When anti-feminist men prophesy that men will love their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters less when pitted against them as political opponents or competitors, they prophesy certainly in many cases the truth. Politics have already estranged fathers from sons, brothers from brothers. But this demonstrates only either that the personal feelings were weaker than the political passions or that these latter have destroyed the attributes which made the personality lovable. But if men are really able to love and women remain lovable, even as political personalities, then a man will not cease to love a woman, even if she votes for a different congressional candidate! Such prophecies have not been verified in other spheres from which men sought to intimidate women by similar warnings. For woman retains her power over man. if she retains her womanly charm, created out of peace, harmony, and kindness. Not that of which a woman speaks, not that for which she works, determines man’s feeling and conduct; but how she does it. A woman may charm a man by a political speech, and drive him away by her table talk. A poor working woman can, without a word, induce the same man to give her his seat in a street car who the next minute can be brutal to an assuming and incapable fellow workwoman. In a word, what a woman makes of her rights and what they make of her—that alone determines the measure of veneration, sympathy, love, which she may expect from a man.
That women have lost their equilibrium cannot be denied. How could it be otherwise? Not only have they in the last half century experienced, together with man, Naturalism and the New Romantic movement, Neo-Kantianism, the Higher Criticism, Bismarck and Bebel, Darwin and Spencer, Wagner and Nietzsche, Ibsen and Tolstoi, Haeckel and von Hartmann, and still many, many more, but they themselves in dizzy haste have been hurled out of their position in society, protected by the family, which they had occupied for centuries. It is obvious that at the present moment the spiritual mobility of women must be greater than their harmony; that the raw culture material which they possess must be richer than that which they can utilise; their life experiences more significant than their art of life. The modern woman must appear for the present less symmetrical, more uncertain, than man’s ideal woman in earlier times. But enduring cultural progress cannot be measured by comparison with the ideal figures of the poetry or of the life of earlier times. It must be estimated according to the average type in a certain period. And the average woman of our time is, in the fullest significance of the word, more full of vitality and adaptability, more individually developed, more beneficial socially, than the average woman of fifty years ago. With the freedom of movement the social feeling has increased; with the participation in universal human culture, the richness of content: the spiritual life has become more complex, and the possibilities of expression of this new soul-life, more numerous.
But since the average man, in the meantime, has undergone no comparable development, he is estranged, has lost his bearings, and consequently repudiates a movement which, directly and indirectly, makes such great demands for the development of his own higher spiritual qualities. Heretofore men could force women to endure undue interference, and so have deprived them of the education wherein the possible consequences of action are considered at the same time with the thought of the action. But the woman movement has now raised a partition between the sexes such as is found in the aquarium where it becomes necessary to teach the pike to allow the carp, also, to live: every time the pike makes a dash at the carp he strikes his head against the obstruction, until the motive of repression becomes so strong that the glass wall can be taken away and both carp and pike live together in peace.
CHAPTER VI
THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MARRIAGE
Certain feminists believe that the woman movement has accomplished such meagre results in regard to the reorganisation of family right for the sole reason that men, who once created the right for their own advantage, still cling to the injustice out of egoism. These feminists forget that the family is the social form of life in which tradition has the greatest power. It speaks here with the voice of the blood; it works through our deepest instincts, our strongest needs of life, our innermost feelings, as these have developed through many thousands of years under the influences which were exercised in and through the family. To accomplish in this sphere not only reforms upon paper but also vigorous modifications—that is, new laws and customs which are rooted in new spiritual conditions of the people as a whole—is more necessary than that man grant women a share in legislation. Innumerable individual human vicissitudes must be experienced and repeated in new forms, entering finally into the universal consciousness, before such spiritual soil can be formed. The man became and remained the head of the family because all experiences and social factors once made this arrangement most advantageous for father, mother, and children. Woman will be able to realise her new ideas in regard to love-life and mother-right to the degree in which she demonstrates, not only in speech and writing but also in vigorous daily living, that these ideals surpass in vital effect those which now obtain.
In the last half century, among the Germanic peoples, however, the family life has already undergone essential transformations, while the Romantic world still continues to exhibit features which in the first half of the 19th century were typical even among these peoples. Marriages are arranged by the father, divorce is considered either a sin or a shame, the paternal power is still absolute, the homogeneous relationship among all the members of the family—in joy and sorrow—is inviolable. The feeling of the son for the mother, bordering almost upon Madonna worship, and the passion of the father for their little children, must, however, always have been more characteristic of the Romance peoples than of the Germans.
Among the latter the attainment of individualism, first in the sphere of legislation, still more in that of customs, most of all in that of mode of thought and feeling, has altered the position of the individual in the family. While the family exhibited fifty years ago a tightly closed unity, in which women had only slight significance, now the wife as well as the husband, mother as well as father, daughter as well as son, assert their personality, not only in the family, but often even against the family. Wives draw the arguments for their self assertion most frequently from the principles of the woman movement.
Truly, in the course of the century, many married women have succeeded in finding expression for their significant universal human or feminine attributes in marriage, and thus have ennobled it. But the self-conscious effort to elevate the position of the wife began simultaneously with the demand that no human right could be denied to a woman upon the ground of her sex, whether within or without marriage.
Individualism has already made personal love, instead of family interest, decisive for the consummation of a marriage. In the name of her personality as of her work, woman desires with ever greater right full majority and legal equality with man in marriage. Against individualism, the doctrine of evolution now advocates certain limitations of the personal erotic freedom to consummate marriage, but advocates at the same time, contrary to the Christian sexual ethics, new freedom for the sake of the higher development of the race. Here comes into effect, the new conception of life by which the possibilities of development and of happiness in the earthly life have acquired a new value and force.