Woman’s High Achievement
By Selma Lagerlof
(Swedish contemporary. Prominent in literary and progressive circles. From an address delivered before the Sixth Congress of the International Suffrage Alliance in Stockholm, entitled “Woman the Savior of the State.”)
Have women done nothing which entitles us to equal rights with man? Our time on earth has been long—as long as his. Have we created nothing of incontestable worth to life and civilization? Besides this, that we have brought human beings into the world, have we contributed nothing of use to mankind?... I look at paintings and engravings, pictures of old women, of olden times. Their faces are haggard and stern; their hands rough and bony. They had their struggles and their interests. What have they done?
I place myself before Rembrandt’s old peasant woman, she of the thousand wrinkles in her intelligent face, and I ask myself why she lived? Certainly not to be worshipped by many men, not to rule a state, not to win a scholar’s degree! And yet the work to which she devoted herself could not have been of a trivial nature. She did not go through life stupid and shallow! The glances of men and women rest rather upon her aged countenance than upon that of the fairest young beauty. Her life must have had a meaning.
We all know what the old woman will reply to my question. We read the answer in her calm and kindly smile: “All that I did was to make a good home.”
And look you! That is what the women would answer if they could rise from their graves generation after generation, thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions: “All that we strove for was to make a good home.”
We know that if we were to ask the men, could we line them up, generation after generation, thousands and millions in succession, it would not occur to one of them to say that he had lived for the purpose of making a good home....
We know that it is needless to seek further. We should find nothing. Our gift to humanity is the home—that, and nothing else....