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 THE MORALITY OF WOMAN
 AND OTHER ESSAYS

 AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION FROM THE SWEDISH
 OF
 ELLEN KEY
 BY
 MAMAH BOUTON BORTHWICK

 [Illustration]

 THE RALPH FLETCHER SEYMOUR CO.
 FINE ARTS BUILDING
 CHICAGO


 COPYRIGHT, 1911
 BY
 THE RALPH FLETCHER SEYMOUR CO.
 CHICAGO




 CONTENTS


 THE MORALITY OF WOMAN      page 5
 THE WOMAN OF THE FUTURE     "  39
 THE CONVENTIONAL WOMAN      "  51




THE MORALITY OF WOMAN

(TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH)


    "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 sex 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 sex relation and
of the significance of love in the sex 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 chastity. Purity is the new-fallen snow which can be melted
or sullied; chastity is steel tempered in the fire by white heat. For
chastity is only developed together with complete love; this not only
excludes equally all partition among several but also makes a separation
between the demands of the heart and the senses impossible. The essence
of chastity 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 chastity 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 pass 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 "Sanctity 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 prostitution 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 assert that celibacy for either sex 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 classic 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 crass
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 circumstances; in their assertion 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 hitherto 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 nobler than the others.

This noblest 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 sexual 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 noble
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 assert 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 asserted, some
certain conception of morality, some certain form of concluding or
dissolving marriage which, in the last analysis, 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 constitutes 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
<DW43>-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 pronounced 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 passion; 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 analysis which will prevent him from confounding a passing
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 gratitude, 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 chastity than that of their contemporaries. It is
this experience or this dream which has already begun to assume 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 chastity.

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 sexes, 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
assures 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
assuring 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, assertion 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 asserted 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 ignoble 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 assured. 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 pass 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-assertion 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.

This source is the Christian conception of life which has displaced the
great, sound, strong conviction of antiquity of the holiness of nature.
Mary was the "Virgin Mother;" Jesus, celibate. Paul regarded marriage as
the lesser of two evils. Thus man first learned to regard the unmarried
state as the higher and the married as the lower state. The result of
the Christian conception of life then was that the sex relation was
regarded in and for itself as unholy, human nature in and for itself as
base and the earthly demand for happiness as the greatest egotism.

Therefore the Christian conception of life is now, since it has
accomplished its great task of culture, the development of altruism--an
obstacle to the unified conception out of which the happiness of mankind
will finally develop.

No one who thinks or feels deeply dreams that this happiness can be
easily achieved. The consistent belief of monism in human nature can
only gradually leaven life. And until then suffering will be for the
majority the first result of freedom. Even for the few, to whom the
relationships have already given happiness, must this be incomplete in
the measure in which they feel sympathy with all the suffering about
them. But above all is happiness rare because the genius for happiness
is still so rare, is indeed on the whole the rarest genius. To possess
it means to approach life with the humility of a beggar, but to treat it
with the proud generosity of a prince; to bring to its totality the deep
understanding of a great poet and to each of its moments the abandonment
and ingenuousness of a child; it means to be able to enjoy wholly each
present, immediate, joy and yet to be able to give up the incidental joy
for the enduring one.

Happiness lies so far from man; but he must begin by daring to will it.
It is this courage which Christianity broke down when it directed the
soul from the earth to eternity and gave to renunciation the highest
place among ethical values. Through the _Revaluation of all Values_,
which is now going on, happiness will receive this Place.

He who contends for the deepest of all ideas, Spinosa's idea, that "Joy
is perfection," contends with certainty of victory, however solitary he
may stand, however much of his heart's blood may be shed in the strife.

We live still in our inmost soul only by that for which we die. And all
for which we have died will live when the time shall come in which all
we ourselves have suffered signifies nothing for us, yet that for which
we have suffered signifies everything for others.




THE WOMAN OF THE FUTURE


There are phrases which charm like a song, and one of these phrases is:
"The Woman of the Future."

This sings for me in the verse of a poet and a seer, whose name now
shines with the radiance of the morning star, although during his
lifetime it was sullied with defamation as that of an atheist and
destroyer of society--because the luminous path of his thoughts appeared
to the prejudices of his contemporaries as a blinding flash of
lightning. His poet's vision revealed to him a new time in which women
would be

  "... frank, beautiful and kind
  As the free heaven, which rains fresh light and dew
  On the wide earth
  From custom's evil taint exempt and pure;
  Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,
  Looking emotions once they feared to feel,
  And changed to all which once they dared not be
  Yet being now, made earth like heaven."

