The Woman Movement

by Ellen Key

When at the end of the period of Orthodoxy and Absolutism, the great fundamental principle of Protestantism, the principle of personality, once more made headway, one of the most characteristic expressions of this reaction is that, in England, Milton wrote upon the right of divorce and Defoe upon the right of woman to the development and exercise of her mental powers. Among others who demanded greater education for women were Comenius in Germany and Fénelon in France. It was not in the former country that woman, so long oppressed, first won her great cultural influence. That happened in the land where women had never wholly lost it. In France, in the age of enlightenment, it was the salons created by women that determined the European spirit of the time. Letters and memoirs indicate sufficiently the influence of woman—in good as well as in bad sense—in politics and literature, manners, customs, and taste. Women transform indirectly the political, philosophic, and scientific style. For they demand that every subject be treated in a manner easily comprehensible and agreeable to them. A number of writings appeared which aimed to make it easy for “women folk” also “to be freed through the reason.”

Since it was the approval of women which determined fame, men were only too eager to fulfil their expressed demands. Women disseminated the ideas of men in wide circles, partly by buying their writings in great numbers and distributing them, partly also by social life. Never has woman more perfectly accomplished the important task of adjusting culture values. The art of conversation, developed to the highest perfection, was, it is true, often only a game of battledore and shuttlecock with ideas. But it performed at the same time, and in more elegant and more effective manner, a great part of the office of to-day’s Press. The political leader, art and literary criticism, gossip (causerie), the “portrait gallery” of contemporaries—all this was gathered from clever discourse. Through their art of conversation the women became—next to the philosophers and statesmen who in this or that salon were the leading spirits—the intellectual leaders of the time; they created “enlightened opinion,” they co-operated finally in the Revolution. The mistresses of these salons scarcely felt the need of an emancipation of woman; for they had for themselves as many possibilities of culture, of development of their powers, of the exercise of their faculties, as even they themselves could wish. The intellectual curiosity, which coveted learning, and the cultural interest of these women penetrated in wider circles, and a result of this general awakening was the Woman’s Lyceum founded in Paris in 1786, among the students of which were found, some years later, enthusiastic supporters of the Revolution.

Also among the German peoples there appeared, in the age of enlightenment, women with literary and scientific interest; some with extraordinary gifts which they also exercised. But for the most part women and men under more clumsy social forms, so-called “Academies” and “Societies,” engaged in their “learned pastime”; and nowhere, except in the person of some ruler, did woman attain in Europe, in the age of enlightenment, an influence which can be compared to that of the French women.

In the midst of the period of rococo elegance and gallantry, of reason and esprit, came the great regeneration, the second Renaissance—the Revival of Feeling. This occurred first in the field of religion, through the pietistic movement of the time. Later it was Rousseau who, in connection with religion, nature, love, motherhood, became the liberator of feeling, and together with him were the English “sentimental” poets and the German poetry, which reached its culminating point in Goethe. Literature, the Theatre, and Art came more and more to the front and, by that means, women acquired greater possibilities of becoming acquainted with, understanding, and loving the richest culture of the time.

And with this Revival of Feeling, personal freedom, individual character, became again the great life value. Women who wish to give expression to their feeling in their life now become more numerous: women who are conscious that their being buries many unsatisfied demands, not only in connection with the right of culture of their natural character, but also in connection with the right, in private life and in society, to give expression to this natural character. Men are continually in intellectual interchange with women, giving as well as receiving; woman nature is esteemed with ever finer comprehension.

Since feelings determine thoughts—for the thought always goes in the direction in which the feeling says happiness is to be found—so it is natural that, in the second half of the 18th century, the idea of freedom is the ideal which kindles the soul of increasing numbers of women. The emancipation of the individual is the tale within the tale, from the Renaissance up to the struggles of the Reformation for freedom of conscience, freedom of learning, freedom of investigation, and freedom of thought. Then finally came the struggle for constitutionally protected civic freedom. In America as early as 1776 the demand for the enfranchisement of women was raised, because they had taken part in the struggle for freedom with such great enthusiasm and constancy. With the same passion they threw themselves into the struggle in France for the “Rights of Man.” But both times they had to learn to their sorrow that “fellow-citizen” and “man” were terms which as yet referred only to men. That a woman during the French Revolution proclaimed “Women’s Rights,” that women discussed these questions as well as questions of education and other vital questions, with ardour, had as little immediate effect as the attempt at that time to enforce the right of the fourth estate. These sorely oppressed movements, of women and of working men, dominate the 19th century and now at the beginning of the 20th have every reason for assurance of victory.

In the 17th and 18th centuries men and women writers appeared in different countries to demonstrate and establish the worth and right of woman as “man.” Indirectly inspired by the great women of the earlier centuries, they were immediately influenced by woman’s political and cultural exercise of power in the 18th century. Especially notable are the arguments which were advanced in the 90’s of the 18th century by writers manifestly uninfluenced by one another—the Swede, Thorild, in The Natural Nobility of Womankind; the German, Hippel; the Frenchman, Condorcet; the English woman, Mary Wollstonecraft. All insist that difference in sex can form no obstacle to placing woman on an equality with man in the family and in society; that she shall have the same right as man to education and free agency. The men writers emphasised more her individual human right, as “man,” and the advantage to society; the women writers more the mother’s need of culture and her right to it, in order to be able to rear and protect her children better. But all four ideas are, at heart, determined by the same point of view which the great philosopher of evolution thus formulated later: the fundamental condition for social equilibrium is the same as for human happiness and lies in the law of equal freedom. And this means that every one—without regard to difference between sex and sex, man and man—must have the right and the opportunity to develop and exercise his own capacities. For no one to-day can undertake so certain a valuation of talents that this valuation could justify society in restricting, a priori, the right of a single one of its members to develop his capacities, even though these capacities might take such a direction, later, that society would be compelled to limit their exercise.

Spencer arrived by the deductive method at the same demand Romanticism reached earlier by the intuitive method. Romanticism recognised that in the measure in which the individual is unusual he must be also unintelligible, for he shows to the majority only his surface; his innermost soul only to those in harmony with him. Even in the family circle the individual often remains therefore undiscovered. How much more then must society, composed for the most part of Philistines, outrage the individual if it concedes rights to one category, to one sex, to one class, and not to the other!

And from this point of view the Romanticists drew for women also the logical conclusion of individualism. They pointed out that the sex character, carried to the extreme, furnished neither the highest masculine nor the highest feminine type; that each sex must develop in itself both noble human universality and individual peculiarity. And this the great woman personalities did who shared the destiny of the Romanticists. They were thereby fully and wholly able to share also the intellectual life of their husbands. Love became thus a unity of souls. The romantic ideal of love was expressed in La Nouvelle Héloise, in Goethe’s letters to Charlotte von Stein, in Rahel, in Mme. de Staël. It was found in the first half of the 19th century in many great women; for example, George Sand, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Camilla Collett. It appeared in Shelley and in the Swedish poet Almquist, in Stuart Mill and Robert Browning, also in certain French and German poets and thinkers. This ideal has now been for some centuries the ideal of most women and of not a few men of feeling.

But since a truly psychic unity is possible only between two beings who are, in outer as in inner sense, free, exactly for this reason, “romantic love” has as consequence the demand for the emancipation of woman.