The Woman Movement

by Ellen Key

The modern developed mother feels with every breath a grateful joy in that she lives the most perfect life when she can contribute her developed human powers, her liberated human personality, to the establishment of a home and to the vocation of motherhood. These functions conceived and understood as social, in the embracing sense in which the word is now used, give the new mother a richer opportunity to exercise her entire personality than she could find in modern commercial work. In one such occupation she must suppress either the intellectual or the emotional side of her nature; in another, the life either of the imagination or of the will. In domestic duties, on the contrary, these powers of the soul can work in unison. This is undoubtedly the deepest reason why, taken as a whole, women have become more harmonious, and men stronger in any special crisis, women more soulful, men more gifted. On this account men offer their great sacrifice more readily for an idea, or for the accomplishment of a work; women, for persons closely connected with them. And yet this co-operation of woman’s spiritual powers was in earlier times partly repressed by man’s demand for passivity on the part of woman as a thinking and willing personality, but for her unceasing activity as promoter of his comfort and that of the entire home. The mother of to-day can, on the contrary, exercise, as distributer, her culture, her thought, her supervision, her judgment, and her criticism, in order to make fully effective the faculty of her sex for foresight and organisation. She applies a great amount of spiritual energy to the selection of the essentials and the subordination of secondary things, to the creation of such facilities in the material work that time and means are left for the spiritual values, which, alas, are still neglected in the domestic economy of small, private households, as well as in national housekeeping. And as mother, modern woman is offered the first fitting opportunity to assert herself as a thinking and willing personality.

The significance of the vocation of mother has been underrated in its significance even by moderate feminists. But these were right when they demonstrated that the “sanctity” of this office had become a mere phrase, so badly or amateurishly was this vocation fulfilled—an indictment in which Nietzsche and feminism for one rare moment are on common ground. Mothers needed the spur of this contempt; it was necessary that their feeling of responsibility, their universal human culture, their personal self-reliance, should be aroused by the woman movement. Only so could the new generation acquire the new type of women who for the present seek to qualify themselves by self-culture for the office of mother, in the expectation that for all women an obligatory education for motherhood will be realised. So long as this vocation can be practised without any training, nothing can be known of the possibilities whereby ordinary mothers may become good educators—unless they place the mother love and the intuitive understanding of the nature of the child that it affords above even the best outside teachers. Just as a glorious voice makes a country girl a “natural singer,” so nature has at all times made certain mothers—and not least the women of the people—natural educators of children.

The biography of nearly every great man shows the place the mother through her personality occupied in the life of her son, the atmosphere which she diffused about her in the home, her direct and indirect influence. But only the culture of their natural gifts with conscious purpose will make of mothers artists.

When Nietzsche wrote: “There will come a time when we shall have no other thought than education,” and when he placed this education specifically in the hands of mothers, least of all did he mean those “arts of education,” from which amaternals believe they “guard” children by rejecting an “artistically creative” home training by the mother, as a violence to the peculiar characteristic of the child!

The new mother, as the doctrine of evolution and the true woman movement have created her, stands with deep veneration before the mystic depths she calls her child, a being in whom the whole life of mankind is garnered. The richer the nature of the child is, the more zealously she endeavours to preserve for him that simplicity which he needs, and at the same time to provide for him the material that will enable him to work for himself. She insures to the child the pleasures adapted to his age, pleasures which at no later time can be enjoyed so intensely. The effect upon him of his playfellows and books, of nature, art, music, conversation, of the entire home milieu which the child receives, above all the influence of the personality and interests of the father and mother—all these the mother who is an artist in education observes in order to learn the natural proclivity of the child and then directly to strengthen and encourage it. At the same time she endeavours to find out what restraints are necessary in order that the natural bent be not impeded in its growth by secondary qualities. But the new type of mother does not seek to eradicate; she recognises the likeness between wheat and tares. The Christian education, which has thus far prevailed, has exercised a restraining oppression or has done violence to the “sinful nature,” which must be broken and bent; this education was dermatological, not psychological, in method.

The new mother is especially characterised by the fact that she has rejected this earlier method. She allows her child, within certain bounds, full freedom, and demands, beyond those bounds, unconditional obedience. She helps the child to find for himself ever nobler motives for repression. This she can do because from the very beginning she has taken care of him; year by year she has persevered in the effort to establish good habits; she has tried to enlist as aids, food, bath, bed, dress, air, and play in the effort to keep him strong, sound, sexually pure—conditions fundamental to the whole later conduct of life. Such a methodical physical care can be performed by the mother herself, while, on the other hand, in the first years of childhood paid hands might, through carelessness, stupidity, cruelty, laxity, or over-indulgence, destroy the glorious possibilities. If the prevention of the possibilities of nature being warped or destroyed constituted all that a mother could give, this one task would, nevertheless, be more important than any social relief work.

