i-S»!flifisi;:ffi 
 
 The Woman 
 Move me lit 
 
 Ellen Key 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021874056 
 
By Ellen Key 
 
 The Century of the Child 
 The Education of the Child 
 Love and Marriage 
 The Woman Movement 
 
 / 
 
The 
 Woman Movement 
 
 By ....-^j^x^ 
 
 Ellen Key 
 
 Author of 
 " The Century of the Child," " Love and Marriage," etc. 
 
 Translated by 
 
 Mamah Bouton Borthwick, A.M. 
 
 With an Introduction by 
 
 Havelock Ellis 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 New York and London 
 
 Ube tailtketbocbet press 
 
 1912 
 
COFTEICHT, I912 
 BY 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 Vbe 'ftntefiecbocket ffcees, Itew IBerft 
 
Es gibt kein Vergangenes' das man zuriicksehnen durfte; es 
 gibt nur ein ewig Neues, das sich aus den erweiterten Elementen 
 des Vergangenen gestaltet, und die echte Sehnsucht muss stets 
 productiv sein, ein neues, besseres Erschaffen. — Goethe. 
 
 " There is no past that we need long to return to, 
 there is only the eternally new which is formed out 
 of enlarged elements of the past; and our genuine 
 longing must always be productive, for a new and 
 better creation." 
 
 m 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The literature upon the right and the worth 
 of woman, beginning as early as the 15th century, 
 has in recent times increased so enormously that 
 a complete collection would require a whole library 
 building. In these writings are represented all 
 classes, from tables of statistics to comic papers. 
 Not only both sexes but almost all stages of life 
 have contributed to it. By immersing oneself in 
 this literature, especially in its belletristic and 
 polemic portions, one could find rich material for 
 the illumination of that sphere to which the pub- 
 lisher limited my work: the indication of the new 
 spiritual conditions, transformations, and reciprocal 
 results which the woman movement has effected. 
 Historic, scientific, political, economic, juridical, 
 sociological, and theological points of view must, 
 therefore, be practically set aside. But even for 
 my task, limited to the psychological sphere, time, 
 strength, and inclination are wanting to btiry my- 
 self in this literature. I must, therefore, confine 
 myself to giving chiefly my own observations. 
 
 It is more than fifty years ago that I read 
 Hertha, Sweden's first "feministic" (dealing with 
 
vi Preface 
 
 the woman question) novel, and listened to 
 the numerous contentions concerning it. With 
 ever keener personal interest I have since followed 
 the operations of the woman movement — above all, 
 the new psychic conditions, types, and forms of 
 activities which the woman movement has evoked ; 
 I have also given consideration to the new possi- 
 bilities and new difficulties resulting therefrom for 
 individuals and for society. 
 
 The limited compass of this little book prevents 
 me from substantiating my assertions by means of 
 parallels with earlier times, comparisons which 
 might illuminate certain spiritual transformations 
 and new formations. My comparisons of the 
 present with the past do not go farther back than 
 my own memory reaches. And these touch, more- 
 over, in what concerns the past, principally up- 
 on Swedish conditions; while my impressions of 
 the present were gathered throughout Europe. I 
 have considered, however, that I could summarise , 
 both in a comprehensive picture. For although 
 the women of Sweden a generation ago possessed 
 rights for which the women in many countries are 
 still struggling, to-day, yet the woman movement 
 in the last decade has advanced so rapidly that 
 the conditions have in great measure been equal- 
 ised. Indeed, some of the grey-haired champions 
 of the woman movement have seen one after 
 another of their demands fulfilled in this new cen- 
 tury — demands which in the fifties and sixties, in 
 many countries even in the seventies and eighties, 
 
Preface vii 
 
 were publicly and privately derided even in the 
 very person of these champions. And among 
 peoples who even ten years ago were unaffected 
 by the emancipation of women, for example the 
 Chinese and the Turks, it is already progressing. 
 It amounts to this, that even if national pecvdiari- 
 ties in character and in laws occasion differences 
 in the curve which the woman movement describes 
 in the different cotmtries, yet everywhere the 
 movement has had the same causes, must follow 
 the same main direction, and — sooner or later — 
 must have the same effects. 
 
 In Hertha, the book containing the tenets of the 
 Swedish woman movement, the demand is made 
 for woman's "freedom and future, and a home for 
 her spiritual life"; the desire is expressed that 
 women should "preserve the character of their 
 own nature, and not be imiformly moulded, not 
 ,be led by a string as if they had not a soul of their 
 own to show them the way." There must be 
 "vital air for woman's soul and a share in Hfe's 
 riches." It is to be lamented that "woman's 
 spiritual talent must be a field that lies fallow," 
 that the law "denies her free agency in seeking 
 happiness." The prerogative is demanded that 
 "woman in noble self-conscious joy shall succeed 
 in feeling what she is able to do now and what she 
 is capable of attaining" ; that she shall be free to 
 "aspire to the heights her youthful strength and 
 consciousness point out to her"; that she may 
 
viii Preface 
 
 "be fully herself and be able to exercise an uplift- 
 ing, ennobling influence upon the man" to whom 
 she says: "All that is mine shall be thine and 
 thereby the portion of each shall be doubled." 
 
 Even if all fields are made accessible to them, 
 "God's law in their nature will always lead the 
 majority of women to the home, to the intimacy 
 of the family life, to motherhood and the duties 
 of rearing children — but with a higher conscious- 
 ness." That women shall be citizens signifies that 
 they shall become "human beings in whom the 
 life of the heart predominates." 
 
 This picture of the future, which has already 
 become a reality in many respects, was sketched 
 at a time when innumerable women were still com- 
 pelled to experience that "there is no heavier bur- 
 den than life's emptiness," and when it was true of 
 every woman, "dark is her way, gloomy her future, 
 narrow her lot." 
 
 But because that which is, is always considered 
 by the masses as that which ought to be, "whatever 
 is, is right," so the writer who painted the pic- 
 ture was called "dangerous," "a disintegrator of 
 society," "mad," "ridiculous"! "Mademoiselle 
 Bremer's" name possessed then quite a different 
 intonation from that of Fredrika Bremer now; 
 it caused strife between the sexes; it was hated by 
 some and derided by others. 
 
 I should like to advise young women of the 
 present time to read Hertha; they will thus obtain 
 a criterion for the progress which has taken place 
 
Preface ix 
 
 during the last half century and also a clear view 
 of the character of the opposition which the preserlt 
 desire for progress encounters. 
 
 Ellen Key. 
 October i, 1909. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 There can be little doubt that at the present 
 moment what is called the "Woman's Movement" 
 is entering a critical period of its development. 
 A discussion of its present problems and its present 
 difficulties by one of the most advanced leaders 
 in that movement thus appears at the right time 
 and deserves our most serious attention. 
 
 The eariy promulgators of the Woman's Move- 
 ment, a century or more ago, rightly regarded it 
 as an extremely large and comprehensive move- 
 ment affecting the whole of life. They were anx- 
 ious to secure for women adequate opportunities 
 for free human development, to the same extent 
 that men possess such opportunities, but they laid 
 no special stress on the abolition of any single dis- 
 abiUty or group of disabilities, whether as regards 
 education, occupation, marriage, property, or 
 political enfranchisement. They were people of 
 wide and sound intelligence; they never imagined 
 that any single isolated reform would prove a cheap 
 panacea for aU the evils they wished to correct; 
 they looked for a slow reform along the whole line. 
 They held that such reform would enrich and en- 
 large the entire field of human life, not for women 
 only, but for the htmian race generally. Such, 
 indeed, is the spirit which still inspires the wisest 
 
xii Introduction 
 
 and most far-seeing champions of that Movement. 
 It is only necessary to mention Olive Schreiner's 
 Woman and Labour. 
 
 When, however, the era of actual practical re- 
 form began, it was obvious that a certain amount 
 of concentration became necessary. Education 
 was, reasonably enough, usually the first point 
 for concentration, and gradually, without any 
 tmdue friction, the education of girls was, so far 
 as possible, raised to a level not so very different 
 from that of boys. This first great stage in the 
 Woman's Movement inevitably led on to the 
 second stage, which lay in a struggle, not this time 
 always without a certain amount of friction, to 
 secure the entry of these now educated women to 
 avocations and professions previously monopolised 
 by the men who had alone been trained to fill them. 
 This second stage is now largely completed, and 
 at the present time there are very few vocations 
 and professions in civilised lands, even in so con- 
 servative and slowly moving a land as England, 
 which women are not entitled to exercise equally 
 with men. Concomitantly with this movement, 
 however, — ^and beginning indeed, very much 
 earlier, and altogether apart from any conscious 
 "movement" at aU, — there was a tendency to 
 change the laws in a direction more favourable 
 to women and their personal rights, especially as 
 regards marriage and property. These legal re- 
 forms were effected by Parliaments of men, elected 
 exclusively by men, and for the most part they 
 
Introduction xiii 
 
 were effected without any very strong pressure 
 from women. It had, however, long been claimed 
 that women themselves ought to have some part 
 in making the laws by which they are governed, 
 and at this stage, towards the middle of the last 
 century, the demand for women's parliamentary 
 suffrage began to be urgently raised. Here, how- 
 ever, the difficulties naturally proved very much 
 greater than they, were in the introduction of a 
 higher level of education for women, or even in 
 the opening up to them of hitherto monopolised 
 occupations. In new cotmtries, and sometimes 
 in small old countries, these difficulties could be 
 overcome. But in large and old countries, of 
 stable and complex constitution, it was very far 
 from easy to readjust the ancient machinery in 
 accordance with the new demands. The difficulty 
 by no means lay in any unwillingness on the part 
 of the masculine politicians in possession; on the 
 contrary, it is a notable fact, often overlooked, 
 that, in England especially, there have for at least 
 half a centiiry been a considerable proportion of 
 eminent statesmen as weU as of the ordinary rank 
 and file of members of Parliament who are in 
 favour of granting the suffrage to women, a much 
 larger proportion, probably, than would be found 
 favourable to this claim in any other section of 
 the community. That, indeed, — apart from the 
 delay involved by ancient constitutional methods, 
 — has been the main difficulty. Neither among 
 the masculine electors nor among their women- 
 
xiv Introduction 
 
 folk has there been any constuning desire to achieve 
 women's suffrage. 
 
 The result has been a certain tendency in the 
 Woman's Movement to diverge in two different 
 directions. On the one hand, are those who, re- 
 cognising that aU evolution is slow, are content 
 to await patiently the inevitable moment when 
 the political enfranchisement of women will be- 
 come possible, in the meanwhile working towards 
 women's causes in other fields equally essential 
 and sometimes more important. On the other 
 hand, a small but energetic, sometimes even 
 violent, section of the women engaged in this 
 movement concentrated altogether on the suffrage. 
 The germs of this divergence may be noted even 
 thirty years back when we find Miss Cobbe de- 
 claring that woman's suffrage is "the crown and 
 completion of all progress in woman 's movements, 
 while Mrs. Cady Stanton, perhaps more wisely, 
 stated that it was merely a vestibule to progress. 
 In recent years the difference has become accentu- 
 ated, sometimes even into an acute opposition, 
 between those who maintain that the one and only 
 thing essential, and that immediately and at all 
 costs, even at the cost of arresting and putting 
 back the progress of women in all other directions, 
 is the parliamentary suffrage, and on the other 
 hand, those who hold that the suffrage, however 
 necessary, is still only a single point, and that the 
 woman's movement is far wider and, above all, 
 far deeper than any mere political reform. 
 
Introduction xv 
 
 It is at this stage that Ellen Key comes before 
 us with her book on The Woman's Movement, first 
 published in Swedish in 1909, and now presented 
 to the reader in English. As Ellen Key views the 
 Woman's Movement, it certainly includes aU that 
 those who struggle for votes for women are fighting 
 for; she is unable to see, as she puts it, why a 
 woman's hands need be more soiled by a ballot 
 paper than by a cooking recipe. But she is far 
 indeed from the well-intentioned but ignorant 
 fanatics who fancy that the vote is the alpha and 
 the omega of Feminism ; and still less is she in 
 sympathy with those who consider that its import- 
 ance is so supreme as to justify violence and rob- 
 bery, a sort of sex war on mankind generally, and 
 the casting in the mud of aU those things which 
 it has been the gradual task of civilisation to 
 achieve, not for men only but for women. The 
 Woman's Movement, as Ellen Key sees it, in- 
 cludes the demand for the vote, but it looks upon 
 the vote merely as a reasonable condition for 
 attaining far wider and more fundamental ends. 
 She is of opinion that the Woman's Movement will 
 progress less by an increased aptitude to claim 
 rights than by an increased power of self -develop- 
 ment, that it is not by what they can seize, but by 
 whai; they are, that women, or for the matter of 
 that men, finally count. She regards the task of 
 women as constructive rather than destructive; 
 they are the architects of the future humanity, 
 and she holds that this is a task that can only be 
 
xvi Introduction 
 
 carried out side by side with men, not because 
 man's work and woman's work is, or should be, 
 identical, but because each supplements and aids 
 the other, and whatever gives greater strength 
 and freedom to one sex equally fortifies and 
 liberates the other sex. 
 
 Certainly we may not all agree with Ellen Key 
 at every point, nor always accept her interpreta- 
 tion of the great movement of which she is so 
 notable a pioneer. The breadth of her sympathies 
 may sometimes seem to lead to an impracticable 
 eclecticism, and, in the rejection of narrow and 
 trivial aims, she may too sanguinely demand an 
 impossible harmony of opposing ideals. But if 
 this is an error it is surely an error on the right 
 side. She has not put forward this book as a mani- 
 festo of the advanced guard of the Woman's Move- 
 ment, but merely as the reflections of an individual 
 woman who, for nearly half a century, has pond- 
 ered, felt, studied, observed this movement in 
 many parts of the world. But it would not be 
 easy to find a book in which the claims of Feminism 
 — ^in the largest modem sense — ^are more reason- 
 ably and temperately set forth. 
 
 rfi^^o-^ c/v — Y^A 
 
 London, May i, 1912. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction i 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I The External Results of the Woman 
 
 Movement ..... 23 
 
 II The Inner Results of the Woman 
 
 Movement ..... 58 
 
 III The Influence of the Woman Ques- 
 
 tion upon Single Women. . . 71 
 
 IV The Influence of the Woman Move- 
 
 ment upon the Daughters . . 89 
 
 V The Influence of the Woman Move- 
 ment upon Men and Women in 
 General. ..... iii 
 
 VI The Influence of the Woman Move- 
 ment upon Marriage . . . 139 
 
 Vll The Influence of the Woman Move- 
 ment UPON Motherhood . . 169 
 
The Woman Movement 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The first "woman movement" was Eve's ges- | 
 ture when she reached for the fruit of the Tree of 
 Knowledge — a movement symboHc of the entire . 
 subsequent woman's movement of the world. For 
 the will to pass beyond established bounds has 
 constantly been the motive of her conscious as^ 
 well as of her subconscious quest. Every genera- 
 tion has called this transgression, this passing 
 beyond the botmds, a "fall of man," the "original 
 sin," a crime against God's express command, a 
 crime against the nature of woman as prescribed 
 for her for all time. 
 
 And yet from the beginning women have 
 appeared who have passed far beyond the estab- 
 lished boundaries set for their sex by their era and 
 upheld by their own people. They have demon- 
 strated that limitations thus prescribed do not 
 always coincide with what is considered by the 
 majority to be the "nature" of woman. Atone 
 time a woman has manifested the "masculine" 
 
2 The Woman Movement 
 
 characteristics of a ruler or has performed a "mas- 
 culine" deed; at another time she has distingmshed 
 herself in "masculine" learning or art, or again 
 has dared to love without the permission oi 
 law and custom. In a word the individual woman, 
 when her head or her heart, was strong enough, has 
 always shown the possibilities of the development 
 of personal power. But she has had in that effort 
 only her own strength and her own will upon which 
 to rely; she has neither been urged on by the spirit 
 of her time (Zeitgeist) nor been emulated by the 
 masses. Exceptional women have sometimes been 
 glorified by their contemporaries and by posterity 
 as "wonders of nature"; sometimes been cited as 
 "warning examples." Seen in connection with 
 the world's woman movement all these instances, 
 where a bond was broken by woman's power of 
 mind or creative gift, by a heart or a conscience, 
 are parts of what can be called the "prehistoric" 
 woman movement. This movement for personal 
 freedom formed no step in that phase of the de- 
 velopment which possesses a conscious purpose, 
 but was merely sporadic. Even so the participation 
 was 1 ng nameless which women took in th- great 
 .struggles for freedom where, without consideration 
 for the "nature" of woman, they dared bleed upon 
 the arena and scaffold, ascend the pyre, and be 
 raised upon the gibbet. Very rarely did these 
 women martyrs alter immediately men's — or even 
 women's — conception of woman's "being." But 
 just as many perfumes are dissipated only after 
 
Introduction 3 
 
 centuries, so there are also deeds whose indirect 
 results persist through centuries. 
 
 Most significant, however, upon the whole in 
 the "prehistoric" woman movement, are innumer- 
 able women whose souls found expression only 
 in the strong, quiet acts of every day life but yet 
 remained living and growing. As a reason for the 
 "enslavement" of woman by man, the primitive 
 division of labour is still occasionally cited. This " 
 division of labour made war and the chase man's 
 task and so developed in him courage, energy, and 
 daring, while the woman remained the "beast of 
 burden." But we forget that, in this labour 
 arrangement, the handicraft and husbandry which 
 woman practised at that time made her, to perhaps 
 a higher degree than man, the conservitor of civil- 
 isation and probably developed her psychic power 
 in more comprehensive manner than his. 
 
 Even after this division of labour ceased there 
 remained — and remain still in innumerable country 
 households — in and through many of the import- 
 ant and difficult tasks of the mother of the house, 
 numerous possibilities for spiritual development. 
 And exactly in this respect industrial work robs 
 the woman of much. 
 
 By the side of these innumerable nameless 
 women who, century after century, in and through 
 the material work of culture which they performed, 
 increased their psychic power, we must remember 
 all the unnamed women who with flower-like 
 quiet mien turned their souls to the light. 
 
4 The Woman Movement 
 
 Antique sepulchres and Tanagra figures tell us 
 more about the harmonious, refined corporeality 
 of the Hellenic woman than the famous statues 
 of Aphrodite or Athena. In like manner it is not 
 the illustrious but the nameless women who most 
 clearly reveal the will of the woman soul, in 
 , ajntiquity, for light and life. 
 I' Numbers of Greek women were disciples of the 
 ■i philosophers, some even were their inspiration. 
 \?,i Generally courtesans, these women represented 
 ! the "emancipation" of that time from the servile 
 condition of the legitimate married women and 
 also showed that women already longed to share 
 in the interests of men and to acquire their culture. 
 History has preserved also words and deeds of 
 wives and mothers of the past which show that 
 these also at times attained "masculine" greatness 
 of soul and civic virtue. Psrthias and Sibyls, 
 Vestals and Valas, are other witnesses that the 
 power of woman's sotd was active and recognised 
 long before Christianity. Even among the purely 
 primitive races there were found — and are found — 
 cases in which woman in power and rights was 
 placed, not only on an equality with man, but even 
 above him. And if, on the one hand, the rigid 
 exactions which men from the earliest time have 
 fixed upon the wife's fidelity — while they them- 
 selves had full freedom for promiscuity — show that 
 the wife was considered as the property of the hus- 
 band, so, on the other hand, this very conception 
 was a means of elevating and refining the sotd life 
 
Introduction 5 
 
 of woman. For the self-control which she had to 
 impose upon herself deepened her feeling for a 
 devotion which embraced only one, the man to 
 whom she belonged. Nothing would be more 
 superficial than to estimate the real position of 
 woman, among any special people, only by what 
 we know of their laws. It is as if one, in a few 
 centuries from now, should judge the actual posi- 
 tion of the modem European wife by referring it 
 to the wretched marriage laws which now ob- 
 tain. They forget the deep gtilf between law and 
 custom who declare that marriage devotion, venera- 
 tion for the sanctity of the home, esteem for the 
 spiritual being of the wife first arose as a result 
 of Christianity. 
 
 It is significant enough for the freeing of woman 
 that Jesus raised the personal worth of all mankind 
 through His teaching that — ^whoever or whatever 
 the person in outer respects may be — every soul 
 possesses an eternal value comprised, as it were, in 
 God's love; significant enough that Jesus Himself, 
 because of this point of view, treated every woman, 
 even the sinner, with kindness and respect. 
 Because of the increasing tmcertainty concerning 
 the real ideals of Jesus, one is compelled to assume 
 that — just as Veronica's handkerchief preserved 
 the imprint of Jesus' outer image — ^the manner of 
 life of the oldest Christian communities has pre- 
 served the imprint of His teaching. It is signifi- 
 cant of their doctrines that in these communities 
 women and men stood side by side in the same 
 
6 The Woman Movement 
 
 faith, in the same hope, in the same exercise of love, 
 and in the same martyrdom. Here was "neither 
 man nor woman," but all were one in the hope 
 of the speedy second coming of Jesus to establish 
 God's Kingdom. 
 
 But the more this hope faded, the more the 
 Pagan- Jewish conception of woman again made 
 itself felt. It is true the Church sought to place 
 man and woman on an equaUty in regard to certain 
 marriage duties and rights ; to uphold on both sides 
 the sanctity of marriage; to protect women and 
 children against despotism. It is true the Church 
 strove to counteract crude sensuality, utilising, 
 among other things, an emphasis of celibacy as the 
 expression of the highest spirituality. 
 
 But, on the other hand, the doctrine of this 
 Church became the greatest obstacle to the eleva- 
 tion of woman, because it lessened the reverence 
 I 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 de- 
 graded and considered the most grievous tempta- 
 tion of man in his striving after higher sanctity. 
 Before God, so man taught, man and woman were 
 truly equal; but not inhuman relationships or quali- 
 ties; yes, and man has gone in this direction even to 
 • the point of debating the question in church coun- 
 cils, as to whether woman reaUy had a soul or not ! 
 
Introduction 7 
 
 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 wor- 
 ships, in the likeness of Mary, the purest and 
 noblest womanhood. The virtues especially ex- 
 tolled by the Church were also those in which Mary 
 in particular and woman in general had pre-emi- 
 nence. 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 her- 
 self. It also contributed to the esteem of man for j 
 woman that, as the men were always obliged to 
 stand in arms, they could rarely acqtdre the learn- 
 ing 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 minne- 
 singer first became famous. When in Mainz one 
 
8 The Woman Movement 
 
 sees Heimich Frauenlob's tombstone, one compre- 
 hends, through the soulful noble lines, how mourn- 
 ing 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 
 cwn 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 move- 
 ment of the time which women already half con- 
 sciously 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 be- 
 gan to arrogate to themselves one handicraft after 
 
Introduction 9 
 
 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 accompUshed most peaceftdly the "emancipa- 
 tion," 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 di- 
 rected their genius to great ends — outside in the 
 world, exercised a powerftd influence upon the 
 thought as upon the events of their time and, af- 
 ter 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 num- 
 ber 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 literatiu-e increased during 
 
10 The Woman Movement 
 
 the following centuries. Famous men emphasised 
 the importance of a higher education of woman; 
 some, as early as the beginning of the i6th 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 condi- 
 tions than, by means of examples of famous women 
 of antiquity, to demonstrate the personal right 
 and the social gain of what already obtained with- 
 out 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 aesthetic interests, stood beside the men of Hu- 
 manism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. 
 
 The ideal of the time, the fully developed hvunan 
 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 appro- 
 priated 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 
 
Introduction ii 
 
 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 
 min. 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 frtiits of the 
 florescence of the Renaissance. 
 
 As it is, this florescence acquired only very slight i 
 immediate influence upon the emancipation of 
 woman — and the farther North one goes the 
 slighter it becomes. The periods of the Coun- 
 ter-Reformation, of the Religious Wars and of 
 the new Orthodoxy, on the contrary, had as re- 
 sult 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 mar- 
 riage, had little in common with the deep feeling 
 
12 The Woman Movement 
 
 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 con- 
 ception 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 Hf e 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 doc- 
 trine 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 aU, even this period produced not 
 a few women who procured for themselves the 
 learning after which they thirsted, who succeeded 
 in keeping their souls aUve, 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 in- 
 frequently extended to the daughter, for whom 
 even the ability to read and write was con- 
 
Introduction 13 
 
 sidered a temptation to deviation from the path 
 of virtue.' 
 
 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 re- 
 spect, 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 stiU Uved 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 rebelUous spirit 
 to a daughter or granddaughter. 
 
 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 j 
 expressions of this reaction is that, in England, i 
 Milton wrote upon the right of divorce and Defoe ' 
 
 ' 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. 
 
14 The Woman Movement 
 
 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 Fenelon in Prance. 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 enlighten- 
 ment, it was the salons created by women that 
 determined the European spirit of the time. Let- 
 ters and memoirs indicate sufficiently the influence 
 of woman — ^in good as weU as in bad sense — in 
 poUtics 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 num- 
 ber 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 deter- 
 mined 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 Ufe. Never has woman more 
 perfectly accomplished the important task of ad- 
 justing 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, 
 
Introduction 15 
 
 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 contempo- 
 raries — all this was gathered from clever dis- 
 course. Through their art of conversation the 
 women became — ^next to the philosophers and 
 statesmen who in this or that salon were the lead- 
 ing spirits — ^the intellectual leaders of the time; 
 they created "enlightened opinion," they co-opera- 
 ted finally in the Revolution. The mistresses of 
 these salons scarcely felt the need of an emancipa- 
 tion 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 foimd, 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 
 
1 6 The Woman Movement 
 
 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 Re- 
 vival of Peeling. 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 free- 
 dom, individual character, became again the great 
 life value. Women who wish to give expression 
 to their feeUng in their life now become more num- 
 erous: women who are conscious that their being 
 buries many unsatisfied demands, not only in con- 
 nection 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 
 
Introduction 17 
 
 thought always goes in the direction in which 
 the feeling says happiness is to be found — so it is 
 nattural that, in the second half of the i8th century, 
 the idea of freedom is the ideal which kindles the 
 soul of increasing numbers of women. The eman- 
 cipation of the individual is the tale within the 
 tale, from the Renaissance up to the struggles of 
 the Reformation for freedom of conscience, free- 
 dom of learning, freedom of investigation, and 
 freedom of thought. Then finally came the strug- 
 gle 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, dom- 
 inate the 19th century and now at the beginning 
 of the 20th have every reason for assurance of 
 victory. 
 
 In the 17th and i8th centuries men and women 
 
1 8 The Woman Movement 
 
 writers appeared in different countries to demon- 
 strate 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 exer- 
 cise of power in the i8th century. Especially 
 notable are the arguments which were advanced 
 in the go's of the i8th century by writers mani- 
 festly uninfluenced by one another — ^the Swede, 
 (Thorild, in The Natural Nobility of Womankind; 
 the German, Hippel; the Frenchman, Condorcet; 
 ^he English woman, Mary Wollstonecraft. All in- 
 ,sist 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 ctilture 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 evo- 
 lution thus formtdated later: the fundamental con- 
 dition for social equilibrium is the same as for human 
 happiness and lies in the law of egual freedom. And 
 this means that every one — ^without regard to dif- 
 ference between sex and sex, man and man — must 
 have the right and the opporttmity to develop and 
 exercise his own capacities. For no one to-day 
 can undertake so certain a valuation of talents 
 
Introduction 19 
 
 that this valuation could justify society in restrict- 
 ing, a priori, the right of a single one of its mem- 
 bers 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 iimermost sotd only 
 to those in harmony with him. Even in the family 
 circle the individual often remains therefore undis- 
 covered. 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 indi- 
 vidualism. They pointed out that the sex charac- 
 ter, carried to the extreme, fiumished 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 Heloise, in 
 Goethe's letters to Charlotte von Stein, in Rahel, 
 
20 The Woman Movement 
 
 in Mme. de Stael. It was found in the first half 
 of the 19th century in many great women; for 
 example, George Sand, Elizabeth Barrett Brown- 
 ing, Camilla Collett. It appeared in Shelley and 
 in the Swedish poet Almquist, in Stuart Mill and 
 Robert Browning, also in certain French and Ger- 
 man 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, jree, exactly for this reason, ' ' romantic love ' ' 
 has as consequence the demand for the emancipa- 
 tion of woman. 
 
 The love of Romanticism, which has been cari-' 
 catiired to the extent that it signified only moon- 
 shine, ecstasy, sonnets, and wife barter, had its 
 real essence in the desire for completeness of soul 
 in love. This was, in a new form, the ideal of the 
 courts of love. But since completeness of soul 
 means that all the powers of the soul can freely and 
 fully penetrate and elevate one another, so the first 
 requisite for that soulful love was that woman's 
 thinking as well as her feeling, her imagination as 
 well as her wiU, her desire for power, as well as her 
 conscience, be freed from the shackles imposed 
 upon them from without, in order to be strength- 
 l ened and purified. The second stipulation was 
 that man's inner, spiritual life be freed from the 
 deteriorating results of the prerogatives and pre- 
 judices accorded to and maintained by his sex. 
 
Introduction 21 
 
 A new ideal in the relationship between husband 
 and wife, between mother and child; the demanc 
 of the feminine individuality for the right to fred 
 cultivation of her powers and to self-direction; 
 the need of new fields for this exercise of her power\ 
 after industrialism began to usiup one branch of 
 domestic work after another — these are the funda- 
 mental reasons for what is called the middle-class 
 woman movement. The middle-class woman— 
 because of the increasing surplus of women, 
 because of the continually greater variety of eco- 
 nomic conditions and the decrease in marriage for 
 this and other reasons — ^was to an ever greater 
 extent constrained to self-maintenance. Thus the 
 economic reason for the woman movement, not 
 only in the labouring class but also in the middle 
 class, became the most effective influence opera- 
 ting in the widest circles, although the reasons men- 
 tioned previously were the first and deepest causes. 
 
 And herewith we stand at the beginning of the 
 woman movement, become conscious of its purpose. 
 
 But this movement would be a stream without 
 sources if the "anonymous" movements indicated 
 here with the greatest brevity had not preceded, 
 if in the grey morning of time the endless proces- 
 sion had not begun in which women now nameless 
 for us walked at the head, each with an amphora 
 upon her shoulder — amphorae which they fiUed 
 at any fountain of life. Before these nameless 
 women vanished on the horizon, each, like a water 
 nymph of antiqtiity, lowered the brim of her urn 
 
22 The Woman Movement 
 
 to the earth, which thus was traversed by innum- 
 erable interlacing rills. And all these — even if 
 by the most circuitous route — ^have augmented 
 by some drops the mighty stream now called the 
 woman movement. 
 
' CHAPTER I 
 
 THE EXTERNAL RESULTS OF THE WOMAN 
 MOVEMENT 
 
 The history of the woman movement, con- 
 scious of its purpose, does not fall within the com- 
 pass of this book. But as foundation for later 
 judgments, it is necessary to take a short retro- 
 spective glance over the essential results which 
 the woman movement has attained in the struggle 
 for woman's equality with man in the right to 
 general culture, professional education, and work, 
 as well as in the sphere of family and of civil status. 
 These several demands for equality were voiced, as 
 early as 1848, in a powerful and man-indicting 
 plea by the American women in their "Declaration 
 of Sentiments." But in 1905 the program for 
 Germany's "AUgemein Frauenverein," as weU as 
 many both conservative and radical resolutions 
 for women congresses in different countries, show 
 how far removed Europe and, in many respects, 
 America also, still are from the desires expressed 
 in the year 1848. 
 
 If the humble utterance of women, "We can 
 with justice demand nothing of life except a work 
 and a duty," be conclusive, then life has already 
 
 23 
 
24 The Woman Movement 
 
 conceded to the demands of woman in rich mea- 
 sure. The woman movement and the self-interest 
 of the employers have made accessible to her a 
 number of new fields of labour, without mentioning 
 those which fifty years ago were the only ones 
 "proper" for women of the middle class-4;hose of 
 teacher, lady companion, and "lady's help. " The 
 woman movement and man's increasing recogni- 
 tion of woman's need of general education and pro- 
 fessional qualification have created a large number 
 of educational institutions. But in regard to the 
 right of work, the acquisitions are but insignificant 
 if this right be defined as the opportunity for that 
 work which one prefers and for which one is best fitted. 
 Women have now, for example, in many countries 
 the right to pass the same examinations as men, 
 but in many cases not the right to the offices which 
 these examinations open to men. The profession 
 to which women have found a comparatively easy 
 entrance, that of physician, is widely extended 
 among women in Europe as well as in America. 
 That a dwelling was denied to the first woman 
 physician because her profession was considered 
 "improper" for a woman, sotmds now Hke a fable. 
 Everywhere now are women nurses, teachers of 
 gymnastics, dentists, apothecaries, and midwives. 
 In America there are even many women ministers 
 and it sounds likewise wholly fabulous to say that 
 the first of these was literally stoned. Women 
 judges also have been appointed in America. In 
 Europe there are none to my knowledge and no 
 
The External Results 25 
 
 women preachers. And yet the woman pastor 
 would often be, especially for women and children, 
 a better minister than the clergyman; for them also 
 the woman judge might often surpass the man in 
 penetration and understanding. The profession 
 of law, open to women in many countries, is as yet 
 little practised by them in Europe. And yet as 
 advocate, police officer, and prison attendant, the 
 female official would be of special service for her own 
 sex as well as for children and young people of both 
 sexes. But in every field where the Uving reaHty of 
 flesh and blood has to be compressed into legal para- 
 graphs, mankind must be more or less mistreated. 
 And since even masculine jurists of feeling suffer 
 under this conviction, the reason for the fact that 
 this career, in which woman could be of infinitely 
 great service to humanity, has thus far attracted 
 her little, may be sought in feminine sensitiveness. 
 All the more numerous are the women who have 
 devoted themselves to the task most akin to 
 motherhood, the profession of teacher. Unfor- 
 tunately not always the inner call but the prestige 
 of the position has determined the choice. Mil- 
 Hons of women are now employed as teachers in 
 all possible types of schools, from kindergartens 
 to training schools, from infant schools to boys' 
 colleges. Even in universities, although in Europe 
 very rarely it is true, women occupy chairs of 
 learning. In the field of popular education, women 
 are zealously active as lecturers, Hbrarians, leaders 
 of evening classes, and in similar work. 
 
26 The Woman Movement 
 
 With every decade, woman's powers l^ave 
 attained their right more ftdly and in fields where 
 it now seems incredible that men coiild, an4 still 
 partly do, insist upon getting along without them. 
 I refer to the associations and institution^ con- 
 nected with prison supervision and reformatories ; 
 with schools and children's homes; care of the 
 poor and the sick; health and factory inspection. 
 Slowly but surely the woman movement has pre- 
 pared a place here for the mother of society beside 
 the father of society who in these domains is often 
 very awkward or quite helpless. Alone, or together 
 with men, women have organised milk distribu- 
 tion and creches, housekeeping schools, school 
 food-kitchens, people's food-kitchens, people's 
 polyclinics, sanitariums and rest-homes, vacation 
 colonies, homes for sick and neglected children, 
 etc. Many kinds of homes for working women, 
 old people's homes, rescue homes, .institutions for 
 the protection of mothers and children, employ- 
 ment bureaus, legal redress, and other forms of 
 social relief are connected, indirectly if not directly, 
 with the woman movement. Great women agi- , 
 tators on their part set thousands of women into 
 action, as for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 
 agitating against negro slavery, Josephine Butler ' 
 against prostitution, Frances WiUard against in- 
 temperance, and Bertha von Suttner against war. 
 
 And yet in spite of the fabulous amount of time, 
 strength, and money which the associations and 
 organisations thus created have cost in donations 
 
The External Results 27 
 
 of time and money, this social relief work is only 
 the oil and wine of the Samaritan for the wounds 
 of society. As long as brigand hands drag mothers 
 and children into factories; as long as armies cost 
 much more than schools; as long as dwelling con- 
 ditions in the cities are for many people worse 
 than those for domestic animals in the country; as 
 long as alcohol and syphilis brand the new genera- 
 tion — so long woman's devotion remains powerless. 
 
 And this conviction has urged women to trans- 
 form their social work from an often injudicious 
 "Christian" compassion into an organised charity 
 in order to anticipate and prevent need and to 
 facilitate self-help. But also in this new phase 
 of their philanthropic work many women of the 
 middle class are arriving at an understanding of 
 the necessity of a social reform in accordance with 
 socialistic demands. A larger number of women 
 join the suffragist movement, less owing to indi- 
 vidual demands for rights than out of despair over 
 the hopeless social work to which their feeling of 
 solidarity still impels them. For without suffrage 
 (this they experience every day) their work of 
 relief is like seed sown in a morass. 
 
