No “culture” can annul the great fundamental laws of nature; it can only ennoble them; and motherhood is one of these fundamental laws. I hope that the future will furnish a new and a more secure protection for motherhood than the present family and social organisation affords. I place my trust in a new society, with a new morality, which will be a synthesis of the being of man and that of woman, of the demands of the individual and those of society, of the pagan and Christian conceptions of life, of the will of the future and reverence for the past.
When the earth blooms with this beautiful and vigorous flower of morality, there will no longer be a woman movement. But there will always be a woman question, not put by women to society but by society to women: the question whether they will continue in a higher degree to prove themselves worthy of the great privilege of being the mothers of the new generation.
In the degree in which this new ethics permeates mankind, women will answer this question in life-affirmation. And the result of their life-affirmation will be an enormous enhancement of life, not only for women themselves but for all mankind.
THE END
[1]. In the summer of 1909 I sat in a Swedish home where the grandmother, for this reason, had never learned to write but where the granddaughter read aloud the thesis for her bachelor’s examination. One hears even to-day of customs and points of view in certain farms and manses which faithfully imitate those of the time of the Reformation.
[2]. Next to the textile industry, the tobacco industry employs the most women.
[3]. This idealism has naturally part also in the fact that, for example, two-thirds of the women who have gone through college in America do not marry, and find in club life a compensation for domestic life. But other motives also must often play a part here, from the desire to devote herself entirely to one of the lifeworks serviceable to mankind, to the egoism of spiritually barren young girls with its distaste for burdens and restraint.
A keen-sighted observer who recently spent a half year in North America corroborated what many have already stated: that the student and working young American girls devote themselves with true passion to the cultivation of their beauty, their toilette, their flirtations. All this belongs for her to the “Fine Arts” and as such is an end sufficient in itself, while for European women these arts, as a rule, are still means for alluring men to marriage. While study or work often makes European women in outer sense less “womanly,” although her soul always guards its full power to love, in America the reverse is the case: the outer appearance is bewitchingly womanly, but the soul no longer vibrates for love. The sexual sterility which Maudsley already prophesied thirty years ago, when he spoke about the “sexless ants,” has been partly realised, partly chosen voluntarily. In Europe it still frequently happens that a young woman who has put love aside for the sake of study or work is suddenly seized by an irresistible passion; in America, on the contrary, this is extremely rare. Women students look down upon the less cultured men, who ordinarily finish their studies earlier in order to earn a livelihood. The sympathy which they need, women find more easily in their own sex. The unmarried have quite the same social position as the married and do not desire children. If they finally marry, it is ordinarily because a more brilliant position is offered them than the one which they could create themselves, and the man is then considered and treated as a money-getter.
My authority emphasises also that the young students or working girls are ordinarily less original, of less personal significance, less individually developed, than the older women, especially women’s rights women, who often have not studied but have grown grey in marriage and motherhood, in self-development and in social work. The interesting significant American feminists were women between the ages of fifty and ninety; the woman of the present generation, however, which now enjoys the fruits of the work of the older generation, is, in spite of excellent scholarship and great working proficiency, less a woman and less a human being, less a personality.