Then we shall attain such an outlook on the great forces of the time,—the emancipation movements of labouring men and of women,—that we shall see how necessary both were in order that society should come to understand that not the mass of material production, but the higher cultivation of the race is the social-political end, and that for this end the service of mother must receive the honour and oblation that the state now gives to military service.
And women themselves, whom nature has made creators and protectors of the tender life—the task for which nature even in the plant world has made such wonderful provision—will no longer resist being more intimately associated with nature, nearer to earth, more like plants, more restrained in outer sense and therefore, in inner respects, less active than man, who always had more of the freedom of movement of the forest animal. The woman of the future will not, as do many women of the present time, wish to be freed from her sex; but she will be freed from sexual hypertrophy, freed to complete humanity. For the universal, human characteristics, forced to remain latent in the primitive division of labour, because the father was obliged to exert all his strength in one direction and the mother in another, can now, through the facilities for culture in the struggle for existence, be developed on both sides: woman can develop the latent quality which became active in man as “manliness”; man can develop the latent quality which became active in woman as “womanliness.” But the proportional ratio of these characteristics, which development has already strengthened, will on the whole remain fixed—the proportional ratio which, in the progress of evolution, gave to woman the ascendency in regard to inward creative powers, and to man the ascendency in regard to outward creative powers—a proportional ratio which for the present has made woman more gifted in the sphere of feeling, man more potent in the sphere of ideas; which has made her the listener and yearner in the sphere of the spiritual life, and him the pioneer investigator and founder of systems, that has given her more of the Christian, and him more of the pagan virtues. The improvement of the universal, human characteristics of both sexes elevates also the plane upon which they exercise their especial functions, valuable alike for culture. With increasing frequency the one sex may, when so desired, assume the culture function of the other.
A perfect fusion of the two spiritual sex-characters would, on the contrary, have the same result as physical hermaphroditism—sterility. Genius—and in using the term we limit its meaning to poetic genius, for real feminine genius has thus far appeared only in that domain—embraces, as emphasised above, both man and woman, but not harmoniously blended. For such a genius would be unproductive, as we imagine those celestial forms to be which are neither “man nor woman.” The masculine and the feminine characteristics, which exist side by side in the poet soul, produce work in co-operation. Alternately, however, they seek to usurp the entire power, whereby is occasioned the disharmony which enters into the life of those who endeavour to fulfil at one and the same time the universal, human duties as well as those of sex. Indeed it may be that one of the reasons why great poetic geniuses, masculine as well as feminine, have often had no progeny at all, and in other cases one of little significance, is that their nature was not capable of a double production, that poetic creation received the richest part of their physical and psychical power.
Whether the opinion of genius expressed here is correct or not, does not, however, affect the general situation. For the genius will always go his own way, which is never that of the average man. From the point of view of the ordinary individual an effacement of the spiritual sex character would be in still higher degree a misfortune for culture and nature. For it is the difference in the spiritual as well as in the physical sex-characteristics that makes love a fusion of two beings in a higher unity, where each finds the full deliverance and harmony of his being. With the elimination of the spiritual difference psychical love would vanish. There would be left, then, upon the one side, only the mating instinct, in which the same points of view as in animal breeding must obtain; on the other, only the same kind of sympathy which is expressed in the friendship between persons of the same sex, the sympathy in which the human, individual difference instead of sexual difference forms the attraction. In love, on the other hand, sympathy grows in intensity, the more universally human and at the same time sexually attractive the individual is: the “manly” in man is charmed by the “womanly” in woman, while the “womanly” in man is likewise captivated by the “manly” in woman, and vice versa. But when neither needs the spiritual sex of the other as his complement, then man, in erotic respects, returns to the antique conception of the sex relationship, of which Plato has drawn the final logical conclusion.
The “humanity” in the soul of man was strengthened when he felt himself necessary to mother and child. When woman by sweetness and tenderness taught man to love, not only to desire, then his humanity increased immeasurably.
In our time the average man is beginning to learn that woman does not desire him as man, that she looks down upon him as a lower kind of being, that she does not need him as supporter. He does not at all grasp what it is the woman of highest culture seeks, demands, and awaits from his sex. But he learns that even the mediocre woman rejects the best he has to give her erotically; that imbued as she is with ideals of “universal humanity,” she no longer needs him as the supplement to her sexual being. Then brutality awakes in him anew; then his erotic life loses what humanity it had won; then he begins to hate woman. And not with the imaginative, theoretical hatred of thinkers and poets; but with the blind rage which the contempt of the weaker for the stronger arouses in him. And here we encounter what is, perhaps, the deepest reason for the present war between the sexes, appearing already in the literary world as well as in the labour market.
Here the extreme feminists play unconsciously about an abyss,—the depths in the nature of man out of which the elementary, hundred-thousand-year-old impulses arise, the impulses which all cultural acquisitions and influences cannot eradicate, so long as the human race continues to subsist and multiply under present conditions.
The feminism which has driven individualism to the point where the individual asserts her personality in opposition to, instead of within, the race; the individualism which becomes self-concentration, anti-social egoism, although the watchword inscribed upon its banner is “Society instead of the family,”—this feminism will bear the blame should the hatred referred to lead to war.
It would be a pity to conclude a survey of the influence of the woman movement with an expression of fear lest this extreme feminism should be victorious. I believe not; no more than I believe that the sun will for the present be extinguished or streams flow back to their sources.