The Morality of Woman and Other Essays Part 1

The Morality of Woman and Other Essays.

by Ellen Key.

"The law condemns to be hung those who counterfeit banknotes; a measure necessary for the public welfare. But he who counterfeits love, that is to say: he who, for a thousand other reasons but not for love, unites himself to one whom he does not love and creates thus a family circle unworthy of that name--does not he indeed commit a crime whose extent and incalculable results in the present and in the future, disseminate far more terrible unhappiness than the counterfeiting of millions of banknotes!"

C. J. L. ALMQUIST.

The simplest formula for the new conception of morality, which is beginning to be opposed to moral dogma still esteemed by all society, but especially by women, might be summed up in these words:

Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.

The customary objection to this tenet is that those who propose it forget all other ethical duties and legitimate feelings in order to make the s.e.x relationship the center of existence, and love the sole decisive point of view in questions concerning this relationship. But if we except the struggle for existence--which indeed must be called not a relationship of life but a condition of life--what then can be more central for man, than a condition decreed by the laws of earthly life--the cause of his own origin? Can one imagine a moment which penetrates more deeply his whole being?

That many men live content without the happiness of love, that others after they attain it seek a new end for their activity, proves nothing against the truth of the experience that for men in general the erotic relation between man and woman becomes the deepest life determining factor, whether negatively, because they are deprived of this relation or because they formed it unhappily; or positively, because they have found therein the fullness of life.

The depreciation for mankind of the significance of the s.e.x relation and of the significance of love in the s.e.x relation brings into it all the immorality still imposed by conventionalism as morality.

We no longer consider, as in our mother's youth, ignorance of the side of life which concerns the propagation of the race the essential condition of womanly purity. But the conventional idea of purity still maintains that the untouched condition of the senses belongs to this conception. And it would be right, if the distinction were made between purity and chast.i.ty. Purity is the new-fallen snow which can be melted or sullied; chast.i.ty is steel tempered in the fire by white heat. For chast.i.ty is only developed together with complete love; this not only excludes equally all part.i.tion among several but also makes a separation between the demands of the heart and the senses impossible. The essence of chast.i.ty is, according to George Sand's profound words: "to be able never to betray the soul with the senses nor the senses with the soul"

("de ne pouvoir jamais tromper ni l'ame avec les sens ni les sens avec l'ame"). And as absolute consecration is its distinctive mark, so is it also its demand. This alone is the chast.i.ty which must characterize the family life and form in the future the basis of foundation for the happiness of the people.

Literature was, therefore, wholly justified when in the name of nature it attacked the hyperidealistic subtlety which raised the love of the heart to the highest rank and made that of the senses the lowest; and when it desired that the woman should not only know what complete love was but that she should also when she loved desire that completeness.

Because from time to time powerful voices were raised, like George Sand's or Almquist's, calling without consideration not only that marriage immoral which was consummated without mutual love but also that marriage immoral which was continued without mutual love--a purer consciousness has awakened in questions regarding the conditions of the genesis of the unborn race and elevated the conditions of the personal dignity of man and woman. So eventually it will come to pa.s.s that no finely sensitive woman will become a mother except through mutual love; that this motherhood sanctioned legally or not so sanctioned shall be considered the only true motherhood, and every other motherhood untrue.

Thus will mankind awaken to such a feeling of the "Sanct.i.ty of the generation," and to such an understanding of the conditions of the health, strength and beauty of the race, that every marriage which has its source in worldly or merely sensual motives, or in reasons of prudence or in a feeling of duty shall be considered as Almquist calls it: "A criminal counterfeiting of the highest values of life." And the same criminal counterfeit obtains in every married life which is continued under the compulsion, the distaste or the resignation of one of the two. Man will be penetrated with the consciousness that the whole ethical conception which now in and with marriage gives to a husband or a wife rights over the personality of the other, is a crude survival of the lower periods of culture; that everything which is exchanged between husband and wife in their life together, can only be the free gift of love, can never be demanded by one or the other as a right. Man will understand that when one can no longer continue the life in love then this life must cease; that all vows binding forever the life of feeling are a violence of one's personality, since one cannot be held accountable for the transformation of one's feeling. Even though this new moral ideal should in the beginning dissolve many untrue marriages and thus cause much suffering, yet all this suffering is necessary. It belongs to the attainment of the new erotic ethics which will uplift man and woman in that sphere where now the spirit of slavery and of obtuseness under a holy name degrade them; where social convention sanctions prost.i.tution alongside monogamy, and vouchsafes to the seducer but not to the seduced, social esteem, calling the unmarried woman ruined who in love has become a mother, but the married woman respectable who without love gives children to the man who has bought her!

