If it be true that immediate, “blind,” erotic attraction is most instinctively correct in choice, then the present comrade life of young people and the increased clear-sightedness which it gives, as well as the increasing erotic idealism of young girls, are not unconditionally advantageous to the new race. The question is, however, still undecided. Here it may only be emphasised that the young girl of to-day, in spite of all intellectual development, is still won always by powerful spiritual-sensual love, which the woman movement has too long considered as a negligible quantity. Under the influence of the doctrine of evolution, young girls begin to understand that their value as members of society depends essentially upon their value for the propagation of mankind; all the more they realise the duty of physical culture which will enable them to fulfil this function better; they no longer consider their erotic longing as impure and ugly but as pure and beautiful. It is out of this soul condition that the different movements for the protection of mothers and children, theoretically considered, have proceeded. These are at present the most important “woman movements,” although unrecognised by the older woman movement. And this older movement has not yet recognised the fact that, because of present marriage conditions, the degenerate, uneducated, decrepit, have greater opportunity for propagating the race, both within and outside of marriage, than the young, sound, pure-minded, and loving; that it can therefore be no sin, from the point of view of the race, if the latter become parents without marriage, nor should it be a subject of shame from the social point of view. All women’s rights have little value, until this one thing is attained: that a woman who through her illegitimate motherhood has lost nothing of her personal worth, but on the contrary has proved it, does not forfeit social esteem.
Our time can point to women who have been typical of the reform tendencies of the century in this respect. Some of these women, if they really accomplished the unprecedented task of “a child and a work,” have drawn their strength for the task out of precisely the commonplace, homely qualities and sterling virtues, contrary to which they believed they were acting when they became mothers, driven by a power greater than their conscious personality. Others again became mothers with the consent of their whole personality. They were clear that they thus made use of the masculine rights and freedom which feminism first brought home to women. And although many advocates of women’s rights refrain from such consequences of their ideas, the women who in other respects determine their conduct of life by their own free personal choice recognise that this, their real “emancipation,” is a fruit of the woman movement.
In Europe, however, most women under thirty still dare to dream of motherhood in a love marriage as the greatest happiness and the highest duty of life.[[5]]
But, as direct and indirect result of the woman movement, the fact none the less remains that there is found among women an increasing disinclination for maternity, a reluctance which deprives mankind of many superior mothers, while at the same time woman’s commercial work for self-support in all classes increases her sterility or makes her incapable of the suckling so vitally important for the children.
That the modern woman, because of individual fate or her own choice, often remains unmarried is no danger in and for itself. This fact, as I have emphasised above, is connected with a number of cultural and material conditions, which sometime will be altered, and then woman’s desire for marriage will again increase. The real danger has appeared only since women have begun to strengthen the tendency to celibacy by the amaternal theory, which now confuses the feminine brain and leads the feminine instinct astray.
The woman movement in and with this influence upon maternity sinks to the lowest point of the scale according to the criterion of worth employed here: the elevation of the life of the individual and of the race. In this we stand in our time before a twofold mystery, which lies in the circumstance that not only women—women “with breasts made right to suckle babes”—emphasise this stultifying influence, but that there are men, each the son of a mother, who also propagate it. These men have allowed themselves to be blinded by the false logic concerning women, which declares that since rich mothers do not wish to fulfil the duties of a mother and the poor cannot fulfil them, superior social organisations must be created for that purpose; in other words, instigated by a mere temporary unpleasant discrepancy, we will create a new, a different order of things. But, if this obtained universally, it would inflict incomparably greater injury upon mankind than do present unhappy conditions.
Upon the whole, however, it is precisely as a result of this tendency that the deepest hostility of men against feminism has developed. The fact that the idea of evolution is now beginning to enter into the flesh and blood of man also contributes its share to this feeling. Just as formerly a man wished heirs for his personal and real estate and for his name, he now desires inheritors of his being; he desires an eternal life, which becomes a certainty only by means of parenthood, whereby the individual as father or mother lives on physically and spiritually, in body and soul, in his children and grandchildren down to the last of his descendants. This conception has made the sex instinct again holy, as it was for the pagans. This new reverence for their duty as beings of sex now induces many young men to guard their sexual health and strength by an asceticism the motive of which is the exact opposite of that which determined the asceticism called forth by Christianity, the asceticism which was fear of the sex instinct as impure and as a temptation to sin. Now the innermost aim of young men’s creative desire is the higher development of mankind. Love becomes for them the condition by which they can most perfectly redeem their religious certainty of being part of a great design, their religious longing for harmony with life’s creative desire, with the infinite.
There are now men who work most zealously for the ennoblement of the race—“eugenics,” as this effort is called in England—as well as for the protection of mother and child—“puericulture,” as this endeavour is called in France. There are men who write excellent works upon the psychology of the child, and upon sexual instruction; men, who, in art and poetry, give expression to the new veneration for the sanctity of generation, for motherhood, for the child. The finest thing written about the child as a cultural power is written by an American.[[6]] Painting has now new devotional pictures of the Mother with her Child, especially those conceived by a Frenchman and an Italian.[[7]] The most beautiful representation of youth’s new desire for love is by a German sculptor.[[8]] Likewise a German, Nietzsche, has the most profound conception of parenthood and education as the means whereby humanity will cross over the bridge of the men of to-day to the superman.
Only when all this is realised can one conceive what the feelings of these new men must be when they meet those new women “who are no longer willing to be slaves of the instinct for the propagation of the race;” who see in motherhood “a loss of time from their work;” “an attack upon their beauty;” an obstacle to the refined conduct of life;—a conduct of life certain to debase woman’s worth as a child-bearing being, but to elevate her to that exquisite, perfect product of culture, a “woman of the world;” an obstacle also for woman as creator of other objective cultural values. If a man with a father’s desires finds himself united with such a woman, he finds himself in marriage quite as much a prostitute as innumerable wives have felt themselves to be when they were mere tools of a man’s desire. On the contrary the desire for the elevation of mankind on the part of the new woman and the new man, is evinced in the idea that not the quantity but the quality of the children they give to humanity is most significant; that a land of fewer but more perfect men is a higher culture ideal than the principle still always maintained from the point of view of national competition, that the inhabitants of a country must only be numerous however inferior they may be.
To this wholly new evolutionary conception of life the amaternal women oppose the following train of thought which greatly influences the feeling and desire of women to-day[[9]]: