Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism

by Floyd Dell

Her writings have had a peculiar career in America, one which perhaps prevents a clear understanding of their character. On the one hand, they have seemed to many to be radically "advanced"; to thousands of middle-class women, who have heard vaguely of these new ideas, and who have secretly and strongly desired to know more of them, her "Love and Marriage" has come as a revolutionary document, the first outspoken word of scorn for conventional morality, the first call to them to take their part in the breaking of new paths.

On the other hand, it must be remembered that America is the home of Mormonism, of the Oneida Community, of the Woodhull and Claflin "free-love" movement of the '70s, of "Dianism" and a hundred other obscure but pervasive sexual cults—in short, of movements of greater or less respectability, capable of giving considerable currency to their beliefs. And they have given considerable currency to their beliefs. In spite of the dominant tone of Puritanism in American thought, our social life has been affected to an appreciable extent by these beliefs.

And these beliefs may be summed up hastily, but, on the whole, justly, as materialistic—in the common and unfavorable sense. They have converged, from one direction or another, upon the opinion that sex is an animal function, no more sacred than any other animal function, which, by a ridiculous over-estimation, is made to give rise to jealousy, unhappiness, madness, vice, and crime.

It is a fact that the Puritan temperament readily finds this opinion, if not the program which accompanies it, acceptable, as one may discover in private conversation with respectable Puritans of both sexes. And it is more unfortunately true that the present-day rebellion against conventional morality in America has found, in Hardy and Shaw and other anti-romanticists, a seeming support of this opinion. So that one finds in America today (though some people may not know about it) an undercurrent of impatient materialism in matters of sex. To become freed from the inadequate morality of Puritanism is, for thousands of young people, to adopt another morality which is, if more sound in many ways, certainly as inadequate as the other.

So that Ellen Key comes into the lives of many in this country as a conservative force, holding up a spiritual ideal, the ideal of monogamy, and defending it with a breadth of view, a sanity, and a fervor that make it something different from the cold institution which these readers have come to despise. She makes every allowance for human nature, every concession to the necessities of temperament, every recognition of the human need for freedom, and yet makes the love of one man and one woman seem the highest ideal, a thing worth striving and waiting and suffering for.

She cherishes the spiritual magic of sex as the finest achievement of the race, and sees it as the central and guiding principle in our social and economic evolution. She seeks to construct a new morality which will do what the present one only pretends, and with the shallowest and most desperately pitiful of pretenses, to do. She would help our struggling generation to form a new code of ethics, and one of subtle stringency, in this most important and difficult of relations.

Thus her writings, of which "Love and Marriage" will here be taken as representative, have a twofold aspect—the radical and the conservative. But of the two, the conservative is by far the truer. It is as a conservator, with too firm a grip on reality to be lured into the desertion of any real values so far achieved by the race, that she may be best considered.

And germane to her conservatism, which is the true conservatism of her sex, is her intellectual habit, her literary method. She is not a logician, it is true. She lacks logic, and with it order and clearness and precision, because of the very fact of her firm hold on realities. The realities are too complex to be brought into any completely logical and orderly relation, too elusive to be stated with utter precision. There is a whole universe in "Love and Marriage"; and it resembles the universe in its wildness, its tumultuousness, its contradictory quality. Her book, like the universe, is in a state of flux—it refuses to remain one fixed and dead thing. It is a book which in spite of some attempt at arrangement may be begun at any point and read in any order. It is a mixture of science, sociology, and mysticism; it has a wider range than an orderly book could possibly have; it touches more points, includes more facts, and is more convincing, in its queer way, than any other.

"Love and Marriage" is the Talmud of sexual morality. It contains history, wisdom, poetry, psychological analysis, shrewd judgments, generous sympathies, ... and it all bears upon the creation of that new sexual morality for which in a thousand ways—economic, artistic, and spiritual—we are so astonishing a mixture of readiness and unreadiness.

Ellen Key is fundamentally a conservator. But she is careful about what she conservates. It is the right to love which she would have us cherish, rather than the right to own another person—the beauty of singleness of devotion rather than the cruel habit of trying to force people to carry out rash promises made in moments of exaltation. She conserves the greatest things and lets the others go: motherhood, as against the exclusive right of married women to bear children; and that personal passion which is at once physical and spiritual rather than any of the legally standardized relations. Nor does she hesitate to speak out for the conservation of that old custom which persists among peasant and primitive peoples all over the world and which has been reintroduced to the public by a recent sociologist under the term of "trial marriage"; it must be held, she says, as the bulwark against the corruption of prostitution and made a part of the new morality.