 A by-product of the social reHef work is that 
 many single women have found, in voluntary 
 social work, an occupation and often also, in 
 remunerative social work, a livelihood; in both 
 cases through service in which certain feminine 
 qualities can be of value. 
 
 Yes, exactly in the above mentioned fields of 
 
28 The Woman Movement 
 
 work, which so often bring the modern woman in 
 contact with the finest and most delicate as well 
 as with the coarsest and hardest sides of life; which 
 place her before conflicts of the most exceptional 
 as well as of the most universally human kind — 
 there woman has nothing new to give except her 
 motherliness. That means protecting tenderness, 
 gentle patience, glad readiness to help, the interest 
 embracing each one in particular, the fine and 
 quick vibration in contact with the feelings of 
 others which we, in a word, call "tact." If, how- 
 ever, a woman has not been endowed with mother- 
 liness, or has none remaining, then she reverts to 
 impersonal devotion to duty, hard formalism, dry 
 routine; then all the talk about the social signifi- 
 cance of woman's entrance into the field of medi- 
 cine or jurisprudence or the ministry or social work 
 remains only empty phrases. In all these spheres 
 a good man is much more valuable than a hard 
 woman. And that woman's hands can be rough, 
 woman's eyes cold, woman's soul base or cruel — 
 this many suffering and crushed, sorrowing and 
 sinful, small and defenceless have already experi- 
 enced. If woman is to keep her superiority as 
 the alleviator of the stiffering of others, the pro- 
 tector of others, solicitous for the welfare of others, 
 then she must not only acquire certain universal 
 human qualities in which man is often superior to 
 her; she must also carefully guard and cultivate 
 the best capacities which her sex gained in and 
 through the hundred thousand years' activity as 
 
The External Results 29 
 
 that half of mankind which created the home and 
 reared the children. 
 
 Although the woman movement has mtdtiplied 
 and extended the social rehef work of woman in 
 innumerable directions, still it has not yet opened 
 to her the field in which formerly deaconesses, and 
 much earlier still nuns, were engaged. But what 
 is new as result of the woman movement is that 
 more and more single cultured women now devote 
 themselves to the occupations of governess, nurse, 
 midwife, and kindred callings; as well as that more 
 special training is demanded for these vocations 
 to which women turned earlier with downright 
 criminal carelessness. 
 
 Simultaneously with the need of the middle- , 
 class woman for new fields of work, came the',' 
 extraordinarily rapid development of commerce 
 and business, which occasioned the need of new 
 working forces. Feminine honesty, orderliness, 
 and devotion to duty — alas, also her modest de- 
 mands of compensation — made the state as well as 
 private employers favourably disposed to employ 
 women in increasingly greater numbers in the ' 
 different branches of commerce: in the post- '■ 
 office, railroads, telegraph, telephone, as also in | 
 banks, counting houses, agencies or stores, as sec- i 
 retaries, stenographers, and clerks. In cases where : 
 the wife or daughter was the husband's, or father's ! 
 assistant such work then received a personal in- ; 
 terest, and what woman's laboiur in this form can 
 
30 The Woman Movement 
 
 signify for national wealth can be seen in France 
 especially. But as a rtile no real joy in work could 
 illuminate the days and years of the generation of 
 women who in all these vocations have grown gray 
 and at best have been pensioned. Nevertheless, 
 in these ofSces one always sees fresh faces bending 
 over the desk to fade away in their turn. 
 
 Lack of courage or means often deters the Euro- 
 pean woman from more independent business 
 activity, and this in spite of increasing freedom to 
 choose her occupation, in spite of brilliant exam- 
 ples of successful undertakings of women, in pho- 
 tography, hotel or boarding-house management, 
 dress-making, etc. In America, on the contrary, 
 there is no masculine occupation, from that of 
 butcher and executioner to real estate speculator 
 and stock-exchange gambler that women have not 
 practised. 
 
 But while the women of the older generation 
 were thankful if only they succeeded in obtaining 
 "a work and a duty," however monotonous and 
 wearing it might be, the will of the younger gen- 
 eration for a pleasurable labour has fortunately 
 increased. Partly alone, partly co-operatively, 
 women began to venture into the applied arts, 
 handwork, farming, or kindred work. And since 
 corresponding special training schools quickly 
 arise to meet the awakening of the desire for a 
 vocation, we can hope for good results for these, 
 as yet rare, enterprising spirits. For special edu- 
 cation is, in our time, the essential condition of 
 
The External Results 31 
 
 success, especially in agriculture, where the women 
 often succeeded without other help than their 
 personal eflSciency and the "farmer's customary 
 practice." 
 
 Since I know America only at second hand I 
 have no claim to a final judgment regarding the 
 influence of business life and modem methods of 
 production upon the soul life of woman. In the 
 women who have succeeded in securing affluence 
 through commercial life one finds probably the 
 same antichristian effects of this Hfe as among men. 
 Recently in America a number of men and women 
 endeavoured to live for fourteen days, as Christ 
 would have lived. The decision of most of those 
 who were engaged in business life was that either 
 they must cease to follow in the footsteps of 
 Christ — or must resign their positions. And since, 
 with due consideration for the number of woman 
 employers in America, many of these experiences 
 must surely have been made imder feminine super- 
 vision, the exp riment does not lack a certain 
 significance for the forming of a judgment in 
 the direction referred to. 
 
 The zeal of women's rights advocates to open to 
 women all of man's fields of labour, and not only 
 this but to prove that these fields are as well adap- 
 ted to woman as man — this zeal has unfortunately 
 had as result that the woman movement has 
 turned the aptitude of many women in a wrong 
 direction and has fettered a great amount of 
 woman's misused working power to thankless or 
 
32 The Woman Movement 
 
 galling tasks. But, on the other hand, how the 
 woman movement has elevated woman's work, 
 since it has raised the standard of qualification in 
 many fields and increased the feeling of responsi- 
 bility in aU ! How it has increased the honour of 
 work and the capacity for organisation, developed 
 the judgment, stimulated the wUl power, strength- 
 ened the courage ! It has awakened innumerable 
 slumbering talents, given freedom of action to in- 
 numerable shackled powers. And thus it has trans- 
 formed hosts of women of the upper class, formerly 
 the most useless burden of earth, into productive 
 members of society, instead of mere consumers; 
 made them self-supporting instead of dependent, 
 joyful instead of weary of life. 
 
 The woman movement of the lower classes is 
 sociaUstic. It has increased in extent and signi- 
 ficance in the same measure in which the working 
 woman has given up farming, housework, and 
 domestic service for industry. 
 
 This woman movement also worked in two di- 
 rections. The older program reads : "Full equality 
 of woman with man." In the "state of the fu- 
 ture" both sexes shall have the same duty of 
 work and the same protection of work, while the 
 children are reared in state institutions. 
 
 The movement in the other direction purposes 
 to win back the wife to the husband, the mother 
 to the children, and, thereby, the home to all. 
 
The External Results 33 
 
 The old or right wing of the middle-class woman 
 movement, as well as the older direction of social- - 
 ism just mentioned, still uphold, with arguments 
 of the old liberalism, the "individual freedom" of^ 
 the working woman against all protecting "excep- 
 tional laws." Increasing numbers of the more 
 radical — ^that means in this connection more social 
 — feminists of the upper class, however, stand side 
 by side with the less dogmatic trend of socialism 
 in its supreme struggle for the protection of the 
 mother. 
 
 In the socialistic woman movement, both ef- 
 forts for freedom were interwoven — that of the 
 working men and that of women — checked during 
 the French Revolution but soon after revived as 
 the two great forces of the new century. In this 
 intertwining of the woman question with the 
 labour question is found the explanation of the 
 fact that socialists characterise the woman ques- 
 tion as an economic question solely; while in reality 
 the woman question, historically, manifestly began 
 as an advocacy of the human right and worth of 
 woman; and that too before any great industry 
 appeared on the horizon. As long as the man was 
 the one who, outside the home, was producer and 
 provider, and the woman the one who, within the 
 home, managed and perfected the raw material, 
 no economic woman question could arise, but on 
 the other hand exactly a question of woman's 
 rights. For, as some writers demonstrated, as 
 early as the 1 8th century it was absurd, if woman's 
 3 
 
34 The Woman Movement 
 
 work in the home was so valuable and so faithfully 
 performed, that it should not secure in consequence 
 corresponding rights. And exactly because the 
 middle-class woman movement tried to uphold 
 and defend the right and the freedom of women in 
 the compass of the old society, this movement 
 became, and must stiU often be, a struggle of 
 women against men. The socialistic woman 
 movement is on the other hand merely a factor in 
 a joint struggle of men and women against the old 
 society and for a new condition. The struggle here 
 cannot be sex against sex, but class against class. 
 Each of these woman movements has been partly 
 right, each has partly misunderstood the other. 
 Only in recent times has a convergence between 
 the middle class and the socialistic woman move- 
 ments been accomplished for the attainment of 
 a number of common ends; for example, the 
 protection of the mother, mentioned above, and 
 especially the franchise. This convergence has 
 dissolved the prejudice on both sides. In both 
 quarters they begin to understand the power and 
 aim of the other movement. 
 
 Socialism and the woman movement are two 
 mighty streams which drag along with them great 
 parts of the firm formations which they touch. 
 But if one wishes to be just toward both, one 
 must not forget that in this way new lands are 
 created. 
 
 The socialistic women on their part, as speakers, 
 agitators, journalists, members of special associa- 
 
The External Results 35 
 
 tions, have stood in rank and file beside the men 
 as true comrades, and the middle-class women have 
 much to learn from the feeling of solidarity of the 
 women socialists. The masculine comrades have 
 not always in practice substantiated the principle 
 of equality, for even the socialist is first man and 
 then comrade; but in theory, he has generally sup- 
 ported it. 
 
 Through socialism, feminism has penetrated 
 to the masses. What the middle-class woman 
 movement would have needed another century to 
 effect, socialism has accomplished in a few decades. 
 Nothing shows better than its fear of socialists 
 how blindly prejudiced was the right wing of 
 middle-class feminism. And nothing so clearly 
 elucidates in what stage of feminism the upper- 
 class movement was than its obstinate adherence to 
 "the principle of personal freedom" in face of the 
 atrocious actual conditions which resulted from the 
 "freedom of work" of the women factory hands. 
 
 I win here recall only in brief the progress of the 
 economic woman movement in the class of factory 
 workers. When machines transformed the whole 
 method of production and a host of women no 
 longer found sufficient occupation in the home, 
 while at the same time the possibilities of marriage 
 decreased because of the surplus of women and 
 also for other reasons, the middle-class women 
 looked about them for new fields of labour. The 
 great industries in return looked about them for 
 more "hands." And since, with the machine. 
 
36 The Woman Movement 
 
 female hands were quite as serviceable as male- 
 •with a new machine it was possible to replace thirt 
 men with one woman — and since in addition the 
 were cheaper, then began that exodus of wome 
 from the home into the factory, the results c 
 which we are now experiencing. 
 
 When the mother is absent from the home, the 
 there is lacking the cohering, supervising, warmin 
 force, and the home deteriorates and falls to pieces 
 the children are neglected, the husband suffers 
 the street takes possession of the children, th 
 alehouse of the men. Moreover, the women wor 
 often for starvation wages, whereby less comes int 
 the home than is lost by the absence and incapacit; 
 of the mother. In the middle classes daughters an 
 wives, entirely or partly supported in the home 
 could be satisfied with smaller wages and hav 
 thus become the competitors of men and wome 
 wholly self-supporting. For the same reaso: 
 wives working in these industries have ofte: 
 become the competitors of men, children agai: 
 the competitors of women, and married wome 
 the competitors of unmarried. 
 
 In woman, so long secluded in the sphere of th 
 family, the social feeling of solidarity has bee: 
 very slowly awakened. Therefore, organisatio: 
 which could prevent the competition just men 
 tioned has only in the last decade made grea 
 progress everywhere among working women. L 
 the middle-class vocations this is almost entirel; 
 lacking. Among the working women slowness o 
 
The External Results 37 
 
 organisation is natural, for the more wretched 
 their position was, the more difficult was it for 
 them to organise. But among middle class 
 women the reason was partly their individualism, 
 partly their anti-socialism, partly the lack of feel- 
 ing of solidarity just referred to. 
 
 Home work for profit and pleasure in one's own 
 family or in service of the applied arts has become 
 a means for the "sweat system," the facts of which 
 belong to the darkest side of modem working life. 
 These facts alone would be sufficient to prove that 
 working women have Httle to gain from the luxury 
 of the rich, an assertion with which luxury often 
 vindicates itself. There is still for the women 
 working at home as well as for the women working 
 in the factory, beside their professional work, also 
 the duty of caring for the children and managing 
 the home. However insufficient this may be yet 
 it still claims a great part of their already meagre 
 leisure; and the more tender and conscientious the 
 mothers are, the more they wear themselves out, 
 and the sooner must society, after night-watching, 
 lack of light and hunger have ruined them,, main- 
 tain them as infirm or paupers. The life of these 
 women passed in the factory often from childhood 
 has made them moreover, generation after genera- 
 tion, more unfitted for household work. What 
 does it profit to attempt to remedy the evil by 
 housekeeping schools and instruction in the care of 
 children? For where time and strength are lack- 
 ing the home has lost its right. 
 
38 The Woman Movement 
 
 What can be expected of women who three or 
 four days after conjBnement must again stand at 
 the machine, who are compelled to leave their 
 children behind them, shut in at home, exposed to 
 all conceivable accidents? What can be expected 
 of mothers, who have become mothers against their 
 win, — mothers of children, who because of the 
 conditions of their parents' work have become 
 scrofulous, rickety, idiotic — children who contract 
 degeneration of the liver because the harassed, 
 ignorant mother quieted them with brandy, ill- 
 treated them, — ^herself a physical and psychic ruin 
 who spreads destruction about her! 
 
 The feminists are accustomed to rage over the 
 custom which formerly condemned the Indian 
 widows to be burned upon the funeral pyre — a 
 custom which is only an innocent sport in com- 
 parison with the woman slavery which Europe 
 has even brought to a system and which the woman 
 movement long ignored. 
 
 To these general facts, which apply also to 
 women employed in hard agricultural labour, 
 there is also added an entirely new series of evils 
 associated with occupations dangerous to health — 
 for example those in which lead, quicksilver, phos- 
 phorus or tobacco poison the workers,' or those 
 branches of work where inhaling dust at the weav- 
 ing loom or in spinning, breathing gas and coal 
 smoke, exposed to heat, smoke and damp, they 
 
 » Next to the textile industry, the tobacco industry employs 
 the most women. 
 
The External Results 39 
 
 contract tuberculosis and other diseases; to say- 
 nothing of the physical and moral misery in which 
 miners and stevedors live. But the worst begins 
 only when the women are to become mothers. 
 Either the embryo is killed by an abortion, inten- 
 tional or caused by the occupation; or it comes into 
 the world dead or sick or crippled; or it dies in the 
 first weeks or wastes away under artificial nourish- 
 ment — ^in England for example only one out of 
 eight children is nursed. The mothers either can- 
 not or will not. Next to the labour conditions, 
 alcohol plays the greatest part in this indirect 
 massacre of infants. 
 
 If one turns from the women engaged in indus- 
 trial work to the servant class, then female drudg- 
 ery reaches perhaps its height among the girls 
 employed in bars, cafes, and similar establishments. 
 What physical and psychic results this work 
 entails can be divined from the fact that, in Eng- 
 land, half of all women suicides are such waitresses 
 under 30 years of age. That family servant girls 
 are allowed to sleep in closets and to work far 
 beyond the present customary factory time; that 
 in the class of saleswomen, especially in cigar 
 shops, the longest working hours together with 
 the most paltry starvation wages are found — all 
 this, as every one knows, is the ftmdamental reason 
 why the path is so short from all these occupations 
 to the lowest — to prostitution. The servant girl 
 corrupted by the master of the house, the half- 
 starved, overworked shop girl, the night-watching 
 
40 The Woman Movement 
 
 cigar worker, and many, many others are found here 
 as sacrifices of a shameless exploitation. Herewith 
 we stand before that "woman question" ift which 
 both elementary instincts have united tor that 
 captivity of woman from which the womah move- 
 ment has found no means of emancipation ; against 
 which the means sought in these and other t[uarters 
 prove fruitless. For only a radical transformation 
 of society and sexual ethics can here provide a 
 remedy 
 
 Every one in face of these facts, touched upon 
 thus superficially, must be astounded that women 
 fcould oppose laws for the protection of women. 
 Fortunately these progress-impeding emancipation 
 iwomen had no influence when, in England and 
 pther coimtries, certain night work began to be 
 ^prohibited to women, their working hours limited, 
 icertain employments barred out, and a time of rest 
 assured to the woman recently confined. Still 
 very small steps only, but in the right direction. 
 At the same time the organisation of working 
 women advances so that by labour tmions and 
 strikes here and there they have succeeded in en- 
 forcing better wages, shorter working hours, and 
 better labour conditions. And so long as the 
 woman movement of the upper classes has no 
 solidarity with that of the lower, the female factory 
 inspector can accomplish very little, as a result of 
 the fear of the working women to give facts and 
 
The External Results 41 
 
 the adroitness of the employers in veiling these. 
 But if women of the upper class begin to compete 
 with the slave-driving, sweat-system employers 
 through well-organised co-operative enterprises 
 especially for the revival of artistic handwork, 
 whereby a profitable work is made for mothers 
 at home under good working conditions; and if 
 they boycott all shops where the working hours 
 of the women exceed the due measure, while their 
 wages are below the standard; then the woman 
 movement would be able to hasten certain re- 
 forms in the field of industry, just as so many 
 mistresses of girls' private schools have hastened 
 the reform of public schools: they simply availed 
 themselves of the improvements arising from 
 feminine initiative. 
 
 The married woman as family provider beside 
 the man, often also in place of the man, but always 
 however subservient to the man's dominion — this is 
 the worst form of woman slavery our time has 
 created. The woman movement purposes indeed 
 to make the wife "of age," in every respect, and 
 free from the husband's guardianship. But within 
 the woman movement all are not yet entirely 
 agreed that the work of the mother outside the home 
 in and for itself is an evil. Attempts are indeed 
 being made to alter the conditions which are most 
 to blame for the deterioration of mothers and 
 children. But a large faction in the woman move- 
 
 •\ 
 
42 The Woman Movement 
 
 ment wishes still, as was said, to cling to the 
 immediately remunerative work of the mother and 
 remedy the resulting lack of home by social insti- 
 tutions for care of children, housekeeping, ^tc. 
 
 On this side, the following arguments ar6 heard: 
 woman becomes free only when she can whojlly sup- 
 port herself and can devote herself to her work 
 tmhampered by duties toward husband afld child- 
 ren; only through the reciprocal social obligation 
 of work and the complete individual freedom of 
 both sexes can the present conflicts between the 
 labour of man and woman, between individual 
 happiness and the common weal, finally cease. 
 
 Like every canalisation or drainage of the 
 mighty river system of the life of human feeling, 
 this program is direct and conclusive. One may 
 easily understand that rnasculine brains, domi- 
 nated by a passion for logic, could devise it; but if 
 we hear it advocated by multitudes of women, 
 then we recognise how harassed by the fourfold 
 burden of family provider, child bearer, child edu- 
 cator, and housekeeper the poor women must 
 be who can smilingly assent to the foregoing 
 picture of the future. 
 
 And yet there is another possible ideal of the 
 futiu-e which can be realised as soon as production 
 is determined, no longer by private capitalistic 
 interests, but by social-political interests. Women 
 win then be employed in industrial fields of work 
 where their powers are as productive as possible 
 with the least possible loss in time and strength; 
 
The External Results 43 
 
 above all in those fields where the work requires 
 no long preparation and the dexterity does not 
 suffer by interruptions. Before the years in which 
 the occupation is motherhood, and after these years, 
 woman can still be always remunerated by an 
 economic wage; during the years on the contrary 
 in which motherhood is the vocation, she can be 
 remunerated by the state. It is only necessary that 
 women and men will a new order whereby in the 
 future we attain the following conditions: 
 
 A Society, in which the welfare of the new gene- 
 ration is the centre to which all social-political 
 plans, at heart, are aiming. 
 
 Children bom of parents whose souls and bodies 
 are qualified and prepared for a worthy parenthood 
 and who can thus create for their children sound 
 and beautiful conditions of life. 
 
 Mothers won back to the husbands, the children, 
 the homes, but under such circumstances that as 
 free human personalities they perform the most 
 important work of society: the bearing and rear- 
 ing of children. 
 
 Fathers with time and leisure to share with the 
 mothers the task of education and to share with 
 them and the children the joys of the home life, as 
 well as of the remainder of existence. 
 
 This ideal of the future state takes in my imagi- 
 nation the form of a varied ItaHan garden with 
 a wide outlook upon the great sea. The other 
 ideal of the future, on the contrary, is to me like 
 a coal mine wherdn all spiritual and social 
 
44 The Woman Movement 
 
 vegetation is petrified so that it now serves only 
 as motive-power for machines. 
 
 Nothing more effectively proves how rife with 
 reactions — and for that reason how hidden — ^is 
 the power of development, than to realise that the 
 unorganized, inorganic socialistic ideal of the 
 future, just mentioned, is the logical sequence of 
 the woman movement if one draws the extreme 
 conclusion from its fundamental idea — the right 
 of woman to individual, free development of her 
 powers. It is consistent historically that in 
 America, where the movement for the right and 
 freedom of woman has been most widely successful, 
 many middle-class women have resolutely drawn 
 these extreme conclusions of emancipation. Quite 
 as psychologically logical is it, that at a time when 
 the vmcomplicated soul life and life demands of the 
 masses still form the most important factors in 
 the shaping of the ideal of the future, the social- 
 istic women, from their different point of view, 
 have arrived at like ideals. But fortunately there 
 are in women, as in the masses, still great tracts 
 of "new ground" where new soul conditions will 
 germinate, and in due time, new ideals will flower. 
 Groups of men can a,t times forget mankind in 
 dwelling upon themselves. But mankind in its 
 entirety has never yet lost the instinct for the con- 
 ditions of self-preservation and the higher develop- 
 ment of the race. I wiU come back later to the 
 
The External Results 45 
 
 psychological phase of the question. I touch upon 
 it here only as the social program of the future. 
 
 A new field which the woman movement has 
 opened up to woman is the scientific field. For 
 the fact that as early as the Renaissance some 
 Italian women occupied chairs of academic instruc- 
 tion, that in the 17th and i8th centuries some 
 women devoted themselves seriously to classic 
 studies or the exact sciences — all that was only 
 exceptional. And the women who since the begin- 
 ning of the woman movement have distinguished 
 themselves by great services in science are still 
 exceptional. But in many places, sometimes as 
 assistants of their husbands or of other men, 
 women now perform good scientific work in dif- 
 ferent lines. Many women are also active in the 
 sphere of invention, without a single woman's 
 name having been thus far connected with an 
 epoch-making invention. 
 
 Especially where constructive ability is neces- 
 sary, women have as yet not been eminent; they 
 have created neither a philosophical system nor a 
 new religion, neither a great musical work nor a 
 monumental building, neither a classic drama nor 
 an epic. On the other hand, the exact sciences, 
 which would be considered a priori as Httle 
 adapted to women, for example mathematics, 
 astronomy, and physics, are exactly those in 
 which thus far they have most distinguished 
 
46 The Woman Movement 
 
 themselves. This contains a warning agains 
 too precipitate conclusions about the intellectuE 
 life of woman. Not until several generations c 
 women — with the same privileges of educatio 
 as man, with the same encouragement from horn 
 and society — ^have exercised their faculty for dii 
 covery and their inventive and creative facultit 
 can we really know whether the present inf eriorit 
 of woman in this respect is a provision of natui 
 or not; whether her genius was only hampered i 
 its expression or whether, as I believe, it is ord 
 narily of a different kind from that of man. 
 
 In art there are several fields which the woma 
 movement did not need to open for the first tire 
 to woman: dramatic art, music, and the dano 
 Indirectly, however, the woman movement hi 
 transformed the position of women occupied i 
 these lines by increasing the respect for all goo 
 work of woman and raising the requiremeni 
 for woman's education in general. The woma 
 movement has also exercised an immediate infit 
 ence upon certain artists of the present timi 
 Thus Eleanora Duse said to me that her mo! 
 cherished desire has been to represent and inte: 
 pret the new types of women, although the dram: 
 tists of to-day have rarely given her the materii 
 she desired wherewith to create characters by whic 
 she could reveal the sotd of the new woman an 
 elevate man's, as well as woman's own, ideal < 
 woman. 
 
 In the dance, women have been, especially i 
 
The External Results 47 
 
 America, creative in connection with its forms and 
 have been thereby also revelations of the new- 
 spiritual life of woman which has found expression 
 in these forms. Great women singers, through 
 Wagner's operas and ballad-singing, have given 
 voice to the primeval yearning of the woman soul, 
 as that yearning now assumes form in the new 
 woman. And in interpretations at the hands of 
 great pianists or violinists, not one classic musical 
 work failed to furnish similar revelations. 
 
 The very finest effects of the woman move- 
 ment — mere shades of feeling which cannot be 
 enumerated nor discussed — ^have reached our 
 present time through lines, movement, rhythm, 
 cadence, through the timbre of a voice, the gest- 
 ure of a hand, the glance of an eye, the tone of 
 a violin. And these effects have been secttred 
 without any disturbance of the receptivity by 
 strife over the precedence of woman or of man. 
 In other spheres, susceptibility to the effects of art 
 creations by woman is stiU often dulled by this 
 strife. In the above named fields, long before the 
 beginning of the woman movement, conscious of 
 its purpose, women without arguments have con- 
 vinced the world of the complete equality of ^ 
 woman with man. And all these women, con- 
 quering through beauty in one form or another,^ 
 have done more for the woman movement than it 
 has done for them. Certainly the woman move- 
 ment both directly and indirectly has had its share 
 in opening to women musical as well as other art 
 
48 The Woman Movement 
 
 academies and schools of applied arts, but 
 academies have a doubtful value and the smaller 
 the value, the more gifted the student. The new 
 right has thus become dangerous to the inde- 
 pendence of real gifts and, with all possibilities 
 of education thus opened wide, there comes a 
 temptation for fancied talents to pass beyond 
 their botmds. This danger, as far as the plastic 
 arts are concerned, has found more and more its 
 counterpoise in the schools of applied art, by 
 which many women have been directed to the 
 decorative professions, from house and garden 
 architecture to fashion designing and holiday 
 decorations. 
 
 But in the field of the applied arts, as well as of 
 the plastic arts and of music, the facility afforded 
 by the modem conditions of training and of public 
 careers has instigated many women, who before 
 had exercised their little talent only for the pleas- 
 ure of the home or society circles, to exhibit and 
 appear publicly to the detriment both of the home 
 circles and, alas, also of art ! 
 
 The works of art by women, which humanity 
 could not lose without reaUy becoming poorer, 
 have been created, thus far, neither in the sphere 
 of music nor of plastic art ; they aU belong to lit- 
 erature. And this sphere the woman movement 
 has not opened to woman; ever since the days of 
 Sappho and of Corinna, women have attained fame 
 as writers. 
 
 In letters and memoirs not originally designed 
 
The External Results 49 
 
 for publication, next to that in the field of romance 
 and the novel, occasionally also in the lyric, the 
 feminine character has found thus far its fullest 
 and finest expression. In all these fields women 
 have produced works which have been placed by 
 men, not it is true beside the greatest works of 
 masculine genius in the same domain, yet beside 
 eminent works of men. As intermediary of the 
 works of others, woman has not in our time, as in the \ 
 period of enlightenment or in the circle of Goethe, \ 
 her greatest significance through conversations and 
 letters but through the printing-press. The mod- 
 em woman, however, as essayist and biographer, as 
 translator and collector, is a valuable intermediary 
 of culture. She is also unfortunately a menace to '' 
 culture, not so much because of the inferior works 
 which she produces, for these, like the similar works 
 of men, soon sink into oblivion. The real danger 
 lies in the fact that women in great multitudes 
 increase the number of those journalists who lack ' 
 intellectual as well as ethical culture, which should 
 be an imperative condition in that field of work. 
 But this profession is now, on the contrary, the one 
 into which the amateur may most easily force 
 an entrance without special training and without 
 professional reputation. The result is that men 
 and women who lack both can puU down, in their 
 journals, the real work and essential character of 
 serious people, without the remotest conception 
 or the faintest comprehension of either. On the 
 other hand these cliques of coffee-house people 
 
50 The Woman Movement 
 
 crown one another as kings and queens — for a daj 
 The press-breed carries on in leaflets its flirtation £ 
 well as its vengeance. The knife which the chil 
 of nature thrusts into a rival's breast is now trans 
 formed into the pen with which the reviewer stat 
 a competitor's latest work. In a word wome 
 now furnish to the Press work, occasionally exce 
 lent, frequently mediocre, all too often worthies 
 Their womanly characteristics make it feasibl 
 more frequently for them than for men to adof 
 more completely the rituals of the temple servic 
 of the deity of the Press — ^the Public. Th: 
 "womanliness" evinces itself, especially, in th 
 ability "to grip the fleeting moment by its flu1 
 tering locks" and also to anticipate when ths 
 moment's locks are false and so the grasp pro-v 
 profitless. 
 
 While hosts of women have turned to jouma 
 ism, they are seldom found in the fields to whic 
 the woman movement should have directed then 
 in the field of sociological and psychologies 
 research. Nearly all significant works upon th 
 normal, the abnormal, the criminal psychic lil 
 of children, young ppople and women have bee 
 written by men. They have unforttmately treate 
 the feminine spiritual life in "scientific" worl 
 also, in which the author dares speak of "woman 
 even though he knows nothing of her except whs 
 his own happy or tmhappy experiences in a mothe 
 or sister, wife or sweetheart, have taught him. 
 
 The slight title of men to their "scientifi 
 
The External Results 51 
 
 method" when they venture upon the terra incog- 
 nita which the soul of woman still is for them, 
 explains why they extol, as "scientific," works of 
 women about women which are quite as superficial 
 as those of men themselves. With a few excep- 
 tions, it is not the physiological-psychological 
 books written by women about women which have 
 really taught the present something new about 
 womankind in general and the new woman in' 
 particular. No, in the form of romances, of lyrics 
 or in voluntary confessions, woman has contri- 
 buted the most valuable documents about her sex : 
 on the one hand those which indicate the trans- 
 formations which the woman movement has occa- 
 sioned in woman's nature, on the other hand those 
 which demonstrate the extent to which her fun- 
 damental nature has remained unchanged, even 
 though this elementary material exhibits many 
 more facets in the modem woman than in the 
 woman of any previous time; facets restdting from 
 the manifold contacts and frictions with life to 
 which woman now exposes herself or is exposed. 
 
 From a literary point of view, these books of 
 confession have seldom a value which could be 
 compared with that of the, in outer sense, objec- 
 tive, classic works which talented women writers 
 of the present have produced. Often, however, one 
 of these confessions, in which the writer has can- 
 didly given her own history, has been of real lit- 
 erary value. But even when the works contain 
 mendacities and self-extenuations, crass injustice 
 
52 The Woman Movement 
 
 toward men or toward other women, as revelations 
 of the modem woman soiil they are more valuable 
 for the future than the clarified, artistically perfect 
 works of women, mentioned above. For the truth 
 about woman in the century of the woman is found 
 only in the impassioned books in which the hard 
 struggles for freedom, work, right, or fame are 
 recited ; or in those works impassioned in another 
 way, in which the soul or the blood or both cry out 
 their yearning, ever unappeased, in spite of free- 
 dom and work, right and fame. What we may 
 to-day rightly protest against in these books is 
 their recklessness which may in the future be re- 
 garded as their greatest value. 
 
 Because, up to the present time, the most exqui- 
 site as well as the most horrifying women charac- 
 ters in literature have been created by men, many 
 men think that they understand women better 
 than women do themselves. And to this extent 
 men are right — that women attain their most sub- 
 lime heights and reach their deepest degradation 
 in and through love. But aside from that, women 
 have a much clearer insight and, for that reason, 
 a much more intelligent idea of one another than 
 man has of woman. When accordingly a woman 
 speaks not only of herself but also of another wom- 
 an — sometimes also of children — we feel already 
 that "the eternal feminine" (das Ewig-Weib- 
 Uche) in hterature can create a feminine art, in 
 the best meaning of the word. For the present 
 we hope, and with good reason, that art as well as 
 
The External Results 53 
 
 science will not appear as either masculine or femi- 
 nine but reveal a complete human personality. 
 But this does not mean that this personality has 
 fused the masculine and feminine qualities into a 
 common humanity and thus enervated it. No, it 
 means that, in such a being, masculine and femi- 
 nine traits exist side by side and assert themselves 
 alternately or harmoniously in all their strength. 
 In the rank of talent, one may find feminine men 
 and masculine women; in that of genius, never. 
 There each one guards fully and completely the 
 character of his own sex in addition to the finest 
 attributes of the other sex. The distinctively 
 masculine or distinctively feminine attributes 
 characterising an earlier culture epoch are on the 
 contrary often lacking in these greatest men and 
 women of their time. In other words they lack 
 exactly those attributes, hyper-masculine or hyper- 
 feminine, by which men and women, not abreast 
 of the times in their, development, please each 
 other and the masses, in literature as well as in 
 life. 
 
 In the woman-literature, directly evoked by the 
 woman movement, we can read the whole gamut 
 of the feminine nature, from the feminine in the 
 highest sense to the feminine in the worst sense. 
 This literature shows how tmthinkingly and de- 
 fenceless certain women have plunged into the 
 struggle, how rationally and well equipped other 
 women have fought it out. The impartiality 
 of this judgment can be proven by the admission 
 
54 The Woman Movement 
 
 that in the first-named class I have not infrequently 
 found adherents ; in the latter class, opponents. 
 
 The woman movement itself, partly in lectures 
 and in literary activity, partly by means of office- 
 routine and work of organisation, has become a 
 new field of labour for women. Even in this field 
 it is found that many are called but few are chosen. 
 But when — except after defeat — was an army 
 ever seen without baggage? 
 
 In the field oi family right, the woman movement 
 has achieved, directly and indirectly, great im- 
 provements in the legal position of the unmar- 
 ried woman. The nearest proof is my own coun- 
 try. This has, within a period of from seventy to 
 eighty years, granted to the sister the same right of 
 inheritance as to the brother; declared the unmar- 
 ried woman at her majority at the same age as 
 man, a majority which was also expanded later 
 through the suspension of the right of guardian- 
 ship on the part of the husband, existing for 
 married women. The marriageable age of woman 
 was postponed to 17 years. Gradually woman 
 has been placed on an equality with man to carry 
 on trade and industry; she has acquired the right 
 to hold certain public offices, although many still 
 remain closed to her. The married woman on the 
 contrary is still always a minor; if no marriage 
 settlement is made the husband has the right to 
 dispose of the wife's property; he has control of 
 
The External Results 55 
 
 their common possessions; he can restrict her 
 freedom of work; he has authority over the child- 
 ren. A few small progressive steps may never- 
 theless be pointed out : certain reinforcements of 
 the effectiveness of the marriage contract; the 
 right to her wages accorded to the wife; certain 
 reforms in regard to the division of property and 
 divorce; some improvements in the position of 
 children bom out of wedlock. In other countries 
 also like reforms have been accomplished, directly, 
 through masculine initiative; indirectly, through 
 the influence of the woman movement. But 
 everywhere family right is still founded upon the 
 principles of paternal right, supremacy of the 
 husband over the wife, indissolubility of marriage 
 or solubility under greater or less difficulties. 
 
 In regard to citizenship I draw my examples also 
 from the land I know best. In Sweden, women 
 have long since participated in the choice of pastor; 
 for about fifty years they have possessed municipal 
 franchise; later in certain cases they have attained 
 also municipal eligibility, for example, to the 
 school board, board of charities, and now finally 
 to the town council. Still others could be cited. 
 In other countries women have sometimes more 
 sometimes less civic right; only in a few countries 
 have they won political franchise; in a single one, 
 Finland, also political eligibility. 
 
 In the sphere of family right, as well as civic 
 right, the woman movement has then much more 
 remaining to conquer than it has thus far won. 
 
56 The Woman Movement 
 
 But I am convinced that the little girls I see dow 
 below in the garden playing "mother and chUd 
 ■will possess all the rights due the wife, the mothe 
 and the citizen. 
 
 The woman movement, in its present form, h.£ 
 accomplished its task if it has procured for ever 
 woman the legal right to develop and practise hf 
 individual characteristics unhindered because < 
 her sex. But after this emancipation of tl: 
 woman as a human being and a citizen, thei 
 remains her emancipation as a woman. And hei 
 no transformation of forms of thought and f eelini 
 of manners and customs, attainable by any leg; 
 provisions or paragraphs, avail. The preser 
 woman movement has created and still continue 
 to create the social conditions for this last emanc 
 pation. But it will not approve such far extenc 
 ing results of its own work. It desires the sam 
 rights but also the same duties for all women. If 
 single woman uses the freedom, which the woma 
 movement has procured for her as a member c 
 society, to fashion her individual life according t 
 the deepest demands of her being, then the ol 
 guard trembles before the outcome of the battl 
 for freedom in which it fought so valiantly. 
 
 But nothing is more certain than that the fem 
 nine personality, whether her innermost desire b 
 spiritual creative instinct, erotic happiness, matei 
 nal bliss, or universal human goodness, wiU acquii 
 ever new forms of expression: forms of expressio: 
 which the once liberal, now more conservative fen: 
 
The External Results 57 
 
 inists and the modem socialistic feminists partly 
 do not divine and partly — divining — deplore ! For 
 the present even the "emancipated" woman fol- 
 lows as a rule the paths which social custom has 
 marked out for her sex, as well as the cultural ideas 
 which have been, thus far, those of man. But if, 
 in the coming thousand years, a feminine culture 
 shall really supplement the masculine, then this 
 wiU be exactly, in the measure in which women 
 have the courage to create and to act as most 
 feminists now do not even dare think. Then it 
 will be evident that all social movements of the 
 present time, especially the woman movement and 
 socialism, are only the work of the path finder for 
 the masculine and feminine superman or, if you 
 prefer the older expression, complete man. 
 
 Like other "old guards," the veterans of femi- 
 nism will not surrender but wUl f aU upon the field 
 of battle. The little girls there below will one day 
 celebrate their memory. For through their strug- 
 gles the way became free for youth, the way which 
 leads out to the wide sea where perhaps shipwreck 
 awaits the one who ventures out into the darkness 
 with her fragile skiff. But many will brave the 
 voyage and bide their fate, strong, proud, and 
 composed as the maiden in Schwind's Wasserfahrt 
 — that splendid symbol of the woman of the future. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE INNER RESULTS OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT 
 
 If I now start out to consider the woman-soul 
 as it has developed itself under the influence of all 
 the circumstances mentioned above, perhaps many 
 will expect a theory about the character of the 
 feminine soul life. But, at present, when the 
 greatest problems of psychology are in revolution 
 and tmdecided, such a theory would be as scien- 
 tifically impossible as aphorisms are unanswera- 
 ble. Likewise, conclusions, based upon experience, 
 concerning the psychic peculiarity of woman would 
 be in this chaotic transition period, superficial, if 
 they attempted to be absolute. Only one decided 
 opinion about the spiritual life of woman I cannot 
 — ^in consequence of my monistic-evolutionary 
 conception of the spiritual and physical life — 
 refrain from expressing. This opinion is that, in 
 the one hundred thousand years at least in which 
 woman has practised the physical maternal func- 
 tions, the spiritual attributes essential for mother- 
 hood must have been so strongly developed by 
 her that this development has had, and still has 
 always, as a result a pronounced difference be- 
 
 58 
 
The Inner Results 59 
 
 tween the feminine and masculine sotd — that 
 is to say, everywhere where the soul, as well as 
 the body of a woman, is adapted and desirous of 
 motherhood — a fitness and readiness which can 
 still be called the normal condition. The spiritual 
 qualities which maternity required have become 
 the attributes of "womanliness," the qualities 
 which paternity required, have become the attri- 
 butes of ' ' manliness. ' ' This difference has become 
 qmte as significant for the functional fitness of 
 both sexes for the perpetuation and development 
 of the race, as for the wealth of life of each new 
 generation. The obliteration or retention of this 
 difference is therefore a vital question for mankind. 
 
 Figuratively expressed, this seems to me the 
 process: from a common root of universal human 
 spiritual life issue two stems which can again unite 
 in their blossoming. The ramification has neces- 
 sarily involved a division of labour in two equally 
 important spheres. From this point of view I 
 give, in the following, my opinion of the value of 
 the influence of the woman movement upon the 
 spiritual life of woman. 
 
 We all know that life expresses itself as move- 
 ment, that movement brings with it change, 
 transformation; that this can mean quite as well 
 disintegration as higher organisation. 
 
 The woman movement is the most significant of 
 all movements for freedom in the world's history. 
 The question whether this movement leads man- 
 kind in a higher or lower direction is the most 
 
6o The Woman Movement 
 
 serious question of the time. Those who assert 
 unconditionally the former or the latter have 
 uttered a premature judgment. The question 
 must be formulated thus: 
 
 (o) Has the woman movement brought to man- 
 kind a higher degree of vital force, a greater faculty 
 for self-preservation, a more complete organisa- 
 tion, by which the more simple forms have become 
 more finely complex, the more uniform have 
 become richer, more diverse; the incoherent have 
 attained a more perfect unity? Or has the woman 
 movement called forth an activity which represses 
 life? degrades, scatters, and reduces the powers to 
 uniformity, in society and in mankind? 
 
 (fi) Is woman's spiritual life now in general above 
 the level at which it was in the beginning of the 
 woman movement? Have modem women finer 
 perceptions, deeper feelings, clearer ideas, a firmer 
 will, richer association of ideas ? Do their spiritual 
 faculties so work together that they mutually 
 enhance instead of hinder one another? In a 
 word is the modem woman more soulful than the 
 woman of any other time? 
 
 (c) Is the body of the modem woman, at all 
 stages of life, stronger, more healthy, and more 
 beautiful than that of the woman of the previous 
 century, when the woman movement began in 
 real earnest in Europe? 
 
 (d) Does the modem woman perform in more 
 perfect manner than the woman of that time, the 
 physical and psychic functions of motherhood? 
 
The Inner Results 6i 
 
 If the question be put thus then the objec- 
 tive investigator must answer to all — " Yes and 
 No." 
 
 But if this investigator is an evolutionist, then 
 he knows that the progress of every social evolution 
 is like that which womankind is now experiencing. 
 We see first, how, in any given sphere of society, 
 where those engaged therein have attained a pure, 
 instinctive certainty in their actions through laws 
 and customs, the individuals oppressed by these 
 laws and customs must rebel against the limits, 
 drawn from without, for the development and 
 exercise of their powers. This revolt occasions at 
 first a stage of anarchy in which everything seems 
 to collapse — while in the previous conserving epoch 
 * ' crystallisation ' ' f lurdshed the vital danger ! But 
 after such an anarchistic stage there comes infal- 
 libly the constructive stage, where a part of the old 
 is organised, incorporated, into the new. But this 
 acts no longer as instinctive impulse. No, man- 
 kind has become conscious anew of these values 
 of law and custom; they have been recognised by 
 the thought, encompassed by feeling, sanctioned 
 by the will as still always indispensable, in another 
 and higher form it is true than that against which 
 the individuals rebelled. But just as the leaves 
 which once grew green above in the summer light, 
 gradually become one with the earth, so the motives 
 of the new customs sink gradually down into the 
 imknown; man acts again with instinctive cer- 
 tainty and uniformity — tmtil the new period of 
 
62 The Woman Movement 
 
 stagnation evokes a new rebellion and achieve- 
 ment of individualism. 
 
 The woman movement finds itself now at a 
 point where it is about to pass from the dynamic 
 stage to a static stage. Exactly at this point a 
 survey begins to be possible ; and it is also necessary 
 for every one who believes that the ideal, as well as 
 the practical direction of the woman movement, 
 in future, must be influenced by the knowledge 
 gained about the effect of the movement, thus far, 
 upon the uplifting of the life of mankind. 
 
 Every great achievement of individuaKsm is as 
 inconsiderate as the spring tide and must be, in 
 order to have strength for its task. The woman 
 movement was so also. But it encotmtered two 
 other great ideas of the time. Socialism and Evolu- 
 tionism, and in consequence the woman movement 
 was obliged to modify gradually its conception of 
 the feminine individual and of her position in 
 existence. 
 
 On the one hand, as has been already shown, 
 man has had to understand that "open competi- 
 tion" and "individual initiative" are not abso- 
 lute political-economic truths. On the other 
 hand, the defender of women's rights has been 
 forced to understand more and more that woman's 
 soul is no unchangeable value which must remain 
 the same however much the spheres have changed 
 toward which this spiritual life directed itself and 
 from which it received its impression. While 
 feminists fifty years ago scorned the objection 
 
The Inner Results 63 
 
 that "womanliness" would be lost in business life 
 or in politics, now the evolutionist mind in think- 
 ing women tmderstands that all human soul life 
 is subject to the law of change; that just as indis- 
 putably as the soul Ufe of man is changed by- 
 different vocations and surroimdings, so that of 
 woman also must be changed. The feminists 
 founded their dogma that the woman movement 
 can only benefit woman, man, the child, the family, 
 society, mankind upon the conviction of the 
 stability of "true womanliness." 
 
 And if the woman movement had not had this 
 religious certainty of belief, how could it have 
 withstood the mass of prejudice and stupidity 
 which it encountered in its own, as weU as in the 
 other sex? The woman movement has conquered 
 because it was self-intoxicated. 
 
 And quite naturally! After a stability of cent- 
 uries, during which the position of woman was 
 altered only in and with the general progress of 
 culture, women finally recognised that they could 
 accelerate their own progress and with it also the 
 somewhat snail-like course of universal human 
 culture. And so woman asserted herself and 
 increased her motion. The faster this move- 
 ment became, the more was she seized by the 
 intoxication which always accompanies every 
 vigorous physical or psychic movement. And 
 when has a movement of the time advanced more 
 rapidly? 
 
 Folk-migrations, crusades, slave rebellions, revo- 
 
64 The Woman Movement 
 
 lutions have led a race, a class, a group, beyond 
 certain geographical or social boundaries. The 
 emancipation of women has shifted and extended 
 the limits of the freedom of movement of halj 
 mankind. No wonder that the extent of the move- 
 ment in and for itself was advanced as proof of the 
 infallibility of its direction. All points of depart- 
 ure, the natural right of man, individual freedom, 
 social necessity — aU led out into the sun, which, 
 in society as in nature, should radiate over woman 
 as well as over man; they led up onto the summit 
 where man and woman both should breathe the 
 air of the heights. All obstacles which were raised 
 with the help of arguments such as, "the nature 
 of woman," "the welfare of the family," "the idea 
 of society," "the purpose of God" — all proved 
 temporary. And of necessity — for the innermost 
 law of life, the law of development, of Ufe enhance- 
 ment, carried the movement forward. When it 
 began, the Biblical expression about the wind was 
 quoted, "Man knows not whence it comes not 
 whither it goes." Now aU know it. Now the 
 spirit of the time speaks with "feminist" voice, 
 The ideas of emancipation "are in the air," like 
 bacilli, by which only savages are thus far wholly 
 untouched. 
 
 There are now no great movements of the time 
 whose path does not run parallel with or cut across 
 the woman movement. Every new generation is 
 involuntarily and unconsciously drawn along with 
 it. The ends already attained seem to the present 
 
The Inner Results 65 
 
 age obvious ; the ends, for which man is still strug- 
 gling to-day, will appear equally obvious to the 
 future. The woman movement is now a power 
 with which even its most bitter adversaries must 
 reckon. And this force has so quickly attained 
 prominence exactly as a result of fanaticism. Just 
 as the White and the Blue Nile mingle their waters 
 in the main stream, so in every great current of 
 time enthusiasm is mingled with fanaticism. And 
 it is the latter which bears the most fruit, for 
 it gives power of growth to the passions of the 
 majority, good as weU as bad. 
 
 Every great idea begins with great promulgators. 
 The promulgator who has the spirit does not hold 
 to the letter. And the woman movement which 
 was spirit began also with women and men who did 
 not follow the call of the spirit of the time; no, who 
 from lonely heights sent out their awakening call 
 to the time. Men who give their age new ideals 
 have always religious natures. This means, ac- 
 cording to a good definition, that they are "in- 
 dividualists in their being, social in their action." 
 
 Such natures bum, above all, with the passion 
 to find themselves. Then they bum with the 
 passion to sacrifice themselves in order to help 
 others, whose suffering or wrongs they feel as 
 deeply as if they were their own. No one who 
 passively endures an injustice against himself has 
 the material in him to struggle for the rights of 
 others. The one who patiently forbears becomes 
 an accessory to the injustice done to others. He 
 
66 The Woman Movement 
 
 who resists the injustice which he himself meets 
 can open up the way to a higher right for others. 
 Such path-finders were the first apostles of the 
 emancipation of women. They consecrated to 
 this task a faith which required no proof, a faith 
 which saw visions and heard melodies of the glori- 
 ous future that their victory would prepare for 
 mankind. They emanated neither from scientific 
 investigations, nor from systems of political eco- 
 nomy, nor from philosophic evidence, nor theories 
 of political science. They flung themselves into 
 the struggle with inadequate weapons, without 
 plan of campaign, just as do aU impelled by the 
 spirit. But such a method always evokes later 
 dissension among the disciples. Sects are formed, 
 gradually a church is crystallised, an orthodoxy, a 
 papacy, and an inquisition. This course is physi- 
 cally necessary as long as mankind is still in 
 greatest part a mass. APatd more "Christian" 
 than Christ and a Luther more "Paulist" than 
 Paul are met also in the woman movement. 
 
 This has now, among most people of ctdture, 
 passed beyond the stage of the great apostles and 
 martyrs and heralds. The movement has reached 
 the point where certain tjrpical manifestations, 
 certain conventional forms testify that the masses 
 — ^which stoned the prophets — ^have now, since the 
 ideas of the woman movement have become 
 truisms, banalities, the fashion, appropriated them 
 to themselves and endeavour to transform them to 
 their image and adapt them to their needs. 
 
The Inner Results 67 
 
 Again and again the old tale repeats itself: the 
 trolls steal the weapons of the gods but they can- 
 not use them. Again and again there is occasion 
 to deplore the fact that the autocrat of genius, 
 whether he rule over a people or a kingdom of 
 ideas, has heirs, heirs who diminish his work. 
 Again and again it must be recognised that no 
 spiritual formation vanishes at one blow. The 
 servile mind, intrigue, pettiness, delusion — all 
 that, from which the great spirits of the woman 
 movement hoped to "emancipate" woman — could 
 not suddenly vanish out of the world. And since 
 all this must go somewhere it finally finds room 
 in the woman movement itself! 
 
 But on the other side — since after aU everything 
 has another side — ^it must be admitted that the 
 levelling and conserving tendency of the average 
 person is of real value at the stage when an idea 
 begins to be transformed into law and custom. 
 
 Those who can work only in crowds receive 
 their significance exactly because of their collective 
 work. They push aside the "individual emanci- 
 pation" which they do not need for their own part, 
 since they have no individuality to emancipate. 
 But by diHgent and efficient work they succeed in 
 securing certain results, which are the common 
 cause of all. So the Philistines make for them- 
 selves a footstool of that which was a stumbling- 
 block for their congenial souls in the previous 
 generation. From this height they look down 
 upon the new truth of their time. And those who 
 
68 The Woman Movement 
 
 perceive and uphold this new truth ttun aside from 
 the great uniformed army which now advances 
 safely where the little vanguard has previously 
 and laboriously opened up the way. Those who 
 turn aside wiU form the new vanguard when it 
 comes to achieving, in the spirit of the first apostle, 
 the emancipation not only of women in the mass, 
 but of each individual woman. When the present 
 work of the woman movement for joint, common 
 ends shall no longer be necessary, because one end 
 after another has been attained, then, comes the 
 task of the present "radical " feminism : the accom- 
 plishment of "emancipation" by leading it up to 
 those free heights which already the path finders 
 are endeavouring to attain, the heights where every 
 feminine individuality can choose her own path of 
 life, perhaps at variance with all others; can choose 
 it in freedom, answerable only to her own con- 
 science. Although this sunmiary grouping his- 
 torically as well as psychologically corresponds 
 approximately to the past, present, and future of 
 the woman movement, yet there are so many 
 ramifications of the three groups into one another, 
 that the woman movement now exhibits a tangled 
 confusion in which every exact demarcation is 
 impossible. 
 
 Whoever lives to witness it will see the course 
 of progress just described — ^for which the modem 
 labour movement offers quite as good material 
 for observation as the woman movement — ^repeat 
 itself in the next great emancipation movement. 
 
The Inner Results 69 
 
 I mean the movement for the right and freedom of 
 the child, which will be the unconditional result 
 of the victory of the woman and labour move- 
 ments. This idea is still in the morning-clear 
 hour of inspiration. But from the cry, "Away 
 with the child destroying home training," we can 
 hear that the troop of Philistines wiU appear by 
 afternoon upon the scene, to adopt the idea into 
 their midst! 
 
 By means of the comparison with socialism, I 
 have endeavoured to emphasise that the woman 
 movement's formation of dogmas and its doctrin- 
 ary fanaticism are not effects of the peculiarity of 
 the feminine mind. These phenomena are typical 
 of every movement of the time thus far observed. 
 They are essential above all because a new belief 
 without dogma and without ritual is for the masses 
 a sword without a hilt: it offers nothing tangible, 
 nothing whereby the masses can come into relation 
 with the idea. 
 
 That certain feminists still believe that the 
 woman movement has advanced just as the exodus 
 of the Children of Israel out of the land of bondage, 
 that is to say, under God's special protection 
 against wandering astray; that they stigmatise as 
 "treason" and "defection" the assertion that this 
 movement was determined by the same psycho- 
 logical and sociological laws as every other move- 
 ment for freedom — this shows to how high a degree 
 many leaders of the woman movement lack 
 elementary psychological and sociological concep- 
 
70 The Woman Movement 
 
 tions. This deficiency is, however, being contin 
 ually remedied. And in the generation whicl 
 now advances, dogmatic fanaticism has well nigl 
 vanished, but pure enthusiasm is preserved. 
 
 We can thus expect from this generation i 
 clearer understanding of the necessary soda 
 repressions which the woman movement has nov 
 sufficient strength to impose upon itself withoui 
 forfeiting thereby its character of a movement fot 
 freedom. As such it cannot and dare not ceas( 
 until it has attained all its ends. As long as th< 
 law treats women as one race, men as another 
 there is a woman question. Not until man anc 
 woman, equal and united, work together foi 
 mankind will the woman movement belong tc 
 the past.' 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN QtmSTION UPON 
 SINGLE WOMEN 
 
 The following comparisons between the life of 
 women, especially their spiritual life of about 
 fifty years ago and their life as it has shaped itself 
 under the influence of the woman movement, have 
 been arranged in descending scale. They begin 
 with that phase of women's life in which this 
 influence was most favourable from the point of 
 view of life enhancement, namely with the life 
 of unmarried women. 
 
 You will find to-day, among women seventy 
 or eighty years of age, one or another type of 
 that fine culture which the gifted single woman, 
 in comfortable circumstances, could attain in the 
 previous century. Her home, especially if it was 
 an estate in the country, became a culttiral fireside 
 which radiated light and heat for relatives and 
 friends. The lesser gifted disseminated, each 
 according to her natiure, comfort or discomfort, 
 yet could in extremity at least be sure of the 
 homage of their future heirs. Toward those 
 dependent upon them, these women were some- 
 
 71 
 
72 The Woman Movement 
 
 times kind, sometimes indifferent, sometimes hard: 
 the feeling of social responsibility was an unknown 
 idea to them. The penniless single women, on the 
 contrary, were found either in one of the "re- 
 spectable" positions which, however, brought with 
 them a multitude of humiliations: as governess, 
 companion, housekeeper — in Germany also as 
 maid of honour at one of the numerous small 
 courts — or in some charitable institution for gentle 
 folks, an asylum for pauvres honteuses; but 
 most frequently in the comer of the home of a 
 relative. This comer was at times the warmest 
 and most confidential in the whole house, that 
 comer which the children sought for stories and 
 sweetmeats; the youth, to find an embrace in 
 which he could potir forth his grief, an ear which 
 listened to his most beautiful dreams. But it 
 happened more frequently that the "aunt" looked 
 upon as a "necessary evil " was in reality that very 
 thing. Humiliated and embittered, she became 
 ingenious in making those about her siiffer for her 
 afflictions. Before they became hopelessly old, 
 the "aunts" were the laughing stock of the young 
 through their efforts, in the eleventh hour, to 
 reach the "peaceful haven of matrimony"; and 
 they themselves looked with envious eyes upon 
 the good fortune of the young. We meet the 
 unmarried woman of that time at her best as 
 trusty servant who shared the cares, the joys, and 
 the sorrows of the family and, in her garret cham- 
 ber, of which she cotild be certain to the day of 
 
Influence upon Single Women 73 
 
 her death, she looked back upon a rich life lived 
 vicariously. Not infrequently, she rejected a 
 marriage proposal in order to stay with her beloved 
 master and mistress to whom she knew she was 
 indispensable. The superfluous women previously 
 mentioned would have thrown themselves into 
 the arms of Beelzebub had he come as suitor. 
 When the years passed, when neither their desire 
 for activity nor the thirst of the heart nor of the 
 senses was quenched, then not infrequently insan- 
 ity conjured up for these lonely women a life con- 
 tent for which they had longed in vain. To-day, 
 however, we have for the position which the 
 expression, "a forsaken old maid," betokens an 
 entirely new type: "the glorified spinster," as the 
 joyous, active, independent unmarried woman is 
 called by the people among whom she first became 
 a reality. Among these women, independent 
 through their work, useful to society, that older 
 type is still occasionally found perhaps, a survival 
 of the time when emancipation was rather gen- 
 erally interpreted as freedom for masculinity. 
 The "man- woman" in masculine attire, with 
 weapons of defence against man in one hand and 
 a cigarette in the other, her soul fiUed with mad 
 ambition for her own sex and, as representative of 
 her entire sex, with hatred toward the other, was 
 however always rare. Now, she has almost 
 entirely vanished, except alas, the cigarette. 
 But she smokes it now often with — masculine 
 friends ! She foUows in her mode of life, as in her 
 
74 The Woman Movement 
 
 dress, the law of good taste — not to offend; khe 
 endeavoiirs, if only with a flower or two, to give a 
 glimmer of cosy comfort to her place of work. 
 This comfort, which often comes into the public 
 life with woman is perhaps the reason why many 
 men, who first looked with indignation upon femi- 
 nine fellow-workmen, would now miss them. The 
 more personal the culture of these women becomes, 
 the more they endeavour, according to their time 
 and means, to express their personality in the 
 lines and colours of their dress and in the arrange- 
 ment of their room. Those best situated often 
 succeed, toward the end of their working days, 
 in winning their own little home which they per- 
 haps share with a friend, or they join a co-operative 
 enterprise and can thus raise their standard of 
 living. The same women who, at twenty-five, 
 scornfully declared that they "would never bury 
 their head in a sauce-pan," are now, at fifty, con- 
 sciously aware of the significance of the table for 
 the activity of the brain; indeed they are now 
 quite as proud if they have prepared a good dish 
 as they were in their youth when they passed a 
 fine examination! 
 
 It is not to be wondered at that the emanci- 
 pated women, exactly as all recently emancipated 
 masculine classes and races, at first groped inse- 
 curely after a new form. The astonishing thing, 
 on the contrary, is that women adapted themselves 
 so quickly to the new circumstances; that the 
 transition period furnished so few grotesque types ; 
 
Influence upon Single Women 75 
 
 that the present shows so many harmonious types, 
 each in her own way. This harmony of single 
 women is no mere form. It has its inner counter- 
 part in the satisfaction with their existence, an 
 existence in accord with their desires. The psy- 
 chology was not exhaustive which saw in feminism 
 only a "spinster question," a question of the 
 unmarried woman, springing from the surplus of 
 women and the increasing difficulty or disinclina- 
 tion of men to contract marriage — a question 
 therefore for the ugly, not for the beautiful; for 
 the unmarried, not for the married; for the poor, 
 not for the rich. For a great number of beautiful 
 women prefer to remain unmarried; a great num- 
 ber of rich desire to work; a great number of 
 married women are zealous suffragists. Fifty 
 years ago, we saw the most clever women idealise 
 an ape into a god; now, the modem, intelligent 
 working girl, when she looks about her for her 
 ideal, exercises a lively criticism. She often flirts 
 with one who exhibits some phase of the ideal, 
 but she has too clear an understanding and too 
 much to do to imagine a great feeling for one who 
 is unworthy. So it often happens that youth has 
 passed without such a feeling having stirred her. 
 And she enters without deep regret the age when 
 ambition and desire for power become her life 
 stimulants. From these women of predominating 
 mind and will is formed more and more what 
 Ferrero calls "The third sex," Maudsley, "The 
 sexless ant": energetic, clever, happy in their 
 
76 The Woman Movement 
 
 work, cool, but sound; in private life, in the zeal 
 of everyday work, often egoistic but willing to 
 make sacrifices in face of social exigencies. 
 
 So a great part of the fifty-year-old women form 
 an exception since they with true instinct have 
 remained tmmarried. For in the same degree 
 that their metallic being is well adapted to the 
 machinery of society, it is little qualified to make 
 a home for husband and children. They do not 
 depreciate however the value of this task, unless 
 they be fanatic feminists. In that event they 
 reproach the women who wish to marry with 
 "betraying the woman cause"; they demand at 
 times, as imperative loyalty toward this cause, 
 that their friends shall protest against the present 
 marriage laws at least by the form of their marriage 
 alliance if not even by not marrying at all. Their 
 theory of equality has at times been carried so far 
 that — as recently happened in France — they advo- 
 cate women's performing also masculine military 
 service. 
 
 But in spite of their aridity and inflexibility of 
 principle how much more human are even these 
 feminists than the " ill-natured " aunts of earlier 
 times who became ill-natured exactly because their 
 temperament was of the kind mentioned above, 
 but who could find no sphere of operation for their 
 passionate longing for activity. One or another 
 was perhaps burning with ambition. For there 
 are women as well as men who can Hve only as 
 pagan gods, in the blaze and perfume of sacrificial 
 
Influence upon Single Women ^^ 
 
 fires. In their youth these ambitious natures 
 cotild be satisfied by triumphs in social life. But 
 later the passion became a fire in a powder cask and 
 occasioned incessant explosions. Now it is the 
 electric motive power for an activity of general 
 utility. The "aunts" of the earlier time who felt 
 themselves always overlooked and injured are most 
 easily recognised again in the literary and artistic 
 field to which daily bread or ambition now urges 
 many women, who endeavour to compensate by 
 energetic work for the talent which nature denied 
 them. Since these women are ordinarily not 
 people of imderstanding but of feeling, they must 
 in a double sense be dissatisfied with a life which in 
 addition is, in most cases, still filled with economic 
 cares and the humiliations arising therefrom. And 
 yet in spite of all, how much richer is their Ufe 
 to-day than it would have been fifty years ago 
 when they would have been obliged to sit and 
 draw their needles through interminable pieces 
 of handwork, after ugly patterns and for unneces- 
 sary uses, or to compose sentimental birthday 
 verses for persons whom they abominated. 
 
 Yet there are always those women natures who, 
 in the past, had the qualifications for a real "dear 
 aunt, " who gently calmed the conflicts and filled 
 the gaps in the home of which they had become 
 members. The most tender and sensitive of these 
 modem women, who, rain or shine, year in year 
 out, hasten to and from a work indifferent to them 
 at heart, not infrequently breathe a sigh of longing 
 
78 The Woman Movement 
 
 for those times when, as "aunts," they could have 
 received and imparted warmth in a home. But 
 then again there come moments when they know 
 how to value the independence which puts them 
 in a position to give help where otherwise there 
 would be none; when for example they can send 
 a nephew to college, or a friend to a sanatarium, or 
 provide their mother with a nurse, which they 
 themselves can not be. 
 
 This kind of single woman fulfills more or less 
 the office of family provider just as she also is 
 always ready with word and deed in circles of 
 friends and comrades. These women are so 
 engrossed that the time of love, sometimes love 
 itself, passes them by without their observing it. 
 Their youth flees and they feel with sadness that 
 their woman's life is unlived. But they persuade 
 themselves that they have had enough in their 
 work, that many little joys can take the place of 
 great happiness. And they believe this as truly 
 as the infant believes he is satisfied when he sucks 
 his own thumb. But some of these women 
 acknowledge perhaps, when they have passed the 
 fifties, that they were often tempted to caU out 
 to the first best man, "Give me a child." Some- 
 times it happens that in their last youth they 
 appease their mother longing by adopting a foster 
 child; sometimes they stiU this longing by a child 
 of their own, from a love relation or a marriage. 
 This late and uncertain happiness is often made 
 possible exactly through their work. And then. 
 
Influence upon Single Women 79 
 
 if not earlier, they bless this work which gives 
 them the economic possibility, and thereby also 
 the covtrage, for this hazardous adventure. 
 
 More frequent than these are the cases however 
 where single women, who have passed their first 
 youth, find in friendship for another woman a 
 valve for their, in great part, unused feelings. In 
 some natures this friendship will be jealous and 
 exacting, in others true and devoted. I wish to 
 emphasise that I speak here of entirely natural 
 spiritual conditions. There is to-day much talk 
 about "Sapphic" women; and it is even possible 
 that they exist in that impure form which men 
 imagine. I have never met them, presumably 
 because we rarely meet in life those with whom no 
 fibre of our being has any afiinity. But I have 
 often observed that the spiritually refined women 
 of our time, just as formerly the spiritually refined 
 men of HeUas, find most easily in their own sex 
 the qualities which set their spiritual life in the 
 finest vibration of admiration, inspiration, sym- 
 pathy and adoration. 
 
 The fundamental types of single women depicted 
 here — the person of intellect and the person of 
 feeling — are found everywhere. The former 
 according to current opinion already predominate 
 in America; in Europe, it seems to me, the latter 
 still prevail. That the main classes include in- 
 numerable varieties, it is needless to say. There 
 are for example the numerous, quite ordinary, 
 
8o The Woman Movement 
 
 family girls who would be happy if they could give 
 up their independence in order to enjoy the pro- 
 tection of their parents' or their own home. And 
 the same obtains also with the quite as ancient 
 type of woman, Undine, who — soulless and cold — 
 enslaves all men. If she is in any civic vocation, 
 she knows how to get the smallest amount of work 
 for herself and, in case she is engaged in the artistic 
 field, the best possible criticism. Conscience is 
 an acquaintance which she has never made and she 
 is also of the opinion that everything agreeable is 
 permitted to her; she simply slides past anything 
 disagreeable. Although work belongs to these 
 disagreeable things, she continues it until she has 
 found means to place her "qualities" in the most 
 advantageous manner upon the matrimonial 
 market. 
 
 The diametrical antithesis of this curvilinear 
 type is the rectilinear. It has, just as the pre- 
 ceding tjrpe, existed at all times. It is the woman 
 who really never demanded anything of life but 
 "a work and a duty" and finds both in abundance 
 in all positions of life. She is found year in year 
 out at her desk, in appropriate working garb, free 
 from all aesthetics; proud "if she never has 
 needed to miss a day"; proud that she never has 
 come late. On the contrary she never goes on 
 time. For she has so grown into the business or 
 the office that she takes everything upon herself 
 that is required without murmuring, as a well-dis- 
 ciplined soldier in the ranks of the grey working 
 
Influence upon Single Women 8i 
 
 army; thankful, in addition, if her long working 
 cares yield her a little life annuity or pension for 
 her old age. This type is foiuid principally among 
 women over fifty — ^fortunately. For this class of 
 women which the pre-feministic circumstances 
 created, have, by their "frugality" carried almost 
 to the verge of criminality, by their humble, con- 
 scientious servitude, lowered the wages of their 
 colleagues who are more full of life. These latter 
 have begun work in the hope that it finally will 
 "free" them; that is, will give them something of 
 that for which their innermost being longs, not 
 only their daily bread — a bread which sickness or 
 a turn of affairs moreover can take from them at 
 any time. And perhaps they never succeed even 
 in having their own room where they at least could 
 have repose! Underpaid, overworked, tired to 
 death, who can wonder if these women have lost, 
 if they ever possessed them, the essential charac- 
 teristics of ' ' womanhood ' ' — active kindness, repose 
 even in movement, charming gentleness? The 
 Icelandic poet of yore already knew that "Few 
 become fair through wounds." These women 
 must put all their strength into their work and into 
 the effort to conceal their imderpayment by 
 "respectable" clothing, or else lose their positions. 
 In everything else they must economise to the 
 utmost and perhaps in addition be laughed at 
 because of their economy. They succeed, often 
 admirably, in maintaining themselves in proud 
 fair struggle, in rejecting "erotic" perqtiisites to 
 
82 The Woman Movement 
 
 add to their income and in fulfilling conscientiously 
 the requirements of their work. Yet to do this 
 I i with lively interest, with preserved spiritual elas- 
 / /' ticity ,with quiet amiability — ^for this their strength 
 does not stiffice, exhausted by insufficient nourish- 
 ment, insufficient sleep, still more insufficient re- 
 creation, and strained daily to the utmost. Their 
 nervousness finds vent in either hard or hysterical 
 expression and the public, annoyed by their ill- 
 humour, divines little of the tragedies enacted in 
 offices, business houses, caf6s or similar places. 
 If a suicide concludes the tragedy, the public 
 shudders for a moment and — all goes on as before. 
 
 Thus "emancipation" presents itself in reality 
 for millions of women. To what extent the middle- 
 class woman movement is indirectly to blame for 
 this fact has already been emphasised. 
 
 The essential reason is however the prevailing 
 economic condition of society. By the uninter- 
 ' rupted fever of competition and the accvmiulation 
 of riches, it dries up the soul and robs it of goodness 
 as well as of joy. When the great, beautiful, 
 eternal sources of joy are exhausted, the life 
 stimulus is sought in exclusively physical pleasures, 
 which are always made more exciting in order to 
 be able to arouse still, in the languid nervous sys- 
 tem, feelings of desire. Moreover, there is the 
 neurosis and weariness of life of the overworked, 
 of those continually quaking about their material 
 safety, of those who could be revived by the noble 
 and simple joys of life, to which those jaded with 
 
Influence upon Single Women 83 
 
 riches are already not susceptible; but for all these 
 millions and nuUions such joys are not accessible 
 because hunger for profit depresses wages. If in 
 addition to that we take into account the increasing 
 suffering of the best because of the ever devel- 
 oping feeling of solidarity; and if fimally we con- 
 sider that women, who through the protection of 
 the home could preserve something of warmth- 
 irradiating energy, are now in increasing numbers 
 driven out of the home, then we have some of the 
 reasons which — in higher degree than the religious 
 and philosophic reasons which also exist — con- 
 tribute to the joylessness of our time. 
 
 A contribution to the meagre stock of good for- 
 tune of the present time is furnished however by 
 the joy of life among young girls working under 
 favourable conditions. Among them we meet a 
 new soul condition, which could be designated, as 
 briefly as possible, as covetousness of everything 
 which can promote their personal development and 
 a beautiful liberality with what is thus won. 
 They can gratify their energetic desire for 
 self-development by sport, travel, books, art and 
 other means of culture; their freedom of action 
 between working hours is not restricted by private 
 duties. They can 'utilise their leisure time and 
 their income as they please: for recreation, plea- 
 sure, social intercourse, social work or private, 
 charitable activity. No father nor husband 
 encroaches upon their free agency. And so dear 
 
84 The Woman Movement 
 
 does this liberty become to them through the mani- 
 fold joys which it furnishes, that these young girls, 
 in constantly increasing numbers, refuse to relin- 
 quish their individual independence for the sake 
 of a marriage which, even presupposing the hap- 
 piest love, always means a restriction of the free- 
 dom of movement that they enjoyed while single. 
 And since the modern woman knows that, in the 
 sphere of spiritual values, nothing can be attained 
 without sacrifice, she prefers to keep free agency 
 and to sacrifice love. If she chooses in the oppo- 
 site direction, the task of adaptation will be the 
 more difficult, the longer and the more intensely 
 she has enjoyed freedom. The modem young 
 girl, if she deigns to bestow her hand upon a man, 
 not infrequently has her pretty head so crammed 
 full of principles of equality that she sometimes 
 (frequently in America), by written contract estab- 
 lishes her independence to the smallest detail, 
 which sometimes includes separate apartments 
 and the prohibition that either of the contracting 
 parties shall have the key to the apartment of the 
 other. 
 
 There are many varieties of the new tjrpe of 
 woman. There is for instance the tom-boy, the 
 "gamin," who for her life cannot give up the 
 right to mad pranks and mischievous jokes. There 
 is the girl consumed with ambition, who sacrifices 
 all other values in order to attain the goal of her 
 ambition in art or science. There is the fanati- 
 cally altruistic girl, who considers the work for 
 
Influence upon Single Women 85 
 
 mankind so important that she feels she has not the 
 right to an "egoistic" love happiness. There is 
 the ascetic ethereal girl, who looks upon marriage 
 and child-bearing as animal functions, imworthy 
 of a spiritual being, but above all as unbeautiful. 
 And for many of these modem, aesthetically 
 refined, nervously sensitive yotmg girls the aes- 
 thetic point of view is decisive. AU love the work 
 which permits them to live according to their 
 ideals. Still it often happens that Ovidian meta- 
 morphoses take place: that the young girl sees the 
 cloud or the swan transformed into a god, upon 
 whose altar she sacrifices, with joy, her free agency 
 and everything else which only a few weeks 
 earlier she cherished as her holy of holies. The men 
 who view this process with a smile, think that the 
 anti-erotic ideals were only a new weapon of 
 defence in the eternal war between the sexes. But 
 these men often learn how mistaken they were 
 when they themselves become participators in the 
 war. They meet women so proud, so sensitive 
 regarding their independence, so merciless in their 
 strength, so easily wounded in their instiricts, so 
 zealous to devote themselves to their personal 
 task, so determined to preserve their freedom, that 
 erotic harmony seldom can be realised. Yes, these 
 women " often repudiate love only because it 
 becomes a bond to their freedom, a hindrance to 
 their work, a force for the bending of their will to 
 another's will. 
 
 The women, womanly in their innermost depths, 
 
86 The Woman Movement 
 
 who really feel free only when they give themselves 
 wholly, are becoming continually more rare. But 
 where such a wholly devoted woman still exists, 
 she is the highest type of woman which any period 
 has produced. Especially if she springs from a 
 family of old ctdture. She has then, combined in 
 her personality, the best of tradition and the best of 
 the revolution evoked by the woman movement. 
 The fibres of her being absorb their nourishment 
 with instinctive certainty out of the fruitful soil 
 which pride, devotion to duty, family love, require- 
 ments of culture and refinement of form, for many 
 generations, have created. But her conscious soul- 
 life flowers in the sun of the present; she thinks 
 new thoughts and has new aims. Just as little as 
 she disavows her desire for love, so little does she 
 desire love under other conditions than those of 
 spiritual unity and human equality. If she meets 
 the man who can give her this and if she loves him, 
 then he can be more certain than the man of any 
 other time that he is reaUy loved, that no ulterior 
 motive obscures the devotion of this free woman. 
 He has seen her susceptible to all the riches of life; 
 has seen her assist in social tasks, perform the duty 
 of every day joyful in her work, proud of her 
 independence attained through her work. He 
 knows that just as she is she would have continued 
 to be if he had not entered into her life. How 
 different is this girl from the one of earlier times, 
 who was driven by the emptiness of her life into 
 continual love affairs, which could not lead to a 
 
Influence upon Single Women 87 
 
 marriage nor exist in a marriage that possessed 
 nothing of love! 
 
 This most beautiful new type of woman ap- 
 proaches spiritually the aforementioned type of 
 single, aged women, who because of their econ- 
 omic independence foimd time for a fine personal 
 ctdture. These followed not infrequently in 
 their youth, from a distance it is true, but with 
 joyous sympathy, the progress of the woman 
 movement. They shook their heads later over 
 its extremes. With new joy they regard the 
 young girls just described, in whom they find a 
 more universal development than in themselves, 
 because these yotmg girls have been developed 
 through active consttmption of power which was 
 spared to the older women, although they must 
 have summoned much passive energy in order 
 to maintain their personality against conven- 
 tion. The young girls find often in these older 
 women a fine tmderstanding, which they richly 
 reciprocate. Such terms of friendship are the 
 most beautiful which the present has to offer: 
 they resemble the meeting of the morning and 
 evening red in the bright midsummer nights of 
 the North. 
 
 No time could have been so rich in exquisite fem- 
 inine personalities, at aU ages and in all stages of 
 life, as ours. We must not draw our conclusions 
 regarding the abundance of such women, in the 
 older culture epochs, from the illustrious names of 
 women which incessantly recur in the pictures of 
 
88 The Woman Movement 
 
 the earlier times — like stage soldiers — until they 
 give the illusion of a great host. 
 
 But exquisite women are even to-day excep- 
 tional. The Martha type rather than the Mary 
 type predominates. This is due on one hand to 
 decreasing piety, on the other hand to the kind of 
 working and society life. Fifty years ago single 
 women were often spiritually petrified, now more 
 often they cannot succeed in settling into any 
 form. Their existence, turned outwardly, widens 
 their sphere of interest but makes their soul-life 
 shallow. Restlessness is most imfavourable to 
 the "development of the personality," which was 
 however the goal of the emancipation of woman. 
 This development is delayed most of all perhaps by 
 the lack of personal contact with other personali- 
 ties, of immediate, intimate human connections. 
 This can, from no point of view, be supplied by 
 the society or club life in which single women are 
 to-day absorbed. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON 
 THE DAUGHTERS 
 
 As late as sixty or seventy years ago, the daugh- 
 ters of good families had still few points of contact 
 with life outside the four walls of the home. From 
 the hands of nurse-maids they went into those of 
 the governess, and after confirmation, studies were 
 at an end. If it was a cultured home then reading 
 aloud or music was often practised, whereby it is 
 true no "specific education" qualifying them for 
 examinations was attained, but frequently a fine 
 universal human culture. There was always 
 employment in the house for the zeal for work. 
 The great presses were filled with linen which was 
 not infrequently spun and woven by the daughters ; 
 in the autumn they assembled for sausage-making 
 and candle dipping; later, for Christmas baking 
 and roasting; in summer endless rows of glasses of 
 preserves were set in the store-room. Before 
 Christmas, night after night, Christmas presents 
 were made; after Christmas, night after night, they 
 danced. At these balls those in outer respects 
 uncomely, received a foretaste of that waiting 
 which must fill their Hfe for many long years: 
 
 89 
 
90 The Woman Movement 
 
 would the invitation to the dance — or the wooing 
 respectively — come or not? Every man whose 
 shadow merely fell upon the scene, was immedi- 
 ately considered from the point of view of a suitor. 
 As the years went by the girl, who before twenty- 
 five years of age was considered an "old maid," 
 saw how the glance of the father and the brothers 
 became gloomy, yes, she could even hear how 
 "unfortunate" she was. If such a daughter Uved 
 in a home poor in books — and most of them were — 
 then she could not even procure a book she wished. 
 For the daughters worked year in year out without 
 wages, in case they did not receive meagrely doled 
 out pin-money which only through great ingenuity 
 sufficed for their toilette. All year long there were 
 christenings and birthday celebrations ; in summer 
 games were played, where it was possible riding 
 parties arranged, in winter sleighing parties were 
 organised. Other physical exercise was considered 
 superfluous. The young girls were averse to going 
 to a neighbouring estate if it lay a mile away ; and 
 during the week to take a long walk for pleasure 
 or sit down with a book, which had been borrowed, 
 would be considered simply as idling away one's 
 time. In summer a cold bath was permissible — a 
 warm bath was used only in cases of sickness — ^but 
 swimming was considered so unwomanly, that 
 whoever had learned it must keep it secret. Row- 
 ing, tobogganing and skating were, even if per- 
 mitted in the country, yet half in discredit as 
 "masculine." 
 
Influence upon the Daughters 91 
 
 When grandfather related an heroic deed of some 
 ancestress whose proud countenance shone out 
 among the family portraits, then the daughter of 
 such a family must have asked herself why this 
 deed was lauded while everything "manly" was 
 forbidden her. 
 
 The days and years went by at the embroidery 
 frame or netting needles, amid continuous chatter 
 about the family and neighbours, amid eternal 
 friction and in disputing back and forth over mere 
 trifles. The confined nervous force sought an 
 outlet, and in an existence where each one — 
 according to the first paragraph of family rights — 
 interfered in the greatest as in the smallest con- 
 cerns of all the others, there was always plenty of 
 material about which to become irritated and 
 excited. 
 
 In the country, life was, however, fuller and 
 fresher than in the city where the young girl had 
 less to do and never dared go out alone; yes, where 
 a walk was considered so superfluous, that the 
 mother of the great Swedish feminist Predrika 
 Bremer advised her daughters to jump up and 
 down behind a chair when they insisted that they 
 needed exercise! 
 
 The relation to the parents, even if the principle 
 of tmswerving and mute obedience was not wholly 
 carried out, was ordinarily a reverential alienation. 
 Neither side knew the inner life of the other. The 
 temperament of the mother determined the every- 
 
92 The Woman Movement 
 
 day domestic comforts, the will of the father the 
 external occurrences of life, from the trip to the ball 
 to marriage. The daughter whose inclination cor- 
 responded with the will of the father considered 
 herself fortunate. The one married against her 
 will wept, but obeyed. As an almost fabulous 
 occurrence it was related of one or another girl 
 that she dared to say "No" before the marriage 
 altar; cases were not tmusual in which daughters 
 received a box on the ear and were confined to their 
 room until they accepted the bridegroom whom 
 the father had chosen. Even if a mother, moved 
 by the recollections of her own youth, attempted 
 to support a daughter it rarely succeeded. For the 
 power of the father rested quite as heavily upon 
 the wife. But the worst however was to water 
 myrtle year after year, without ever being able to 
 cut it for a bridal wreath. Even she, who in her 
 heart loved another, found it therefore often wisest 
 to give her consent to an acceptable suitor. Only 
 the one whose dowry was valued at a " ton of gold " 
 — or who also was a celebrated beauty — could run 
 the risk of declining a courtship; yes, she could per- 
 mit herself to occasion it only to decline it. The 
 more suitors she could recount, the prouder she 
 was; such a beauty even embroidered around her 
 bridal gown the monograms of all her earlier wooers. 
 The unmarried remained behind in an environ- 
 ment where the idea prevailed that "woman's 
 politics are her toilettes, her republic is her house- 
 hold and literature belongs to her trinkets." The 
 
Influence upon the Daughters 93 
 
 talented daughter sewed the fine starched shirts in 
 which her stupid brother went to the academy and 
 sighed therewith: "Ah, if one only were a man." 
 
 When the income of the house was small, she 
 increased it perhaps by embroidery, sold in deepest 
 secrecy; for it was a disgrace for a girl of good 
 family to work for money. For her rebellious 
 thoughts she had perhaps a girl friend to whom 
 she could pour out her heart — or a sister. But it 
 often fared with sisters growing old together, just 
 as it must fare with North-pole explorers wintering 
 together, that those holding together of necessity 
 finally loathe one another from the bottom of their 
 hearts. And yet the sisters were most fortunate 
 who could grow old and die in their childhood 
 home and were not compelled to become old house- 
 hold fixtures in the home of relatives. 
 
 Not infrequently this last fate was their portion 
 because a father, a brother or a guardian out of 
 personal, economical self-interest prevented their 
 marriage, or a brother through debt or studies had 
 defrauded them of their inheritance. 
 
 It was not the woman movement but the reli- 
 gious movement, beginning among the Northern 
 peoples almost simultaneously with it, called in 
 Sweden "Laseri" ("Reading") that was the first 
 spiritual emancipation for the old or young unmar- 
 ried girls — ^likewise for wives who longed for a 
 deeper content. Because they took seriously the 
 Bible doctrine that one should disregard the com- 
 mands of the family in order to follow Christ, the 
 
94 The Woman Movement 
 
 home gradually became accustomed to one of the 
 feminine members' going her own way. Often 
 amid great struggles. For the "Reader" was 
 more or less considered as insane; the father was 
 ashamed of her, the mother mourned over her, 
 the brothers laughed at her. But nothing could 
 hinder those strong in their faith from following 
 the irmer voice. And so these women, without 
 knowing it themselves, were a bridge to that eman- 
 cipation of women to which they themselves later 
 — Bible in hand — ^were often an obstacle. 
 
 The movement could not however be prevented.- 
 And now — ^how is it now in the family? Already 
 the ten-year-old talks about what she is sometime 
 going to be. Now, the sisters go with the brothers 
 to school or to the academy and share their intel- 
 lectual interests as well as their Ufe of sport. Now, 
 the fathers and mothers sit at home often alone, 
 for the daughters belong to that host of self-sup- 
 porting girls who can gratify the parents by short 
 visits only. Alas, these visits are not always an 
 unclouded joy. There are collisions between the 
 old and the yotmg often over seeming bagatelles. 
 But a feather shows which way the wind blows 
 and the parents observe that, in the spiritual being 
 of the daughter, the wind blows from an entirely 
 different direction from theirs. The daughter, on 
 the other hand, thinks that perfect calm prevails 
 in the being of her parents; she wishes to raise the 
 dust. The mother pleads her cause in dry and 
 
Influence upon the Daughters 95 
 
 offended manner, the daughter in superior and 
 impetuous words. Accustomed to her freedom, 
 she encounters again at home control over her 
 commissions and omissions, attempts upon her 
 privacy from which she had been freed by leaving 
 home. And they separate again each with a sigh 
 that they "have had so little of one another." In 
 other cases — when the parents have followed the 
 times and the daughters understand that not only 
 children but also parents must be educated with 
 tenderness — then the visits to the parents' home 
 become on both sides elevating episodes in their 
 lives. The daughters repose in the parental ten- 
 derness, which they have only now learned to value 
 when they compare it with their customary loneli- 
 ness. The parents confide to the daughter their 
 cares which she sometimes can effectively lighten, 
 and they revive with her spiritual interests which 
 they themselves had to lay aside. Through her 
 own working Ufe the daughter has gained an 
 entirely new respect for her parents. Through 
 her independence of parental authority she has 
 now gained a frankness, which makes a real inter- 
 change of ideas possible. They discover that they 
 can have something reciprocal for one another. 
 The father, who perhaps at first sighed when the 
 young faces vanished out of the home, now admits 
 that it would have been foolish if the whole troop 
 of girls had continued here at home and so had 
 stood there at his demise, empty-handed, without 
 professional training. The mother, who had 
 
96 The Woman Movement 
 
 helped them persuade the father, smiles, when he 
 insists that he "would not exchange his capable 
 girls for boys." And he is not at all afraid that 
 the daughters could not marry if they would; he 
 remembered indeed how his contemporaries de- 
 clared that they " would never look at a girl student, 
 a Blue stocking, " and yet so many of these were 
 now happily married to — girl students. 
 
 Beside these results of the independence of the 
 daughters which elevate life for all sides, there are 
 opposite cases; when, for example, a single daugh- 
 ter without outer economic compulsion or inner 
 personal necessity, impelled only by the current of 
 the time, leaves a home where her contribution of 
 work could be significant, in order to follow a voca- 
 tion outside. The restdts are often of doubtful 
 value, not only from a social point of view but also 
 from that of the family and herself, when the 
 daughter remains at home but carries on a work 
 outside. This comes partly because they are con- 
 tented with less pay and thus lower the wages of 
 those who support themselves entirely; partly 
 because they over-exert themselves. In those 
 cases where several daughters can share with one 
 another the domestic diuties, no over-exertion 
 results perhaps. But when a single daughter com- 
 bines an exacting professional work with quite as 
 exacting household duties, then she is exhausted 
 by her double task; then she feels the burden, not 
 the joy, of work. For all professional working 
 girls who remain at home, have moreover in addi- 
 
Influence upon the Daughters 97 
 
 tion, even tmder the most favorable circumstances, 
 the spiritual strain of turning from work back again 
 to the gregarious demands of the home, as well as 
 to the many different attractions and repulsions, 
 antipathies and sympathies which determine the 
 deviations in temperature of the home; the strain 
 of respecting the sensibilities. which must be spared 
 or of paying attention to the domestic demands 
 which must be refused, if the work is not to suffer 
 from lack of rest and time for preparation. All 
 this can be so nerve racking that the young girl is 
 seized with an irresistible longing for a little home 
 of her own, where she wotdd be mistress of her 
 leisure time, and could see her own friends — not 
 alone those of her family, — ^where she could join 
 those who held the same views, where she, in a 
 word, wotild live her life according to the dictates 
 of her personal demands. If she can, she often 
 does this. For to-day young girls live to apply the 
 principle of the woman movement — ^individuaHsm. 
 The older women's rights advocates desired, it is 
 true, that woman shotdd be allowed to "develop 
 her gifts," but she should "administer" them for 
 the benefit of others; they desired that she should 
 receive new rights from law and custom, but that 
 she should seek always in law and custom support and 
 security for her action. The young women's rights 
 advocates, on the other hand, believe that their own 
 growth, just as that of animals and trees, is intend- 
 ed above all for self-development, that in their 
 own character the direction for their growth is 
 
98 The Woman Movement 
 
 specified, and that they have not the right to con- 
 fine themselves by circumstances or subject them- 
 selves to influences by which they know they 
 hinder the development of their powers, according 
 to their individual natures. The more refined the 
 feeling of personality becomes, the more exactly 
 these young p'eople understand how to choose 
 what is essential for them and to repudiate what 
 is a hindrance. But before they attain this cer- 
 tainty they evince often an unnecessary lack of 
 consideration, and the family is often right when 
 it speaks of the egoism of youth. They find no 
 opportunity for helping father or mother nor for 
 participation in the elders' interests. The whole 
 family is rarely assembled even at meal-time; the 
 daughters as well as the sons rush off to lecttires, 
 work, sport, clubs. The mother who sees how 
 occupied the daughters are has not the heart to add 
 to their work or to thwart them in their pleasvires; 
 thus she allows the selfishness of the yoimg crea- 
 tures to increase to the point where she herself 
 in indignation begins — seasonably and unseason- 
 ably — to react against it. The young girl answers 
 her mother's reproof then with the complaint that, 
 "Mamma does not understand" her and that 
 she is "behind her time." Especially the young 
 examination-champions distinguish themselves by 
 their arrogance in the family as in the club, 
 where they look down upon the older ladies who 
 have not passed examinations just as they do upon 
 their own mother. 
 
Influence upon the Daughters 99 
 
 It fares best in the families, and they are even 
 now numerous, where the mother herself has 
 studied or worked outside the home and therefore 
 knows what domestic services she may or may not 
 require; where she herself personally understands 
 the intellectual occupation of the yoting people 
 and has preserved her own youthfulness, so that 
 she becomes not infrequently the real friend of her 
 daughters and sons. If the mother, on the con- 
 trary, was one of the many whw, at the beginning 
 of the woman movement, sacrificed her own talent 
 to the wishes of her family or the demands of the 
 home, in spite of the possibilities for its develop- 
 ment made accessible to her at that time, then 
 she has often absolutely no comprehension of the 
 egoism of her daughter. She herself had acted 
 so entirely differently! Or she imderstands fully 
 that in her daughters as well as in her sons she 
 views the attainment of a new conception of life, 
 with all its Storm and Stress, which the spring- 
 times in the life of mankind bring with them — an 
 attainment in which, to her sorrow, she could not 
 take part in her youth. 
 
 At such spring-times youth is not, as the parents 
 hoped, sunlight and the twittering of birds in the 
 home; but March storms and April clouds. The 
 parents feel themselves at first swept out, super- 
 fluous, disillusioned. They are angered but reju- 
 venated, thanks to all the new points of view that 
 youth makes valid. Yes, father and mother some- 
 times could live through a second youth if their 
 
loo The Woman Movement 
 
 own contemporaries did not depress thfeir buoy- 
 ancy by their disapproving astonishment and the 
 children by their cool rejection of the comradeship 
 of their parents. But in spite of this two-fold 
 opposition, there are now fathers and mothers 
 who are able to enjoy the riches of life qidte as 
 youthfully as and more deeply than their children; 
 while the parents of earlier times, especially the 
 mother, forever stagnated as early as forty. More 
 and more frequently we find mothers who, like 
 their daughters, lead a spiritually rich and emo- 
 tional life, who have so preserved their physical 
 youthftdness and who possess moreover through 
 experience and self -culture so refined a soul-Ufe, 
 that, in regard to the impression they make, they 
 are not infrequently the rivals of their daughters. 
 They are already revelations of that type of woman 
 which, in token of emancipation, has found the 
 equilibrium between the old devoted ideal and the 
 new self-assertive ideal. They view life from a 
 height which gives them a survey also over the 
 essential, in questions concerning their own child- 
 ren. Even if these become something other than 
 the mothers wish, these mothers are so penetrated 
 with the idea of individualism that they let the 
 children foUow their own course. 
 
 Modem fathers rarely find so happy a home as 
 it once could be with a bevy of daughters always 
 at hand. But they find the home richer in con- 
 tent, often also freer from petty dissensions. For 
 in the measure in which each member of the family 
 
Influence upon the Daughters loi 
 
 desires his right and his freedom, do all gradually 
 learn to respect those of others. If the parents 
 consider with dignity their right and their freedom, 
 then a reciprocal consideration resiilts after the 
 boldness which youth evinces under the first 
 influence of the intoxication of freedom. Youth, 
 at first so proud and strong in their assurance of 
 bringing new ideal values to life, begin themselves 
 to experience how the world treats these; and 
 what they once called their parents' prejudice 
 appears to them now often in a new light. Their 
 self-assertion becomes a product of culture, out of 
 a raw material. The manifestations of their indi- 
 vidualism become continually more discreet, more 
 controlled, but at the same time more essential 
 and more effective. When then the young people 
 have fotmd their way and the parents endeavour 
 to turn them aside to the main road — ^which they 
 call the way of wisdom or of duty — then certainly 
 and with right the yoting people put themselves 
 on the defensive. 
 
 Even a devoted daughter cannot bring to the 
 home to-day as undivided a heart as formerly. 
 But this gift was earUer a matter of course, so to 
 speak, a natural result of the conditions. But if 
 to-day a girl sacrifices a talent to fiHal duty, then 
 it is an infinitely greater personal sacrifice; a real 
 choice. And if she does not make the sacrifice, 
 it is not in the least always on the ground of egoism. 
 It happens often in conviction that the uncondi- 
 tional demand of Christianity that the strong must 
 
102 The Woman Movement 
 
 have consideration for the weak, makes these 
 latter often egoists and tyrants; that the strong, 
 who are more significant for the whole, are thus 
 rendered inefficient. 
 
 If a troop of athletic boys continually con- 
 formed to the level of the weakest, then all 
 would remain upon a lower plane, and the weak 
 find no incentive to seek their triumphs in another 
 sphere. 
 
 / On the other hand it is fine and eminently sane 
 and in harmony with the laws of spiritual growth, 
 when the strong shall help the weak to reach a goal 
 which is thus, in his own peculiar direction, really 
 attainable by him. Neither paganism nor Christ- 
 ianity has created the most beautiful strength; it 
 is a union of both. It has found its most perfect 
 expression in art in Donatello's St. George, in 
 MichelangeloVDavidrr youths, whose victorious 
 power conceals compassion and whose compassion 
 embraces even the conquered : symbols of strength 
 which has become kind, of kindness which has 
 become strong. If a mother has seen this expres- 
 sion upon the face of her son or her daughter then 
 she can address to life the words of Simeon: "Now 
 let thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have 
 seen thy glory." For the glory of life is the har- 
 mony between its two fundamental powers — 
 conquest and devotion: self-assertion and self- 
 sacrifice. In every new phase of the ethical devel- 
 opment of mankind the cultural problem is this 
 harmony and the cultural profit is not the per- 
 
Influence upon the Daughters 103 
 
 dominance of one of the two but the perfected 
 synthesis of both. 
 
 This problem has now become actual, throtigh 
 the woman movement, for the feminine half of 
 mankind, after the unconditional spirit of sacrifice 
 has obtained for centuries as the indispensable 
 attribute of womanliness. In the first stage of the 
 woman movement the majority of the "emanci- 
 pated" were still determined by their spirit of 
 sacrifice, which they aspired to combine with their 
 outside professional work. This generation lived 
 beyond its strength. The younger generation of 
 to-day does not believe that God gives unlimited 
 strength. For they have seen that those who live 
 unceasingly beyond their strength finally have 
 no strength left, either for others or for themselves. 
 And they know that in the long run one can live 
 only upon his own resources and these must be 
 conserved and renewed in order to suffice. But 
 this knowledge makes the problem, which in the 
 course of days and years appears in manifold dif- 
 ferent forms, only more difficult of solution: the 
 problem to find the right choice in the collision 
 between family duties, duties toward oneself and 
 duties toward society; the choice which shall bring 
 with it the essential enhancement of life. 
 
 The conflict is thus solved by some feminists: 
 everything called family ties and family feeling is 
 referred to the "impersonal" instinctive life, while 
 our "personality" expresses itself in intellectual 
 activity, in study, in creation, in imiversally 
 
104 The Woman Movement 
 
 human ends, in social activity, etc. And since the 
 principle of emancipation is certainly the freeing of 
 the "personality," it follows from this idea, in 
 connection with this definition of the personality, 
 that the liberated personality must place the 
 obligations of the intellectual life absolutely above 
 those of the family life; the outside professional 
 work above the work in the home. In a word, 
 the earlier definition of womanliness ignored the 
 universal human element, the present definition 
 of personality ignores the womanly element in 
 woman's being. The last solution of the problem 
 is quite as one-sided as the first. 
 
 The "principle of personality," as it has just 
 been described is entertained especially in America. 
 In Europe there are still women who reflect deeply 
 upon their own being and — who have a depth over 
 which they may meditate! These women have 
 not yet succeeded ia simplifying the problem which 
 is the central one of their life. They know that not 
 only do instincts, impulses of the will, feelings, 
 form the strongest part of the individual character 
 which nature has given them, but also that this 
 part determines their thinking and creating power 
 — their whole conscious existence. They know 
 that their character receives its peculiarities 
 through the development which they themselves 
 accord to one or another side of their individual 
 temperament. In one personality the intellectual 
 life will predominate, in another the emotional: 
 in one the ethical, in another the sesthetic motive. 
 
Influence upon the Daughters 105 
 
 The personality becomes harmonious only when 
 no essential motive is lacking, when all attain a 
 certain degree of development, a harmony which 
 is as yet only so won that no motive receives its 
 greatest possible development. Such a harmony has 
 long been the especial characteristic of the most 
 beautiful womanhood, while the most significant 
 men have ordinarily achieved their superior 
 strength in one direction, at the cost of harmony in 
 the whole. If now women believe that they can 
 achieve the strength of men without, for that rea- 
 son, being obliged to sacrifice something of their 
 harmony, then they believe their sex capable of 
 possibilities which thus far have been granted 
 rarely and then only to the exceptional in both 
 sexes. What experience shows is : the greater har- 
 mony of single women in a limited existence as com- 
 pared with the lack of harmony in the Uves of 
 daughters, owing to the irreconcilable problems 
 which their richer existence brings with it. For 
 these problems must be solved, at one time, by 
 sacrifice of intellectual, at another, by sacrifice 
 of emotional values. In every case, the sacrifice 
 leaves behind it, not the joyful peace of fulfilled 
 duty, but the gnawing unrest of a duty still ever un- 
 fulfilled. Every woman who has a heart knows 
 it is at least quite as important a part of her per- 
 sonaEty as her passion for science perhaps. If 
 for example she is obliged to surrender to another 
 the loving service of a sick father in order to pur- 
 sue scientific researches, then her heart is quite as 
 
io6 The Woman Movement 
 
 certainlyinthe sick-room as, in case of the opposite 
 choice, her thoughts would have been in the labor- 
 atory. By calling one factor "instinct" and the 
 other "personality," nothing is in reality gained. 
 Theorising ladies can easily write — the paper is 
 forbearing. But human nature is of flesh and 
 blood. And therefore thousands of women grap- 
 ple to-day with tormenting questions: — When we 
 women shall belong entirely to industrial work and 
 to the social life, who then is left for the work of 
 love? Only paid hands. What becomes then of 
 the warmth in human life when such a division of 
 labotir is established that kindness becomes a pro- 
 fession, and the rest of us shall be exempt from its 
 practice because our "Personality" has more 
 important fields for the exercise of its strength? 
 What does it signify to live for society when we 
 come to the service of society with chilled hearts? 
 If the warmth is to be preserved then we must 
 have leisure for love in private life, a right to love, 
 peace and means for love. Only thus can our 
 hearts remain warm for the social life. Can the 
 whole really profit if we sacrifice unconditionally 
 that part of the whole which is nearest us? Can 
 our feeling of solidarity increase toward mankind 
 when we pass by exactly those people to whom we 
 cotdd, by our deeds, really show our sympathetic 
 feUow-feeling? 
 
 The woman whose instinct life is still strong 
 and sound, whose personality has its roots deep in 
 life — which means not social life alone — she also 
 
'" Influence upon the Daughters 107 
 
 understands how to determine what life in its 
 deepest import purposes with her; she knows how 
 she serves it best, whether by remaining in a posi- 
 tion where she fulfils her personal obligations as 
 part of a family or by seeking another position 
 where she fulfils this obligation as a member of 
 society. 
 
 It is true the erroneouus idea still prevails in 
 many homes that the daughter must willingly sacri- 
 fice her social task for the family, a sacrifice which 
 the family would never even wish on the part of 
 a son. But the assurance that the daughter could 
 have made another choice instils in the family, 
 unconsciously, a new conception of her sacrifice, 
 and gives to herself the courage to asstime a posi- 
 tion in the home other than that she held at the 
 time when no choice remained to her. If the total 
 of efficacious daughterly love of to-day and earlier 
 times be estimated, this total would not prove less 
 now. But it is now given rather in a great sum; 
 earlier, on the contrary, in many small coins. 
 Because of the professional work of the daughter, 
 there are now often lacking in the home the ready 
 obliging young hands whose help father and 
 brother so willingly engrossed; the cheerful com- 
 forter, the admiring listener. But in a great hour 
 the daughter or sister gives now often a hundred 
 times more in deep, personal understanding. One 
 draws a false conclusion when one thinks that the 
 more closely a family holds together the more 
 it signifies a corresponding unity and devotion. 
 
io8 The Woman Movement 
 
 The young act in submission because they permit 
 themselves to be cowed by the family authority 
 which like a steam-roller passed over their wills 
 and their hearts. But the indignation that they 
 experienced in their innermost hearts, the criticism 
 which they exercised among one another, were not 
 less bitter than that which they to-day openly 
 utter. 
 
 The home life of fifty years ago was a school of 
 diplomacy; it especially served to oppose cunning 
 to the father's authority, and the mother often 
 taught the children to use this weapon of weakness. 
 Now the father does not wish to make himself 
 ridiculous by saying: "I forbid you," for the 
 daughter answers: "Well, then, I wiU wait until 
 I am twenty-one. ' ' The threat, ' ' I disinherit you, ' ' 
 recoils from the determination of the daughter, " I 
 can work." Only in a distant province, in a little 
 town, or among the "upper ten thousand" of a 
 large city, where the daughters stiU often receive 
 a "general education," which does not fit them to 
 earn their living, are they occupied all day without 
 the feeling of having worked. They serve at five 
 o'clock teas, embroider for charity bazaars, etc. 
 But they also experience the power of the spirit of 
 the time strongly enough to know that they lead 
 a selfish life but not a life of self. The lower the 
 scale of riches the more housework do the daugh- 
 ters have to perform. But as a result of the patri- 
 archal organisation of labour they still perform 
 this without their own responsibility, without the 
 
Influence upon the Daughters 109 
 
 joy of independence, without regular unoccupied 
 time and without one penny at their disposal! 
 
 Even in these circles however the spirit of the 
 time is active ; such a daughter leads now in every 
 case a life of much richer content than some 
 decades ago, when even though middle-aged she 
 was still treated as ignorant innocence and must 
 allow herself to be extolled to every possible 
 marriage candidate. She suffers when she sees her 
 mother as the submissive wife, whose continual 
 according smile has graven lines of humility about 
 her mouth, whose continually pacifying tone has 
 made her voice whining. She suffers when the 
 father cuts short a diversity of opinion with the 
 words, "You have heard what I said — That will 
 do." She suffers when her brothers find her 
 "insufferably important" or declare her new ideas 
 "crazy." But exactly these new ideas about the 
 right and freedom of woman, which she encoun- 
 ters everywhere, have given a dignity to her 
 own being which has its influence even without 
 words. On the other hand, the fact that the 
 fathers lose one legal right after another over the 
 feminine members of the family has its effect, 
 so that they gradually change their tone, the 
 clenched fist falls less and less frequently upon the 
 table, the disdain is silenced, and even in the 
 provinces the family life is changing more and 
 more from the despotic political constitution to 
 the democratic, where each one maintains his 
 position by virtue of his own personality. There 
 
1 10 The Woman Movement 
 
 are still men it is true, who wish to confine "wom- 
 an's sphere" to the four "C's" — "Cooking, cloth- 
 ing, children, church." But there is no one who 
 now insists that "a girl cannot learn Mathematics," 
 or that it is "tmwomanly to pore over books" — 
 sayings which were still often heard fifty years 
 ago. Certainly there are still men who accept 
 the cherishing thoughtful care on the part of the 
 women members of the family as obvious homage. 
 But the mMi are becoming more and more num- 
 erous who receive these womanly acts of tender- 
 ness with waking joy. Daughters and sisters of 
 earlier times have pardoned the vices of their 
 fathers and brothers seven and seventy times; 
 those of the present throw away the fragments 
 of trust and love which have been irrevocably 
 shattered. The assurance that the daughters 
 and sisters could do nothing else except pardon, 
 since they were dependent upon their tormentors, 
 often made the fathers and brothers of earlier 
 times grossly inconsiderate. The men of to-day 
 will be refined by the necessity of showing consid- 
 eration and justice to their daughters and sisters 
 if they wish to enjoy their presence in the home. 
 Fathers and brothers have, in a word, gained quite 
 as much spiritually through the loss of their power 
 to oppress as the daughters and sisters have gained 
 in being no longer oppressed. And this experience 
 will be repeated in marriage when man and wife 
 shall be absolutely free and equal. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON 
 MEN AND WOMEN IN GENERAL 
 
 In their struggle for freedom for the same oppor- 
 ttmities of study, for the same fields of work, the 
 same citizenship as man, women have encountered 
 all possible opposition, from that of the Pope, who 
 recently pronounced the most positive condemna- 
 tion of the whole movement for the emancipation 
 of woman, and that of Parliament, to the rough 
 pranks of students. Man's attempt to define the 
 botmdaries of "woman's natural sphere " continues 
 always. The woman physician, for example, had 
 to struggle, in her student years, against prejudice 
 in the dissecting room, and, in her practice, against 
 the professional jealousy of men. The history of 
 emancipation has much shameful conduct on the 
 part of man toward woman to record. Great 
 reluctance to recognise the results of woman's 
 work is stiU common. When this work, in litera- 
 ture and art for instance, is compared with man's, 
 the comparison is made not for the purpose of 
 getting a finer understanding of woman's peculiar 
 
 characteristics, but only to disparage it. The 
 
 iif 
 
112 The Woman Movement 
 
 energy which men of the present time not infre- 
 quently lack they cannot endure to recognise in 
 women, who often possess it in high degree. In 
 the Romance countries, self-supporting working 
 women are always looked upon as a special caste 
 — a caste into which a man does not marry however 
 high respect he pays, theoretically, to "les vierges 
 fortes." 
 
 And yet how different — ^and more beautiful — 
 are the present relations between men and women 
 in general, especially among the Germanic peoples. 
 A friendly comradeship prevails among the young 
 men and women studying at the university, in 
 ■art academies, music schools, business colleges, etc. 
 In the North, this comradeship often continues 
 from the primary schools, through the grades to 
 the university, with results advantageous to both 
 sexes. Especially in the years under twenty, this 
 comradeship has a significance which cannot be 
 overestimated. Girls, who were, earlier, confined 
 to a narrow, uninteresting, joyless family circle, 
 now often find in the circle of masculine and femi- 
 nine comrades their share of the joy of youth with- 
 out which life has no springtirae. Youths who 
 formerly had known no other yoting women than 
 those with whom they should never have come in 
 contact, now learn to know soulful, pure-minded 
 girls, and this gives them a new conception of 
 woman. Both sexes now experience together the 
 joys of youth in such fresh and significant forms 
 as folk-dancing, sport, etc. They have opportunity 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 113 
 
 for. stimulating interchange of ideas in a great 
 circle, and quiet discussion with a few congenial 
 friends. Dtiring the last twenty or thirty years, 
 young men and young women have again begun to 
 discover one another spiritually, discoveries which 
 since the days of romanticism have been made 
 only through the stained glass of literature. In the 
 romantic period, men and women exercised recipro- 
 cally upon one another a htimanising influence. 
 A like influence again obtains at the present time, 
 but upon a much broader basis. The men and 
 women of romanticism formed a group bound 
 together only by spiritual relationship, in which 
 the women aspired to the culture of the men and 
 shared their intellectual interests, while the men 
 promoted the women's "desire for men's culture, 
 art, knowledge, and distinction" {Geluste nach der 
 Manner Bildung, Kunst, Weisheit und Ehre. — 
 Schleiermacher). Now, young people studying 
 in different fields exert a mutual humanising in- 
 fluence and thereby learn to know one another 
 from the side of intelligence as well as from 
 that of character and disposition. Thus are 
 dispelled certain illusions and conceptions almost 
 forced upon them through which both sexes in the 
 years of adolescence once regarded each other. 
 Men as well as women obtain a finer criterion for 
 the conception of "womanliness "and of "man- 
 liness"; both discover the innumerable shadings 
 which these conceptions conceal; both recognise 
 that the sexes can meet not only upon the erotic 
 
114 The Woman Movement 
 
 plane, but upon a plane that is universally human ; 
 finally, both learn that the more perfect and com- 
 plete human beings they become, the more they 
 have to thank one another for it. 
 
 Comprehension in erotic relations is most diffi- 
 cult because, there, women are far in advance of 
 men. Woman's ideal of love, however, is becom- 
 ing more and more the ideal of young men. Young 
 girls, on their side, are beginning to understand 
 better the sexual nature of men. The whole 
 world in which man received his culture, won his 
 victories, suffered his defeats, is no longer terra 
 incognita to women; they have lost the bUnd 
 reverence or the blind hostility with which they 
 formerly regarded the doings and dealings of men. 
 Men, on the other hand, are learning that the do- 
 mestic labours for the comfort of the family, which 
 they have thus far regarded as the sole duty of 
 woman, cannot engross her whole soul, that domes- 
 ticity leaves many wishes imfuLfiUed. So both 
 sexes have begun, each on its own side, to buUd 
 a bridge across the chasm which law and custom 
 had dug between them. The yoimg still ponder 
 over the enigmatical antitheses in their natures, 
 yet they find they have very much that is human 
 in common with one another. In comradeship, 
 however, that "chivalry" vanishes, which among 
 other things consisted in the ideal that the young 
 men had always to bear all the burdens and duties. 
 Now as a rule, the girl carries her own knapsack 
 on excursions and pays her share of the expenses. 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 115 
 
 But if she really needs help, the youth is quite as 
 ready as before to grant it to her, just as she also 
 on her part is ready to assist according to her 
 strength: honest friendship has replaced rap- 
 turous chivalry. This friendly comradeship often 
 satisfies the young man's need of feminine kind- 
 ness and enjoyment in those dangerous years when, 
 as a young man said, "Three fourths of the life 
 of a youth, conscious and unconscious, is sex life," 
 And nothing can more eiiectually prevent him 
 from degrading himself than access to a circle 
 where in quiet and freedom he meets young girls, 
 without an indelicate, intruding family siu^eU- 
 lance, interfering and asking him about his "inten- 
 tions." If between two such comrades an erotic 
 feeling finally develops, even if the wooing takes 
 place in a laboratory instead of a romantic arbour, 
 the possibilities always exist, in the golden haze 
 of love, of making mistakes. But both have, 
 however, had opportunities of seeing each other 
 in many character-iUuminating situations; they 
 have observed each other, not only with their own 
 eyes, but also through the more critical glasses of 
 the comrade circle. On the other hand, it often 
 happens that discussions and interchange of letters 
 conjure up a congeniality which exists only in 
 opinions and temperament, not in nature. It is 
 forttmate when this is discovered in time. Other- 
 wise bitter conflicts may be the result, should a 
 strong individual nature wish to mould the other 
 after himself or after his ideal of man or woman. 
 
ii6 The Woman Movement 
 
 For that anyone loves the individuality of another 
 without illusions is still very rarely the case. It 
 now happens somewhat more frequently, since 
 young people in comradeship learn to know mutu- 
 ally their ideals and dreams, as well in erotic as in 
 universally human aspects. But if these ideals 
 and dreams do give a hint of character, comrade^ 
 ship brings a true knowledge of character only 
 when it also offers an opportunity of seeing others 
 act; not only of hearing them speak of themselves. 
 Such analyses of one's own soul or the soul of 
 others in the atmosphere of tea and cigarettes, 
 music and poetry, give the "interesting" mascu- 
 line or feminine parasites opportunity to ensnare 
 a victim, who is then intellectually or erotically, 
 often even economically, sucked dry. 
 
 But even if such an interchange of ideas really 
 enriched all, it can be carried to excess and become 
 deleterious to energy for work, directness, and 
 idealism. However beneficial may be the honesty 
 of to-day in sexual questions, the discussion of 
 the instincts of life which has now become a com- 
 monplace is also dangerous. These discussions 
 are fraught with the same danger to the roots of 
 human life as is a continual digging up of the roots 
 of a plant to see how it is growing. 
 
 The earlier a marriage can be consummated, 
 the less is the danger of freshness being lost in this 
 way; the greater the prospect that man and wife 
 will grow close together, just as do the man and 
 wife of the people, through the difficulty of the 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 117 
 
 jQominpn struggle for existence. But if this 
 struggle becomes easier before youth has entirely 
 passed, then there enters often into the life of the 
 man a crisis which the practised French call "La 
 maladie de quarante ans " : the need of the man for 
 a new erotic experience. While those on a lower 
 erotic plane, to-day as at all times, seek this in 
 transient secret alliances, it leads those on a higher 
 level in our time to the most tragic of all separa- 
 tions, where the man — after decades of the most 
 intimate life together, of the most faithful work 
 together, of mutual understanding — drives the 
 wife out of the home in order to bring in a young 
 wife who has never been to him, perhaps never 
 can be to him, a fellow fighter and helper, as the 
 repudiated wife was, but who has for him the 
 charm of the mystery which the maiden had for 
 the man before the days of coeducation, sexual 
 discussions, comradeship, and dress-reform! 
 
 Women students now escape the earlier danger 
 of the daughter of the family, falling in love out 
 of lack of occupation. They have not the time, 
 often also not the means to permit themselves 
 erotic dreams. There are among them many 
 poor girls who dare lose no single semester, for 
 they must hasten to earn their livelihood. More- 
 over, such a girl knows that if she should yield to 
 the need for tenderness, for support, that is so 
 strong in her, the same fate could happen to her 
 as to this or that fellow student who after a short 
 happiness was left alone when the lover found a 
 
ii8 The Woman Movement 
 
 good match. And she was left behind not only in 
 her sorrow but also in her work. And the more a 
 yearning girl buries herself in her studies, the more 
 science or art unlock their riches to her, the happier, 
 more fuU of life she feels herself in spite of loneli- 
 ness, scanty means, and shabby dress. 
 
 Among women students there are also many of 
 the cerebral type, mentioned above, women who 
 need tenderness neither in the form of friendship 
 nor of love ; yes, who fear in both a bond for their 
 "free individuality." These take part in sports, 
 discuss, jest, with their fellow men students, open- 
 hearted and unconcerned, without thinking whether 
 they please or not. All these young girls now go 
 about with perfect freedom; even in the Romance 
 cotmtries, a young woman can now go alone with 
 her bag of books or her racquet. For in circles 
 where study has not yet exercised its freeing in- 
 fluence, sport has brought this about. 
 
 In America, student life, because of the early 
 entrance of the men into the professions, becomes 
 more a one-sided, feminine comrade-life. There, 
 the women have to develop their arts of the toilet 
 for each other, whom they find more interesting, 
 more worthy of pleasing than the masculine sex. 
 Even in Europe, feminine comradeship in the 
 student years is at times most intimate. For a 
 friendship between a young girl and a yoimg man 
 often ends with love — on one side. Or in an inti- 
 mate circle A has fallen in love with B, but B with 
 C, etc. Such eventualities the wise girl will avoid 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 119 
 
 for they can bring both suffering and obstruction 
 to her work. With women comrades, she has, with- 
 out this risk, an interchange of ideas which pro- 
 motes study, deepens culture, opens up new views, 
 and gives to all new impulses. There exists, at 
 least at the present time, a difference between the 
 masculine and feminine method of inquiry, of 
 solving problems, of apprehending ideas, which 
 results in the fact that comradeship between wo- 
 men cannot take the place of comradeship between 
 men and women. It is, however, for deep and 
 beautiful natures often impossible at the beginning 
 of life to be capable, in a spiritual sense, of 
 more than a single friendship with their own sex; 
 for each new spiritual contact becomes a new and 
 difficult problem. For such men or women a 
 friendship with a comrade of their own sex is often 
 the richest advantage of their student time. Often 
 a student in good circumstances finds her joy in 
 taking care of some lonely comrades. They find 
 at her apartments, in a friendly welcome, a few 
 flowers and pictures, a teakettle, a fireplace, that 
 feeling of homely warmth for which the shivering 
 students have longed, — a longing which has often 
 driven a lonely, impressionable youth from the 
 dreary students' room to "rough pleasures." 
 Now when he leaves the little comrade circle, his 
 sweetest memories of home, his finest dreams, 
 vibrate in him. And the timid girl goes in the 
 certainty that there is another girl who is con- 
 cerned about her wretched fate. 
 
I20 The Woman Movement 
 
 In such a quiet as also in a more lively comrade- 
 life both sexes learn to know not only each other 
 but also different classes and, in certain Etiropean 
 tmiversities, the several nations. It is not un- 
 usual for nine or ten races to be found represented 
 in one small group of comrades. Life thus becomes 
 everywhere enriched by strong manifestations or 
 fine shades of congeniality; spiritual attractions 
 and repulsions cross one another; inspiring or 
 restraining impressions radiate in all directions. 
 It would be quite as impossible to estimate the 
 fructifying influence of such a friendly intercourse 
 as to measure the life which comes into existence 
 on a spring day filled with the sigh of the wind, 
 the fluttering of butterflies, and humming of bees. 
 
 In such a circle of comrades, devotion and ca- 
 pacity for sacrifice are past belief, especially in 
 the nation where "the girls wear short hair and the 
 young men long hair," as a wag characterised the 
 young Russians studying abroad. That a couple 
 of Russian girls, for a whole winter, possessed to- 
 gether but a single pair of shoes and so cotild never 
 go out at the same time, is one of the inntunerable 
 small and great expressions of the feeling of soli- 
 darity among the poorest students of the university. 
 
 When the comrade life assumed the form ex- 
 clusively of coffee-house visits, then the women had 
 to revolt against it. But they often, alas, allowed 
 themselves to be carried with the stream. Be- 
 cause the coffee-house life at first reaUy gave a 
 certain polish to the intelligence, it could for a short 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 121 
 
 time have its justification. But when a blade is 
 worn out, the artist of life should cease grinding; 
 if on the contrary he allows the grindstone to go 
 on continually, then at last he has only the haft 
 in his hand. Formerly, it was only the young men 
 but now even the girls wear out thus their weapons 
 or tools before they ever use them seriously. 
 
 The darkest side of coeducational life has been 
 that women could demonstrate their equal capa- 
 bility with men in no other way than by the same 
 courses and examinations as those of the men. 
 The eagerness of women to prove their hke pro- 
 ficiency with men in study and in sport has often 
 had disastrous physical results. These are con- 
 tinually becoming more infrequent, thanks to 
 the decreasing prudery in regard to the sexual 
 ftmctions and to the increasing hygienic conscience. 
 The intellectual results, however, continue to 
 exist and are disastrous alike for both sexes; but 
 because of the ambition and conscientiousness of 
 girls, perhaps still more disastrous for them. The 
 examinations which they pass are often dearly 
 bought. This was not noticed in the beginning, 
 when a woman doctor was still looked at with 
 wonder as a noteworthy product of culture, and 
 regarded herself also with wonder. Truly she had 
 sacrificed to grinding and cramming for examina- 
 tions a multitude of youthful joys, but she had, as 
 was thought, won in this way much greater values. 
 This, however, is not always really the case. 
 
122 The Woman Movement 
 
 Ethically, the conscientious girl is certainly above 
 the boy who, not infrequently in the unconscious 
 instinct of self-preservation, idles away his time. 
 But the mental strength of the latter may fre- 
 quently be better preserved in any determined 
 direction. Girls, conscientious and zealous in 
 their work, have filled their heads ftill of lessons to 
 which the coming examination and not their own 
 choice has urged them. What is thus crammed in 
 is not assimilated and consequently has not pro- 
 moted spiritual or mental growth. But it has 
 taken up room and has thereby impaired the 
 intellectual freedom of motion and compelled the 
 natural individuality to compress itself so that 
 it is long before the space conditions in the brain 
 permit it to extend again— in case it is not simply 
 choked by all the chaotic mass that has been ab- 
 sorbed. How many young girls have come to the 
 university or to the art academy full of thirst for 
 knowledge and energy for work ! But after a few 
 years they feel the disgust of surfeit, unless they 
 have found a teacher who has been to them a 
 leader to the essentials in science or in art. Then 
 their joy in study could really be as rich as they 
 had once dreamed it — ^yes, as perhaps even their 
 grandmothers had dreamed it when they had to 
 content themselves with their little text-books 
 written for "girls." Many young girls maintain 
 to-day, through some teacher or some masculine 
 comrade, that spiritual development which only 
 an exceptional relationship between a father and 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 123 
 
 daughter, a brother and sister, could give in earlier 
 times. 
 
 When men and women can study together, 
 then the relationship later between masculine and 
 feminine fellow workmen will, as a rule, be better 
 than when the sexes work independently in the 
 student days. It is true masculine competitors stiU 
 have recourse to the weapon of spreading reports 
 of the incapacity of their feminine competitors 
 — at times honestly convinced of it themselves. 
 The same weapon is of course turned also against 
 masculine competitors. Yet there it is a question 
 of the individual, while in regard to women, the 
 sex is often the only proof the man thinks he need 
 assign for the inferiority of their work. It can 
 be said, however, upon the whole, that the rela- 
 tionship between men and women professional 
 colleagues exhibits the same good side as the com- 
 mon student Hfe, although naturally to a lesser 
 degree. The joint work does not often leave much 
 time for significant interchange of ideas, and after 
 working hours each usually longs for new faces. 
 The influence of joint labour is often limited to 
 the refining effect that the presence of one sex 
 exercises upon the other. Small services are 
 mutually rendered and each worker learns also 
 to respect the achievements of the other; or one 
 is provoked because the work which should have 
 been dispatched by the other now falls to his share ! 
 
 If_the woman performs the same work as the 
 
124 The Woman Movement 
 
 man, then she is often indignant because she must 
 do it for smaller compensation than he. All too 
 easily, the feminists forget that this injustice is 
 equalised if a man who wishes to establish a family 
 cannot obtain a post which he seeks because a 
 woman retains it who can be satisfied with a smaller 
 ■wage since she remains in her parents* home. 
 For this disparity, raising bitterness on both sides, 
 there is no remedy under the present economic 
 system. Feminists can demand the same compen- 
 sation, but working women wiU not obtain it so 
 long as the supply of workers is to the demand as 
 one hundred to one in the professional occupations 
 to which women flock. In vain underpaid women 
 will call to the agitators of the woman movement, 
 "Help us to obtain endurable conditions of Ufe." 
 The only honest answer is, "Help one another, 
 just as the working men have helped one another, 
 by union and solidarity! " 
 
 The competition of the sexes in the labour field 
 is only indirectly connected with the woman move- 
 ment; it is a part of the social question and will 
 therefore only be touched upon here. 
 
 The hostility which the competition between 
 the sexes has evoked is a factor in the social war ; 
 and if — by reason of this competition — marriage 
 decreases, then such competition is a form of social 
 danger. If the cause is sought in the woman 
 movement, then the question is begged completely, 
 because the women with sufficient income to be 
 able to live at home without industrial work, after 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 125 
 
 the loss of a husband or a father, are constantly 
 becoming more rare. There is the additional fact 
 that in many positions where man and woman have 
 equal salary, the woman is preferred because of 
 her greater honesty and faithfulness to duty. 
 Further it must be emphasised that, even in 
 middle-class vocations, women with increasing 
 frequency earn their whole livelihood, not merely 
 a supplementary remuneration, when if they did 
 not thus work they would be a burden to some 
 man and so perhaps prevent him from marrying. 
 Many of these women would wish nothing better 
 than to enjoy the warmth of "the domestic hearth" 
 to which men in theory relegate them; but since 
 no man offers this warmth, they must at least be 
 allowed to procure fuel for their lonely hearth fire. 
 
 When men declare that "the only duty which 
 has life value for a woman is to be man's helpmeet, ' ' 
 then they ought not to forget that this task is more 
 and more rarely assigned to a woman, because men 
 prefer to do without her aid, and even find a richer 
 life in bachelorhood than in marriage. They should 
 not dare to forget also that a great number of men 
 disinclined or disqualified for work compel their 
 sisters, daughters, wives, to undertake the task of 
 family provider, and these women also must forego 
 being, "in the quiet of the home, man's helpmeet." 
 
 However weak the feminist logic often may be, 
 it is not so weak as the anti-feminist logic of man. 
 Masculine vactiity hasjfound there an arena where 
 it performs the most incredible gymnastics. The 
 
126 The Woman Movement 
 
 hysteria of literary fanatics, the crude lordly in- 
 stincts of the mediocre man, the irritation of the 
 masculine good-for-nothing at the increasing 
 ability of women, the rage, confounding cause and 
 effect, over the competition of women — these are 
 some of the reasons for the present antagonism 
 between men and women. The deepest reason is 
 this: the more woman is compelled to maintain 
 the struggle for existence under the same social 
 conditions as those imder which men have been 
 thus far compelled to struggle, the more she loses 
 that character by which she gives happiness to 
 man and receives it from him. A diminished 
 erotic attraction is frequently the result, not of 
 the work of women, but of their work under such 
 conditions that the drudging, worn-out women 
 comrades finally appear to their masculine col- 
 leagues only as "sexless ants." Sometimes they 
 really exhibit that obliteration of all characteristic 
 marks of sex which Meunier has indicated to us 
 in his Woman Miner, a great thought-inspiring 
 work of art. 
 
 Many a woman of the present time, deeply 
 feminine, suffers under this compulsory neutral- 
 ising of her womanly being. Others again con- 
 sider this a path to complete humanity. 
 
 But the complete personality is only that man 
 or woman who has cultivated and exercised the 
 strength which he or she as a human being pos- 
 sessed without having neutralised thereby the 
 characteristic of sex. It is tragic when nature 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 127 
 
 herself creates deviations from normal sexuality, 
 but criminal when the ideas of the time weaken 
 sound instincts and inculcate unsound ones. It 
 is not woman nature but the denatured woman 
 who is beginning to grow through the ultra- 
 feminism which looks down upon woman's normal 
 sexual duty as only a low, animal function. 
 
 That soimd men abominate this tendency is 
 justifiable. On the other hand, it is unwarrant- 
 able to confuse a variation of feminism with the 
 woman movement in its entirety, a movement 
 which includes in itself a great earnest desire to 
 work for the welfare of both mothers and children. 
 As a manifestation of womanliness in its most 
 complete, perfect form, many men still elect the 
 woman whose entire Hfe-content consists in the 
 cult of her own beauty, a cult whose attendant 
 phenomenon is the aesthetic ciilture which raises 
 the temple about the altar. Under this perfect 
 and apparently inspired form there is, however, 
 rarely anything to be found of that which the man 
 seeks: the longing and the power of true woman- 
 hood to give happiness by erotic and motherly 
 devotion. Such women, like those cerebral women 
 engrossed by their studies and their work, allow 
 a real love to pass them by ; men are only sacrificial 
 servants of the cult, and the high priest is chosen 
 not upon the ground of motives of feeHng. This 
 type is said to be more common in America than 
 in Europe. But it existed thousands of years 
 ago on the Tiber as well as on the Nile. That 
 
128 The Woman Movement 
 
 Cleopatra in the language of feminism now speaks 
 of the "right of the personality," and means 
 thereby her right to represent no other value in 
 life than that of the white peacock and the black 
 orchid — the value of rarity — that does not make 
 her a "prodjict of the woman movement." 
 
 But certain men characterise a woman thus, 
 if they have been deceived in her: a psychology 
 which equals in value that of the feminist when 
 she speaks of man as the "oppressor," the "cor- 
 rupter," — without noting that the world is full 
 of poor men corrupted or tormented by women! 
 Amid such mutual accusations, just or unjust — 
 whereby gifted men maintain generalisations about 
 "woman's" being which are quite as ingenuous 
 as those which silly women propose about "man's" 
 being — the sexes, in the days of the woman move- 
 ment, have been almost as much alienated from 
 each other as drawn together. The estrangement 
 has taken place in the erotic field and through 
 labour competition; the reconciliation has been 
 effected — leaving out coeducation — by common 
 industry and the social activity of both sexes. 
 
 The middle-class women of Europe have still 
 so little share in the control of production that 
 one cannot determine whether or not they have 
 even awakened to the tmderstanding that the 
 ftmdamental condition of a universal life-enhanc- 
 ing issue of the woman movement must be new 
 social conditions One cannot yet predicate 
 anything at all in regard to their desires to pro- 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 129 
 
 mote more humane labour conditions and a more 
 just distribution of profit. Under the system 
 now prevailing they must, like men, either conform 
 to it or be destroyed economically. It is even so 
 in public offices and similar fields of labour. Just 
 as so many young men do, at the beginning of 
 their career, a great number of women attempt 
 to aboHsh the abuses and mitigate the formalism. 
 But they meet such obstacles that, like the young 
 men, they are obliged to abandon the effort; or 
 they are compelled to give up the position whereby 
 they win their scanty bread. 
 
 In this way, principally, the work of women in 
 the sphere of charitable activity has given to men 
 the opportunity for a correct valuation of the social 
 working power of woman. Men have then in a 
 wider sphere than that of the family circle, so 
 often overlooked by them, learned to appreciate 
 feminine enthusiasm and capacity for organisa- 
 tion, energy and devotion, initiative and endur- 
 ance. Innumerable men — from the soldiers up, 
 who in the hospitals of the Crimea literally kissed 
 Florence Nightingale's shadow on the floor of the 
 hospital ward — have learned in the last half 
 century that life has become more kindly for them 
 since social motherHness has obtained for itself a 
 certain elbow-room. The more women lose their 
 present fear of appearing, in cooperation with 
 men, "womatUy" impulsive, savage in face of in- 
 justice and cruelty, the more wiU they signify in 
 that joint work where, at least to-day, they stiU 
 
130 The Woman Movement 
 
 have a more forttinate hand — the hand of the 
 mother. 
 
 And since a single fact is more convincing than 
 a thousand words, so the facts gained in the social 
 activity of woman have won, in later years, 
 many men supporters of woman suffrage. The 
 arguments derived from abstract right — ^however 
 obvious they may be for every tax-paying, law- 
 abiding woman — go to the rear to make way for 
 the argument of "social utility." 
 
 Not only women themselves but men also refer 
 now to what women have accomplished when they 
 are allowed to work in the service of society; 
 they point to the reforms which were retarded or 
 bungled because women had no immediate influ- 
 ence there where appropriations were granted and 
 laws were enacted. 
 
 Especially significant for the reconciliation of 
 the sexes is the joint social work of young people. 
 The temperance cause or the education of the 
 masses or socialism now brings together a host of 
 young men and girls, who learn thereby that the 
 social as well as the private life of labour gains in 
 strength and wealth if men and women participate 
 in it together. 
 
 The men who fear political life for woman are, 
 however, right. Just as this life has injtired the 
 best qualities in the manhood of many men, so 
 will it impair the womanhood of many women. 
 Neither the spiritual personality of woman nor 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 131 
 
 of man, nor even their secondary physical sex 
 characteristics can withstand the influences of 
 their private miUe%, of their private labour con- 
 ditions. Why should women better resist the 
 influences of the public life? When the man is 
 compelled, in political work for the state, to neglect 
 in the highest degree the foundation of the state 
 — the home — how should women be able to do 
 otherwise than the same thing? The political 
 work of both can benefit the home in general but 
 their own home must always suffer for it, for a time 
 at least. Women will learn, as so many men have 
 already learned, that the fresh enthusiasm, the 
 unexhausted optimism with which they entered 
 the political life soon vanish before party pres- 
 sure, general prejudice, opportunism, and the de- 
 mands of compromise. And just as now so many 
 men for these reasons withdraw from Parliament, 
 many women wUl do likewise when they learn 
 that what they can accomplish there with the 
 characteristics peculiar to them, is so insignificant 
 that it does not compensate for the injury which 
 ensues because these characteristics are missing 
 in the home. 
 
 If the eligibility of woman is really to benefit 
 society, then the right of resignation must be im- 
 conditioned for mothers, and they themselves must 
 understand that the parliamentary mandate is in- 
 compatible with motherhood so long as the chil- 
 dren are still in the home; in like manner during 
 the same period, the franchise of the mother of a 
 
132 The Woman Movement 
 
 family must not result in rushing into electioneer- 
 ing. The ballot in and of itself does not injure 
 the fineness of a woman's hand any more than a 
 cooldng receipt. 
 
 Because woman's motherhood must be pre- 
 served, if she is to bring to the social organism 
 a really new factor, so she must always continue 
 to be found and to work in private life, in 
 order to be, meanwhile, useful in public life. 
 The genius of social reform which women will 
 develop can complement that of man only if this 
 genius is of a new order; if it originates thoughts 
 which bring new points of view to the social 
 problems, wUls which seek new means, souls which 
 aspire to new ends. Women could, if they re- 
 ceived their full civic right before they lost their 
 intuitive and instinctive power through mascu- 
 linisation, effect the progress of culture as, for 
 example, the entrance of the Germans influenced 
 the antique world. 
 
 The sooner woman receives her political fran- 
 chise, the more, on the whole, can be expected 
 from it. The generation which has now fought 
 the fight for suffrage is wholly conscious of the 
 reforms that await woman for their final realisa- 
 tion. And this generation of women would in- 
 troduce into the political Hfe a new, fresh current. 
 In any event, we can hope to secure from women 
 new impulses and better organisation in political 
 life, as has already been the case in social life. 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 133 
 
 But every new generation of parliamentary women, 
 who together with the men have been "politically 
 trained," would have — as long as the present 
 economic conditions obtain — continually greater 
 economic interests to advocate "parliamentarily," 
 and would also for other reasons evince the same 
 parliamentary maladies as the men evince now. 
 And as little as evil men lose their evil character- 
 istics because of the franchise, quite as little will 
 bad women lose theirs. The entrance of women 
 into politics cannot therefore — as certain femin- 
 ists maintain — signify the victory of the noble 
 over the ignoble. But it signifies a great increase 
 in noble as well as ignoble powers hitherto inactive 
 in political life, which in the wider sphere that they 
 there maintain oppose one another, now conquer- 
 ing, now yielding. Men and women together, 
 however, will be able to enact more humane laws 
 than men alone can enact. Questions concerning 
 women and children can be treated with deeper 
 seriousness by men and women together than is 
 now the case. Men and women together will 
 consider the social life from more significant 
 points of view than can one sex alone. Govern- 
 ment consisting of men and women together will 
 be more profound than heretofore. No one who 
 has observed the effects of masculine and feminine 
 cooperation in fields already mentioned can doubt 
 this. Who can deny that with the civic right of 
 woman her feeHng of social responsibility will 
 increase and that her horizon will widen? And 
 
134 The Woman Movement 
 
 therewith her value as wife and mother of men will 
 also increase? But she wiU increase in value for 
 the men closely connected with her as weU as in 
 social respects. The woman of earlier times, for 
 aU of whom society might go to pieces if only her 
 home and family prospered, was only in a restric- 
 ted sense man's help. In certain great crises she 
 usually betrayed him simply because she wholly 
 lacked the social feeling. 
 
 Obviously, the female member of Parliament 
 cannot confine herself solely to questions which 
 concern the protection of the weaker and the edu- 
 cation of the new race. The more women con- 
 centrate upon the cause of justice against power, 
 and of public spirit against self-interest, the more 
 advantageous it will be for her herself and for the 
 public life. But concentration is, unfortunately, 
 exactly what modem parliamentarism does not 
 promote; what it does promote is disintegration. 
 
 Woman has, however, where she has entered 
 into parliamentary life as elector and eligible, 
 shown thus far exactly this tendency toward con- 
 centration. She has worked for moral, tem- 
 perance, and hygienic questions; for questions 
 concerning schools and education of the masses; 
 for mother and child protection; reform of marriage 
 laws, and kindred subjects. What thinking man 
 can maintain that all this does not belong to 
 "woman's sphere" or can say that these and 
 similar social interests have been sufficiently 
 attended to by an exclusively masculine govern- 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 135 
 
 ment? Already the opposite danger appears in 
 certain social spheres: an exclusively "feminine 
 government." 
 
 In the present forms of public life, however, 
 much feminine power will without doubt be 
 wasted. Only when man, upon a higher plane, has 
 created a new kind of representation "of the 
 people," where professional interests in every 
 sphere are represented, can the highest vocation of 
 woman — motherhood — come into its rights. 
 
 It belongs to the necessary course of historical 
 development that women also go through the 
 stage of party-power politics in order together 
 with man to reach the stage of social politics and 
 finally that of culture politics. 
 
 But women cannot wait untU this development 
 has been attained; they must accomplish it to- 
 gether with man. Just as the best masculine 
 powers sooner or later must be concentrated to 
 transform increasingly tmtenable parliamentary 
 conditions, so the best feminine powers wiU also 
 work in the same direction, especially if the will 
 becomes intense in mothers not only to awaken 
 in their children the social spirit, but also to create 
 for them better social conditions. 
 
 In later years, the movement for the suffrage 
 of woman has not only filled the world with suf- 
 frage societies but the agitation has even achieved 
 popular representation in eighteen European 
 countries, in the legislative assemblies of a 
 number of American States, in Australasia, in 
 
136 The Woman Movement 
 
 legislative assemblies in Canada and in the Philip- 
 pines. In Iceland as weU as in Italy, in Japan as 
 in South Africa, the movement is in progress, and 
 whoever thinks it will not attain its goal is politic- 
 ally blind. 
 
 When anti-feminist men prophesy that men will 
 love their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters less 
 when pitted against them as political opponents 
 or competitors, they prophesy certainly in many 
 cases the truth. Politics have already estranged 
 fathers from sons, brothers from brothers. But 
 this demonstrates only either that the personal 
 feelings were weaker than the political passions 
 or that these latter have destroyed the attributes 
 which made the personality lovable. But if men 
 are really able to love and women remain lovable, 
 even as political personalities, then a man wiU not 
 cease to love a woman, even if she votes for a 
 different congressional candidate! Such prophe^ 
 cies have not been verified in other spheres from 
 which men sought to intimidate women by similar 
 warnings. For woman retains her power over 
 man if she retains her womanly charm, created 
 out of peace, harmony, and kindness. Not that 
 of which a woman speaks, not that for which she 
 works, determines man's feeling and conduct; 
 but how she does it. A woman may charm a man 
 by aTpolitical speech, and drive him away by her 
 table talk. A poor working woman can, without 
 a word, induce the same man to give her his seat 
 in a street car who the next minute can be brutal 
 
Its Influence on Men and Women 137 
 
 to an assuming and incapable fellow workwoman. 
 In a word, what a woman makes of her rights and 
 what they make of her — that alone determines 
 the measure of veneration, sympathy, love, which 
 she may expect from a man. 
 
 That women have lost their equilibrium cannot 
 be denied. How could it be otherwise? Not 
 only have they in the last half century experi- 
 enced, together with man, Naturalism and the 
 New Romantic movement, Neo-Kantianism, the 
 Higher Criticism, Bismarck and Bebel, Darwin 
 and Spencer, Wagner and Nietzsche, Ibsen and 
 Tolstoi, Haeckel and von Hartmann, and still 
 many, many more, but they themselves in dizzy 
 haste have been hurled out of their position in so- 
 ciety, protected by the family, which they had occu- 
 pied for centuries. It is obvious that at the present 
 moment the spiritual mobility of women must be 
 greater than their harmony; that the raw culture 
 material which they possess must be richer than 
 that which they can utilise; their Hfe experiences 
 more significant than their art of life. The modem 
 woman must appear for the present less sym- 
 metrical, more tmcertain, than man's ideal woman 
 in earlier times. But enduring cultural progress 
 cannot be measured by comparison with the ideal 
 figures of the poetry or of the Hfe of earlier times. 
 It must be estimated according to the average 
 type in a certain period. And the average woman 
 of our time is, in the fullest significance of the word, 
 more full of vitality and adaptability, more indi- 
 
138 The Woman Movement 
 
 vidually developed, more beneficial socially, than 
 the average woman of fifty years ago. With the 
 freedom of movement the social feeling has in- 
 creased; with the participation in universal human 
 culture, the richness of content : the spiritual life 
 has become more complex, and the possibilities 
 of expression of this new soul-life, more numerous. 
 But since the average man, in the meantime, 
 has undergone no comparable development, he is 
 estranged, has lost his bearings, and consequently 
 repudiates a movement which, directly and in- 
 directly, makes such great demands for the de- 
 velopment of his own higher spiritual qualities. 
 Heretofore men could force women to endure un- 
 due interference, and so have deprived them of the 
 education wherein the possible consequences of 
 action are considered at the same time with the 
 thought of the action. But the woman movement 
 has now raised a partition between the sexes such 
 as is found in the aquarium where it becomes 
 necessary to teach the pike to allow the carp, also, 
 to live: every time the pike makes a dash at the 
 carp he strikes his head against the obstruction, 
 until the motive of repression becomes so strong 
 that the glass wall can be taken away and both 
 carp and pike live together in peace. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON 
 MARRIAGE 
 
 Certain feminists beKeve that the woman move- 
 ment has accomplished such meagre results in 
 regard to the reorganisation of family right for 
 the sole reason that men, who once created the 
 right for their own advantage, still cling to the 
 injustice out of egoism. These feminists forget 
 that the family is the social form of life in which 
 tradition has the greatest power. It speaks here 
 with the voice of the blood; it works through our 
 deepest instincts, our strongest needs of life, our 
 innermost feelings, as these have developed 
 through many thousands of years under the in- 
 fluences which were exercised in and through the 
 family. To accomplish in this sphere not only 
 reforms upon paper but also vigorous modifica- 
 tions — that is, new laws and customs which are 
 rooted in new spiritual conditions of the people 
 as a whole — is more necessary than that man grant 
 women a share in legislation. Innumerable indi- 
 vidual human vicissitudes must be experienced and 
 repeated in new forms, entering finally into the 
 
 139 
 
140 The Woman Movement 
 
 universal consciousness, before such spiritual soil 
 can be formed. The man became and remained 
 the head of the family because all experiences and 
 social factors once made this arrangement most 
 advantageous for father, mother, and children. 
 Woman will be able to realise her new ideas in re- 
 gard to love-life and mother-right to the degree 
 in which she demonstrates, not only in speech 
 and writing but also in vigorous daily living, that 
 these ideals surpass in vital effect those which 
 now obtain. 
 
 In the last half century, among the Germanic 
 peoples, however, the family life has already under- 
 gone essential transformations, while the Romantic 
 world still continues to exhibit features which in 
 the first half of the 19th century were typical even 
 among these peoples. Marriages are arranged by 
 the father, divorce is considered either a sin or a 
 shame, the paternal power is still absolute, the 
 homogeneous relationship among all the members 
 of the family — in joy and sorrow — is inviolable. 
 The feeling of the son for the mother, bordering 
 almost upon Madonna worship, and the passion 
 of the father for their little children, must, how- 
 ever, always have been more characteristic of the 
 Romance peoples than of the Germans. 
 
 Among the latter the attainment of individual- 
 ism, first in the sphere of legislation, still more in 
 that of customs, most of all in that of mode of 
 thought and feeling, has altered the position of 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 141 
 
 the individual in the family. While the family 
 exhibited fifty years ago a tightly closed unity, 
 in which women had only slight significance, now 
 the wife as well as the husband, mother as well as 
 father, daughter as well as son, assert their per- 
 sonality, not only in the family, but often even 
 against the family. Wives draw the arguments 
 for their self assertion most frequently from the 
 principles of the woman movement. 
 
 Truly, in the course of the century, many mar- 
 ried women have succeeded in finding expression 
 for their significant universal human or feminine 
 attributes in marriage, and thus have ennobled it. 
 But the self-conscious effort to elevate the posi- 
 tion of the wife began simultaneously with the 
 demand that no human right could be denied to a 
 woman upon the ground of her sex, whether within 
 or without marriage. 
 
 Individualism has already made personal love, 
 instead of family interest, decisive for the consum- 
 mation of a marriage. In the name of her per- 
 sonality as of her work, woman desires with ever 
 greater right full majority and legal equality with 
 man in marriage. Against individualism, the 
 doctrine of evolution now advocates certain 
 limitations of the personal erotic freedom to con- 
 summate marriage, but advocates at the same time, 
 contrary to the Christian sexual ethics, new free- 
 dom for the sake of the higher development of the 
 race. Here comes into effect, the new conception 
 of life by which the possibilities of development 
 
142 The Woman Movement 
 
 and of happiness in the earthly life have acquired 
 a new value and force. 
 
 The tiltimate heights of the modem conception 
 of sex-Hfe are indicated by erotic idealism, which 
 since "La Nouvelle H61oise" has by poets and 
 dreamers been continually elevated, whUe world- 
 renowned lovers showed the possibility of this 
 wonderful love. In addition to all these influences 
 of the spirit of the time upon the transformation 
 of marriage, come the indirect effects of the woman 
 movement. Thaiiks to the vibrations in which 
 this movement has set the "spirit of the time," 
 many an ordinary man now accords to his wife 
 that power and authority in the fanuly which the 
 law still denies her; yes, many commonplace 
 people of both sexes now desire from their marriage 
 things of which their equals fifty years ago did not 
 even dream. If one adds also the decisive in- 
 fluences which the political-economic conditions 
 of the present exercise upon the family life, one 
 has found some of the threads which form the woof 
 of the unalterable warp, a woof which makes the 
 marriage of the present a variegated and unquiet 
 fabric, whose pattern exhibits primeval oriental 
 motives beside those in newest "modem style." 
 
 Here it is of the greatest importance to indicate 
 the zigzag line which denotes the alternate repul- 
 sion and attraction that under the influence of 
 the woman movement marriagehas had forwoman. 
 
 First came the little crowd of "masculine wo- 
 men" with their hatred of marriage and man. 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 143 
 
 Then the great working army that forgot, over 
 the human rights of woman, that to these also 
 must belong the right to fulfil her duty as a being 
 of sex, and not alone the right to be "independent 
 of marriage" through her work. Then came the 
 reaction against this incompleteness. At this 
 time, the nature of woman was called an "empty 
 capsule," which received its content only from man : 
 a "cry of the blood," which finds its answer in the 
 child. There was no other "woman question" 
 than the possibility of living erotically a complete 
 life. One woman wished this in love without 
 marriage, another in love without children, a third 
 in children without marriage, a fourth in children 
 without love — "A work and a child" was the life 
 cry — a fifth woman wished the man only for the 
 sake of the child, a sixth the child only for the sake 
 of the man, and the seventh wished both only for 
 her own sake ! 
 
 The conviction of some women that the common 
 erotic life of man and woman must have also a 
 spiritual life-value for two human souls, filling 
 out and developing each other, was called "Ibsen- 
 ism." And after the ideal demands which Ibsen 
 pressed upon the consciousness of the time, many 
 men — and not a few women — found relaxation 
 after their spiritual over-exertion, if they desired 
 nothing more from one another than "the sound 
 happiness of the senses. ' ' Woman's ' ' personality, ' ' 
 "equality," and "human right" were old play- 
 things, relegated to the rubbish heap. 
 
144 The Woman Movement 
 
 The reaction against this reaction is now in 
 progress. Just now — and equally one-sided as 
 will be shown later — ^woman's universal humanity 
 is emphasised at the expense of the instinct life; 
 her social labour-duty, at the expense of the 
 domestic life; her personality, at the expense of 
 the family. 
 
 Among all these zigzag movements, more deeply 
 thoughtful women continually sought to recall 
 that neither the universal human nor the sexual 
 being of woman must be over-developed at the 
 expense of the other quahties of her being; that 
 perfect humanity signifies for neither sex that the 
 spiritual life has suppressed the sex-life or sex, 
 the soul-life, but that both find in a third higher 
 condition their full redemption and harmony. 
 Through great love, exceptional natures already 
 create this condition; but what to-day only ex- 
 ceptional natures attain, culture can gradually 
 make attainable for many. 
 
 This great love demands fidelity. But often 
 only one — ordinarily the woman — experiences this 
 great feeling. And then not even the deepest 
 devotion on her part suffices to preserve the com- 
 munity of Hfe. To preserve the form for the pur- 
 pose of guarding the inner emptiness, as was done 
 earlier, is repugnant to the erotic consciousness 
 of the modem woman. This is the deepest reason 
 why the modem woman — even also the modem 
 developed man — becomes continually more un- 
 decided about contracting marriage. They both 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 145 
 
 know that the passion which attracts two beings 
 is not synonymous with a sympathy which arises 
 through the harmony of their natures, which must 
 not be so complete that nothing remains of the 
 vmexpected and mysterious that is so essential 
 an element of love. The modem woman asks 
 herself, "What can prove to me that an erotic 
 sympathy is profoimd, real, decreed by nature, 
 life-long?" And she asks with good reason. If 
 two lovers who know that they make each other 
 happy with aU the senses, constrained themselves, 
 each in a comer of a room fettered to a stool, 
 blindfolded, to entertain each other three hours 
 daily for three months, this test would probably 
 prevent a great number of marriages void of 
 sympathy. But it would furnish no guaranty 
 that those who consummated the marriage after 
 such a concentrated soul interchange, would hold 
 out. For souls which in a certain stage of develop- 
 ment seem inexhaustible can be so transformed 
 that they experience only satiety for each other. 
 The young wife of to-day is deeply conscious of 
 what a new problem for each newly married woman 
 marriage is. She knows how impossible it is to 
 foresee what difficulties will be encotmtered and 
 whether good intentions and tactful adaptation 
 wUl succeed in overcoming these difficulties. She 
 knows that, even if the written law made her 
 wholly equal to man, even if she made herself 
 that equal by entering only into a marriage of 
 the higher, newer conscience, yet all the inner, 
 
146 The Woman Movement 
 
 most difficult, deepest problems still remain. 
 This certainly induces many women to become 
 only the beloved, the mistress, of the man who 
 wishes no comm\mity of life, but only happy 
 hours. Many more women still strike the possi- 
 bilities of erotic happiness out of their plan of 
 life, because they have not experienced the ideal 
 love of which they dreamed, or else could not 
 realise it. ' 
 
 ' 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 life- 
 works 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. AH this belongs for her to the 
 "Fine Arts" and as such is an end sufficient m itself, while for 
 European women these arts, as a rtile, are stiU 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 stiU 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 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 147 
 
 Sometimes their doubt, in regard to the duration 
 of love and the unity of souls, decides them, an- 
 other time the longing for a personal hfe-work is 
 the reason for their determination — a life-work 
 for which these women have suffered so keenly, 
 been deprived of so much, and have so struggled, 
 that it has become passionately dear to them, and 
 they feel that a complete renimciation of the erotic 
 Hfe is easier than the torment of being "drawn and 
 quartered," as the death penalty of the Middle 
 Ages was called — a quartering between profession, 
 husband, home, and children. And the result 
 
 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 oflfered 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 signi- 
 ficance, less individually developed, than the older women, es- 
 pecially women's rights women, who often have not studied but 
 have grown grey in marriage and motherhood, in self-develop- 
 ment 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 excel- 
 lent scholarship and great working proficiency, less a woman and 
 less a human being, less a personality. 
 
 These wholly fresh observations, which were communicated 
 to me during the printing of my book, seem to me to confirm 
 so strongly my point of view that I wish to repeat them here. 
 
 But in France and elsewhere mothers tell us how clear, intel- 
 ligent, and universally interested their daughters are, and at the 
 same time how critical, how free from ardour and enthusiasm. 
 It is not the hasty love-marriage that many mothers now fear for 
 their daughters, but a worldly-wise marriage without love. 
 
148 The Woman Movement 
 
 usually demonstrates that celibacy is wiser than 
 the compromise. It is most frequently the case, 
 — ^in Europe at least, — ^if the work of the un- 
 married woman had no personal character, and if 
 the home is not dependent upon the earnings of 
 the wife, that she gives up her professional work 
 after her marriage. 
 
 Against this sacrifice, however, the higher erotic 
 idealism has begun to rebel and has, thereby, come 
 into conflict with the conservative direction of 
 feminism, which while planning to make the wife 
 equal to the husband, adheres firmly to the present 
 marriage as protection for wife and children. 
 
 It is this point of view that is condemned by the 
 new idealism. For it "protection" signifies, in its 
 innermost meaning, that the man buys love and 
 the woman sells it, which is considered "moral," 
 while it is considered immoral for a man to sell 
 love and for a woman to buy it. The "protec- 
 tion" in this relationship has as result that 
 the "virtue" of the maid is synonymous with 
 untouched sexual nature, and that of the wife, 
 with physical fidelity; while the "virtue" of the 
 youth and the man is judged from an entirely 
 different point of view. 
 
 The relationship affording "protection" has 
 also brought with it the idea that a woman could 
 not show her love as openly as a man, except when 
 he was proud and poor and she was rich. Only 
 when the duty of support on the part of the man 
 ceases, will woman be able to demand the same 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 149 
 
 chastity and fidelity from him as he demands 
 from her; she will then be able, quite as proudly 
 and naturally as he, to show the flowering of her 
 being — her love — instead of as now increasing 
 her demand in the marriage market by artful 
 dissimtilation. As long as maintenance, within 
 or outside of marriage, is the price for "possession" 
 of the woman, the man will consider the woman 
 as "his," and the more submissive she is the more 
 fully she satisfies his feeling of ownership. Now 
 marriage has become only an affair of custom, a^ 
 conamon death or comatose condition, because^ 
 neither party needs trouble himself to keep the 
 love of the other. Only when woman, through her 
 work, can lead an existence worthy of a human 
 being, when no woman will sell her love but every 
 woman can freely give it, will man experience 
 what perfect womanly devotion is. And when no 
 man can "possess" love but miist remain worthy 
 of love in order to be loved then only will women, 
 on their side, experience what tenderness and fine 
 feeling masculine devotion can attain. 
 
 This, the purest and warmest erotic idealism, 
 is the morality of the future. But the way to its 
 realisation is not, as many women believe to-day, 
 that mothers, even, should continue their work of 
 earning a livelihood, but that way whose direction 
 I have elsewhere pointed out. ' 
 
 ' See Love and Ethics, Ralph Fletcher Sejmiour, Chicago, and 
 also Mutter und Kind, published in Germany only, Pan-Verlag. 
 My plan is a paternity assessment upon society as a contribution 
 
I50 The Woman Movement 
 
 Here we have to do, however, only with the 
 spiritual conditions which arise in the marriage of 
 to-day, whether the wife has retained her work 
 or has given it up. 
 
 Even the cultivated modem man, who brings 
 
 to the maintenance of children and a compensation of mother- 
 hood by the state. 
 
 Society has akeady shown by a series of institutions, mater- 
 nity assurance, infants' milk distribution, clothing and feeding 
 of children, and many kindred social efforts, that the mainten- 
 ance afforded by the father is not sufficient for the young genera- 
 tion; quite as little is the mother's care, which is supplemented 
 by other means, crkies, etc. But when the child finally becomes 
 the unconscious "head of the family," then it will be the affair of 
 society to requite maternity. Marriage will then signify only 
 the living together of two people upon the ground of love and 
 the common parenthood of children. Maternal right will in law 
 take the place of paternal right, but in reality the father will con- 
 tinue to, retain all the influence upon the children which he per- 
 sonally is able to exert, just as has been hitherto the case with 
 the mother. 
 
 In such circumstances there will be no more illegitimate child- 
 ren; no mothers driven out from the care of tender children to 
 earn their daily bread; no fathers who avoid their economic duties 
 toward their children, and who cannot be compelled by society 
 to perform at least that paternal duty which animals perform 
 now better than men: that of contributing their part to the main- 
 tenance of their progeny. There will be no mothers who for 
 the sake of their own and their children's maintenance need to 
 stay with a brutal man; no mothers who, in case of a separation, 
 can be deprived of their children on any ground except that of 
 their own unworthiness. In a word, society must — upon a higher 
 plane — restore the arrangement which is already found in the 
 lower stages of civilisation, the arrangement which nature herself 
 created: that mother and child are most closely bound together, 
 that they together, above all, form the family, in which the 
 father enters through the mother's or his own free will. 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 151 
 
 to the human personality of his wife admiration 
 and sympathy, seeks in her always that "woman- 
 liness" to which Goethe has given the classic 
 expression : the finely reserved, quiet, strong, self- 
 contained woman, reposing harmoniously in the 
 fulness of her own nature, a maternally lovely 
 being, wholly "natural," a "beautiful soul," 
 observing, creative, but using these gifts only to 
 create a home. These creative offices the modem 
 man who loves desires to assure, when he wishes 
 to "maintain" his wife, and begs her to abandon 
 the outside commercial work in which he foresees 
 a danger to the beautiful Hfe together of which 
 both dream. The woman who along with her 
 new self-conscious individuality and her profound 
 culture has guarded the "old" devotion, under- 
 stands ordinarily this desire of the man. She 
 chooses, in spite of her idealism, as he wishes, in 
 cases where her work has not been very personal. 
 If she has worked in the same field as the man, 
 then she converts her gifts into comprehension of 
 him, into personal interest for all his interests; 
 and these marriages in which the wife has enjoyed 
 the same education as the man, but later has de- 
 voted herself entirely to the home, are, as a rule, 
 the happiest marriages of the present time. But 
 in the proportion in which her work was creative, 
 is the difficulty of the choice. In the case where 
 the productive power has the strength of genius, 
 the modem man will scarcely utter such a wish and 
 in those circumstances the modem woman wiU 
 
152 The Woman Movement 
 
 not graxit it And because the woman of genius 
 is generally a complete human being, with strong 
 erotic as well as universal human demands, she 
 chooses often compromise. She finds in love, 
 in motherhood, new revelations; and in the mys- 
 terious depths of her nature, the productive element 
 of the maternal function has an elevating influence 
 upon her gift of creative power. Thus the energy 
 temporarily diminished by motherhood is restored. 
 And her uneasy conscience, because she must en- 
 trust to others much of the care and education 
 of the children, is appeased by the consciousness 
 that she has often given to manMnd richer natures, 
 and so more significant children, than more devoted 
 mothers, and that her own nature, because of the 
 double creative activity, has attained a ripeness 
 and richness which make her personality more 
 significant for husband and children than if she 
 had given up her calling to please them. These 
 thoughts cannot, however, prevent the daily con- 
 flict between her feelings of love and the impos- 
 sibility, in times of strong spiritual production, 
 of giving expression to it. The very proximity 
 of the children consumes at such times too much 
 nervous energy. And since all creation requires 
 selfishness — ^in the sense of concentration upon 
 one's own needs in order to be able to work creat- 
 ively and to sink oneself in the work — while all 
 love's soHcitude requires active attention to the 
 needs of the loved ones, the conflict must remain 
 permanent and insoluble. 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 153 
 
 In this conviction, many women of genius choose 
 the lesser conflict: marriage without children. 
 Such a relationship occurs not infrequently in 
 our time in this way : a man of feeling through the 
 work of a woman is first moved by her being. 
 The man is in that case often the younger or the 
 less developed. At first, marriage brings both a 
 rich happiness. But later comes a time when the 
 power of the personality of the woman of genius 
 becomes too strong for the man; when he feels 
 himself exhausted by all the sensitiveness and 
 impatience which charge the air about a creative 
 personality with .electricity. He has now had 
 enough of the rich spiritual exchange and longs 
 for a woman who is only fresh richness, sunny 
 quiet, easy dodlity; the now vanished "ingenue" 
 would be the type of woman who most of all 
 could entrance him. 
 
 In another case, it is the wife who becomes 
 wearied, when the man can no longer keep pace 
 with her development nor afford her new inspira- 
 tion. The erotic life of the woman as weU as of 
 the man of genius exhibits two phases: in one 
 they are attracted by their opposite, in the other 
 by a congeniality of souls ; in one phase they have 
 sought sentiment, intimacy, nature; in the other, 
 soul, passion, culture. The order changes in 
 different cases, but the phenomenon repeats 
 itself. What both consciously or imconsdously 
 desire of love is not another individuaUty to love 
 but only a means of inspiration. 
 
154 The Woman Movement 
 
 Yet one thing may be emphasised: the richer 
 the nature of a woman is and^the greater her talents, 
 the more life-determining love will be for her; at 
 one time making her existence desolate, at another 
 time making it fruitful. For the woman of genius 
 is less able than the man to renounce her own fate. 
 This the man is capable of doing, in the midst of 
 passion, without his work suffering thereby in 
 vigour and strength; the woman on the contrary 
 ■ — ^even the genius — ^loses more easily her creative 
 impulse in happiness, her creative power in un- 
 happiness. 
 
 In this connection it may be recalled that many 
 of the most gifted, most highly developed woman 
 personalities of to-day have produced nothing, 
 but have been what a Frenchman has called "les 
 grandes inspiratrices." These have not, indeed, 
 like the "Ladies" of the Middle Ages, been wor- 
 shipped at a distance by knights and poets; but 
 they have had an influence similar to that of 
 Beatrice, through the power of commtinication 
 of their rich personality in a relationship which 
 had now the character of an "amitie amoureuse," 
 now that of a love imbued with sympathy, which 
 in some cases, infrequently however, led to mar- 
 riage. I need only mention the name Richard 
 Wagner for the forms of two such women to ap- 
 pear, one of whom, who was his wife, surpassed 
 in personal greatness aU independently creative 
 women of her time. But there have always been 
 less unusual women who had significance as pro- 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 155 
 
 pagandists of the ideas of a great man through 
 their specifically feminine gifts of convincing, of 
 diffusing ideas, of modifying views, etc. If the 
 future, because of the wife's zeal for production 
 on her own part, should lose this element of cul- 
 ture, it would be deplorable. 
 
 One of the favourite arguments of the woman 
 movement has been that two married people 
 working in the same profession had the best op- 
 portunities for understanding each other and 
 consequently also for being happy. And truly 
 they can best talk shop with each other. But 
 that is what the working man needs least of all 
 in his home; there he seeks rather relaxation from 
 his calling, or at least a quite disinterested, im- 
 mediate sympathy with its annoyances or joys. 
 When one of the married fellow workmen needs 
 exactly this sympathy, the other is perhaps busy 
 or too tired to-be capable of such lively interest 
 as the other expects. Or one has experienced 
 disappointments, the other joys, and then a real 
 sympathy is stiU more difficult. To these cross- 
 ings of mood is added also the unintentional, in- 
 voliuitary competition, which the similarity of 
 vocation brings with it. The wife gains patients, 
 the husband does not; his picture is praised, hers 
 is pulled to pieces; she comes home from the 
 theatre victorious, he after a defeat. During 
 work, the criticism of one often disturbs the other; 
 after the work, the criticism of the press disturbs 
 the harmony of both. Love wishes to fuse them 
 
156 The Woman Movement 
 
 into one being, the outer world compels them 
 always to feel themselves separate. In the begin- 
 ning they think: "Nothing can come between 
 us." But if both do not possess a rare tenderness 
 as well as rare fineness of soul, soon needles of ice 
 fly through the air between them. Only when the 
 wife, as is the case so often in France, puts her 
 ability into her husband's affairs does this common 
 interest prevent rivalry. 
 
 Whether the province of the husband and wife 
 is the same or not, difficulty always restilts from 
 the wife's commercial or professional work in that 
 she rarely finds a good substitute for the domestic 
 and maternal duties. And when the husband 
 sees the house badly managed and the children 
 ill-bred, he tries according to his strength to 
 render assistance or, as more frequently happens, 
 seeks his comfort outside the home. But even 
 if these stumbling-blocks may be cleared away by 
 other feminine hands, the fact still remains that 
 the wife because of her work must demand sacri- 
 fices on the part of the man such as his work has 
 reqtiired at all times from the wife. She is often 
 compelled to forego much of the society of her 
 husband, of his solicitude and tenderness because 
 he has no available time. Now each of the married 
 people has consideration for the leisure of the 
 other and for all other severe conditions of the 
 work. But beside these favourable results stands 
 also the detrimental fact that each suppresses his 
 claims upon the sympathy of the other, as well 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 157 
 
 as the wish to express his own, whenever this 
 receiving and giving would interfere with the 
 work. If this has become for one or for both a 
 real passion, then the passion blinds him to every- 
 thing that does not concern the work, and causes 
 alternately joy or suffering. Each of the married 
 couple then disturbs the other by moods, and 
 each needs to be cherished by the other. The 
 tenderness which neither can give to the other, 
 they find perhaps in a third. 
 
 But in those cases where the work is not passion- 
 ately absorbing or where both husband and wife 
 are persons of tmderstanding, rather than of feeling, 
 marriages of colleagues turn out well. Each has 
 in the other an intelligent, appreciative friend; 
 the common work together is rich, and neither 
 gives nor requires more than the other is able to 
 reciprocate. The education of the wife makes her 
 a good organiser in the home, which is comfort- 
 able without the work's suffering thereby. When 
 this is not too strenuous for either, but after the 
 close of a reasonable working time, the two meet 
 spiritually free in the home, the duties of which 
 they often share — then the domestic life is happy 
 and the work progresses easily, as long as there 
 are no children. When children arrive, then there 
 begins for the wife, even in such marriages, a life 
 beyond her strength. 
 
 But since nature, in the interest of the race, 
 often makes opposites attractive to each other, 
 one may find a husband, full of feeling, who loves 
 
158 The Woman Movement 
 
 children, united to a wife for whom science is the 
 greatest value of life, while she relegates feeling 
 to a lower plane and considers motherhood an 
 animal function. In place of the tenderness and 
 of the children for which the husband longed, he 
 has to participate in the victories and defeats of 
 a woman of science. Or we see a wife who dreamed 
 of an intimate life with her husband and who 
 sacrificed her work to it; but the Hfe together 
 was wrecked upon the husband's artist concentra- 
 tion, and the wife had to suffer under a twofold 
 emptiness: the lack of her work and the lack of 
 happiness. Then one sees instances where the 
 wife retained her work because it was economically 
 necessary and because she hoped out of the rich- 
 ness of her young strength to be able to fulfil all 
 duties. And all this she was able to do except 
 one thing — to preserve under the excessive strain 
 her beauty, her power of charm, the elasticity of 
 her nature. Perhaps she belonged to the very 
 highest among the new women who are so undi- 
 vided, so proud, who think so highly of themselves, 
 of man, of love, that they are beyond a whoUy 
 justified coquetry and rest blindly upon the unit- 
 ing power of spiritual congeniality. But the day 
 comes perhaps when these strong and, in all other 
 respects, wise women have nothing other than 
 freedom to give to the man whose senses, whose 
 fancy, need that charm which the wife no longer 
 possesses. In case, however, the man's nature is 
 not of those for whom the silken threads of daily 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 159 
 
 domestic comfort form the strong band, but on 
 the contrary is of the sort which needs renewal, 
 then the very absence of the wife, occasioned tem- 
 porarily by the work, can keep the relationship 
 long fresh. This is upon the assumption that she 
 tinderstands what some of these women do not 
 tmderstand: to give, but in such a way that the 
 man always longs for more; to remain sweetheart, 
 not only friend; to be able to jest, not only to 
 talk seriously. The modem wife of to-day, 
 tested upon so many subjects, is often deeply 
 mistaken in regard to the kind of "ministry" the 
 man needs. The simple wisdom of their grand- 
 mothers consisted in this: to give much and to 
 require nothing, always to subordinate themselves 
 to the man with gentleness and humility, never 
 to assert themselves before him as a free, self- 
 determining personality. The wives of to-day, 
 sacredly convinced of the right and freedom of 
 women, succeed better in asserting their per- 
 sonality than in pleasing their husbands, and the 
 quantity of their demands is often more noteworthy 
 than the quality of their gifts. That many 
 modem marriages turn out well shows that the 
 adaptability of the modem husband is beginning 
 to be even as great as that of the wife in former 
 times! 
 
 The marriage is absolutely wrecked when the 
 wife brings to it aU the new demands of woman, 
 but the husband all the primeval instincts of his 
 sex. What in each sex relationship most inti- 
 
i6o The Woman Movement 
 
 mately unites or most deeply sunders is and re- 
 mains the erotic depth of nature in each. And the 
 difference in this respect between the men and 
 women of the present ever more widely separates 
 them, and this division becomes fatal to inntimer- 
 able individual lovers of to-day, as well as for the 
 attitude of the sexes toward marriage in general. 
 The erotically symmetrical woman views with 
 hostility the dualism in the erotic nature of the 
 modem man. This dualism evinces itself, with 
 innumerable nuances it is true, in three typical 
 ways: infinite erotic discussion, but inability to be 
 stirred by it either with the sotd or with the senses; 
 ability to love only with the senses, not with the 
 soul; and finally looking down upon the senses 
 and desiring "spiritual love" only. For the 
 modem completely developed woman the chat- 
 tering vacuity, the animal instinct, the ascetic 
 spirituality, are equally repellent. And yet it 
 happens that the rosy mist of love can bring such 
 a woman to a point where she creates for herself 
 an illusion out of one of the above mentioned types. 
 Most frequently this occurs in the case of the 
 vigorous man who divines nothing of the spiritual 
 content of the woman whose outer appearance 
 has charmed him. The tragedy of the modem 
 woman is then Hke that which Hebbel has revealed 
 in Judith, that the sex being in her is attracted 
 by the muscular masculinity, which her human 
 personality hates as her mortal enemy. For as a 
 personality she admires in man only the spiritual 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage i6i 
 
 strength of the man. The man on his part regrets 
 his mistake that he did not choose a pretty amiable 
 girl "of the old sort," who would punctually lay 
 his table and willingly share his bed; a woman 
 "into whose head Ibsen had put no fancies," who 
 "had not allowed herself to be talked into some 
 folly by feminism." 
 
 Among such "foUies," similar men, and many 
 others as well, include the demand advanced by 
 the woman movement for the married woman's 
 property right, as well as a specified income for 
 the wife working in the home, who however has 
 to contribute from her property or her "remuner- 
 ation" as housekeeper to the common household 
 ■ — a coroUary which is always forgotten by the 
 antifeminist writers who assert that "the man 
 becomes a slave when he has to work for the whole, 
 but the wife may retain everything of hers." 
 (Strindberg.) 
 
 The modem woman who before her marriage 
 was independent, owing to her work, abhors the 
 thought of a request for money — this most painful 
 moment even in the happiest marriages — to so 
 great a degree that this aversion determines the 
 wife in some cases to keep up her own work. If 
 on the contrary she has given this up, the con- 
 sciousness of her earlier independence makes her 
 often so sensitive that she feels herself injured by 
 a protest however delicate in regard to the ex- 
 penditure of money. More than one man has 
 
1 62 The Woman Movement 
 
 regretted, in consequence of the unreasonable 
 demands of his wife, that he ever begged her to 
 give up her own work. There are women, on the 
 other hand, who continue their work and thereby 
 only increase the incapability of a good-for- 
 nothing man. In such cases, it avails little that 
 in many countries the law now allows the wife 
 free disposal of the income from her labour. Not- 
 withstanding this, the assertion is ridiculous that 
 "if the man drinks up the money of his wife it 
 is with her consent," and "it is therefore of no 
 avail to alter the law." For it makes a significant 
 difference in the relative position of the man and 
 wife whether the law gives him the right to it, or 
 whether he takes it by force. But in this as in 
 other cases, the woman movement obviously 
 cannot free women so long as they are impelled 
 by unconscious forces from within to actions and 
 sacrifices at variance with their conscious person- 
 ality. The one thing which the woman movement 
 has already achieved and can continue to achieve, 
 is that the undue encroachment of the men ceases 
 to have legal protection. 
 
 It is undeniable, on the other hand, that the 
 unmarried woman's personal and economic inde- 
 pendence fashions wives who in marriage show 
 themselves in a high degree egotistic, but who yet 
 incessantly scold about man's egotism, wives who 
 themselves exhibit very little devotion and fine 
 feeling, but place very great importance upon 
 consideration. These wives were the ones whom 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 163 
 
 fifty years ago men called "graters." But the 
 lack of amiability, which in certain women was 
 usually due to childbirth, has nevertheless in 
 modem woman, at least during the freedom of her 
 girlhood, been unrestrained habit. Her firm 
 — and just — decision not to be "subservient" to 
 her husband has resulted in, first, an armed peace, 
 later, a war, in which the wife's work is one of the 
 projectiles. "I have my work, why should I stay 
 here to be used up and tormented?" she asks 
 herself. And when such questions begin, there 
 is usually but one answer. 
 
 There is one decided advantage in giving to the 
 woman the opportunity to earn her living : she has 
 again acquired thereby significance in the home, 
 while the generation of women, who neither co- 
 operated productively in the home nor assumed all 
 the duties of the mother, were regarded by man 
 with less respect than, on the one side, their 
 grandmothers who produced all of the household 
 reqtiisites, on the other side, their now independent 
 self-supporting granddaughters. Only when so- 
 ciety recompenses the vocation of mother, can woman 
 find in this a full eqtiivalent for self-supporting 
 labour. 
 
 Another typical group of our time is formed by 
 the numerous women for whom no choice remains 
 in regard to their work, since it is of a kind that 
 they must give up because of the removal to an- 
 other place, or more frequently because they 
 find so much work in the new home that every 
 
i64 The Woman Movement 
 
 thought of anything further outside must cease. 
 Those who think that industry has made the work 
 of the wife in the home to-day superfluous, speak 
 only of the great cities, and usually only of opulent 
 families in the great cities, where they are in a posi- 
 tion to buy cheaper everything that the labour of 
 the wife could produce. But in the country, 
 among all classes, the mother must be the director 
 of the work; and in all cotmtry homes in moderate 
 circumstances — as in countless poor or not very 
 well-to-do city families — the work of the mother is 
 still frequently indispensable, and in addition is 
 more economical than her earnings out of the 
 house could be, especially since the developed 
 modem woman is usually capable of a more 
 rational housekeeping than the woman of earlier 
 times. 
 
 But while the mothers of that time knew nothing 
 except housework, those of to-day have often, as 
 iinmarried and self-supporting women, enjoyed a 
 freedom of movement and opportunities of de- 
 velopment which, now that they are over-burdened 
 with household cares, they may seriously miss. 
 The work of the mother is now still further in- 
 creased by the difficulty of getting servants — 
 at least capable ones — and also by the demands of 
 luxury. The result of this again is that hospitality 
 in the home decreases, that the watchword of the 
 time, "the windows of the house wide open to 
 the world, fresh air in the home, no creeping into 
 the chimney comer," is so interpreted that warmth 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 165 
 
 and intimacy vanish. Yes, the overworked 
 mother often herself insists that the family leave 
 the house and seek some place of recreation for 
 the annual festivals, which were once the children's 
 happiest and brightest recollections of home. 
 
 The fact that most modem women of culture 
 devote themselves to some branch of social work, 
 often to several, contributes still further to the 
 over-exertion of the mother. Even when this 
 occurs from pure altruism, the motive cannot 
 prevent such altruism from becoming sometimes 
 a disease of which one may die quite as surely 
 as of other diseases. This death is quite as 
 immoral as any other resulting from neglected 
 hygiene. No one has the right to perish from 
 altruism, except when destruction is the condition 
 of his fulfilling his duty. But in many cases 
 the:occasion is the widely ramified social activity 
 of the woman for whom the home now often faUs 
 short; not a result of altruism, but a mani- 
 festation of that desire for power which once 
 was satisfied in the family. Or it may be a 
 form of the hysteria characteristic of the present 
 time. In the sixteenth century, the hysterical 
 were burned as witches; now they "sacrifice" 
 themselves to an activity which offers them in 
 reality the variety, the intoxication of publicity 
 — in a word, the life stimulus they need. But 
 even sound, sincere, and conscientious women are 
 driven by the woman movement and by social 
 work to assume pseudo duties, for which the real 
 
i66 The Woman Movement 
 
 duties are pushed aside. If instead of instituting 
 official inquiries among wives and mothers as to 
 what they can accomplish, one should direct the 
 same questions to their husbands and children, 
 these would, if they dared be honest, testify that 
 they must pay the price for the altruistic activity. 
 
 Since the work of married women outside the 
 home, the woman movement, and the social work 
 began, one seldom finds a whoUy sound, joyous, 
 harmonious wife and mother. The constant 
 complaint of the modem woman is that she 
 "never has time." The minority who Hve a 
 life of luxury, wholly free from work, while the 
 husband works feverishly to provide the luxury 
 which neither will forego, telephone away a quarter 
 of the day making appointments concerning the 
 toilette, visits, and amusements, which take up 
 the remaining three quarters of the day. And 
 others, loaded down with household work or 
 divided between this and work for their livelihood, 
 how shall they find time! 
 
 Least of all have they the time necessary for 
 the coimtless little tokens of tenderness which 
 intensify all relationships between people. A 
 French mother who became a widow and brought 
 up her children by means of her own work received 
 from her son, grown to a youth, the judgment: 
 "Thou hast never loved us." Too late, it became 
 clear to her that "it requires time to love," that 
 it is not enough to feel love, and, looked at as a 
 whole, to act with love — no, love must be ex- 
 
Its Influence upon Marriage 167 
 
 pressed. And for this the harassed mother of 
 to-day lacks time and quiet. 
 
 Formerly, it was only the husband and father 
 who had no time; the wife and mother had it and 
 could thus preserve the warmth of the home. 
 But now? 
 
 There are now, it is true, many women with so 
 few claims that they think they have fulfilled 
 the fourfold task. In reality, they have fulfilled 
 all their duties imperfectly, or eliminated one task 
 for a time in order to be able to accomplish the 
 others. No woman has ever been at the same time 
 all that a wife can be to her husband, a mother to 
 her children, a housewife to her house, a working 
 woman to her work. In the last capacity the~ 
 difi&culty of the married woman is still further 
 increased by the present competition, as also by 
 the fact that the better a person works the more 
 work falls to her, so that an exact and reasonable 
 division of time between work and home is often 
 rendered quite impossible. 
 
 In addition to all these difficulties arising 
 through actualities, there are finally also those 
 evoked by the "spirit of the time." A wife has, 
 for example, decided to give up a vocation which 
 she saw was not compatible with her home. But 
 she stills finds no rest. She is harassed by the 
 demand of the "spirit of the time" that a married 
 woman should be able to take care of the house 
 as well as to accomplish outside personal work. 
 The husband, also influenced by the "spirit of 
 
1 68 J The Woman Movement 
 
 the time," thinks the same or feels painfiilly the 
 fact that his wife, for love of him, has sacrificed 
 the exercise of a talent, in which he perhaps has 
 felt a personal interest; the longing for the voca- 
 tion awakens in her, and she resumes her work, 
 with the result that, if she has energetically resisted 
 the lassitude that comes with beginning mother- 
 hood, she and the child must suffer later. Or 
 she lives in a permanent state of over-exertion 
 which finally culminates in nervous conditions 
 under which the whole family must share her 
 suffering. Had she been able to follow in peace 
 her instinct to strike deep root in the home soil 
 and to enlarge and enrich her being by the annual 
 growth of ring after ring of her production of love, 
 then the essential values would have been in- 
 creased for all. Now, she is led astray by a biased 
 opinion of the time, which owes its effectiveness 
 to the single fact that the opinionated resolutely 
 turn their back upon all facts. 
 