The erotic-ethical consciousness of mankind cannot be uplifted until the new idea of morality with all its consequences is clearly established.

This ideal has two types of adversary. One is the adherent of the conventional morality; the other the supporter of the transitory union to which the name of "free love" is erroneously applied.

Those of the first type demand quite the same morality for the man as for the woman. They a.s.sert that celibacy for either s.e.x brings with it serious difficulties. They maintain that the social feeling of duty, not mutual love, must be the ground of conjugal fidelity. They call "pure love" love untouched by all that which they call "sensuality."

These same moral dogmas in recent years have manifested themselves in the effort to quench all fire, whiten all burning red coals, and drape all nudity in literature and art. The supporters of this dogma certainly understand--since, to begin at the beginning they have surely glanced into the Bible and Homer--that the undertaking would be too vast were it to extend to cla.s.sic literature. But all the more ardently they have directed their zeal against modern literature and art. And if they do not encounter energetic opposition the fig leaf will soon among us also attest the fall of taste and of the soul.

"Free love" has also its fanatics who are guilty of quite as cra.s.s excess. They have no conception of soulful and true devotion, which they consider an absurdity or a conventionality under which human nature cannot bow without hypocrisy. For since experience shows that lifelong love is frequently an illusion, so, they say, one must not begin by expecting it! The so-called Bohemians have shown as great monomania in their rotation around this one point, the right of the senses, as have the zealots of traditional morality in their rotation around their point, the suppression of the senses. The extreme result of both would be retrogression to a lower degree of culture; in one case to the asceticism of the Middle Ages, in the other to the promiscuity of the savage. Both forget the reality of life. On the one side they ignore this reality in their absolute demands without consideration of temperament or circ.u.mstances; in their a.s.sertion of the unqualified moral superiority of woman and in depreciation of the significance of love for the full harmony of man and woman. On the other side they ignore this reality when they try to make woman as unrestrained morally as man has. .h.i.therto been; when they forget all the suffering of the new generation born and reared in such an unrestrained existence; when they learn nothing of the nature of woman from the many younger and older women who live solitary and yet sound and useful lives in the deep conviction that, since they have not found the great, mutual love, which decides existence, any union with a man would be degrading and unhappy.

Development has, because of multifarious influences made entirety and continuity in love a greater life necessity for the woman of culture in general than for the man of the same intellectual level. A man, therefore, ordinarily dissolves an erotic relation without bitterness when he has ceased to love, while a woman, even after her love has ceased, often suffers because the relationship has not endured a lifetime.

It is this ever increasing peremptory demand for erotic completeness of the woman of developed individuality of the present time, which causes her always to wish to more fervently cherish the personality of the man as entirely as it is her happiness and her pride to be able to give her own. It is this demand for entirety which, among Germanic peoples, at least, makes woman neither desirous nor psychologically fitted for the so-called "free love." This is evidently to be concluded from the vicissitudes of those who have tried it.

"Free love" is moreover quite as senseless an expression as "legal love." Because no external command can call love into being or repress it; it is in this sense always free, yet as are all feelings, it is bound by certain psychological laws. If not, then it does not deserve the name of love. It is with love as with the human face: though the individual varieties are infinite, yet there are certain general characteristic features which make all these different faces human faces, all these different feelings human love. And in every time there is a type for both, which is recognized as n.o.bler than the others.

This n.o.blest type of love has been portrayed by a Danish writer,[A] who endeavored to show that a conception of life founded upon evolution need not lead to laxity in s.e.xual relations. He shows how the erotic feeling, as all other feelings, has been developed from an incoherent, indeterminate and indefinite condition to one more coherent, determinate and differentiated, and so from a simple instinct for reproduction of the species has been finally transformed to an entirely personal, inner love. The highest type of this love is that which exists between a man and a woman of the same moral and intellectual level; which demands of necessity reciprocal love in order to be perfected, and can therefore be contented with no other kind of reciprocal love than a corresponding erotic love. This perfect love includes the yearning desire of both lovers to become entirely one being, to free each other and to develop each other to the greatest perfection. If love is perfected and consummated thus by the life together, then can it be given to only one and only once in a lifetime. This thought of the Danish writer is expressed with the concise brevity of the poet, by Bjornson, when he says of the sensation "feeling oneself doubled" in the beloved one: "_That_ is love, all else is not love." This feeling which liberates, conserves and deepens the personality, which is the inspiration to n.o.ble deeds and works of genius, is the opposite of the ephemeral, merely sensual love, which enslaves, dissipates and lessens the personality.

