The Woman Movement

by Ellen Key

But, on the other hand, the doctrine of this Church became the greatest obstacle to the elevation of woman, because it lessened the reverence for her mission as a being of sex. Marriage, the only recognised ends of which were the prevention of unchastity and the propagation of the race, was looked upon as an inferior condition in comparison with pure virginity. And the more this ideal of chastity was extolled, the more woman was degraded and considered the most grievous temptation of man in his striving after higher sanctity. Before God, so man taught, man and woman were truly equal; but not in human relationships or qualities; yes, and man has gone in this direction even to the point of debating the question in church councils, as to whether woman really had a soul or not!

But when the Church revered pure virginity in the person of the Mother of Jesus, it was woman in highest form—as happy or suffering mother—that the Church unconsciously glorified. In the statues and altar pieces of the cathedral man worships, in the likeness of Mary, the purest and noblest womanhood. The virtues especially extolled by the Church were also those in which Mary in particular and woman in general had pre-eminence. By all these impressions a soul condition was created in which the heart penetrated by religious ecstasy, must, of psychological necessity, devote itself to the earthly manifestations of this same pure womanhood. Generally this devotion was only an ecstatic cult, an adoration from afar of an ideal, inspiring deeds or poetry. Sometimes this ecstasy fused the being of man and woman in the sensuous-soulful unity of great love. But when neither was the case, yet the adoration of knights and minnesingers increased the esteem of man for woman and the esteem of woman for herself. It also contributed to the esteem of man for woman that, as the men were always obliged to stand in arms, they could rarely acquire the learning which the priests—and through them the wives and daughters of the castles—acquired. The superiority of woman in this respect had a refining influence upon manners and customs and upon the general culture of the time. Often through a number of women auditors the poem of a minnesinger first became famous. When in Mainz one sees Heinrich Frauenlob’s tombstone, one comprehends, through the soulful noble lines, how mourning women bore him to the grave, as the little bas-relief at the base of the stone represents. Their sympathy made him their singer and his sympathy revealed, to their time and to themselves, their own being. Woman’s ideal of love became through poetry and courts of love the ideal also of the most cultured men. We see here a movement of the time which women already half consciously effected by their life of feeling and their culture. The authority which the wife exercised as lady of the manor during the absence, often of many years’ duration, of her husband gave her increased power to disseminate about her that finer culture which she herself had gained. But when the lords of the manor returned and again assumed power, then indeed at times strange thoughts might have come to their wives, while they fixed their glance, under the great arched eyelids, upon the missal or the romance of chivalry or, with long tapering fingers, moved the chessmen or played the harp, or while they bent the slender white neck over the embroidery frame or the lace-pillow upon which they wrought veritable marvels of handicraft. Perhaps even then there stirred under many a brow the presentiment of a time in which the relationship between man and woman would be different. Such thoughts must have arisen also in the manor-houses when the men began to arrogate to themselves one handicraft after another, occupations which in earlier times the daughters once learned from their fathers, at whose side they sometimes even entered the guild. Could even the nun’s veil prevent such thoughts from rising between the white temples of some of the women who—suffering or superfluous outside in the world—had found refuge in the cloister? Here was accomplished most peacefully the “emancipation,” of that time, of the intellectual and artistic gifts of woman, for whom religion and the life of the cloister had always employment. And if the soul of a nun was greater and richer than usual, then might it indeed have happened that she devoted herself to meditation, in a quandary as to whether all of God’s purposes for the gifts of her soul were truly fulfilled. And this the more intently since even then many women outside the cloister—women whose religious inspiration directed their genius to great ends—outside in the world, exercised a powerful influence upon the thought as upon the events of their time and, after death as saints, retained power over souls. Our Birgitta, for example, possessed herself of a great part of “woman’s rights.”