 Thanks to these ideas of the time propagated 
 by certain feminists, we see increasing numbers 
 of women who perform their "social duty" as the 
 telegraph poles perform their function; while 
 such duty could have been fulfilled as the tree 
 grows in a garden: blooming, fruit-bearing, joyful, 
 joy-bringing. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON 
 MOTHERHOOD 
 
 Because it has increased the culture of woman 
 and her feeling of personal responsibility, the 
 woman movement has had its influence, both 
 directly and indirectly, upon the postponement 
 of the legal and customary marriage age. Since 
 young girls have exercised their brains as much 
 as the boys have, they are no longer so far in 
 advance of the boys in physical development. 
 But when modem girls finish their studies they 
 are physically as weU as psychically more univer- 
 sally developed than their grandmothers were. 
 They know much more of the difficulties and 
 realities of life, not least of the sexual life. And 
 this knowledge has instilled in them a reluctance 
 to undertake too early the serious and difficult 
 task of motherhood. They have greater need of 
 truth and culture, and less tendency to erotic 
 visionary dreaming than girls of their age in the 
 middle of the previous century; their desire for 
 work and their social feeling fix goals, and they 
 
 work with all their might to attain them. And 
 
 169 
 
170 The Woman Movement 
 
 because, as already explained, both sexes have for 
 each other a more many-sided attraction than the 
 merely erotic, young people are more careful, more 
 choice, in their erotic decisions. The finest yoimg 
 girls of to-day are penetrated by the Nietzschean 
 idea, that marriage is the combined wiH of two 
 people to create a new being greater than them- 
 selves. But their joy does not consist in the fact 
 "that the man wills"; they are themselves "will," 
 and above all they have the will to choose the right 
 father for their children, not only for their own 
 sake but for the sake of the children. 
 
 If it be true that immediate, "bKnd, " erotic 
 attraction is most instinctively correct in choice, 
 then the present comrade life of young people and 
 the increased clear-sightedness which it gives, as 
 well as the increasing erotic idealism of young 
 girls, are not unconditionally advantageous to the 
 new race. The question is, however, still tmdecided. 
 Here it may only be emphasised that the yotmg 
 girl of to-day, in spite of all intellectual develop- 
 ment, is still won always by powerful spiritual- 
 sensual love, which the woman movement has too 
 long considered as a negligible quantity. Under 
 the influence of the doctrine of evolution, young 
 girls begin to understand that their value as mem- 
 bers of society depends essentially upon their value 
 for the propagation of mankind ; all the more they 
 realise the duty of physical culture which -will 
 enable them to fulfil this function better; they no 
 longer consider their erotic longing as impure and 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 171 
 
 ugly but as pure and beautiful. It is out of this 
 soul condition that the different movements for 
 the protection of mothers and children, theo- 
 retically considered, have proceeded. These are 
 at present the most important "woman move- 
 ments," although imrecognised by the older woman 
 movement. And this older movement has not yet 
 recognised the fact that, because of present mar- 
 riage conditions, the degenerate, uneducated, de- 
 crepit, have greater opportunity for propagating 
 the race, both within and outside of marriage, than 
 the young, sound, pure-minded, and loving; that 
 it can therefore be no sin, from the point of view of 
 the race, if the latter become parents without 
 marriage, nor should it be a subject of shame from 
 the social point of view. All women's rights have 
 little value, imtil this one thing is attained: that 
 a woman who through her illegitimate motherhood 
 has lost nothing of her personal worth, but on the 
 contrary has proved it, does not forfeit social 
 esteem. 
 
 Our time can point to women who have been 
 typical of the reform tendencies of the century 
 in this respect. Some of these women, if they 
 reaUy accomplished the unprecedented task of "a 
 child and a work," have drawn their strength 
 for the task out of precisely the commonplace, 
 homely qualities and sterling virtues, contrary 
 to which they believed they were acting when 
 they became mothers, driven by a power greater 
 than their conscious personality. Others again 
 
172 The Woman Movement 
 
 became mothers with the consent of their whole 
 personality. They were clear that they thus 
 made use of the masculine rights and freedom 
 which feminism first brought home to women. 
 And although many advocates of women's rights 
 refrain from such consequences of their ideas, the 
 women who in other respects determine their 
 conduct of life by their own free personal choice 
 recognise that this, their real "emancipation," is 
 a fruit of the woman movement. 
 
 In Europe, however, most women under thirty 
 still dare to dream of motherhood in a love mar- 
 riage as the greatest happiness and the highest 
 dutjr of life. ' 
 
 iBut, as direct and indirect result of the woman 
 movement, the fact none the less remains that 
 there is found among women an increasing dis- 
 
 ' An inquiry instituted among English women as to whether 
 they would prefer to be men or women gave as a result the fact 
 that, out of about 7000 who answered, two-thirds wished to 
 remain women and this above all in order to be mothers, while a 
 third wished to be men. This indicated probably the highest 
 figure of the disinclination for maternity which such a European 
 inquiry could elicit. But even these women who wish to marry 
 and to become mothers feel the pressure of the idea created by 
 the zealots of the woman movement which finds expression often 
 in the following conversation between two former schoolmates 
 about a third : "And A what is she doing now ? " — " Noth- 
 ing — she is married and has children. " 
 
 The old folk legend about the girl who trampled on the bread 
 she was carrjdng to her mother because she wished to go dry-shod, 
 can serve as symbol of many modem women zealots: life's great, 
 sound values are offered for the meal; vanity sits down alone to 
 partake of them. 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 173 
 
 inclination for maternity, a reluctance which de- 
 prives mankind of many superior mothers, while 
 at the same time woman's commercial work for 
 self-suppori; in all classes increases her sterility or 
 makes her incapable of the suckling so vitally 
 important for the children. 
 
 That the modem woman, because of individual 
 fate or her own choice, often remains immarried is 
 no danger in and for itself. This fact, as I have 
 emphasised above, is connected with a number of 
 cultural and material conditions, which sometime 
 will be altered, and then woman's desire for mar- 
 riage will again increase. The real danger has ap- 
 peared only since women have begun to strengthen 
 the tendency to celibacy by the amatemal theory, 
 which now confuses the feminine brain and leads 
 the feminine instinct astray. 
 
 The woman movement in and with this influence 
 upon maternity sinks to the lowest point of the 
 scale according to the criterion of worth employed 
 here: the elevation of the life of the individual and 
 of the race. In this we stand in our time before 
 a twofold mystery, which lies in the circumstance 
 that not only women — ^women "with breasts made 
 right to suckle babes" — emphasise this stultifying 
 influence, but that there are men, each the son 
 of a mother, who also propagate it. These men 
 have allowed themselves to be blinded by the false 
 logic concerning women, which declares that since 
 rich mothers do not wish to fulfil the duties of a 
 mother and the poor cannot fulfil them, superior 
 
174 The Woman Movement 
 
 social organisations must be created for that pur- 
 pose; in other words, instigated by a mere tem- 
 porary unpleasant discrepancy, we will create a 
 new, a different order of things. But, if this 
 obtained universally, it would inflict incomparably 
 greater injury upon mankind than do present 
 unhappy conditions. 
 
 Upon the whole, however, it is precisely as a 
 result of this tendency that the deepest hostility 
 of men against feminism has developed. The fact 
 that the idea of evolution is now beginning to enter 
 into the flesh and blood of man also contributes 
 its share to this feeling. Just as formerly a man 
 wished heirs for his personal and real estate and 
 for his name, he now desires inheritors of his 
 being; he desires an eternal life, which becomes a 
 certainty only by means of parenthood, whereby 
 the individual as father or mother lives on physi- 
 cally and spiritually, in body and soul, in his child- 
 ren and grandchildren down to the last of his 
 descendants. This conception has made the sex 
 instinct again holy, as it was for the pagans. This 
 new reverence for their duty as beings of sex now 
 induces many young men to guard their sexual 
 health and strength by an asceticism the motive of 
 which is the exact opposite of that which deter- 
 mined the asceticism called forth by Christianity, 
 the asceticism which was fear of the sex instinct 
 as impure and as a temptation to sin. Now the 
 innermost aim of yoimg men's creative desire is 
 the higher development of mankind. Love be- 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 175 
 
 comes for them the condition by which they can 
 most perfectly redeem their religious certainty of 
 being part of a great design, their religious longing 
 for harmony with life's creative desire, with the 
 infinite. 
 
 There are now men who work most zealously 
 for the ennoblement of the race — "eugenics," as 
 this eSort is called in England — as well as for the 
 protection of mother and child — "puericulture, " 
 as this endeavour is called in Prance. There are 
 men who write excellent works upon the psychol- 
 ogy of the child, and upon sexual instruction; men, 
 who, in art and poetry, give expression to the 
 new veneration for the sanctity of generation, for 
 motherhood, for the child. The finest thing writ- 
 ten about the child as a cultural power is written 
 by an American.' Painting has now new devo- 
 tional pictures of the Mother with her Child, 
 especially those conceived by a Frenchman and an 
 Italian.' The most beautiful representation of 
 youth's new desire for love is by a German sculp- 
 tor. Likewise a German; Nietzsche, has the 
 most profound conception of parenthood and 
 education as the means whereby humanity will 
 cross over the bridge of the men of to-day to the 
 superman. 
 
 Only when all this is realised can one conceive 
 what the feelings of these new men must be when 
 they meet those new women "who are no longer 
 
 ' Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp. 
 
 ' E. Carrifere and Segantini. 3 Max Kruse, Liebesgruppe. 
 
176 The Woman Movement 
 
 willing to be slaves of the instinct for the propaga- 
 tion of the race"; who see in motherhood "a loss 
 of time from their work"; "an attack upon their 
 beauty"; an obstacle to the refined conduct of 
 life; — a conduct of life certain to debase woman's 
 worth as a child-bearing being, but to elevate her 
 to that exquisite, perfect product of culture, a 
 "woman of the world"; an obstacle also for 
 woman as creator of other objective cultural 
 values. If a man with a father's desires finds 
 himself united with such a woman, he finds him- 
 self in marriage quite as much a prostitute as 
 innumerable wives have felt themselves to be 
 when they were mere tools of a man's desire. On 
 the contrary the desire for the elevation of man- 
 kind on the part of the new woman and the new 
 man, is evinced in the idea that not the quantity 
 but the quality of the children they give to human- 
 ity is most significant; that a land of fewer but 
 more perfect men is a higher culture ideal than the 
 principle still always maintained from the point of 
 view of national competition, that the inhabitants 
 of a coimtry must only be numerous however 
 inferior they may be. 
 
 To this wholly new evolutionary conception of 
 life the amatemal women oppose the following 
 train of thought which greatly influences the feel- 
 ing and desire of women to-day': 
 
 ■ This amatemal idea is advanced with great ability in some 
 works of Charlotte Perkins Stetson and Rosa Mayreder. The 
 word amatemal coined by me is used to characterise the theory 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 177 
 
 Culture now sets new duties for woman, more 
 significant than exclusively natural ones. The 
 more the individual hfe increases in value, the 
 more the interest for the mere functions of sex 
 declines, and with it also the value of woman as 
 woman for a society where, because of motherhood, 
 she has become a being of secondary rank. It 
 evinces lack of ideality if one censures this tend- 
 ency of the modem woman to renounce maternity 
 for the sake of more spiritual interests. While 
 the mother concentrates herself upon her own 
 child only, the woman who renounces motherhood 
 can extend her being to embrace children as 
 children in general. As a mother, woman is only 
 a being of nature. But the personality, with its 
 multiplicity of feelings and endeavours, demands 
 an independent activity as well as maternity. 
 
 To put her entire personality into the education 
 of her children is a twofold error. First and fore- 
 most, most mothers are bad educators and serve 
 their children better if they entrust them to a bom 
 teacher; in the second place, gifted childiren educate 
 
 subsequently advanced, because the word unmatemal (un- 
 motherly) signifies a spiritual condition, the antithesis to "mother- 
 liness." The maternal as opposed to the amaternal theory is 
 this: that a woman's life is lived most intensively and most 
 extensively, most individually and most socially; she is for her 
 own part most free, and for others most fruitful, most egoistic 
 and most altruistic, most receptive and most generous, in and 
 with the physical and psychic exercise of the function of maternity, 
 because of the conscious desire, by means of this function, to uplift 
 the life of the race as well as her own Ufe. 
 
178 The Woman Movement 
 
 themselves best and should be spared all educa- 
 tional arts. The mediocre child, who is more sus- 
 ceptible to education, has ordinarily also only 
 mediocre parents, who likewise benefit the children 
 most if they put them in the care of excellent 
 teachers. Children who are below mediocrity can 
 also be best educated by specialists. So there 
 remains for the mother, after the first years' care 
 and training, no especial task as educator, at least 
 none in which she can really put her personality. 
 To talk to a mother about the possibilities of a 
 richer office of mother, as educator of her children, 
 she calls lulling her into an illusion under which 
 she must labour only to suffer. A woman who can 
 exercise her personality in another way should 
 not therefore put it into the education of her 
 children. 
 
 The amatemal advocates deny that motherli- 
 ness is the criterion of womanliness; they find this 
 criterion in the form, the external being of woman, 
 in her manner and physical appearance — in a word, 
 in the outer expression of the inner disposition, 
 which they deny as typical of womanliness! 
 "Womanliness" is thus reduced to an "aesthetic 
 principle," while woman's spiritual attributes are 
 considered as "universally human"; and the right 
 is granted to the feminine sex to emancipate her- 
 self from the result of the hereby that motherliness 
 should be the ethical norm for the "being" or 
 "essence" of womanhood. The suitability of 
 woman's psychic constitution for her work as 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 179 
 
 mother is not acknowledged as proof that mother- 
 liness is the distinguishing characteristic of woman- 
 liness. For this constitution is less conspicuous 
 in the higher stages of differentiation. Its suita- 
 bility was then a phenomenon of adaptation and 
 changed with the conditions of life. Thus this 
 constitution cannot be cited as a reason for limit- 
 ing woman's personal exercise of her powers. 
 Motherliness is no social instinct. How can 
 motherHness, which we have in common with 
 beasts and savages, be considered as higher than, 
 for example, justice, truth, and other gradually 
 won spiritual values, which woman can promote 
 by her personal activity? The higher the forms 
 of life woman attains, the less will her personality 
 be determined by motherliness. Why then should 
 women bring to the domestic Hfe the sacrifice of 
 their personality, while no one demands this of 
 men? Why shall not woman, just as man, satisfy 
 her demands as a sex-being in marriage and, as for 
 the rest, follow her profession, attend to her 
 spiritual development, her social tasks? Why con- 
 demn woman to remain a half-being — that is, with 
 tinexercised brain — only because certain of her 
 instincts attract her to man, while he is not con- 
 strained to suppress his personality because he 
 in like manner felt himself attracted to woman? 
 It is the old superstition of the family life as 
 "woman's sphere," which still confuses the con- 
 ception. By the present form of family life 
 woman is "oversexed." Her higher development, 
 
i8o The Woman Movement 
 
 as well as that of her husband and children, will 
 be promoted if woman guards her independence 
 by earning her own living, in commercial work 
 conducted beyond the portal of the home; if 
 housekeeping becomes co-operative ; if the educa- 
 tion of the children is carried on outside the home, 
 in which now the motherly tenderness emasculates 
 the children and fosters in them family sentiment 
 of an egoistic nature and not social feelings. Thus 
 are solved the difficulties which are entailed when 
 the wife's work is carried on outside the home; 
 equipoise between her intellectual and emotional, 
 her sexual and social nature follows, and her worth, 
 as that of a man, will be measured by her human 
 personality, not by her womanliness, her efficacy 
 in the farnily, for the exercise of which she is now 
 constrained to renounce her personality. 
 
 So runs in brief the programme of the amatemals. 
 
 It has already been indicated that the woman 
 movement, in its inception, could gather strength 
 only by combating with all its power the prejudice 
 that woman is incapable of the same kind of activity 
 as man. But now the whole woman movement 
 has for a long time been emphasising the fact that 
 woman is entitled, not only on her own behalf but 
 more especially in her capacity as homekeeper, 
 wife, and mother, to the full development of her 
 powers and to equality with man in the family and 
 in society. In the amatemal programme sketched 
 above, however, the fanaticism, which charater- 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood i8i 
 
 ised the entire woman movement a generation ago, / 
 now evinces itself in the error that equal rights for 
 the sexes must mean also equal functions; that the 
 development of women's powers involves also their j 
 application in the same spheres of activity in ' 
 which man is engaged ; that equality of the sexes 
 implies sameness of the sexes. While moderate 
 feminism begins to see that, if man and wife com- 
 pete, this rivalry can benefit' neither the woman, 
 the man, nor the children, amatemal feminism ; 
 urges the keenest competition. And if this is 
 once accepted as advantageous to woman's per- 
 sonality and to society, then it is obvious that she 
 must, with all the energy of the attacked, defend 
 herself from the duties of maternity, because of 
 which she would obviously come off second-best « 
 in the competition. 
 
 From the point of view of individualism it is 
 obvious that the law must set no limitations to 
 woman's practice of a vocation, unless evident 
 hygienic dangers menace either her or the coming 
 generation. Women must, for their own sake as 
 well as for that of society, have free choice of work, 
 for life and nature possess innumerable unforeseen 
 possibilities. Nevertheless, it does happen that 
 a woman who gives superior children to humanity 
 may, nevertheless, feel herself incapable of educat- 
 
 ' It can even be shown that, if man invades the so-called 
 woman's spheres (for example the art of cooking or of dress- 
 making), it is most frequently he who makes new discoveries and 
 attains great success ! 
 
1 82 The Woman Movement 
 
 ing them; likewise it sometimes happens that a 
 husband and wife who have exceptional children, 
 cannot endure to live together. In neither case 
 has law or custom a right to force upon a mother 
 or a father a yoke that is intolerable or to demand 
 of a mother or a father unreasonable sacrifices. 
 
 But the right to limit the choice of work, the 
 law does not possess; nature assumes that right 
 herself : first of all from the axiom that no one can 
 be in two places at the same time, and in the second 
 place because no one can respond simultaneously 
 and with full energy to two different spiritual 
 activities. One cannot, for example, count even 
 to one hundred and at a certain number give a 
 simple grasp of the hand without suspending the 
 counting momentarily. Although no one has 
 ever been denied the privilege of solving a mathe- 
 matical problem and of following carefully at the 
 same time a piece of music, yet it is certain that 
 the effectiveness of both intellectual activities 
 wotdd be thereby diminished. These extremely 
 simple observations can be continued until the 
 most complex are reached. If the observation be 
 directed to the sphere of domestic life, every wife 
 and mother who is willing to institute impartial 
 observations of self, will affirm the difficulty of 
 working with a divided mind. 
 
 If a mother carries on her work at home and 
 must put it away in order to be beside the sick-bed 
 of her child, or to make those arrangements which 
 assure domestic comfort, or to help her husband. 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 183 
 
 then she feels that her book or her picture suffers, 
 that the activity which binds her more intimately 
 to the home relaxes for a time the intimacy of her 
 connection with her work. One can by day carry 
 on a dull industrial task, and by night produce an 
 achievement of the soul; but one cannot let one's 
 soul radiate in one direction without impairing 
 its energy in another. A work needs exclusive 
 devotion. And this is, viewed externally, difficult 
 to attain in joint action; viewed from within, it 
 requires a renunciation that in the case of a loving 
 soul evokes a continual inner struggle. For that 
 reason, also, literature with woman as its subject 
 has for some decades been filled with the great 
 conflict of modem woman's life: the conflict be- 
 tween vocation and parents, between vocation 
 and husband, between vocation and chUd. Cer- 
 tainly the family has often been a torture cham- 
 ber for individuality, as a consequence of laws and 
 customs, which the future will regard as we now 
 do the rack and the thumbscrew. But nature is 
 more severe than law and custom when she con- 
 fronts us with a choice which, however it may 
 turn out, tears a piece from our heart. 
 
 And now neither custom nor man demands of 
 woman the "sacrifice of the personality." This 
 sacrifice is required only by the law of limitations 
 which rules over us aU. 
 
 The creative man or the man working objectively 
 must often condemn the emotional side of his per- 
 sonality to a partial development ; he must for the 
 
1 84 The Woman Movement 
 
 sake of his work renounce many family values im- 
 portant for this emotional side of his being. Even 
 if shorter working hours could partially diminish 
 this cultural oflEering, the inner conflict, for the 
 man or the woman, is not settled thereby. 
 
 Even if a man, in the consciousness of his wife'is 
 endowment of talent, assumed a number of do- 
 mestic duties, especially those pertaining to the 
 children, the inner conflict would still continue. 
 And this conflict is in no way solved by the amater- 
 nal theory that the personal life must be placed 
 above the instinct life. For, as has been empha- 
 sised, the choice is not between the personal and the 
 instinct life, but between the intellectual and 
 the emotional side of woman's personality. And 
 the solution of this choice has not been discovered 
 by the amatemals, who would combine commercial 
 work with marriage and maternity. Women who 
 remain unmarried or who give up commercial ac- 
 tivity which they cannot carry on in the:; home, 
 have not settled the conflict either, but have only 
 reduced its difficulties. 
 
 The fundamental error of the amatemal solution 
 of the problem is that it characterises motherliness 
 as a non-social instinct, but, on the other hand, 
 defines the "personal" activity of woman as an 
 expression of the social instinct. For all social 
 instincts have been developed by culture out of 
 primitive instincts. All cultural development lies 
 between the sex impulse of the Australian negress 
 and the erotic sentiment of Elizabeth Barrett 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 185 
 
 Browning's sonnets. And when the amatemals 
 assert that motherliness, which "we have in com- 
 mon with beasts and savages," cannot be an 
 expression of the personaHty, their argument has 
 the same validity as that which would deny to the 
 Sistine Chapel the quality of an expression of 
 personaHty because beasts and savages also exhibit 
 the decorative instinct. 
 
 The development of the mother instinct into 
 motherHness is one of the greatest achievements 
 in the progress of culture, a development by which 
 the maternal functions have continually become 
 more complex and differentiated. Already in the 
 case of the higher animals maternity involves much 
 more than the mere act of giving birth ; an animal 
 not only faces death for her young, she gives them 
 also a training which often indicates power of 
 judgment. A cat, for instance, which sought in 
 vain to prevent her kitten from entering the water 
 and which finally threw the kitten in and then 
 pulled it out, thus obtaining the desired result of 
 her pedagogy, had not, as have so many modem 
 mothers, read Spencer, but could, nevertheless, 
 put many of these mothers to shame. Even the 
 initial maternal functions, nursing and physical 
 care, involve a culture of the spiritual life of the 
 mother, not only through an increase in tenderness, 
 but also in observation, discrimination, judgment, 
 self-control; a woman's character often develops 
 more in a month during which she is occupied with 
 the care of children, than in years of professional 
 
1 86 The Woman Movement 
 
 work. Mother love and the reciprocal love which 
 it awakens in the child, not only exercise the first 
 deep influence upon the individual's life of feeling, 
 but this love is the first form of the law of mutual 
 help — it is the root of altruism, the cotyledon of a now 
 widely ramified tree of "social instincts." 
 
 Although woman through the mere physical 
 functions of motherhood makes a great social 
 contribution, the importance of her contribution 
 is greatly enhanced if one also takes into considera- 
 tion her spiritual nature. And notwithstanding 
 the fact that fatherhood has also, to a certain 
 degree, developed in man the qualities of tender- 
 ness, watchfulness, patience, yet the enormous 
 predominance of woman's physical share in parent- 
 hood, in comparison with man's, is in itself enough 
 to create, in course of time, the intimate con- 
 nection which still exists to-day between mother 
 and child, as well as the difference between the 
 personality of woman and man. The physical 
 functions of motherhood were the fundamental 
 reasons for the earliest division of labour. And 
 this division of labour, the aim of which, next to 
 self-preservation, was for both sexes the protection 
 of posterity, augmented and strengthened the 
 qualities which each sex employed for its special 
 functions. All human qualities lie latent in each. 
 But they have been so specialised by this division 
 of labour, or, on the other hand, suppressed by it, 
 that they now appear in varying proportions: in 
 woman, a careful, managing, supervising, life- 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 187 
 
 guarding, inward-directed sense of love; in man, 
 coiirage, desire for action, force of will, power of 
 thought, an activity subduing nature and life, 
 became the distinguishing characteristics; and 
 fatherhood became psychologically, as it is physio- 
 logically, something different from motherhood. 
 Even if culture continues to efface the sharp lines 
 of demarcation, so that it becomes more and more 
 impossible to generalise about "woman" and 
 "man," and increasingly more necessary for each 
 and every woman to solve the "woman question" 
 individually, yet from the point of view of the race, 
 the division of labour must on the whole remain the 
 same as that which hitherto existed, if the higher 
 development of mankind shaU continue in tinin- 
 terrupted advance to more perfect forms. It is 
 necessary for these higher ends of culture that woman 
 in an ever more perfect manner shall fulfil what has 
 hitherto been her most exalted task: the bearing and 
 rearing of the new generation. 
 
 The amatemal assertion, that motherliness can 
 be no higher than justice and truth, is an infuriating 
 antithesis. It is as if one should assert that "air 
 is better than water, or both better than bread." 
 Both assertions place the fundamental condition 
 of life counter to other needs of Hfe! Who shall 
 exercise justice and truth when no new men are 
 bom? And, moreover, how shall justice'and truth 
 increase in mankind if children are not trained to 
 a greater reverence for justice and a deeper love 
 of truth? In order to fulfil this one office of 
 
1 88 The Woman Movement 
 
 education well, mothers need their universal human 
 culture in its entirety. But even if this were not 
 so, if motherhood did not require the concentration 
 of woman's personality; even if motherliness 
 remained only "primitive instinct," yet this 
 instinct, in the women who have guarded it, is 
 more valuable for mankind than the universal 
 htiman development of power of the women who 
 have lost this instinct. No social nor individual 
 activity of women could compensate for the extinc- 
 tion of this "instinct," which only recently in 
 Messina drove hundreds of mothers to shield their 
 children with their own bodies; this "instinct," 
 which recently impelled a mother, who learned 
 before she gave birth to her child that her own 
 life must be the price for the saving of that of the 
 child, to cry: "I have lived, but the life of my 
 child belongs now to mankind — save the child!" 
 So the mother died without even having seen the 
 beautiful being for whom she gave her life. In 
 the world of "personally" developed women, 
 however, after a new Messina catastrophe the 
 mothers would be found with their manuscript 
 and their pictures in their arms. And confronted 
 with a choice like that related above, the mother 
 would answer: "Let the child die, I will live my 
 personal life to the end." 
 
 The amatemal type must persist for the present. 
 There are in reality in our time many women who 
 with unresponsive eyes can pass by a lovely child, 
 among them even mothers who do not feel the 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 189 
 
 pure sensuousness, the wise madness, the intoxicat- 
 ing delight which such a child awakens in every 
 motherly woman ; mothers who have no conception 
 what a fascinating subject for study the soul of a 
 child can offer. Jean Paul, who scourged worth- 
 less mothers and tried to awaken the repressed 
 maternal instinct of his time with the charge that 
 a woman who is bored when she has children, is a 
 contemptible creature, would find to-day many 
 mothers who are bored only if they have their 
 children about them. 
 
 And these cerebral, amatemal women must 
 obviously be accorded the freedom of finding the 
 domestic life, with its limited but intensive exercise 
 of power meagre, beside the feeling of power which 
 they enjoy as public personalities, as consummate 
 women of the world, as talented professionals. 
 But they have not the right to falsify life values 
 in their own favour so that they themselves shall 
 represent the highest form of life, the "human 
 personality" in comparison with which the "in- 
 stinctively feminine" signifies a lower stage of 
 development, a poorer type of life. 
 
 Women who have produced books and works 
 of art, to be compared, as respects permanence of 
 value, to confetti at a carnival, have, according 
 to this viewpoint, proved themselves human 
 individualities, while a mother who has contribu- 
 ted an endless amount of clear thought, rich 
 understanding, warm feeUng, and strong will to 
 the education of a fine group of children, requires 
 
igo The Woman Movement 
 
 a public office in order to prove herself a "human 
 personality"! The brain work which a woman 
 employs in a commercial concern bears witness 
 to her individuality, but the. brain work which a 
 large, well-managed household demands, does not. 
 The woman physician who delivers a mother 
 expresses her "personality," but the mother has 
 put no "personality" into the feelings with which 
 she has borne the child, the dreams with which she 
 has consecrated it, the ideas in accordance with 
 which she has educated it! The girl who has 
 passed her examinations has proved herself a 
 developed human being; but her grandmother, 
 who is now filled with the kindness and wisdom 
 which she has won in a life dedicated to domestic 
 duties, a life in which the restricted sphere of her 
 duties did not prevent the comprehensiveness of 
 her ctiltural interests, nor her all-embracing sym- 
 pathy with humanity — such a woman is not a 
 personality! 
 
 When men advance as an argument against 
 women's rights the fear that women will lose their 
 womanliness in public life, the older feminists 
 answer that womanliness, especially motherliness, 
 is rooted too firmly in nature to make it possible 
 for this danger to exist. Nothing has, however, 
 become more clear in this amatemalistic time than 
 that motherliness is not an indestructible instinct. 
 Just as our time produces in increasing numbers 
 sterile women and women incapable of nursing 
 their children, so it produces more and more 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 191 
 
 psychically amatemal women. We can pass in 
 silence the cases of children martyred in families 
 or in children's homes, for sexual perversity and 
 religious fanaticism often play a r61e in such 
 connections; we can also pass by the millions of 
 mothers who bring about the abortion of their 
 offspring, for the poor are driven to such practices 
 largely by necessity, the rich mostly by love of 
 pleasure. There still remain a sufficient number 
 of women in whom the mother instinct has faded 
 away because of a course of thought like that just 
 described. Our time furnishes manifold proofs 
 of the fact that the mother instinct can easily be 
 weakened, or even entirely disappear, although 
 the erotic impulse continues to Uve; that mother- 
 liness is not a spontaneous natural instinct, but 
 the product of thousands of years not merely of 
 child-bearing, but also of child-rearing; and that it 
 must be strengthened in each new generation by 
 the personal care which mothers bestow upon their 
 children. A woman learns to love the strange 
 child whom she nurses as if it were her own; a 
 father who can devote himself to the care of his 
 little children is possessed by an almost "motherly 
 tenderness" for them, as are also older brothers 
 and sisters for the Httle ones whom they care for. 
 But while those who advocate the cause of the 
 amatemal women draw from such facts the con- 
 clusion that motherliness cannot be used as a 
 criterion of womanliness, yet an entirely different 
 conclusion forces itself upon everyone who sees 
 
192 The Woman Movement 
 
 in the united uplift of the individual and of man- 
 kind the criterion of the life-enhancing effect of 
 the woman movement, the conclusion that the 
 amatemal soul not only confirms the worst ap- 
 prehensions of men in regard to the results of the 
 woman movement, but also constitutes the greatest 
 danger to the woman movement itself. For the 
 amatemal ideas will evoke a violent reaction on the 
 part of men, in case such a reaction does not appear 
 at an early stage on the part of women. 
 
 This latter reaction might also include a rebel- 
 lion against the methods of industrial production, 
 which exhaust the strength of mothers and children. 
 For the objection of industrialism, that "it cannot 
 exist without women," falls to the grotmd in face 
 of the fact that a race cannot exist without soimd 
 and moral mothers. And "moral" means, here, 
 mothers capable and willing to bear sound children 
 and to train children along moral lines. If, on 
 the contrary, Europe and America adhere to the 
 economic and ethical principles which prevent a 
 number of able and wilUng women of this type from 
 becoming mothers, and if numbers of other women 
 who could be mothers continue unwilling to as- 
 sume the burden of motherhood, then this problem 
 will finally become the problem of a future jor the 
 European-American people. 
 
 The woman movement must now with resolute 
 determination abandon the narrow, biased attitude, 
 psychologically natural a generation ago when 
 the zealots of feminism had no other standard of 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 193 
 
 value for an idea, an investigation, or a book, than 
 whether they advanced or did not advance the cause 
 of woman; whether they proved or did not prove 
 woman's equality with man. For woman's work, 
 studies, and other accomplishments, no other 
 standard was applied than that of equality with 
 man's work, man's studies, and the accomplish- 
 ments of man. In a word, the proposition was 
 that woman should be enabled to perform at the 
 same time the life-work of a woman and of a man ! 
 It is through these hybrids that the feminine sex 
 transgresses against the masculine. And this is 
 one reason why our time is so filled with the tragic 
 vicissitudes of women. Truly, every progressive 
 person must agree with Goethe's aphorism, "I 
 love him whom the impossible lures." For, thus 
 allured, man has elevated his particular generation 
 above the generation preceding. But in action 
 every one must go down who is not imbued with 
 the consciousness that whoever exceeds his limits 
 is liable to tragic consequences, in the modem 
 psychological view of the guilt attaching to one 
 who imdertakes more than his strength will 
 allow. 
 
 But our time exhibits also other less convulsively 
 strained conditions of the feminine soul and there- 
 fore also brighter fates for woman. It shows not 
 infrequently wives tmited with their husbands, 
 not only by the sympathy which the human per- 
 sonality of each inspires, but also by the erotic 
 13 
 
194 The Woman Movement 
 
 attraction which the sex character of each exercises. 
 And they have both won thereby that unity 
 through which all the best and highest powers of 
 their being are liberated and elevated as by 
 religion. And their parenthood will then be the 
 highest expression of this religion. 
 
 Only religious natures are — ^in the deepest 
 meaning of the word — loving or faithful or cre- 
 ative. It is the same soul which in one person 
 reveals itself in ecstasy of beHef, in a second 
 in ardour of creation, in a third in a great erotic 
 passion, in the fourth as parental love, in others 
 again as love of cotmtry, as enthusiasm for freedom, 
 desire for reform. At times one and the same soul, 
 a woman's or a man's, is kindled by all these 
 passions. But never has the same soul been able 
 at the same time to feed all these passions in their 
 highest potency. Whether it be God, a work, or 
 a human being that the soul embraces with its 
 entire devotion, the religious character of this 
 devotion always evinces itself in increasing longing, 
 an endless susceptibility, a more persistent search 
 after means of expression, a continual service, an 
 inexhaustible patience in waiting for reciprocal 
 activity from the object of love. The religious 
 strength of a feeling consists in this, that the soul 
 in every work, every sorrow, every joy, — ^in a word, 
 in every spiritual condition, every experience, — is, 
 consciously as well as vmconsciously, more closely 
 united with God, with the work, with the beloved, 
 until every finest fibre of one's being reaches down 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 195 
 
 to the profound depths which the object of love 
 represents for the lover. 
 
 In this necessary condition of concentration of 
 the spiritual life is fotmd the truth of woman's 
 complaint that the man, absorbed by his work, 
 "no longer loves her" ; the truth of the experience 
 that earthly love indisputably detracts from the 
 love of God; the truth of the frequent experience 
 of husband and wife that with children the wealth 
 of their spiritual life together is in certain respects 
 inevitably diminished; the truth of man's fear 
 that woman's absorption in a life-work personally 
 dear to her must to a certain degree detract from 
 her devotion to the home ; the truth of the experi- 
 ence that the office of mother often interferes with 
 the development of woman's intellectual power. 
 
 Only persons who distinguish themselves by 
 what Heine called "exuberance of mental poverty," 
 or what I might call analogously an "abyss of 
 superficiality," have not experienced the severe 
 and beautiful psychic truth of Jesus' glorification 
 of simplicity. The quiet harkening to the voice of 
 God or to the inspiration of work or to the delicate 
 vibrations of another soul, which, daily, hourly, 
 momentarily, are the conditions that enable the 
 soul to live wholly in its belief, its work, its love, 
 so that these feelings may grow stronger and the 
 sotd grow greater through these feelings — all this 
 has "simplicity" as a condition; in a word, sym- 
 metrical unity, longing for completeness, inner 
 poise, the swift emotion. Fidelity — to a belief, 
 
196 The Woman Movement 
 
 a work, a love — is no product of duty. It is a 
 process of growth. 
 
 These are the conditions to which many modem 
 women, womanly at heart but divided, restless, 
 groping, attempting much, will not submit. They 
 could even learn to reverence these conditions in 
 the child for whom play is such sacred seriousness ; 
 but instead they transform the most sacred earnest 
 into play. 
 