This beautiful profile of the woman of the future, which Shelley has
traced, floats before me when I attempt here to draw her portrait in
more precise outlines.

       *       *       *       *       *

The storm and stress period of woman and the new social and
psychological formations thereby entailed must, indeed, extend far into
the twentieth century. This period of conflict will cease only when
woman within and out of marriage shall have received legal equality with
man. It will cease when such a transformation of society shall have come
to pass that the present rivalry between the sexes shall be ended in a
manner advantageous to both and when finally the work of earning a
livelihood as well as care of the household shall have received such
form that it will weigh less heavily than now upon the woman.

Toward the end of the twentieth century only could the type of the
nineteenth century woman have reached its culmination and a new type of
woman begin to appear.

My ideal picture of the woman of the future, and when one paints an
ideal one does not need to limit one's imagination, is that she will be
a being of profound contrasts which have attained harmony. She will
appear as a great multiplicity and a complete unity; a rich plenitude
and a perfect simplicity; a thoroughly educated creature of culture and
an original spontaneous nature; a strongly marked human individuality
and a complete manifestation of most profound womanliness. This woman
will understand the spirit of a scientific work, of an exact search
after truth, of free, independent thought, of artistic creation. She
will comprehend the necessity of the laws of nature and of the progress
of evolution; she will possess the feeling of solidarity and regard for
the interests of society. Because she will know more and think more
clearly than the woman of the present, she will be more just; because
she will be stronger, she will be better; because she will be wiser, she
will be also more gentle. She will be able to see things in the ensemble
and in their connection with each other; she will lose thereby certain
prejudices which are still called virtues. Nevertheless she will remain
the one who forms customs. But she will not seek her support in social
convention; she will find it in the laws of her own being. She will have
the courage to think her own thoughts and to investigate the new
thoughts of her time. She will dare to experience and to acknowledge
feelings which she now suppresses or conceals. Her full liberty of
action and the complete development of her personality will render
possible intrepid efforts for life, an energetic striving after an
existence which shall conform to her own ego. And such an existence she
will be able also to find with surer instinct than now. She will
understand how to work with more intensity, to rest with more intensity
and with more intensity to delight in all immediate, simple sources of
joy than the woman of the present is able to do. Thus in the new woman
the feeling of life will be enhanced, her experience will be more
profound; her soul life, her demands for beauty, her senses will be more
developed and refined. She will be more sensitive, more delicately
vibratory; she will therefore be able to be more profoundly happy and
also to suffer more keenly than the woman of our time.

Thus the woman of the twentieth century will give new value to the life
of society and to art, to science and to literature. But her greatest
cultural significance remains, however, by means of the enigmatic, the
instinctive, the intuitive and the impulsive in her own being to protect
mankind from the dangers of excessive culture. In face of knowledge she
will maintain the rights of the unknowable; in face of logic, feeling;
in face of reality, possibilities; and in face of analysis, intuition.
Woman will above all further the growth of the soul, man that of the
intelligence; she will extend the sphere of intuition, he that of
reason; she will realize tenderness, he justice; she will triumph by
audacity, he by courage.

The woman of the future will not only have learned much, she will also
have forgotten much--especially the feminine as well as anti-feminine
follies of the present time.

With her whole being she will desire the happiness of love. She will be
chaste, not because she is cold, but because she is passionate. She will
be reserved, not because she is bloodless but because she is full
blooded. She will be soulful and therefore she will be sensuous; she
will be proud and therefore she will be true. She will demand a great
love, because she herself can give a still greater. The erotic problem,
because of her refined idealism, will be extremely complicated and often
almost insoluble. Therefore the happiness which she will give and
experience will be richer, more profound and enduring than anything
which up to the present time has been called happiness. Many traits
which belong to the wife and mother of today will probably be lacking in
the woman of the future. She will remain always the beloved, the
sweetheart, and only so will she become a mother. She will devote her
finest and strongest forces to the difficult and beautiful art of being
at the same time the beloved and the mother; her religious cult will be
to create the supreme happiness of life. Because she will know and value
the psychical and physical conditions of health and beauty she will
choose the father of her children with clearer vision and deeper feeling
of responsibility than at present; she will bear and rear sound and
beautiful beings and she herself will possess greater attraction and
longer youth than the woman of the present. She will charm all her life,
because she will always beautify existence. But she will please only
because, at every age, she will be wholly herself; and her imperishable
youth, her most perfect beauty, she will reveal solely to him whom she
loves. She will know that the charm of the soul is the most profound;
and out of the plenitude of her being she will create the eternal
renewal of this charm, always unexpected and in infinitely nuanced
expressions of her personal grace. By her mere presence she will remove
the constraint of form and custom and will create varying expressions,
elevated by her own nobility, for the family life, the public life and
for society. She will probably speak less than the woman of the present
time, but her silence and her smile will be more eloquent. She will give
herself always directly and always with moderation, different and always
constant, spontaneous and always exquisite. Her being will pour forth,
brimming free and fresh, like the surge of the mountain torrent, but
like this, dominated by a certain inner rhythm. However far she allows
herself to go--in ecstasy of joy, in passion of tenderness, in delirium
of happiness or in the frenzy of grief--yet she will never lose herself.
She will be a multiplicity of women and yet always one, whether she
plays and smiles or suffers and smiles; whether she beams with health or
bleeds with mortal wounds; whether she be imbued with and radiate
repose or nervous intensity, joy or tears, sun or night, coolness or
ardor.

