The fundamental types of single women depicted here—the person of intellect and the person of feeling—are found everywhere. The former according to current opinion already predominate in America; in Europe, it seems to me, the latter still prevail. That the main classes include innumerable varieties, it is needless to say. There are for example the numerous, quite ordinary, family girls who would be happy if they could give up their independence in order to enjoy the protection of their parents’ or their own home. And the same obtains also with the quite as ancient type of woman, Undine, who—soulless and cold—enslaves all men. If she is in any civic vocation, she knows how to get the smallest amount of work for herself and, in case she is engaged in the artistic field, the best possible criticism. Conscience is an acquaintance which she has never made and she is also of the opinion that everything agreeable is permitted to her; she simply slides past anything disagreeable. Although work belongs to these disagreeable things, she continues it until she has found means to place her “qualities” in the most advantageous manner upon the matrimonial market.
The diametrical antithesis of this curvilinear type is the rectilinear. It has, just as the preceding type, existed at all times. It is the woman who really never demanded anything of life but “a work and a duty” and finds both in abundance in all positions of life. She is found year in year out at her desk, in appropriate working garb, free from all æsthetics; proud “if she never has needed to miss a day”; proud that she never has come late. On the contrary she never goes on time. For she has so grown into the business or the office that she takes everything upon herself that is required without murmuring, as a well-disciplined soldier in the ranks of the grey working army; thankful, in addition, if her long working cares yield her a little life annuity or pension for her old age. This type is found principally among women over fifty—fortunately. For this class of women which the pre-feministic circumstances created, have, by their “frugality” carried almost to the verge of criminality, by their humble, conscientious servitude, lowered the wages of their colleagues who are more full of life. These latter have begun work in the hope that it finally will “free” them; that is, will give them something of that for which their innermost being longs, not only their daily bread—a bread which sickness or a turn of affairs moreover can take from them at any time. And perhaps they never succeed even in having their own room where they at least could have repose! Underpaid, overworked, tired to death, who can wonder if these women have lost, if they ever possessed them, the essential characteristics of “womanhood”—active kindness, repose even in movement, charming gentleness? The Icelandic poet of yore already knew that “Few become fair through wounds.” These women must put all their strength into their work and into the effort to conceal their underpayment by “respectable” clothing, or else lose their positions. In everything else they must economise to the utmost and perhaps in addition be laughed at because of their economy. They succeed, often admirably, in maintaining themselves in proud fair struggle, in rejecting “erotic” perquisites to add to their income and in fulfilling conscientiously the requirements of their work. Yet to do this with lively interest, with preserved spiritual elasticity, with quiet amiability—for this their strength does not suffice, exhausted by insufficient nourishment, insufficient sleep, still more insufficient recreation, and strained daily to the utmost. Their nervousness finds vent in either hard or hysterical expression and the public, annoyed by their ill-humour, divines little of the tragedies enacted in offices, business houses, cafés or similar places. If a suicide concludes the tragedy, the public shudders for a moment and—all goes on as before.
Thus “emancipation” presents itself in reality for millions of women. To what extent the middle-class woman movement is indirectly to blame for this fact has already been emphasised.
The essential reason is however the prevailing economic condition of society. By the uninterrupted fever of competition and the accumulation of riches, it dries up the soul and robs it of goodness as well as of joy. When the great, beautiful, eternal sources of joy are exhausted, the life stimulus is sought in exclusively physical pleasures, which are always made more exciting in order to be able to arouse still, in the languid nervous system, feelings of desire. Moreover, there is the neurosis and weariness of life of the overworked, of those continually quaking about their material safety, of those who could be revived by the noble and simple joys of life, to which those jaded with riches are already not susceptible; but for all these millions and millions such joys are not accessible because hunger for profit depresses wages. If in addition to that we take into account the increasing suffering of the best because of the ever developing feeling of solidarity; and if finally we consider that women, who through the protection of the home could preserve something of warmth-irradiating energy, are now in increasing numbers driven out of the home, then we have some of the reasons which—in higher degree than the religious and philosophic reasons which also exist—contribute to the joylessness of our time.