So significant had the psychic power of woman shown itself to be in the Middle Ages that already in the early Renaissance it brought forth a number of “feminist” writers, both women and men. And in the height of the Renaissance there was quite an “emancipation” literature, about women and by women. This literature increased during the following centuries. Famous men emphasised the importance of a higher education of woman; some, as early as the beginning of the 16th century, claimed the absolute superiority of woman in all things. Greater freedom, education, and rights, in one or another respect, were demanded by men as well as women “feminists.” This literature purposed less, however, to alter some given conditions than, by means of examples of famous women of antiquity, to demonstrate the personal right and the social gain of what already obtained without hindrance, although with the disapproval of many:—that numbers of women had appeared who in classic culture, in the practice of learned professions, in political or religious, intellectual or æsthetic interests, stood beside the men of Humanism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation.

The ideal of the time, the fully developed human personality of marked individuality, determined the conduct of life of women exactly as that of men. Both sexes cherished the life value which the original, isolated, individual personality signified for other such personalities. Both sexes appropriated to themselves the right to choose that which was harmonious with their own natures, that which soul or sense, thought or feeling, desired. It followed from this conception that women sought to attain the highest degree of the beauty and grace of their own sex and at the same time to cultivate what “manly” courage or genius nature had given them—attributes which men valued in them next to their purely womanly qualities.

But at this time it was not the work of woman which had the great cultural significance, but the human essence of her being reflected in the works of men. In antiquity woman exhibited the manly qualities of greatness of soul and civic virtue; in the Middle Ages she revealed the same faculty as man for saintliness and exercise of love; in the Renaissance she manifested the same ability as man to mould her own personality into a living work of art. If the spirit of equality between the sexes, which prevailed in the Renaissance, had further directed the progress of development, a “woman movement” would never have arisen, because its ends, which are to-day still contended for, would have been attained one after another, at the appointed time, as natural fruits of the florescence of the Renaissance.

As it is, this florescence acquired only very slight immediate influence upon the emancipation of woman—and the farther North one goes the slighter it becomes. The periods of the Counter-Reformation, of the Religious Wars and of the new Orthodoxy, on the contrary, had as result an enormous retrogression in the position of woman.

The “Deliverance of the Flesh,” which was accomplished by the verdict of Protestantism upon the life of the cloister, and by its support of marriage, had little in common with the deep feeling for the right and beauty of corporeality by which the Renaissance, intoxicated with life, became the era of the great renascence of art. Luther’s conception of the sex life, as “sanctified” by marriage, was so crassly utilitarian that it again dragged woman down from that high level upon which the finest life of feeling and culture of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance had placed her.

As matron of the household, woman retained her authority. The rational, common-sense marriage was the one most conformable to this literal doctrine of Luther, and the most usual. To the man who had chosen her, the wife bore children by the dozen and threescore. The Church gave her soul nourishment. If a woman occasionally sought to exercise her spiritual gifts in a “worldly” direction, she needed powerful protection, else she ran the danger of being burned as a witch!

Yet in spite of all, even this period produced not a few women who procured for themselves the learning after which they thirsted, who succeeded in keeping their souls alive, in finding springs in the midst of the stony wastes of the desert. The more, however, the different branches of learning developed, and especially as Latin became the language of the learned, the more difficult it became for women to force their way to these springs, sealed for the majority of their sex. For a classical education became more and more infrequently extended to the daughter, for whom even the ability to read and write was considered a temptation to deviation from the path of virtue.[^[1]]

That women in time of persecution adhered to the new doctrine with warm belief and suffered for it with the whole strength of their souls, that in time of war they managed house and estate with power and understanding, altered in no respect, at the time, woman’s social or marriage position. Man was woman’s sovereign master and therefore a good bit nearer God than she. In marriage woman was considered, according to the bishop’s word, “man’s chattel,” outside of marriage as a tool of the devil. But however deeply the soul of woman was oppressed at this time, yet it still lived and endowed sons, in whom the strong but unexercised endowments of the mother became genius; it endowed daughters, who secretly procured sustenance for their souls and who in turn transmitted their rebellious spirit to a daughter or granddaughter.