[A] See Viggo Drewsen: "En Livsanskuelse grundet paa Elskow" ("A Conception of Life Founded upon Love") and "Forholdet mellem Maud og Kvinde belyst gjennem Udviklingshypothesen." ("The Relation between Man and Woman in the Light of the Hypothesis of Evolution.")

It is only the great love which has a higher right than all other feelings and which can establish its right in a life.

He who considers this love decisive for the morality of such an erotic union cannot believe that external ties are necessary to give ethical value to this union. Social considerations, prudence and feeling for others can indeed in certain cases make the legal bond desirable. But it can just as little give increased consecration to real love, as it can give any consecration whatever to a relation in which this content is lacking. And even if it would be too dogmatic to establish just the highest type of love as ethical norm for all relations between man and woman, since life proves that the highest love is still as rare as the highest beauty, yet it is on the contrary not premature to a.s.sert that this love, legally sanctioned or not, is moral, and that where it is lacking on either side, a moral ground is furnished for the dissolution of the relationship. The ever clearer consciousness that love can dispense with marriage yet marriage cannot dispense with love, is already partially recognized in modern society, by the facility of divorce. And it is only a question of time when the law which gives to one person the power to constrain the other to remain with him against his will, will be abrogated, so contrary is this possibility to that developed conception of the freedom of love--which is not at all the same as so-called "free love!"

It is not historically true that it was, as has been a.s.serted, some certain conception of morality, some certain form of concluding or dissolving marriage which, in the last a.n.a.lysis, has been a decisive factor in the progress or decadence of peoples. Among the Jews as among the Greeks, among the Romans as among our Germanic forefathers, at the most flourishing period, there existed many laws and customs which were considered moral that the present time considers immoral. The decisive thing for the sound life of these peoples was, that that which they considered right had sovereign power to bind them: the faithfulness to the conception of duty more than the content of conception determines the moral soundness of a people. Society is in danger, not when the ideals are raised but when they are lost. But a very highly developed historical sense is necessary to see at the same time the connection and the difference between dissolution and reorganization. Moreover it is necessary to have the large view of the essentials of life which distinguishes the true poet, the view which Sophocles possessed when he let his Antigone follow the higher law of affection and commit a violation of the law which--according to the conception of that time--would lead to general license if it remained unpunished. The new ideal of marriage is now being formed in and through all the many literary and personal dissensions in which it const.i.tutes the theme.

Yes, it is formed also in the midst of all the conflicts of life for which marriage gives so much occasion. It is true there are now married people who separate because from the very beginning they considered fidelity impossible and so did not even strive for it. But many other divorces have far more complex, psychological reasons. When two people are married young, personal development takes often entirely opposite directions; if they have married in more mature years, then their individual differences, already strongly marked from the beginning, make the problem of common life together difficult of solution. The strongly developed sensibility of the modern individual to disposition, nuances, variations of humor, makes a lack of sympathy still more unendurable; a true sympathy a far greater source of joy. The whole multiplicity of psycho-physical influences and impressions which the members of a family exercise upon one another for pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and variance, harmony and discord, are now in all relationships, but above all in marriage, felt with greatest intensity. It is in those natures most individually developed, most refined, for whom the nuances of the married life, not its simple primal colors, signify happiness or unhappiness.

To this general delicacy of feeling there is added especially the heightened sensibility of woman to the discord between that which she expected in marriage and that which in reality it offered her, because the union often lacked the freedom, the understanding which her sympathetic feeling now craves. This lack of harmony is inevitable since the forms of marriage have not even approximately undergone the transformation which would correspond to the individual development of the two beings, of the woman especially, whom it unites. But while all these reasons, cursorily indicated here, contribute their part in the increased number of divorces, the life of finer feeling creates, on the other hand, an ever more intimate married life. There are married people who have pledged each other at marriage full freedom to dissolve the union when either of them so wished, and others who have never given legal form to their marriage yet realize fully and richly love in "sorrow and in joy," in sympathetic work together, in reciprocal, true devotion. There have been, on the other hand, champions of so-called "free love" who were themselves by nature such p.r.o.nounced believers in only one marriage that their life was wrecked when the one to whom they had bound themselves applied to their own case their own theories. It is always the character which ultimately decides. Character can make the radical theorist a moral paragon and the pillar of society resting upon conservative ground a reed of pa.s.sion; it can make the advocate of egoism sublimely devoted and the apostle of Christianity deeply egoistic in his love.

