Culture now sets new duties for woman, more significant than exclusively natural ones. The more the individual life increases in value, the more the interest for the mere functions of sex declines, and with it also the value of woman as woman for a society where, because of motherhood, she has become a being of secondary rank. It evinces lack of ideality if one censures this tendency of the modern woman to renounce maternity for the sake of more spiritual interests. While the mother concentrates herself upon her own child only, the woman who renounces motherhood can extend her being to embrace children as children in general. As a mother, woman is only a being of nature. But the personality, with its multiplicity of feelings and endeavours, demands an independent activity as well as maternity.
To put her entire personality into the education of her children is a twofold error. First and foremost, most mothers are bad educators and serve their children better if they entrust them to a born teacher; in the second place, gifted children educate themselves best and should be spared all educational arts. The mediocre child, who is more susceptible to education, has ordinarily also only mediocre parents, who likewise benefit the children most if they put them in the care of excellent teachers. Children who are below mediocrity can also be best educated by specialists. So there remains for the mother, after the first years’ care and training, no especial task as educator, at least none in which she can really put her personality. To talk to a mother about the possibilities of a richer office of mother, as educator of her children, she calls lulling her into an illusion under which she must labour only to suffer. A woman who can exercise her personality in another way should not therefore put it into the education of her children.
The amaternal advocates deny that motherliness is the criterion of womanliness; they find this criterion in the form, the external being of woman, in her manner and physical appearance—in a word, in the outer expression of the inner disposition, which they deny as typical of womanliness! “Womanliness” is thus reduced to an “æsthetic principle,” while woman’s spiritual attributes are considered as “universally human”; and the right is granted to the feminine sex to emancipate herself from the result of the heresy that motherliness should be the ethical norm for the “being” or “essence” of womanhood. The suitability of woman’s psychic constitution for her work as mother is not acknowledged as proof that motherliness is the distinguishing characteristic of womanliness. For this constitution is less conspicuous in the higher stages of differentiation. Its suitability was then a phenomenon of adaptation and changed with the conditions of life. Thus this constitution cannot be cited as a reason for limiting woman’s personal exercise of her powers. Motherliness is no social instinct. How can motherliness, which we have in common with beasts and savages, be considered as higher than, for example, justice, truth, and other gradually won spiritual values, which woman can promote by her personal activity? The higher the forms of life woman attains, the less will her personality be determined by motherliness. Why then should women bring to the domestic life the sacrifice of their personality, while no one demands this of men? Why shall not woman, just as man, satisfy her demands as a sex being in marriage and, as for the rest, follow her profession, attend to her spiritual development, her social tasks? Why condemn woman to remain a half-being—that is, with unexercised brain—only because certain of her instincts attract her to man, while he is not constrained to suppress his personality because he in like manner felt himself attracted to woman? It is the old superstition of the family life as “woman’s sphere,” which still confuses the conception. By the present form of family life woman is “oversexed.” Her higher development, as well as that of her husband and children, will be promoted if woman guards her independence by earning her own living, in commercial work conducted beyond the portal of the home; if housekeeping becomes co-operative; if the education of the children is carried on outside the home, in which now the motherly tenderness emasculates the children and fosters in them family sentiment of an egoistic nature and not social feelings. Thus are solved the difficulties which are entailed when the wife’s work is carried on outside the home; equipoise between her intellectual and emotional, her sexual and social nature follows, and her worth, as that of a man, will be measured by her human personality, not by her womanliness, her efficacy in the family, for the exercise of which she is now constrained to renounce her personality.
So runs in brief the programme of the amaternals.
It has already been indicated that the woman movement, in its inception, could gather strength only by combating with all its power the prejudice that woman is incapable of the same kind of activity as man. But now the whole woman movement has for a long time been emphasising the fact that woman is entitled, not only on her own behalf but more especially in her capacity as home-keeper, wife, and mother, to the full development of her powers and to equality with man in the family and in society. In the amaternal programme sketched above, however, the fanaticism, which characterised the entire woman movement a generation ago, now evinces itself in the error that equal rights for the sexes must mean also equal functions; that the development of women’s powers involves also their application in the same spheres of activity in which man is engaged; that equality of the sexes implies sameness of the sexes. While moderate feminism begins to see that, if man and wife compete, this rivalry can benefit[[10]] neither the woman, the man, nor the children, amaternal feminism urges the keenest competition. And if this is once accepted as advantageous to woman’s personality and to society, then it is obvious that she must, with all the energy of the attacked, defend herself from the duties of maternity, because of which she would obviously come off second-best in the competition.
From the point of view of individualism it is obvious that the law must set no limitations to woman’s practice of a vocation, unless evident hygienic dangers menace either her or the coming generation. Women must, for their own sake as well as for that of society, have free choice of work, for life and nature possess innumerable unforeseen possibilities. Nevertheless, it does happen that a woman who gives superior children to humanity may, nevertheless, feel herself incapable of educating them; likewise it sometimes happens that a husband and wife who have exceptional children, cannot endure to live together. In neither case has law or custom a right to force upon a mother or a father a yoke that is intolerable or to demand of a mother or a father unreasonable sacrifices.
But the right to limit the choice of work, the law does not possess; nature assumes that right herself: first of all from the axiom that no one can be in two places at the same time, and in the second place because no one can respond simultaneously and with full energy to two different spiritual activities. One cannot, for example, count even to one hundred and at a certain number give a simple grasp of the hand without suspending the counting momentarily. Although no one has ever been denied the privilege of solving a mathematical problem and of following carefully at the same time a piece of music, yet it is certain that the effectiveness of both intellectual activities would be thereby diminished. These extremely simple observations can be continued until the most complex are reached. If the observation be directed to the sphere of domestic life, every wife and mother who is willing to institute impartial observations of self, will affirm the difficulty of working with a divided mind.
If a mother carries on her work at home and must put it away in order to be beside the sick-bed of her child, or to make those arrangements which assure domestic comfort, or to help her husband, then she feels that her book or her picture suffers, that the activity which binds her more intimately to the home relaxes for a time the intimacy of her connection with her work. One can by day carry on a dull industrial task, and by night produce an achievement of the soul; but one cannot let one’s soul radiate in one direction without impairing its energy in another. A work needs exclusive devotion. And this is, viewed externally, difficult to attain in joint action; viewed from within, it requires a renunciation that in the case of a loving soul evokes a continual inner struggle. For that reason, also, literature with woman as its subject has for some decades been filled with the great conflict of modern woman’s life: the conflict between vocation and parents, between vocation and husband, between vocation and child. Certainly the family has often been a torture chamber for individuality, as a consequence of laws and customs, which the future will regard as we now do the rack and the thumbscrew. But nature is more severe than law and custom when she confronts us with a choice which, however it may turn out, tears a piece from our heart.
And now neither custom nor man demands of woman the “sacrifice of the personality.” This sacrifice is required only by the law of limitations which rules over us all.