Whether the province of the husband and wife is the same or not, difficulty always results from the wife’s commercial or professional work in that she rarely finds a good substitute for the domestic and maternal duties. And when the husband sees the house badly managed and the children ill-bred, he tries according to his strength to render assistance or, as more frequently happens, seeks his comfort outside the home. But even if these stumbling-blocks may be cleared away by other feminine hands, the fact still remains that the wife because of her work must demand sacrifices on the part of the man such as his work has required at all times from the wife. She is often compelled to forego much of the society of her husband, of his solicitude and tenderness because he has no available time. Now each of the married people has consideration for the leisure of the other and for all other severe conditions of the work. But beside these favourable results stands also the detrimental fact that each suppresses his claims upon the sympathy of the other, as well as the wish to express his own, whenever this receiving and giving would interfere with the work. If this has become for one or for both a real passion, then the passion blinds him to everything that does not concern the work, and causes alternately joy or suffering. Each of the married couple then disturbs the other by moods, and each needs to be cherished by the other. The tenderness which neither can give to the other, they find perhaps in a third.
But in those cases where the work is not passionately absorbing or where both husband and wife are persons of understanding, rather than of feeling, marriages of colleagues turn out well. Each has in the other an intelligent, appreciative friend; the common work together is rich, and neither gives nor requires more than the other is able to reciprocate. The education of the wife makes her a good organiser in the home, which is comfortable without the work’s suffering thereby. When this is not too strenuous for either, but after the close of a reasonable working time, the two meet spiritually free in the home, the duties of which they often share—then the domestic life is happy and the work progresses easily, as long as there are no children. When children arrive, then there begins for the wife, even in such marriages, a life beyond her strength.
But since nature, in the interest of the race, often makes opposites attractive to each other, one may find a husband, full of feeling, who loves children, united to a wife for whom science is the greatest value of life, while she relegates feeling to a lower plane and considers motherhood an animal function. In place of the tenderness and of the children for which the husband longed, he has to participate in the victories and defeats of a woman of science. Or we see a wife who dreamed of an intimate life with her husband and who sacrificed her work to it; but the life together was wrecked upon the husband’s artist concentration, and the wife had to suffer under a twofold emptiness: the lack of her work and the lack of happiness. Then one sees instances where the wife retained her work because it was economically necessary and because she hoped out of the richness of her young strength to be able to fulfil all duties. And all this she was able to do except one thing—to preserve under the excessive strain her beauty, her power of charm, the elasticity of her nature. Perhaps she belonged to the very highest among the new women who are so undivided, so proud, who think so highly of themselves, of man, of love, that they are beyond a wholly justified coquetry and rest blindly upon the uniting power of spiritual congeniality. But the day comes perhaps when these strong and, in all other respects, wise women have nothing other than freedom to give to the man whose senses, whose fancy, need that charm which the wife no longer possesses. In case, however, the man’s nature is not of those for whom the silken threads of daily domestic comfort form the strong band, but on the contrary is of the sort which needs renewal, then the very absence of the wife, occasioned temporarily by the work, can keep the relationship long fresh. This is upon the assumption that she understands what some of these women do not understand: to give, but in such a way that the man always longs for more; to remain sweetheart, not only friend; to be able to jest, not only to talk seriously. The modern wife of to-day, tested upon so many subjects, is often deeply mistaken in regard to the kind of “ministry” the man needs. The simple wisdom of their grandmothers consisted in this: to give much and to require nothing, always to subordinate themselves to the man with gentleness and humility, never to assert themselves before him as a free, self-determining personality. The wives of to-day, sacredly convinced of the right and freedom of women, succeed better in asserting their personality than in pleasing their husbands, and the quantity of their demands is often more noteworthy than the quality of their gifts. That many modern marriages turn out well shows that the adaptability of the modern husband is beginning to be even as great as that of the wife in former times!
The marriage is absolutely wrecked when the wife brings to it all the new demands of woman, but the husband all the primeval instincts of his sex. What in each sex relationship most intimately unites or most deeply sunders is and remains the erotic depth of nature in each. And the difference in this respect between the men and women of the present ever more widely separates them, and this division becomes fatal to innumerable individual lovers of to-day, as well as for the attitude of the sexes toward marriage in general. The erotically symmetrical woman views with hostility the dualism in the erotic nature of the modern man. This dualism evinces itself, with innumerable nuances it is true, in three typical ways: infinite erotic discussion, but inability to be stirred by it either with the soul or with the senses; ability to love only with the senses, not with the soul; and finally looking down upon the senses and desiring “spiritual love” only. For the modern completely developed woman the chattering vacuity, the animal instinct, the ascetic spirituality, are equally repellent. And yet it happens that the rosy mist of love can bring such a woman to a point where she creates for herself an illusion out of one of the above mentioned types. Most frequently this occurs in the case of the vigorous man who divines nothing of the spiritual content of the woman whose outer appearance has charmed him. The tragedy of the modern woman is then like that which Hebbel has revealed in Judith, that the sex being in her is attracted by the muscular masculinity, which her human personality hates as her mortal enemy. For as a personality she admires in man only the spiritual strength of the man. The man on his part regrets his mistake that he did not choose a pretty amiable girl “of the old sort,” who would punctually lay his table and willingly share his bed; a woman “into whose head Ibsen had put no fancies,” who “had not allowed herself to be talked into some folly by feminism.”
Among such “follies,” similar men, and many others as well, include the demand advanced by the woman movement for the married woman’s property right, as well as a specified income for the wife working in the home, who however has to contribute from her property or her “remuneration” as housekeeper to the common household—a corollary which is always forgotten by the anti-feminist writers who assert that “the man becomes a slave when he has to work for the whole, but the wife may retain everything of hers.” (Strindberg.)
The modern woman who before her marriage was independent, owing to her work, abhors the thought of a request for money—this most painful moment even in the happiest marriages—to so great a degree that this aversion determines the wife in some cases to keep up her own work. If on the contrary she has given this up, the consciousness of her earlier independence makes her often so sensitive that she feels herself injured by a protest however delicate in regard to the expenditure of money. More than one man has regretted, in consequence of the unreasonable demands of his wife, that he ever begged her to give up her own work. There are women, on the other hand, who continue their work and thereby only increase the incapability of a good-for-nothing man. In such cases, it avails little that in many countries the law now allows the wife free disposal of the income from her labour. Notwithstanding this, the assertion is ridiculous that “if the man drinks up the money of his wife it is with her consent,” and “it is therefore of no avail to alter the law.” For it makes a significant difference in the relative position of the man and wife whether the law gives him the right to it, or whether he takes it by force. But in this as in other cases, the woman movement obviously cannot free women so long as they are impelled by unconscious forces from within to actions and sacrifices at variance with their conscious personality. The one thing which the woman movement has already achieved and can continue to achieve, is that the undue encroachment of the men ceases to have legal protection.
It is undeniable, on the other hand, that the unmarried woman’s personal and economic independence fashions wives who in marriage show themselves in a high degree egotistic, but who yet incessantly scold about man’s egotism, wives who themselves exhibit very little devotion and fine feeling, but place very great importance upon consideration. These wives were the ones whom fifty years ago men called “graters.” But the lack of amiability, which in certain women was usually due to childbirth, has nevertheless in modern woman, at least during the freedom of her girlhood, been unrestrained habit. Her firm—and just—decision not to be “subservient” to her husband has resulted in, first, an armed peace, later, a war, in which the wife’s work is one of the projectiles. “I have my work, why should I stay here to be used up and tormented?” she asks herself. And when such questions begin, there is usually but one answer.
There is one decided advantage in giving to the woman the opportunity to earn her living: she has again acquired thereby significance in the home, while the generation of women, who neither co-operated productively in the home nor assumed all the duties of the mother, were regarded by man with less respect than, on the one side, their grandmothers who produced all of the household requisites, on the other side, their now independent self-supporting granddaughters. Only when society recompenses the vocation of mother, can woman find in this a full equivalent for self-supporting labour.
Another typical group of our time is formed by the numerous women for whom no choice remains in regard to their work, since it is of a kind that they must give up because of the removal to another place, or more frequently because they find so much work in the new home that every thought of anything further outside must cease. Those who think that industry has made the work of the wife in the home to-day superfluous, speak only of the great cities, and usually only of opulent families in the great cities, where they are in a position to buy cheaper everything that the labour of the wife could produce. But in the country, among all classes, the mother must be the director of the work; and in all country homes in moderate circumstances—as in countless poor or not very well-to-do city families—the work of the mother is still frequently indispensable, and in addition is more economical than her earnings out of the house could be, especially since the developed modern woman is usually capable of a more rational housekeeping than the woman of earlier times.