a fitness and readiness which can still be called the normal condition. The spiritual qualities which maternity required have become the attributes of “womanliness,” the qualities which paternity required, have become the attributes of “manliness.” This difference has become quite as significant for the functional fitness of both sexes for the perpetuation and development of the race, as for the wealth of life of each new generation. The obliteration or retention of this difference is therefore a vital question for mankind.
Figuratively expressed, this seems to me the process: from a common root of universal human spiritual life issue two stems which can again unite in their blossoming. The ramification has necessarily involved a division of labour in two equally important spheres. From this point of view I give, in the following, my opinion of the value of the influence of the woman movement upon the spiritual life of woman.
We all know that life expresses itself as movement, that movement brings with it change, transformation; that this can mean quite as well disintegration as higher organisation.
The woman movement is the most significant of all movements for freedom in the world’s history. The question whether this movement leads mankind in a higher or lower direction is the most serious question of the time. Those who assert unconditionally the former or the latter have uttered a premature judgment. The question must be formulated thus:
(a) Has the woman movement brought to mankind a higher degree of vital force, a greater faculty for self-preservation, a more complete organisation, by which the more simple forms have become more finely complex, the more uniform have become richer, more diverse; the incoherent have attained a more perfect unity? Or has the woman movement called forth an activity which represses life? degrades, scatters, and reduces the powers to uniformity, in society and in mankind?
(b) Is woman’s spiritual life now in general above the level at which it was in the beginning of the woman movement? Have modern women finer perceptions, deeper feelings, clearer ideas, a firmer will, richer association of ideas? Do their spiritual faculties so work together that they mutually enhance instead of hinder one another? In a word is the modern woman more soulful than the woman of any other time?
(c) Is the body of the modern woman, at all stages of life, stronger, more healthy, and more beautiful than that of the woman of the previous century, when the woman movement began in real earnest in Europe?