The Woman Movement

by Ellen Key

When such a mother is found, and such mothers are already found, she is the most splendid fruit of the woman movement’s sowing upon the field of woman’s nature.

Because the new mother created for herself an open space about her own personality, she understands her son or her daughter when they in their turn push her aside in order to create that same open space about themselves. For in every generation the young renounce the ideals and the aims of their parents. The knowledge of this does not prevent the new mother, any more than it did the mother of earlier times, from feeling the pain incident to being set aside. But the former looks forward to a day when the son and daughter will freely choose her as a friend, having discovered what a significant pleasure the mother’s personality can afford them.

As the bird’s nest is made of nothing but bits of straw and down, so the feeling of home is fashioned out of soft, simple things; out of little activities that are neither ponderable nor measurable as political or as economic factors. When Segantini painted the two nuns looking wistfully into the bird’s nest, he gave expression to the deepest pain that many modern women experience, the pain resulting from the consciousness that their life, notwithstanding its freedom, is lonely, because it has denied them the privilege of making a home and as a consequence has failed to afford them the joy of creation, which nature intended they should have, and of continuity of life in children to whom they gave birth.

Here we stand at a point where the woman movement parallels the other social revolutions, undeviatingly as the rails of a track, and leads to the same objective. Modern men and women, and especially women, have forfeited an opportunity for happiness in the loss of the feeling of homogeneity and security. Just as formerly the property-holding family felt a secure sense of proprietorship in the ancestral estate, so every member of the home group felt himself safe in the family. Now the children cannot depend with certainty upon the parents, nor the parents upon the children; the wife upon the husband, nor the husband upon the wife. Each in extremity relies only upon himself. The character of man is thus altered quite as much as trees are changed when they are left standing alone in the denuded forest of which they once formed a part. If they can withstand the storms, they have produced more “character” than they had when they stood close together, under a mutual protection that nevertheless enforced uniformity.

From their earliest youth innumerable women must now care for themselves, as well as decide for themselves. Thus the feeling of independence of modern woman has increased through the sacrifice of her peace; her individual characteristics, at the expense of her harmony. Her feeling of loneliness is mitigated to a certain degree by the growing feeling of community with the whole. But this feeling cannot compensate certain natures for the forfeiture of the advantages which women of earlier times possessed, when they sat secure and protected within the four walls of the home, sucked the juice from family chronicles, guarded family traditions, maintained the old holiday customs, lived at the same time in the past and in the present.

The new woman lives in the present, sometimes even in the future—her land of romance! The enthusiasm of the old romanticism about a “hut and a heart” has little charm for her. For she knows reality and that prevents her from giving credence to the feminine illusion that twice two can be five. What she does know, on the contrary, is that out of fours she can gradually work out sixteen. While the women of former times could only save, the new woman can acquire. Woman’s beautiful, foolish superstition regarding life has vanished, but her eagerness to achieve can still remove mountains, her daring has still often the splendour of a dream. Intellectual values are for her no longer pastimes but necessities of life; with her culture has developed her feeling for truth and justice. This does not secure the new woman immunity at all times from new illusions and errors of feeling, nor does it prevent her developing passions whose value, to say the least, is questionable. But in and through her determination “to be some one,” to have a characteristic personality, she has acquired a love of life, in its diverse manifestations, both good and evil; a new capacity to enjoy her own and others’ individuality, as well as a new joy—sometimes an unblushing, insolent joy—in expressing her own being. In place of the earlier resignation toward society, the expression of rebellion is found even in the sparkling eye of the school-girl, with red cap upon her curly hair.

The young women of to-day, married or single, mothers as well as those who are childless, are still more vigorous in soul, more courageous, more eager for life than are men. Because all that which for men has so long been a matter of course, is for women new, rich, enchanting, comprising, as it does, free life in nature, scientific studies, serious artistic work economic independence. Even in a fine and soulful woman there is found something of the inevitable hardness toward herself and others of which an observer is instinctively conscious when he speaks of some woman as one who “will go far” upon the course she has chosen. The modern young woman desires above all else the elevation of her own personality. She experiences the same feeling of joy a man is conscious of when she realises that her strength of will is augmented, her ability becoming more certain, her depth of thought greater, her association of ideas richer. She stands ready to choose her work and follow her fate; in sorrow as in joy she experiences the blessedness of growth, and she loves her view of life and the work to which she has dedicated herself, often as devotedly as man loves his.

If we compare the seventeen-year-old girl of to-day with her progenitor living in the middle of the foregoing century, we find that the girl of earlier times was to a larger extent swayed by feeling, and that the modern girl is to a larger extent determined by ideas. The former was directed more to the centre of life, the latter remains often nearer the periphery; the former was warmer, the latter is more intelligent; the former was better balanced, the latter is more interesting.

The restlessness, the uncertainty, the feeling of emptiness, the suffering, that is sometimes experienced by the young woman of to-day, is primarily traceable to the disintegration of religious belief, which gave to the older generation of emancipated women an inner stability, resignation, and self-discipline. Scientific study has deprived many modern women of their belief and those who can create a new one, suited to their needs, are still very few. Thus to the outer homelessness an inner estrangement is added. The woman movement has, it is true, contributed indirectly to this spiritual distress by making the road to man’s culture accessible to woman. For men also suffer in like manner, and suffer above all perhaps because our culture is unstable, aimless, and lacks style, owing to the very fact that it is at present without a religious centre. And even the future can give to mankind no such new centre as the Middle Ages had, for example, in Catholicism. The attainment of individualism has shut out that possibility forever.

But one factor in the religion of the past, the adoration of motherhood as divine mystery; one factor in the religion of the Middle Ages, the worship of the Madonna, has meanwhile been given back to the present by the doctrine of evolution, with that universal validity which the thought must possess which seeks to give again to culture a centre. Great, solitary individuals—prophets more often than sibyls—have proclaimed the religion of this generation. But the word will become flesh only when fathers and mothers instil into the blood and soul of children their devout hope for a higher humanity. When women are permeated by this hope, this new devout feeling, then they will recover the piety, the peace, and the harmony which for the present, and partly owing to feminism, have been lost.