The woman of the future exists already in man's dreams of women, and
woman fashions herself according to the dreams of man. The modern man's
ideal of woman is not the masculine woman, but the revelation of the
"eternal feminine" developed in all directions. This new type of woman
has already gleamed forth here and there, not only in our time but in
centuries passed. In the Middle Ages she wrote the letters of Heloise;
in the Renaissance, Leonardo painted her as Mona Lisa; and in the
eighteenth century she held the salon of Mlle. Lespinasse. In our
century she wrote the love sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; she
appeared upon the stage as Eleonora Duse--and as in a precious stone her
being is crystallized by the poet's words with which Rahel's personality
was epitomized: "calm yet emotionally vivid."[B]

  [B] Footnote from French translation:--The reference here is to
      Rahel de Varnhagen. The citation is taken from the "Hyperion"
      of Holderlin, a German poet of whom mention is made apropos
      of Nietzsche, upon whom he had great influence.




THE CONVENTIONAL WOMAN


Conventionality is the tacit agreement to set appearance before reality,
form before content, subordination before principal. Its field in
certain measure is "vogue" changing according to the idea of beauty of
each new season. In deeper sense, however, a part of the sphere of
conventionality coincides always with that of law and custom, and with
the conception of the amount of self-control and self-sacrifice which
every individual must impose upon himself for the common life with
others. The further the evolution of humanity advances, the fewer are
the fields to which the power of society over the thought, belief, mode
of life and manner of work of the individual is restricted. More and
more prevalent becomes the conviction that all those forms of
expression of the individual which do not interfere with the rights of
others must be free. A great part of the work of culture of each new
generation has consisted and still consists in clearing away great
masses of conceptions of right dried up into conventionalism, dead
rubbish which prevents the new germs from sprouting. In every period
strong voices are heard which desire freedom from the prevailing
customs, and right of choice for the individual conscience and
temperament. In this ever-continuous struggle it is important to
distinguish what are really still living conceptions of right from
factitious conceptions, which form only a conventional obstacle to a
more beautiful freedom, a deeper truth, a greater originality, a richer
life content.

Yet it is not only old conventionalism which needs to be rooted out. In
every faction, in every social circle are soon formed lifeless
collections of prejudices, paltry motives, dependent customs. It is
always the women among whom conventionalism reaches its acme. For
conservatism, that deep significant instinct of woman, becomes also
often a prop of conventionality. Women are as yet seldom sufficiently
developed personally to distinguish, in that which they wish to cherish,
the appearance from the reality, the form from the content; or if they
do distinguish, they have as yet rarely the courage to choose the
content and reality if the majority have declared for form and
appearance!

In the literature of the last ten years and in part also among women
there prevails, however, a strong opposition to conventionality. This
opposition has been directed especially against the archaic ideal of
woman, according to which renunciation is still considered the highest
attribute of woman; and against the antiquated conception of morality
which regarded love without marriage as immoral, but any marriage, even
without love, as moral.

The women who adopted the new ideal--which a Norwegian poet strikingly
defined as "Self-assertion in self-surrender." "Affirmation of self in
giving of self"--encounter now on the part of the modern woman's-rights
advocates the same kind of conventional objection as in the fifties and
sixties was directed against the then new ideal of the earlier woman
movement.

