Copyright, 1912
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
Es gibt kein Vergangenes das man zurücksehnen dürfte; es gibt nur ein ewig Neues, das sich aus den erweiterten Elementen des Vergangenen gestaltet, und die echte Sehnsucht muss stets productiv sein, ein neues, besseres Erschaffen.—Goethe.
“There is no past that we need long to return to, there is only the eternally new which is formed out of enlarged elements of the past; and our genuine longing must always be productive, for a new and better creation.”
PREFACE
The literature upon the right and the worth of woman, beginning as early as the 15th century, has in recent times increased so enormously that a complete collection would require a whole library building. In these writings are represented all classes, from tables of statistics to comic papers. Not only both sexes but almost all stages of life have contributed to it. By immersing oneself in this literature, especially in its belletristic and polemic portions, one could find rich material for the illumination of that sphere to which the publisher limited my work: the indication of the new spiritual conditions, transformations, and reciprocal results which the woman movement has effected. Historic, scientific, political, economic, juridical, sociological, and theological points of view must, therefore, be practically set aside. But even for my task, limited to the psychological sphere, time, strength, and inclination are wanting to bury myself in this literature. I must, therefore, confine myself to giving chiefly my own observations.
It is more than fifty years ago that I read Hertha, Sweden’s first “feministic” (dealing with the woman question) novel, and listened to the numerous contentions concerning it. With ever keener personal interest I have since followed the operations of the woman movement—above all, the new psychic conditions, types, and forms of activities which the woman movement has evoked; I have also given consideration to the new possibilities and new difficulties resulting therefrom for individuals and for society.
The limited compass of this little book prevents me from substantiating my assertions by means of parallels with earlier times, comparisons which might illuminate certain spiritual transformations and new formations. My comparisons of the present with the past do not go farther back than my own memory reaches. And these touch, moreover, in what concerns the past, principally upon Swedish conditions; while my impressions of the present were gathered throughout Europe. I have considered, however, that I could summarise both in a comprehensive picture. For although the women of Sweden a generation ago possessed rights for which the women in many countries are still struggling to-day, yet the woman movement in the last decade has advanced so rapidly that the conditions have in great measure been equalised. Indeed, some of the grey-haired champions of the woman movement have seen one after another of their demands fulfilled in this new century—demands which in the fifties and sixties, in many countries even in the seventies and eighties, were publicly and privately derided even in the very person of these champions. And among peoples who even ten years ago were unaffected by the emancipation of women, for example the Chinese and the Turks, it is already progressing. It amounts to this, that even if national peculiarities in character and in laws occasion differences in the curve which the woman movement describes in the different countries, yet everywhere the movement has had the same causes, must follow the same main direction, and—sooner or later—must have the same effects.