The Woman Movement

by Ellen Key

Every great idea begins with great promulgators. The promulgator who has the spirit does not hold to the letter. And the woman movement which was spirit began also with women and men who did not follow the call of the spirit of the time; no, who from lonely heights sent out their awakening call to the time. Men who give their age new ideals have always religious natures. This means, according to a good definition, that they are “individualists in their being, social in their action.”

Such natures burn, above all, with the passion to find themselves. Then they burn with the passion to sacrifice themselves in order to help others, whose suffering or wrongs they feel as deeply as if they were their own. No one who passively endures an injustice against himself has the material in him to struggle for the rights of others. The one who patiently forbears becomes an accessory to the injustice done to others. He who resists the injustice which he himself meets can open up the way to a higher right for others. Such path-finders were the first apostles of the emancipation of women. They consecrated to this task a faith which required no proof, a faith which saw visions and heard melodies of the glorious future that their victory would prepare for mankind. They emanated neither from scientific investigations, nor from systems of political economy, nor from philosophic evidence, nor theories of political science. They flung themselves into the struggle with inadequate weapons, without plan of campaign, just as do all impelled by the spirit. But such a method always evokes later dissension among the disciples. Sects are formed, gradually a church is crystallised, an orthodoxy, a papacy, and an inquisition. This course is physically necessary as long as mankind is still in greatest part a mass. A Paul more “Christian” than Christ and a Luther more “Paulist” than Paul are met also in the woman movement.

This has now, among most people of culture, passed beyond the stage of the great apostles and martyrs and heralds. The movement has reached the point where certain typical manifestations, certain conventional forms testify that the masses—which stoned the prophets—have now, since the ideas of the woman movement have become truisms, banalities, the fashion, appropriated them to themselves and endeavour to transform them to their image and adapt them to their needs.

Again and again the old tale repeats itself: the trolls steal the weapons of the gods but they cannot use them. Again and again there is occasion to deplore the fact that the autocrat of genius, whether he rule over a people or a kingdom of ideas, has heirs, heirs who diminish his work. Again and again it must be recognised that no spiritual formation vanishes at one blow. The servile mind, intrigue, pettiness, delusion—all that, from which the great spirits of the woman movement hoped to “emancipate” woman—could not suddenly vanish out of the world. And since all this must go somewhere it finally finds room in the woman movement itself!

But on the other side—since after all everything has another side—it must be admitted that the levelling and conserving tendency of the average person is of real value at the stage when an idea begins to be transformed into law and custom.

Those who can work only in crowds receive their significance exactly because of their collective work. They push aside the “individual emancipation” which they do not need for their own part, since they have no individuality to emancipate. But by diligent and efficient work they succeed in securing certain results, which are the common cause of all. So the Philistines make for themselves a footstool of that which was a stumbling-block for their congenial souls in the previous generation. From this height they look down upon the new truth of their time. And those who perceive and uphold this new truth turn aside from the great uniformed army which now advances safely where the little vanguard has previously and laboriously opened up the way. Those who turn aside will form the new vanguard when it comes to achieving, in the spirit of the first apostle, the emancipation not only of women in the mass, but of each individual woman. When the present work of the woman movement for joint, common ends shall no longer be necessary, because one end after another has been attained, then comes the task of the present “radical” feminism: the accomplishment of “emancipation” by leading it up to those free heights which already the path-finders are endeavouring to attain, the heights where every feminine individuality can choose her own path of life, perhaps at variance with all others; can choose it in freedom, answerable only to her own conscience. Although this summary grouping historically as well as psychologically corresponds approximately to the past, present, and future of the woman movement, yet there are so many ramifications of the three groups into one another, that the woman movement now exhibits a tangled confusion in which every exact demarcation is impossible.

Whoever lives to witness it will see the course of progress just described—for which the modern labour movement offers quite as good material for observation as the woman movement—repeat itself in the next great emancipation movement. I mean the movement for the right and freedom of the child, which will be the unconditional result of the victory of the woman and labour movements. This idea is still in the morning-clear hour of inspiration. But from the cry, “Away with the child destroying home training,” we can hear that the troop of Philistines will appear by afternoon upon the scene, to adopt the idea into their midst!

By means of the comparison with socialism, I have endeavoured to emphasise that the woman movement’s formation of dogmas and its doctrinary fanaticism are not effects of the peculiarity of the feminine mind. These phenomena are typical of every movement of the time thus far observed. They are essential above all because a new belief without dogma and without ritual is for the masses a sword without a hilt: it offers nothing tangible, nothing whereby the masses can come into relation with the idea.

That certain feminists still believe that the woman movement has advanced just as the exodus of the Children of Israel out of the land of bondage, that is to say, under God’s special protection against wandering astray; that they stigmatise as “treason” and “defection” the assertion that this movement was determined by the same psychological and sociological laws as every other movement for freedom—this shows to how high a degree many leaders of the woman movement lack elementary psychological and sociological conceptions. This deficiency is, however, being continually remedied. And in the generation which now advances, dogmatic fanaticism has well nigh vanished, but pure enthusiasm is preserved.

We can thus expect from this generation a clearer understanding of the necessary social repressions which the woman movement has now sufficient strength to impose upon itself without forfeiting thereby its character of a movement for freedom. As such it cannot and dare not cease until it has attained all its ends. As long as the law treats women as one race, men as another, there is a woman question. Not until man and woman, equal and united, work together for mankind will the woman movement belong to the past.