So many men, so many souls; so many souls, so many destinies. And to wish to apply to this whole, complex, manifold, incalculable erotic life, with its unfathomable depths, an immutable ethical standard, when judging the relationship between man and woman, and to make this standard decisive also for the ethical value of the personality in other respects--is quite as naive as the attempt of a child to draw up in his little bucket the wonderful depth of the vast storm-driven sea.

Love, as life, will fortunately remain an eternal mystery which no science will be able to penetrate and which reason cannot rule. Our only hope for the future is that man, endowed with a more delicate sense, will listen to the secrets of his own life. A more highly developed and differentiated soul life will give him a surer instinct or a keener power of a.n.a.lysis which will prevent him from confounding a pa.s.sing sentiment of sympathy, need of tenderness or satisfaction of vanity with a love which decides existence. Now, on the contrary, many believe that a wave of admiration, of grat.i.tude, or of pity is the whole sea; that the reflection of the fire of another is the holy fire itself!

No one can with certainty predict the final result of the profound revolution of the feeling and of the customs which is now taking place.

But one thing appears certain: the danger to the future of mankind can scarcely be that the new ideal will result in general license. Rather it will lead to so individual, differentiated and refined love that erotic happiness will be increasingly difficult to find and the idealists of love will more frequently prefer celibacy to a compromise with their greater demands for sympathetic love.

The occasional experience, often only the dream of such a love, sensible to the finest shades of the soul, to the most delicate vibrations of the senses--of a love which is an all comprehensive tenderness, an all embracing intimacy--has already raised the erotic demands and the erotic existence of thousands of men and women to a sphere of more infinite longing, more fervid chast.i.ty than that of their contemporaries. It is this experience or this dream which has already begun to a.s.sume form in the art and literature of the present time. It is true the extreme discord between the peculiar character of man and of woman has long been the favorite theme, especially in modern literature. But among the wild, discordant tones a new leitmotiv resounds which will swell and rise and fill the void with a harmony, still but faintly divined.

One of the conditions that this harmony become as perfect as possible is that woman in life as in literature shall begin to be more honest and man more eager to listen when she reveals to him something of her own nature. Men have desired and justly that women should learn from their confessions in regard to the conflict between man and woman. But woman because of the conventional conception of womanly purity has been intimidated from conceding to man a deep insight into her erotic life experiences.

Only when women begin to tell the truth about themselves will literature universally illuminate the still unknown depths of woman's erotic temperament. To the present time it has been almost exclusively men poets who have made revelations about women. The nearer these poets have approached life, the more surely have they seen the highest expression of the eternal feminine as the great women poets also saw it: in erotic love and in mother love. And it was the completeness of her consecration which was in their eyes a woman's supreme chast.i.ty.

It is the great poets who have taught and have continued to teach youth to revere the "all powerful Eros."

This is the only "morality" which has a future. Only by conforming to this shall we gradually succeed in preventing the erotic feeling from appearing sometimes as a brutal instinct or marriage from being founded upon a fleeting attraction.

An ideal of negative purity--even incarnated in the person of Jesus--cannot inflame youth and therefore cannot in the long run protect him. That alone which has the power not only to restrain but also to transform the brutal instinct is a conception of the existence of a higher feeling which belongs to the same sphere of life as the instinct itself.

To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of fire--that is to give him a real moral strength. Thus there springs up in man the ineradicable, invincible instinct that an erotic relation can exist only as the expression of a reciprocal all comprehensive love.

Thus will youth learn to consider the love-marriage as the central life relation, the center of life, and he will be inflamed with the desire to develop and to conserve body and soul for the entrance into this most holy thing in nature, wherein man and woman find their happiness in creating a new race for happiness. Thus will young men and women in increasing numbers understand that their own happiness, as well as that of the coming generation will be the greater the more completely they can give their personality to love. Boys and girls, young men and maidens, men and women by coeducation, by joint labor and comradeship will develop in one another that mutual understanding which will remove the enmity between the s.e.xes, in which modern individualization--and the therewith increasing demands of the personality--has so far found its expression.