The older emancipation movement advanced along the first line in the
effort to establish the right of woman as a human being; that is, to
give to woman the same rights as to man. The present movement purposes
to assert the right of woman as an individuality; the absolute right to
believe, to feel, to think and to act in her own way, if it does not
interfere with the rights of others. Since the first end was a general
one, the movement could in great part be made effective by collective
work in attaining that end; the exposition of the independence of the
individuality of woman, on the contrary, must be the personal concern of
each single individual. This those women do not understand who still are
working ever for the first end--the rights of woman as a human being.
They do not understand that every woman must receive, not merely her
universal rights, as a member of the body politic, but also her entire
individual rights as the possessor of a definite personality. The right
to establish an ego independent of, and perhaps entirely at variance
with, theories and ideals is at heart the point of struggle between the
one or the other individual woman and the women representatives of the
earlier era of the woman question.

The discovery that each personality is a new world--which in Shakespeare
found its Columbus, a Columbus after whom new mariners immediately
undertook new conquests--this discovery of literature has as yet only
partially penetrated the universal consciousness, as a truth of
experience. But the fact that it has made a beginning, that the
conventional, inflexible conception of the nature of man and of the
problems resulting therefrom is giving place to a relative and
individual conception--this is above all to be ascribed to the thinkers
and poets, in whom the conventional has its deadliest foe; the
recreative poets whose characteristic is deep appreciation of all primal
forces of existence, of all essential elements of life. For although
conventionalism in the form of the echo springs up also around genius,
yet the creative genius itself is always a protest against
conventionality in which any selfjustified life or art--conception has
perished.

The poet who here in the North shattered with a blow the archaic
conventional ideal of woman who sacrificed herself in all circumstances,
was Ibsen when he sent Nora out away from her husband and children in
order to fulfill the duties toward herself; when by means of "Ghosts" he
etched into the moral consciousness the idea that a woman's fidelity to
her own personality is more significant for the welfare of others as
well as of herself than her fidelity to conventional conceptions of
morality.

And Ibsen has always been the annunciator of the freedom under one's own
responsibility which is the key to individualism. Long has man listened,
only in part has he understood. And no consciousness is in this respect
more hermetically sealed than that of certain woman's rights advocates!
That all women should have the same rights as men, this is all that they
mean in their talk about the freeing of the woman's personality. They
forget that the right to be what she wishes entails often for the woman,
as for the man, the obligation to suppress that which she really is by
nature and feeling. They forget that the personality has deeper claims
than the right to work. They overlook the infinite variety of shades of
feeling, thought and character which caused the demand of solidarity in
opinions and actions, among the women active in the woman question, to
degenerate into suppression of woman's individuality. Certainly it is
true that united action is still necessary in order that woman may
obtain the rights which she still lacks. But all compulsory mobilized
action is here more dangerous than elsewhere; because for the advance of
the woman question in the deepest sense it is essential precisely that
the different feminine individualities show their useful faculties as
freely as possible in the different fields of activity.

The conventionality which is a menace in the woman question betrays
itself, not only in exaggerated demands for solidarity, but also in the
mode of treating the objections of the opposition. It reveals itself in
the lack of comprehension of the fact that the woman question,
particularly in what concerns the labor field, now intersects on all
sides the path of the social question. It especially evinces itself in
the inability to understand how the woman question, as it advances in
its evolution, becomes more complex, and how thereby, ever greater
difficulties arise in taking an absolute position in the questions
connected with it.

It is necessary that woman's opportunities for culture be multiplied.
But do all these measures of culture develop also the personality? Have
we not met the finest, most original, most charming natures among
unlettered dames of seventy and eighty years, or among such women as
never had a systematic education? It is right that the wages of women
should be increased; but will the labor value of women increase in
proportion? Can we even desire that the majority of these women bent
over their desks shall devote a live interest to their work, when their
sole essential being would first find expression only when bent over a
cradle? It is well also for girls of wealth to wish to have a vocation.
But is it also good if they, because they can be satisfied with a
smaller wage, take away the work from poor girls and men, often more
competent, who have to live entirely by the fruits of their work, and
must therefore demand larger wages?

So long as these and many other questions remain unanswered, there is
today quite as much that is conventional in rejoicing unreservedly over
the many girls who become students or leave the home, where they are
very much needed, for outside work, as there was in our grandmother's
time in wishing to limit the province of woman to the kitchen, the
nursery and the drawing room.

It is not yet known whether woman, through the competition for bread,
will develop physiologically and psychologically to greater health and
harmony. Woman is a new subject for research, and only centuries of full
freedom in choice of labor and in personal development can furnish
material for well grounded conclusions. Many signs, however, point to
this:--that an ineffaceable, deep-rooted psychological difference due to
physical peculiarities will always exist between man and woman, which
probably will always keep her by preference active in the sphere of the
family, while he probably will remain active in other spheres of
culture. But with a perfect equality with man and a full personal
development, woman can have a significance for culture in its entirety
and for the direction of society which we can still scarcely divine.