A contribution to the meagre stock of good fortune of the present time is furnished however by the joy of life among young girls working under favourable conditions. Among them we meet a new soul condition, which could be designated, as briefly as possible, as covetousness of everything which can promote their personal development and a beautiful liberality with what is thus won. They can gratify their energetic desire for self-development by sport, travel, books, art and other means of culture; their freedom of action between working hours is not restricted by private duties. They can utilise their leisure time and their income as they please: for recreation, pleasure, social intercourse, social work or private, charitable activity. No father nor husband encroaches upon their free agency. And so dear does this liberty become to them through the manifold joys which it furnishes, that these young girls, in constantly increasing numbers, refuse to relinquish their individual independence for the sake of a marriage which, even presupposing the happiest love, always means a restriction of the freedom of movement that they enjoyed while single. And since the modern woman knows that, in the sphere of spiritual values, nothing can be attained without sacrifice, she prefers to keep free agency and to sacrifice love. If she chooses in the opposite direction, the task of adaptation will be the more difficult, the longer and the more intensely she has enjoyed freedom. The modern young girl, if she deigns to bestow her hand upon a man, not infrequently has her pretty head so crammed full of principles of equality that she sometimes (frequently in America), by written contract establishes her independence to the smallest detail, which sometimes includes separate apartments and the prohibition that either of the contracting parties shall have the key to the apartment of the other.
There are many varieties of the new type of woman. There is for instance the tom-boy, the “gamin,” who for her life cannot give up the right to mad pranks and mischievous jokes. There is the girl consumed with ambition, who sacrifices all other values in order to attain the goal of her ambition in art or science. There is the fanatically altruistic girl, who considers the work for mankind so important that she feels she has not the right to an “egoistic” love happiness. There is the ascetic ethereal girl, who looks upon marriage and child-bearing as animal functions, unworthy of a spiritual being, but above all as unbeautiful. And for many of these modern, æsthetically refined, nervously sensitive young girls the æsthetic point of view is decisive. All love the work which permits them to live according to their ideals. Still it often happens that Ovidian metamorphoses take place: that the young girl sees the cloud or the swan transformed into a god, upon whose altar she sacrifices, with joy, her free agency and everything else which only a few weeks earlier she cherished as her holy of holies. The men who view this process with a smile, think that the anti-erotic ideals were only a new weapon of defence in the eternal war between the sexes. But these men often learn how mistaken they were when they themselves become participators in the war. They meet women so proud, so sensitive regarding their independence, so merciless in their strength, so easily wounded in their instincts, so zealous to devote themselves to their personal task, so determined to preserve their freedom, that erotic harmony seldom can be realised. Yes, these women often repudiate love only because it becomes a bond to their freedom, a hindrance to their work, a force for the bending of their will to another’s will.
The women, womanly in their innermost depths, who really feel free only when they give themselves wholly, are becoming continually more rare. But where such a wholly devoted woman still exists, she is the highest type of woman which any period has produced. Especially if she springs from a family of old culture. She has then, combined in her personality, the best of tradition and the best of the revolution evoked by the woman movement. The fibres of her being absorb their nourishment with instinctive certainty out of the fruitful soil which pride, devotion to duty, family love, requirements of culture and refinement of form, for many generations, have created. But her conscious soul-life flowers in the sun of the present; she thinks new thoughts and has new aims. Just as little as she disavows her desire for love, so little does she desire love under other conditions than those of spiritual unity and human equality. If she meets the man who can give her this and if she loves him, then he can be more certain than the man of any other time that he is really loved, that no ulterior motive obscures the devotion of this free woman. He has seen her susceptible to all the riches of life; has seen her assist in social tasks, perform the duty of every day joyful in her work, proud of her independence attained through her work. He knows that just as she is she would have continued to be if he had not entered into her life. How different is this girl from the one of earlier times, who was driven by the emptiness of her life into continual love affairs, which could not lead to a marriage nor exist in a marriage that possessed nothing of love!
This most beautiful new type of woman approaches spiritually the aforementioned type of single, aged women, who because of their economic independence found time for a fine personal culture. These followed not infrequently in their youth, from a distance it is true, but with joyous sympathy, the progress of the woman movement. They shook their heads later over its extremes. With new joy they regard the young girls just described, in whom they find a more universal development than in themselves, because these young girls have been developed through active consumption of power which was spared to the older women, although they must have summoned much passive energy in order to maintain their personality against convention. The young girls find often in these older women a fine understanding, which they richly reciprocate. Such terms of friendship are the most beautiful which the present has to offer: they resemble the meeting of the morning and evening red in the bright midsummer nights of the North.
No time could have been so rich in exquisite feminine personalities, at all ages and in all stages of life, as ours. We must not draw our conclusions regarding the abundance of such women, in the older culture epochs, from the illustrious names of women which incessantly recur in the pictures of the earlier times—like stage soldiers—until they give the illusion of a great host.