What characterises the new mother is that she understands the enormous significance of the first years, when the indispensable “training” takes place, in which the future life of the child is determined by the methods employed—whether they be those of torture or of culture, irrational or rational. Then the great problem must be solved of establishing willing obedience from within in place of the hitherto enforced obedience from without; of maintaining self-control, won by self, in place of self-control imposed from without; of evoking voluntary renunciation in place of enforcing renunciation. For the capacity for obedience, for self-control, for renunciation, is one of the qualities fundamental to the whole later conduct of life. The new mother knows this as well as the mother of former times. But she endeavours to create this capacity by slow and sure means. The same thing obtains in regard to physical and psychical courage, which in the early years can often be so demoralised by fright that it can never emerge again. The training which hitherto was customary—based on compelling and forbidding—had its effect only upon the surface and prevented the child from experiencing the results of his own choice.

It is this indirect education by results which is the new mother’s method. Her unceasing vigilance and consistency are required in order that the child shall actually bear the results of his actions. What she needs for this is first and foremost, time, time, and again time. Apparently good effects can be obtained much quicker by intervening, preventing, punishing, but thus are turned aside the real results. By this method the child is deprived of the inner growth, which only the fully experienced reality with its components of bitter and sweet can give; and this growth the new mother endeavours to advance. Much more time still is necessary to play the psychological game of chess, which consists in the checkmating of black by white; in other words, the conquest of negative characteristics by positive, through the child’s own activity—a task in which the child at first must be guided, just as in the assimilation of the elements of every other accomplishment, but in which he can later perfect himself. Modern investigation in the realm of the soul enables us to see the dangers which sometime will demand quite as new methods in spiritual hygiene as bacteriology has created in the hygiene of the body. But we still leave unexercised powers of the soul, still misunderstand spiritual laws which sometime will radically transform the means of education. At some future day the new mothers will institute legal protection for children to an extent incomprehensible to us and therefore provocative only of smiles. For example, legal prohibition of corporal punishment by parents as well as teachers; legal prohibition of child labour, of certain tenement conditions, certain “amusements,” certain improper uses of the press. For the present every individual educator must set these laws over himself; must sedulously create counter influences to cope with the destructive influences which great cities, especially, exert upon children.[^[12]] The new mothers lead children out into nature and endeavour to satisfy their zeal for activity by appropriate tasks as well as to encourage by suitable means their love of invention and their impulse for play. In the country children provide much for themselves. But what both city and country children need is a mother familiar with nature, who can answer the questions which the child is by his own observations prompted to ask; and the number of such mothers is continually increasing. Both city and country children need also a mother who can tell stories. Just as the settlement gardens most clearly demonstrate how sundered the working people of the great cities are from nature, so the “story evenings,” which are now established for children, show how far children have been permitted to stray from the mother, who formerly gathered them about her for the hour of story, play, and song. What, finally, children need is the mother’s delicate revelation of the sexual “mystery,” which often early exercises the thoughts of the child and in which he should be initiated quietly and gradually by the mother.

All the educational influences here outlined emanate not only from the enlightened, exceptional mother; they are exercised by the average mother of to-day to better advantage than by the spiritually significant mother of fifty years ago. And they are quite as essential, in order that the highest possibility within the reach of each may be attained, in the education of the genius as in that of the ordinary child. Such influences in like degree strengthen the innate bent of the genius and raise the average, from generation to generation, to a level where man can live according to higher standards than those of the present time. The new mothers understand that for the utilisation of all these opportunities that make their appearance in the first seven years of the child’s life, their motherly tenderness, gentleness, and patience do not suffice; that they need in addition all the intelligence, imagination, fine feeling, scientific methods of observation, ethical and æsthetic culture and other spiritual acquisitions they possess, as direct and indirect fruits of the woman movement.

When student and comrade life begin to claim the children, when the influence of the mother—that is of the new mother who has respect for the peculiar characteristic, the human worth, and the right of the child to live his own life—becomes more indirect, she nevertheless bears in mind that it is of the utmost importance that the son and the daughter should find the mother, when they return to the parental roof; that they should be able to breathe there an atmosphere of peace and warmth; that they should find the attentive eye, the listening ear, the helpful hand; that the mother should have the repose, the fine feeling, the observation requisite for following, without interfering with, the conflicts of youth; that she should not demand confidences but be always at hand to receive them; that she should show vital sympathy for the plans of work, the disappointments, the joys, of the young people; that she should always have time for caresses, tears, smiles, comfort, and care; that she should divine their moods, and anticipate their desires. By all these means the mother perpetuates in the soul of the child, unknown to him and to herself, her own personality. The talent which she has not redeemed by a productive work of her own, perhaps often for that very reason, benefits mankind in a son or a daughter, in whose soul the mother has implanted the social ideas, the dreams, the rebellion, which later become in them social deeds or works of art. Above all, in the restless, sensitive, life-deciding years when the boy is becoming a youth and the little girl a maiden, the mother needs quiet and leisure to be able to give the ineffably needy children “the hoarded, secret treasure of her heart,” as the beautiful saying of Dürer runs.