The usages of individual homes will be differentiated, instead of as now maintaining the same conventional forms for all families. After some generations so educated, under the influence of relationships thus arranged, we shall see marriages such as even now not a few are seen, in which not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that a.s.sures fidelity. Then will love be cherished as the most delicate, most precious thing in life; then will egoism and unselfishness attain a perfect harmony, because the husband and wife find happiness only in a.s.suring the happiness of the other. That is the union which the Norwegian poet defines when he calls true marriage "a yearning quest after each other, an energetic cultivation, a.s.sertion of the personality, in order to be able to give one's personality; an ever increasing intimacy of understanding of each other; a union which the whole course of life will make more profound."

So prepared, the absolute human ideal will become perhaps a living reality; not as an isolated man, not as an isolated woman, but as a man and a woman who shall give to mankind a new religion--that of happiness.

Many indeed still doubt that marriage can become this highest form of existence in life, in which the surrender of the ego and the self-seeking of the ego reach a perfect harmony. It is a.s.serted that this ideal condition can be attained perhaps by exceptional people, but never by ordinary people, and that the morality of the latter can be kept sound only by legal and social restraint.

My belief, however, is that, just as the Children of Israel followed the pillar of fire, so ordinary men follow at a distance exceptional men, and in this way mankind as a whole advances. Ordinary men are just now determined upon certain conceptions which at the end of the previous century were not conclusive even for exceptional people. The marriage of reason, for example, is already considered ign.o.ble by many. The authority of the parents is very seldom in evidence either to coerce the children into a marriage without love or to restrain them from it. Even the superficial erotic emotion of our day is serious in comparison with the shallow and frivolous or vulgar and cruel gallantry of the eighteenth century. In the geological deposits of legislation and still more in those of literature we can study these risings of the levels of the erotic sentiments. So we are thereby convinced that the demands and conflicts of the exceptional men become gradually those of the ordinary men also, even though the ordinary men are always some generations behind the men who are stirred by new emotions, new conflicts, when the many have reached the problems which some decades before occupied only the few.

Certainly it may, under present imperfect conditions, often be a duty not to destroy the outward form of marriage for the sake of the children. But by no means can this duty be preached as universally binding. Only the individual himself can in each separate case determine the dissolution best, both for the children and for the married couple themselves, of a marriage which has fallen asunder within. When we consider the development in its entirety, the sooner people cease to sanction the present marriage the more fortunate it will be; for the sooner will the transformation be forced upon us by which marriage will maintain its permanence only from within. Only then will man be wholly able to have the experiences and to find the new, delicate means by which fidelity can be strengthened and happiness a.s.sured. But man will not seek this expedient so long as he can rely upon the power of legal right and social opinion to hold together that which love does not unify.

The ever increasing individualization of love indicates that mono-marriage will doubtless remain the form of erotic union between man and woman. But this rule will have, in the future, as in the past, many exceptions, since the feelings can change. The conflicts which will thus arise will bring suffering as a consequence, but not the bitterness nor the contention which the property sense in marriage now so often occasions. The deep consciousness that love belongs not to the sphere of duty but only to that of freedom will cause the one who has lost the love of the other to feel the same resignation before the inevitable, as if he were separated from the other by death.

And in cases where the individual is not capable of this resignation, then the law as well as custom shall make it impossible for the one to hold back the other against his will. Each of the twain shall be master of his own person and of his property, of his work and of his mode of life; the union shall in each especial case be arranged by the agreement of the individuals, and the law shall decide only the rights and duties of the husband and wife in regard to the children.

When in this way it shall come to pa.s.s that neither the husband nor wife shall have in outward sense, in external things, anything to gain or to lose by the consummation or dissolution of marriage, then only the erotic problem appears in all its seriousness.

Many mistakes, many caricatures, many tragic failures will naturally be the result of freedom. Great waves have great combers. A new principle cannot be put into effect without bringing with it new mistakes. But we may, however, be convinced that the laws of life--to which belongs the law that suffering follows the misuse of freedom--will finally be able to bring everything within its right limits. Nothing indeed has occasioned more suffering as an indirect consequence than Christianity, and although Jesus knew that, yet he did not hesitate to give to mankind this new creative force which destroyed in order to create. But it is above all His ideality which His present followers lack, the great ideality which dares to believe in the might of the spirit rather than that of the form.

It is, therefore, quite natural that these Christians, the upholders of society, oppose the new ideal of morality with vain apprehensions. They believe that a woman whose conscious aim is "Self-a.s.sertion in self-surrender" will forfeit the immediate, fresh originality in this surrender. They believe marriage must be destroyed when the support of its development is no longer bond and injunction, but is its own vital force. They believe morality will lose in the struggle if youth learns to consider the love between man and woman as the central condition of life. These, and a hundred similar apprehensions have all one and the same source.