 Other women, on. the contrary, are beginning 
 to tmderstand these conditions of growth and to 
 comprehend that it was exactly the protected 
 position of woman in the home, which has made it 
 possible for her family feeling to acquire that depth 
 which is to be attained only by concentration. 
 But if this is no longer possible, then woman will 
 love those that belong to her with less religious 
 warmth. Nothing can better illustrate the differ- 
 ence still existing between man and woman in this 
 respect, than the fact that most men woidd con- 
 sider themselves unfortunate if their entire exercise 
 of power were concentrated upon the family, while 
 most women still feel themselves fortunate when 
 they have been given the opportunity to exercise 
 to the uttermost the tendency inherent in them. 
 For most women love best personally and in propin- 
 quity, while the potency of love in man often seeks 
 distant goals. Woman is happy in the degree to 
 which she can bestow her love upon a person 
 closely connected with her; if she cannot do that, 
 then she may be useful, resigned, content, but 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 197 
 
 never happy.' The very fact that woman's 
 strongest primitive instinct coincided with her 
 greatest cultural office has been an essential factor 
 in the harmony of her being. 
 
 The modem developed mother feels with every 
 breath a grateful joy in that she lives the most 
 perfect life when she can contribute her developed 
 human powers, her liberated human personality, 
 to the establishment of a home and to the vocation 
 of motherhood. These functions conceived and 
 understood as social, in the embracing sense in 
 which the word is now used, give the new mother 
 a richer opportunity to exercise her entire person- 
 ality than she could find in modem commercial 
 work. In one such occupation she must suppress 
 either the intellectual or the emotional side of her 
 nature; in another, the life either of the imagina- 
 tion or of the will. In domestic duties, on the 
 contrary, these powers of the soul can work in 
 unison. This is imdoubtedly the deepest reason 
 why, taken as a whole, women have become more 
 harmonious, and men stronger in any special 
 crisis, women more soulful, men more gifted. On 
 this accotmt men offer their great sacrifice more 
 readily for an idea, or for the accomplishment of 
 a work; women, for persons closely connected 
 
 • The best proof of this is that many women who, in a life free 
 from care in an outward sense, were comparable only to geese or 
 peacocks, nevertheless, when hard times came and gave them 
 opportunity to develop their power of love, not only proved them- 
 selves heroines, but asserted that their "happy" years were 
 those in which they had so "sacrificed" themselves. 
 
198 The Woman Movement 
 
 with them. And yet this co-operation of woman's 
 spiritual powers was in earlier times partly re- 
 pressed by man's demand for passivity on the part 
 of woman as a thinking and willing personality, 
 but for her unceasing activity as promoter of his 
 comfort aiid that of the entire home. The mother 
 of to-day can, on the contrary, exercise, as dis- 
 tributer, her culture, her thought, her supervision, 
 her judgment, and her criticism, in order to make 
 fully effective the faculty of her sex for foresight 
 and organisation. She applies a great amount of 
 spiritual energy to the selection of the essentials 
 and the subordination of secondary things, to the 
 creation of such facilities in the material work 
 that time and means are left for the spiritual 
 values, which, alas, are still neglected in the 
 domestic economy of small, private households, 
 as well as in national housekeeping. And as 
 mother, modem woman is offered the first fitting 
 opportunity to assert herself as a thinking and 
 willing personality. 
 
 The significance of the vocation of mother has 
 been underrated in its significance even by 
 moderate feminists. But these were right when 
 they demonstrated that the "sanctity" of this 
 office had become a mere phrase, so badly or 
 amateurishly was this vocation fulfilled — ^an in- 
 dictment in which Nietzsche and feminism for 
 one rare moment are on common ground. Mothers 
 needed the spur of this contempt ; it was necessary 
 that their feeling of responsibility, their universal 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 199 
 
 human culture, their personal self-reliance, should 
 be aroused by the woman movement. Only so 
 could the new generation acquire the new type of 
 women who for the present seek to qualify them- 
 selves by self-ctdture for the office of mother, in 
 the expectation that for all women an obligatory 
 education for motherhood will be realised. So 
 long as this vocation can be practised without any 
 training, nothing can be known of the possibilities 
 whereby ordinary mothers may become good 
 educators — ^unless they place the mother love and 
 the intuitive understanding of the nature of the 
 child that it affords above even the best outside 
 teachers. Just as a glorious voice makes a country 
 girl a "natural singer," so nature has at all 
 times made certain mothers — and not least the 
 women of the people — ^natural educators of 
 children. 
 
 The biography of nearly every great man shows 
 the place the mother through her personality 
 occupied in the life of her son, the atmosphere 
 which she diffused about her in the home, her 
 direct and indirect influence. But only the 
 culture of their natural gifts with conscious pur- 
 pose will make of mothers artists. 
 
 When Nietzsche wrote : ' ' There will come a time 
 when we shall have no other thought than education," 
 and when he placed this education specifically in 
 the hands of mothers, least of aU did he mean 
 those "arts of education, " from which amatemals 
 believe they "guard" children by rejecting an 
 
200 The Woman Movement 
 
 "artistically creative" home training by the 
 mother, as a violence to the peculiar characteristic 
 of the child! 
 
 The new mother, as the doctrine of evolution and 
 the true woman movement have created her, 
 stands with deep veneration before the mystic 
 depths she calls her child, a being in whom the 
 whole life of manJdnd is garnered. The richer 
 the nature of the child is, the more zealously she 
 endeavotu-s to preserve for him that simplicity 
 which he needs, and at the same time to provide 
 for him the material that wUl enable him to work 
 for himself. She insirres to the child the pleasures 
 adapted to his age, pleasures which at no later 
 time can be enjoyed so intensely. The effect upon 
 him of his playfellows and books, of nature, art, 
 music, conversation, of the entire home milieu 
 which the child receives, above all the influence 
 of the personality and interests of the father and 
 mother^ — all these the mother who is an artist in 
 education observes in order to learn the natural 
 proclivity of the child and then directly to strengthen 
 and encourage it. At the same time she endeavours 
 to find out what restraints are necessary in order 
 that the natural bent be not impeded in its growth by 
 secondary qualities. But the new tjrpe of mother 
 does not seek to eradicate; she recognises the like- 
 ness between wheat and tares. The Christian 
 education, which has thus far prevailed, has 
 exercised a restraining oppression or has done 
 violence to the "sinful nature," which must be 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 201 
 
 broken and bent; this education was dermatologi- 
 cal, not psychological, in method. 
 
 The new mother is especially characterised by 
 the fact that she has rejected this earlier method. 
 She allows her child, within certain botmds, full 
 freedom, and demands, beyond those bounds, 
 unconditional obedience. She helps the child to 
 find for himself ever nobler motives for repression. 
 This she can do because from the very beginning 
 she has taken care of him; year by year she has 
 persevered in the effort to establish good habits; 
 she has tried to enlist as aids, food, bath, bed, 
 dress, air, and play in the effort to keep him strong, 
 sound, sexually pure — conditions fundamental to 
 the whole later conduct of life. Such a methodi- 
 cal physical care can be performed by the mother 
 herself, while, on the other hand, in the first years 
 of childhood paid hands might, through careless- 
 ness, stupidity, cruelty, laxity, or over-indulgence, 
 destroy the glorious possibilities. If the preven- 
 tion of the possibilities of nature being warped or 
 destroyed constituted aU that a mother could give, 
 this one task would, nevertheless, be more impor- 
 tant than any social relief work. 
 
 What characterises the new mother is that she 
 understands the enormous significance of the first 
 years, when the indispensable "training" takes 
 place, in which the future life of the child is 
 determined by the methods employed' — whether 
 they be those of torture or of culture, irrational or 
 rational. Then the great problem must be solved 
 
202 The Woman Movement 
 
 of establishing willing obedience from within in 
 place of the hitherto enforced obedience from 
 without; of maintaining self-control, won by self, 
 in place of self-control imposed from without; 
 of evoking voluntary renimciation in place of 
 enforcing renunciation. For the capacity for 
 obedience, for self-control, for renunciation, is 
 one of the qualities ftmdamental to the whole 
 later conduct of Hfe. The new mother knows this 
 as well as the mother of former times. But she 
 endeavours to create this capacity by slow and 
 sure means. The same thing obtains in regard to 
 physical and psychical courage, which in the early 
 years can often be so demoralised by fright that 
 it can never emerge again. The training which 
 hitherto was customary — ^based on compelling and 
 forbidding — ^had its effect only upon the surface 
 and prevented the child from experiencing the 
 results of his own choice. 
 
 It is this indirect education by results which is 
 the new mother's method. Her unceasing vigi- 
 lance and consistency are reqtdred in order that 
 the child shall actually bear the results of his 
 actions. What she needs for this is first and fore- 
 most, time, time, and again time. Apparently 
 good effects can be obtained much quicker by 
 intervening, preventing, punishing, but thus are 
 turned aside the real results. By this method the 
 child is deprived of the inner growth, which only 
 the fully experienced reality with its components 
 of bitter and sweet can give; and this growth the 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 203 
 
 new mother endeavours to advance. Much more 
 time still is necessary to play the psychological 
 game of chess, which consists in the checkmating 
 of black by white; in other words, the conquest of 
 negative characteristics by positive, through the 
 child's own activity — a task in which the chUd at 
 first must be guided, just as in the assimilation of 
 the elements of every other accomplishment, but 
 in which he can later perfect himself. Modem in- 
 vestigation in the realm of the soul enables us to 
 see the dangers which sometime will demand quite 
 as new methods in spiritual hygiene as bacteri- 
 ology has created in the hygiene of the body. But 
 we stUl leave imexerdsed powers of the soul, still 
 misunderstand spiritual laws which sometime will 
 radically transform the means of education. At 
 some future day the new mothers wUl institute 
 legal protection for children to an extent incompre- 
 hensible to us and therefore provocative only of 
 smiles. For example, legal prohibition of corporal 
 punishment by parents as well as teachers; legal 
 prohibition of child labour, of certain tenement 
 conditions, certain " amusenients, " certain im- 
 proper uses of the press. For the present every 
 individual educator must set these laws over him- 
 self; must sedulously create counter influences to 
 cope with the destructive influences which great 
 cities, especially, exert upon children.' The new 
 
 ' How many children have had their idea of right debased by 
 the manner in which the "Captain of Kopernick" was received 
 at his liberation — to cite only one example. 
 
204 The Woman Movement 
 
 mothers lead children out into nattire and en- 
 deavour to satisfy their zeal for activity by 
 appropriate tasks as well as to encourage by suit- 
 able means their love of invention and their im- 
 pulse for play. In the country children provide 
 much for themselves. But what both city and 
 country children, need is a mother familiar with 
 nature, who can answer the questions which the 
 child is by his own observations prompted to ask; 
 and the number of such mothers is continually 
 increasing. Both city and country children need 
 also a mother who can tell stories. Just as the 
 settlement gardens most clearly demonstrate how 
 sundered the working people of the great cities 
 are from nature, so the "story evenings," which 
 are now established for children, show how far 
 children have been permitted to stray from the 
 mother, who formerly gathered them about her 
 for the hour of story, play, and song. What, 
 finally, children need is the mother's deUcate 
 revelation of the sexual "mystery," which often 
 early exercises the thoughts of the child and in 
 which he should be initiated quietly and gradually 
 by the mother. 
 
 All the educational influences here outlined 
 emanate not only from the enlightened, excep- 
 tional mother; they are exercised by the average 
 mother of to-day to better advantage than by the 
 spiritually significant mother of fifty years ago. 
 And they are quite as essential, in order that the 
 highest possibility within the reach of each may 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 205 
 
 be attained, in the education of the genius as in 
 that of the ordinary child. Such influences in 
 like degree strengthen the innate bent of the 
 genius and raise the average, from generation to 
 generation, to a level where man can Hve according 
 to higher standards than those of the present 
 time. The new mothers understand that for the 
 utilisation of all these opportunities that make 
 their appearance in the first seven years of the 
 child's life, their motherly tenderness, gentleness, 
 and patience do not suffice; that they need in 
 addition all the intelligence, imagination, fine 
 feeling, scientific methods of observation, ethical 
 and aesthetic culture and other spiritual acquisi- 
 tions they possess, as direct and indirect fruits of 
 the woman movement. 
 
 When student and comrade life begin to claim 
 the children, when the influence of the mother — 
 that is of the new mother who has respect for the 
 peculiar characteristic, the human worth, and the 
 right of the child to live his own life — becomes 
 more indirect, she nevertheless bears in mind that 
 it is of the utmost importance that the son and 
 the daughter should find the mother, when they 
 return to the parental roof; that they should be 
 able to breathe there an atmosphere of peace and 
 warmth; that they should find the attentive eye, 
 the listening ear, the helpful hand; that the mother 
 should have the repose, the fine feeling, the obser- 
 vation requisite for following, without interfering 
 with, the conflicts of youth; that she should not 
 
2o6 The Woman Movement 
 
 demand confidences but be always at hand to 
 receive them; tliat she should show vital sympathy 
 for the plans of work, the disappointments, the 
 joys, of the young people; that she shotdd always 
 have time for caresses, tears, smiles, comfort, and 
 care; that she should divine their moods, and 
 anticipate their desires. By aU these means the 
 mother perpetuates in the soul of the child, 
 tmknown to him and to herself, her own person- 
 ality. The talent which she has not redeemed by 
 a productive work of her own, perhaps often for 
 that very reason, benefits mankind in a son or a 
 daughter, in whose soul the mother has implanted 
 the social ideas, the dreams, the rebellion, which 
 later become in them social deeds or works of art. 
 Above all, in the restless, sensitive, life-deciding 
 years when the boy is becoming a youth and the 
 little girl a maiden, the mother needs quiet and 
 leisure to be able to give the ineffably needy 
 children "the hoarded, secret treasure of her 
 heart," as the beautiful saying of Dtirer runs. 
 
 When such a mother is found, and such mothers 
 are already fotmd, she is the most splendid fruit of 
 the woman movement's sowing upon the field of 
 woman's nattu*e. 
 
 Because the new mother created for herself an 
 open space about her own personality, she under- 
 stands her son or her daughter when they in their 
 turn push her aside in order to create that same 
 open space about themselves. For in every gener- 
 ation the young renounce the ideals and the aims 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 207 
 
 of their parents. The knowledge of this does not 
 prevent the new mother, any more than it did the 
 mother of eariier times, from feeling the pain 
 incident to being set aside. But the former looks 
 forward to a day when the son and daughter wiU 
 freely choose her as a friend, having discovered 
 what a significant pleasure the mother's person- 
 ality can afford them. 
 
 As the bird's nest is made of nothing but bits of 
 straw and down, so the feeling of home is fashioned 
 out of soft, simple things ; out of little activities that 
 are neither ponderable nor measurably as political 
 or as economic factors. When Segantini painted 
 the two nuns looking wistfully into the bird's 
 nest, he gave expression to the deepest pain that 
 many modem women experience, the pain resulting 
 from the consciousness that their hfe, notwith- 
 standing its freedom, is lonely, because it has 
 denied them the privilege of making a home and 
 as a consequence has failed to afford them the 
 joy of creation, which nature intended they should 
 have, and of continuity of life in children to whom 
 they gave birth. 
 
 Here we stand at a point where the woman 
 movement parallels the other social revolutions, 
 tmdeviatingly as the rails of a track, and leads to 
 the same objective. Modem men and women, and 
 especially women, have forfeited an opportunity for 
 happiness in the loss of the feeling of homogeneity 
 and security. Just as formerly the property-hold- 
 ing family felt a secure sense of proprietorship in 
 
2o8 The Woman Movement 
 
 the ancestral estate, so every member of the home 
 group felt himself safe in the family. Now the 
 children cannot depend with certainty upon the 
 parents, nor the parents upon the children; the 
 wife upon the husband, nor the husband upon the 
 wife. Each in extremity relies only upon him- 
 self. The character of man is thus altered quite 
 as much as trees are changed when they are left 
 standing alone in the denuded forest of which 
 they once formed a part. If they can withstand 
 the storms, they have produced more "character" 
 than they had when they stood close together, under 
 a mutual protection that nevertheless enforced 
 uniformity. 
 
 From their earliest youth innumerable women 
 must now care for themselves, as well as decide 
 for themselves. Thus the feeling of independence 
 of modem woman has increased through the sacri- 
 fice of her peace ; her individual characteristics, at 
 the expense of her harmony. Her feeling of loneli- 
 ness is mitigated to a certain degree by the growing 
 feeling of community with the whole. But this 
 feeling cannot compensate certain natures for the 
 forfeiture of the advantages which women of 
 earlier times possessed, when they sat secure and 
 protected within the fotu- walls of the home, 
 sucked the juice from farmly chronicles, guarded 
 family traditions, maintained the old holiday 
 customs, lived at the same time in the past and 
 in the present. 
 
 The new woman lives in the present, sometimes 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 209 
 
 even in the future — ^her land of romance! The 
 enthusiasm of the old romanticism about a "hut 
 and a heart" has little charm for her. For she 
 knows reality and that prevents her from giv- 
 ing credence to the feminine illusion that twice 
 two can be five. What she does know, on the 
 contrary, is that out of fours she can gradually 
 work out sixteen. WMle the women of former 
 times could only save, the new woman can acquire. 
 Woman's beautiful, fooHsh superstition regarding 
 life has vanished, but her eagerness to achieve can 
 still remove mountains, her daring has still often 
 the splendour of a dream. Intellectual values are 
 for her no longer pastimes but necessities of life; 
 with her culture has developed her feeling for 
 truth and justice. This does not secure the new 
 woman immunity at aU times from new illusions 
 and errors of feeling, nor does it prevent her 
 developing passions whose value, to say the least, 
 is questionable. But in and through her deter- 
 mination "to be some one," to have a characteris- 
 tic personality, she has acquired a love of life, in 
 its diverse manifestations, both good and evil; a 
 new capacity to enjoy her own and others' indi- 
 viduality, as well as a new joy — sometimes an 
 unblushing, insolent joy — ^in expressing her own 
 being. In place of the earlier resignation toward 
 society, the expression of rebellion is fotmd even 
 in the sparkling eye of the school-girl, with red 
 cap upon her curly hair. 
 The young women of to-day, married or single, 
 14 
 
2IO The Woman Movement 
 
 mothers as well as those who are childless, are 
 still more vigorous in sotil, more courageous, more 
 eager for life than are men. Because all that which 
 for men has so long been a matter of course, is for 
 women new, rich, enchanting, comprising,.as it does, 
 free life in nature, scientific studies, serious artistic 
 work economic independence. Even in a fine and 
 soulful woman there is fotmd something of the 
 inevitable hardness toward herself and others of 
 which an observer is instinctively conscious when 
 he speaks of some woman as one who "will go far" 
 upon the course she has chosen. The modem 
 young woman desires above all else the elevation 
 of her own personality. She experiences the same 
 feeling of joy a man is conscious of when she real- 
 ises that her strength of will is augmented, her 
 ability becoming more certain, her depth of 
 thought greater, her association of ideas richer. 
 She stands ready to choose her work and follow 
 her fate; in sorrow as in joy she experiences the 
 blessedness of growth, and she loves her view of 
 life and the work to which she has dedicated 
 herself, often as devotedly as man loves his. 
 
 If we compare the seventeen-year-old girl of 
 to-day with her progenitor living in the middle 
 of the foregoing century, we find that the girl of 
 earlier times was to a larger extent swayed by 
 feeling, and that the modem girl is to a larger 
 extent determined by ideas. The former was 
 directed more to the centre of life, the latter remains 
 often nearer the periphery ; the former was warmer, 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 211 
 
 the latter is more intelligent; the former was 
 better balanced, the latter is more interesting. 
 
 The restlessness, the imcertainty, the feeling of 
 emptiness, the suffering, that is sometimes experi- 
 enced by the young woman of to-day, is primarily 
 traceable to the disintegration of religious belief, 
 which gave to the older generation of emancipated 
 women an inner stability, resignation, and self- 
 discipline. Scientific study has deprived many 
 modem women of their belief and those who can 
 create a new one, suited to their needs, are still 
 very few. Thus to the outer homelessness an 
 inner estrangement is added. The woman move- 
 ment has, it is true, contributed indirectly to this 
 spiritual distress by making the road to man's 
 culture accessible to woman. For men also 
 suffer in like manner, and suffer above aU perhaps 
 because our culture is unstable, aimless, and lacks 
 style, owing to the very fact that it is at present 
 without a religious centre. And even the future 
 can give to mankind no such new centre as the 
 Middle Ages had, for example, in Catholicism. 
 The attainment of individualism has shut out 
 that possibility forever. 
 
 But one factor in the religion of the past, the 
 adoration of motherhood as divine mystery; one 
 factor in the religion of the Middle Ages, the wor- 
 ship of the Madonna, has meanwhile been given 
 back to the present by the doctrine of evolution, 
 with that tmiversal validity which the thought 
 must possess which seeks to give again to culture 
 
212 The Woman Movement 
 
 a centre. Great, solitary individuals — prophets 
 more often than sibyls — have proclaimed the 
 religion of this generation. But the word will 
 become flesh only when fathers and mothers instil 
 into the blood and soul of children their devout 
 hope for a higher humanity. When women are 
 permeated by this hope, this new devout feeling, 
 then they will recover the piety, the peace, and 
 the harmony which for the present, and partly 
 owing to feminism, have been lost. 
 
 The innumerable new relations which the 
 woman movement has established between woman 
 and the home, between woman and society, and 
 all of the interchanges of new spiritual forces 
 which have been put in operation because of these 
 relations, cannot possibly take fixed form, at 
 least not so long as the woman movement remains 
 "a movement"; in other words, as long as every- 
 thing is in a condition of flux, in a state of becoming, 
 all spiritual relationships between individuals 
 must change their form. Continual new, fine 
 shades of feeling, not to be expressed in words, 
 determine every woman's soul and every woman's 
 fate. And even ancient feelings receive continually 
 different nuances, different intonations. I am, 
 therefore, laying down no laws but merely re- 
 capitulating certain suggestions based on what has 
 previously been said in regard to the soul of the 
 modem woman, as seen in that portion of the 
 present generation whose age ranges between 
 twenty and thirty years — that is to say, that 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 213 
 
 part of the generation which is decisive for the 
 immediate future. 
 
 Since co-education is becoming more and 
 more general, each sex is beginning to have more 
 esteem for the other, and woman, as well as man, 
 is beginning to found self-respect upon work. 
 When aU women by culture and capacity for work 
 have finally become strong-willed, self-supporting 
 co-workers in society, then no woman wiU give 
 or receive love for any extraneous benefit what- 
 soever. No outward tie and no outward gain 
 through love — this is the ultimate aim of the new 
 sex morale as the most highly developed modem 
 young woman sees it. 
 
 The new woman is deeply convinced that the 
 relation between the sexes attains its true beauty 
 and sanctity only when every external privilege 
 disappears on both sides, when man and woman 
 stand wholly equal in what concerns their legal 
 right and their personal freedom. 
 
 She demands that the contrasts between legal 
 and illegal, rich and poor, boy and girl, 'shall dis- 
 appear, and that society shall show the same 
 interest in the complete human development of 
 all children. She knows that when both sexes 
 awake to a feeling of responsibility toward the 
 futtire generation, then the real concern of sexual 
 morale becomes the endeavor to give the race an 
 ever more perfect progeny. And in order to 
 feel in its fulness this command, maidens as weU 
 as youths must henceforth demand scientific 
 
214 The Woman Movement 
 
 instruction in sexual duties toward themselves and 
 their possible children. 
 
 The new woman is also deeply convinced that 
 only when she feels happy — and happiness signifies 
 the development of the powers inherent in the 
 personality — can she properly fulfil her duties 
 as daughter, wife, and mother. She can con- 
 sciously sacrifice a part of her personality, for ex- 
 ample forego the development of a talent, but she 
 can never subjugate nor surrender her whole per- 
 sonality and at the same time remain a strong- 
 willed member of the family or of society, in the 
 broadest meaning of the word. She must assert 
 her conception of life, her feeling of right, her 
 ideals. And no social considerations for children, 
 husband, or family life are, for her, above the con- 
 sideration which, in this respect, she owes to her 
 own personality. When conflicts arise, she seeks, 
 wherever possible, a solution that will permit her 
 to ftdfil her duty without annihilating herself. 
 But if this is not possible, then she feels that it is 
 her first duty not to fall below her ideal, either 
 physically or spiritually. For this would prevent 
 her from fulfilling precisely those duties for which 
 she has so sacrificed herself; duties which she can 
 perhaps perform later imder other conditions, 
 provided she has saved herself from being ex- 
 tinguished by brutality or despotism. 
 
 But along with this individualism there exists 
 in the new woman a feeling for the unity of exist- 
 ence, the unity in which all things are parts and 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 215 
 
 in which nothing is lost. She does not, then, 
 look upon husband and children as continually 
 demanding sacrifice and upon herself as being 
 always sacrificed ; she sees herself and them, as in 
 the antiquity of the race, always existing by means 
 of one another. She is not consumed by her love, 
 for she knows that under such circumstances 
 she would deprive her loved ones of the wealth 
 of her personality. But although she wiU not, 
 like the women of earlier times, abandon her ego 
 absolutely, she will not, on the other hand, like 
 certain modem feminists, keep it unreservedly. 
 She will preserve upon a higher plane the old 
 division of labour which made man the one who 
 felled the game, fought the battles, made con- 
 quests, achieved advancement through victories; 
 and which made woman the one who rendered 
 the new domains habitable, who utilised the booty 
 for herself and hers, who transmitted what was 
 won to the new generation — all that of which 
 woman's ancient tasks as guardian of the fire and 
 cultivator of the fields are beautiful symbols. 
 She feels that when each sex pursues its cottrse for 
 the happiness of the individual and of mankind, 
 but at the same time and as an equal helps the 
 other in the different tasks, then each is most 
 capable, then society is most benefited. 
 
 The fact that there is still so much masculine 
 brutality and despotism, and that there are so 
 many. legal means at man's disposal whereby he 
 may put into practice with impunity this brutality 
 
2i6 The Woman Movement 
 
 and despotism, is the reason why the new woman 
 is still always a "feminist," why she still maintains 
 the fundamental tenets of the woman movement. 
 But she is not a feminist in the sense that she 
 turns against man. Her solution is always that 
 of Mary Wollstonecraf t : "We do not desire to 
 rule over men but to rule over ourselves." She 
 often exhibits now in deliberation and in deter- 
 mination the characteristics which were formerly 
 called "masculine": practical knowledge, love of 
 truth, courage of conviction; she desists more and 
 more from unjust imputations and empty words; 
 she proposes a greater number of well-considered 
 suggestions for improvements. The woman move- 
 ment has now in a word a more universally 
 human, a less onesidedly feminine character. It 
 emphasises more and more the fact that the right 
 of woman is a necessity in order that she may ful- 
 fil her duties in the small, individual family, and 
 exercise her powers in the great, universal human 
 family for the general good. The new woman 
 does not wish to displace man nor to abolish 
 society. She wishes to be able to exercise every- 
 where her most beautiful prerogative to help, to 
 support, to comfort. But this she cannot do so 
 long as she is not free as a citizen and has not 
 fully developed as a human personality. She 
 knows that this is the condition not only of her 
 own happiness, but also, in quite as high a degree, 
 of the happiness of man. For every man who 
 works, stmggles, and suffers there is a mother, a 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 217 
 
 wife, a sister, a daughter, who stiffers with him. 
 For every woman who in her way works and strug- 
 gles, there is a father, a husband, a brother, or a 
 son for whom her contribution directly or indirectly 
 has significance. Above all, the modem woman 
 tmderstands that in every marriage wherein a 
 wife still suffers under man's misuse of his legal 
 authority, it is in the last analysis the man who 
 sustains the greatest injury, for under present 
 conditions he needs exercise neither kindness nor 
 justice nor intelligence to be ruler in the family. 
 These humane characteristics he must, therefore, 
 begin to develop when the wife is legally his equal. 
 
 The sacred conviction of the new woman is 
 that man and woman rise together, just as they 
 sink together. 
 
 The antique septdchres, on which man and wife 
 stand hand in hand before the eternal farewell, 
 cotdd quite as well be the symbol of the entrance 
 of modem man and modem woman into the new 
 life, where they work together in order that the 
 highest ideals of both — the ideals of justice and of 
 human kindness — may assiune form in reality. 
 The motherly qualities of women are applied 
 for the good of children as well as of the weak and 
 the suffering. The arrival of the day when woman 
 shall be given opportunity to exercise social 
 motherliness in its full and popularly representa- 
 tive extent, can be only a question of time. In a 
 century they will smile at our time, in which it 
 was still the practice to debate about such obvious 
 
2i8 The Woman Movement 
 
 matters. And those who to-day ridicule the 
 woman movement will be ridiculed most of all. 
 
 Then we shall attain such an outlook on the great 
 forces of the time, — the emancipation movements 
 of labouring men and of women, — ^that we shall 
 see how necessary both were in order that society 
 should come to understand that not the mass of 
 material production, but the higher cultivation of 
 the race is the social-political end, and that for 
 this end the service of mother must receive the 
 honour and oblation that the state now gives to 
 military service. 
 
 And women themselves, whom nature has 
 made creators and protectors of the tender life 
 — the task for which nature even in the plant 
 world has made such wonderful provision — will 
 no longer resist being more intimately associated 
 with nature, nearer to earth, more Uke plants, 
 more restrained in outer sense and therefore, in 
 inner respects, less active than man, who always 
 had more of the freedom of movement of the forest 
 animal. The woman of the future will not, as do 
 many women of the present time, ivish to be freed 
 from her sex; but she will be freed from sexual 
 hypertrophy, freed to complete humanity. For 
 the universal, human characteristics, forced to 
 remain latent in the primitive division of labour, 
 because the father was obliged to exert all his 
 strength in one direction and the mother in another, 
 can now, through the facilities for culture in the 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 219 
 
 struggle for existence, be developed on both sides: 
 woman can develop the latent quality which 
 became active in man as "manliness"; man can 
 develop the latent quality which became active 
 in woman as "womanliness." But the propor- 
 tional ratio of these characteristics, which develop- 
 ment has already strengthened, will on the whole 
 remain fixed — ^the proportional ratio which, in 
 the progress of evolution, gave to woman the 
 ascendency in regard to inward creative powers, 
 and to man the ascendency in regard to outward 
 creative powers — a proportional ratio which for 
 the present has made woman more gifted in the 
 sphere of feeling, man more potent in the sphere 
 of ideas; which has made her the listener and 
 yeamer in the sphere of the spiritual life, and him 
 the pioneer investigator and fotmder of systems, 
 that has given her more of the Christian, and him 
 more of the pagan virtues. The improvement of 
 the universal, htmian characteristics of both sexes 
 elevates also the plane upon which they exercise 
 their especial functions, valuable alike for culture. 
 With increasing frequency the one sex may, when 
 so desired, asstmie the ciolture function of the 
 other. 
 
 A perfect fusion of the two spiritual sex- 
 characters would, on the contrary, have the same 
 result as physical hermaphroditism — sterility. 
 Genius — and in using the term we limit its mean- 
 ing to poetic genius, for real feminine genius has 
 thus far appeared only in that domain — embraces, 
 
220 The Woman Movement 
 
 as emphasised above, both man and woman, but 
 not harmoniously blended. For such a genius 
 would be unproductive, as we imagine those 
 celestial forms to be which are neither "man 
 nor woman." The masculine and the feminine 
 characteristics, which exist side by side in the 
 poet soul, produce work in co-operation. Alter- 
 nately, however, they seek to usurp the entire 
 power, whereby is occasioned the disharmony 
 which enters into the life of those who endeavour 
 to fulfil at one and the same time the universal, 
 human duties as well as those of sex. Indeed it 
 may be that one of the reasons why great poetic 
 geniuses, masculine as well as feminine, have often 
 had no progeny at all, and in other cases one of 
 little significance, is that their nattu-e was not 
 capable of a double production, that poetic 
 creation received the richest part of their physical 
 and psychical power. 
 
 Whether the opinion of genius expressed here 
 is correct or not, does not, however, affect the 
 general situation. For the genius wiU always go 
 his own way, which is never that of the average 
 man. From the point of view of the ordinary 
 individual an effacement of the spiritual sex- 
 character wotald be in still higher degree a mis- 
 fortune for culture and nature. For it is the 
 difference in the spiritual as well as in the physical 
 sex-characteristics that makes love a fusion of two 
 beings in a higher unity, where each finds the full 
 deliverance and harmony of his being. With the 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 221 
 
 elimination of the spiritual diflfference psychical 
 love wotdd vanish. There would be left, then, 
 upon the one side, only the mating instinct, in 
 which the same points of view as in animal breed- 
 ing must obtain ; on the other, only the same kind 
 of sympathy which is expressed in the friendship 
 between persons of the same sex, the sympathy 
 in which the human, individual difference instead 
 of sexual difference forms the attraction. In love, 
 on the other hand, sympathy grows in intensity, 
 the more universally human and at the same time 
 sexually attractive the individual is: the "manly" 
 in man is charmed by the "womanly" in woman, 
 while the " womanly ' ' in man is likewise captivated 
 by the "manly" in woman, and vice versa. But 
 when neither needs the spiritual sex of the other 
 as his complement, then man, in erotic respects, 
 returns to the antique conception of the sex 
 relationship, of which Plato has drawn the final 
 logical conclusion. 
 
 The "humanity" in the soul of man was strength- 
 ened when he felt himself necessary to mother 
 and child. When woman by sweetness and 
 tenderness taught man to love, not only to 
 desire, then his humanity increased immeasur- 
 ably. 
 
 In our time the average man is beginning to 
 learn that woman does not desire him as man, 
 that she looks down upon him as a lower kind of 
 being, that she does not need him as supporter. 
 He does not at all grasp what it is the woman of 
 
222 The Woman Movement 
 
 highest culture seeks, demands, and awaits from 
 his sex. But he leams that even the mediocre 
 woman rejects the best he has to give her erotically ; 
 that imbued as she is with ideals of "universal 
 humanity," she no longer needs him as the supple- 
 ment to her sexual being. Then brutality awakes 
 in him anew; then his erotic life loses what human- 
 ity it had won ; then he begins to hate woman. And 
 not with the imaginative, theoretical hatred of 
 thinkers and poets; but with the blind rage which 
 the contempt of the weaker for the stronger 
 arouses in him. And here we encotmter what 
 is, perhaps, the deepest reason for the pres- 
 ent war between the sexes, appearing already in 
 the literary world as well as in the labour 
 market. 
 
 Here the extreme feminists play unconsciously 
 about an abyss, — ^the depths in the nature of man 
 out of which the elementary, hundred-thousand- 
 year-old impulses arise, the impulses which all 
 cultural acquisitions and influences cannot eradi- 
 cate, so long as the human race continues 
 to subsist and multiply under present condi- 
 tions. 
 
 The feminism which has driven individualism to 
 the point where the individual asserts her per- 
 sonality in opposition to, instead of within, the 
 race; the individualism which becomes self- 
 concentration, anti-social egoism, although the 
 watchword inscribed upon its banner is " Society 
 Instead of the family," — this feminism will bear 
 
Its Influence upon Motherhood 223 
 
 the blame should the hatred referred to lead to 
 war. 
 
 It would be a pity to conclude a survey of 
 the influence of the woman movement with an 
 expression of fear lest this extreme feminism 
 should be victorious. I believe not ; no more than 
 I believe that the sun wUl for the present be 
 extinguished or streams flow back to their sources. 
 
 No "culture" can aimul the great fundamental 
 laws of nature; it can only ennoble them; and 
 motherhood is one of these fimdamental laws. 
 I hope that the future will furnish a new and a 
 more secure protection for motherhood than the 
 present family and social organisation aflfords. 
 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 Ufe, of the will of the 
 future and reverence for the past. 
 
 When the earth blooms with this beautiful and 
 vigorous flower of moraHty, 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 
 
224 The Woman Movement 
 
 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. 
 
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 With Special Reference to England and the United States 
 
 By £u^ene A. HecKer 
 
 Master in the I^oxbury l^atin School* Author of 
 °"Fhe Xeaching of Latin in Secondary Schools" 
 
 Crown 800. $I.SO net. (By mail, $I.6S) 
 
 Mr. Hecker, an authoritative scholar, has set him- 
 self the task of telling the story of women's progress, and 
 has done it with much painstaking and thoroughness, 
 and with a manifestation of a high order of talent for 
 discriminating as to materials and presenting them 
 convincingly and interestingly. . . . One feels the 
 studiousness of the author in every page. The matter 
 presented is not only carefully arranged, but it is in a 
 manner digested too ; and thus the work becomes 
 literature in a true sense, and not an unenlightened 
 assembly of details and facts from the pages of the past. 
 
 St. Louis Times. 
 
 G. F. Putnam's Sons 
 
 Ne-w Yorh. London