The conventional points of view, just mentioned in considering the woman
question, <DW44> the development of woman's individuality above all
because they overlook the diversity of nature and the complexity of the
problem. The conventional conception of self-renunciation as the highest
expression of womanhood is still continually the greatest obstacle to
the achievement of woman's personality. To be able to perish for a loved
being with joy is one of the beautiful inalienable priviliges of woman
nature. But by considering this under all circumstances as ideal, woman
has thus retarded not only her own development but also that of man. If
we compare marriages of older generations with those of the younger, the
men of the latter show great advance in regard to considerate tenderness
and sympathetic understanding toward their wives--wives who have on the
other hand a personal life more complete and with other demands than
formerly. Both have thus gained since women have begun to practice the
self-renunciation of self-assertion! Because for every self-sacrificing
woman nature it is infinitely harder to take her due than to sacrifice
it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Conventional womanhood will ever have its strongest support in
education.

The individuality of a child is seldom repressed in the inconsiderate
and brutal manner of former times. But by attrition it is effaced. In
the olden times the children enjoyed a certain freedom in the nursery
where the expression of life, manifestation of joy, pleasure and
displeasure, sympathy and antipathy of the growing personality was not
continually moderated. Now the children are continually with the parents
and these accustom them to a certain exacting restraint. The children
wish to be entertained; they cannot play of their own initiative, for
they lose the desire that originates in the freedom of the creative
phantasy. Neither children nor parents possess themselves in peace. In
the continual association the children are worn out by commands so
varied and numerous that obedience cannot be maintained. They do not,
therefore, learn the discipline necessary for the development of their
personality--to subordinate the unessential life expressions to the
essential and to dominate even over these last--a culture of the fallow
child ground which must begin early in order to become a second nature.

And this happens only when the educator knows clearly what he will
adhere to as essential in the development of the child, and when
according to that he establishes his commands and prohibitions, which
must be few in number but as immutable as the laws of nature, and if
violated must bring upon the child, not artificial punishment, but the
inevitable results of the act itself. So can man by fixed practice form
the child of nature into a man of culture, who out of consideration for
himself and for others curbs his tendencies which are inimical to
society, without, however, suppressing his personality. For outside the
field of immutable laws, children ought not to be constrained or coerced
against their nature and their disposition, against their healthy egoism
and against their especial tastes.

Now many mothers by their own effacement of self develop an unjustified
egoism of the child, but desire in other respects a self-control, a
circumspection, a moderation and discretion such as a whole life has not
ordinarily been able to inculcate in the mother herself. Out of this
soft clay, which is material for an individuality, parents, servants and
teachers mold a society being, sometimes a social being, but never a
human being.

This modeling is called education. And a part of the earliest education
must, as I have just shown, truly consist in that of molding. But after
the first years of life the aim of education should be to prevent all
molding and on the contrary to assure the freedom or development of the
single force which, considered in the light of the whole, makes it
significant for mankind that new generations succeed those which have
disappeared--the force of a new personality.

Every child is a new world, a world into which not even the tenderest
love can wholly penetrate. However openly the clear eyes meet ours,
however confidingly the soft hand is laid in ours, this tender being
will perhaps one day deplore the suffering of his childhood, because we
treated him according to the assumption that children are replicas, not
originals; not new, wonderful personalities. It is true the child in
certain measure is a repetition of the child nature of all times, but at
the same time, and this in a far higher degree, an absolutely new
synthesis of soul qualities, with new possibilities for sorrow and joy,
strength and weakness.

This new being will, upon his own responsibility, at his own risk, live
this terrifyingly earnest life. What creative force, new inceptions, he
will be able to bring to it; what elasticity he will possess under the
blows of destiny, what power to give and to receive happiness--all
depends, outside of nature itself, in essential degree upon the
educator's method of treating this individual child nature.

Goethe long ago lamented that education aspired to make Philistines out
of personalities. And this is now much worse since education has become
pedagogical, without at the same time becoming psychological.

Only he who treats the feelings, will and rights of a child with quite
the same consideration as those of a grown person, and who never allows
the personality of a child to feel other limitations than those of
nature itself, or the consideration, based upon good grounds, for the
child's own welfare or that of others--only he possesses the first
requisite principle of real education. Education must assuredly be a
liberating of the personality from the domination of its own passions.
But it must never strive to exterminate passion itself, which is the
innermost power of the personality and which cannot exist without the
coexisting danger of a corresponding fault. To subdue the possible fault
in each spiritual inclination by eliciting through love the
corresponding good in the same inclination--this alone is individual
education. It is an extremely slow education, in which immediate
interference signifies little, the spiritual atmosphere of the home, its
mode of life and its ideals signify on the contrary almost everything.
The educator must above all understand how to wait: to reckon all
effects in the light of the future, not of the present.

The educator believes often that he spares the child future suffering
when he "opposes his onesidedness," as it is called. He does not reflect
that in the effort to force the child in a direction contrary to that in
which his personality evinces itself, he merely succeeds in diminishing
his nature; yes, often merely in retaining the weakness in the quality,
not the corresponding strength!

But ordinarily it is indeed no such principle, but only the old
thoughtlessly maintained ideal of self-renunciation which is decisive.
We repress the child's joy of discovery and check the spirit of
enterprise; wound his extremely sensitive sense of beauty; exercise
force over his most personal possessions, his tokens of tenderness;
combat his aversions and quench his enthusiasm. Amid such attacks upon
their individual being, their feelings and their inclinations most
children, but especially girls, grow up. It is therefore not surprising
that when grown they seldom look back upon their childhood as a happy
time.

An intense feeling of life, a sense of plenitude, entirety, of the
complete development of the powers of the potentialities--this
constitutes happiness. Children have more possibilities of happiness
than adults, for they can experience this feeling of joy of life more
undividedly and immediately. They should utilize these possibilities of
happiness while the parents have partial power over their life. Soon
enough must they on their own initiative attempt, accomplish, bleed; and
herein no one of all the influences of education has even approximately
the significance of this: that the individual be not overtrained, that
he have still strength enough to live. That means: to suffer his own
sorrow, to enjoy his own happiness, to perform his own work, to think
his own thoughts, to be able to devote himself absolutely and
entirely--the sole condition of being able to work, to love and to die.

It is a deep psychological truth that the kingdom of heaven belongs to
the children. For no one attains the highest that life offers in any
other way than by simplicity, unworldliness and the power of devoting
his whole being without reserve to his object. This is the strength of
the child nature. If a mother by education has preserved this holy
strength and developed it to a conscious power, then she has given to
mankind not only a new being but a new personality.

But the education in the family, just as in the school, is tending in
the opposite direction. The destruction of the personality is therefore
the great evil of the time.

       *       *       *       *       *

Yet man is fortunately a vigorous organism. And those, whose personality
has been bowed or repressed by education, could raise themselves again
and create freedom for their development if they were aware of the value
of this freedom.

Few beings and so likewise few women can be exceptional. But if only a
few are destined for a great personality, yet nevertheless most can, in
spite of the errors of education, develop a certain degree of
personality, if they are deeply, earnestly concerned in it.

For everything is interrelated. No one lives unpunished by a second
hand. We cannot advance intellectually by borrowing, without becoming
also morally less scrupulous. We are today unjust to a book, a picture,
a drama, because we pronounce judgment upon it according to the words of
others, or because we do not dare to show the pleasure it gives us, in
case the critic has not granted us permission to be pleased, or because
we feign indignation we do not feel, but which others require of us in
the name of taste or morality. Tomorrow, in the same way, we shall be
unjust or dishonest to man, or to our own feeling--an injustice or a
dishonesty which can have influence over the destiny of a whole life.

The sum of spiritual riches, of spiritual utilities, is thereby
diminished if we do not cede to the whole what is most essentially ours.
That which is really our own may be great or small, rich or
insignificant--if we ourselves have felt or thought it, it is more
significant to others than that which we merely repeat, even if our
authority be the highest. And in those cases where we must rely upon
authorities, we still can put a certain personality into our choice and
honesty in acknowledging our indebtedness, by confessing that we have
borrowed our judgment we can put honesty and originality into this
dependence.

It is possible for no one to acquire more than a limited amount of the
results of culture, to form an entirely original judgment oftener than
in a few isolated cases. But each one can learn to understand that it is
a mark of culture not to pronounce judgment upon questions with which he
is not conversant. Good taste prescribes that just as one refuses to
wear false jewels if one possesses no real ones, so one should refrain
from pronouncing judgment upon persons or questions upon which one has
not formed an opinion through one's own impressions. When this honesty
begins to be considered a mark of spiritual refinement, then will the
culture of woman have made quite as great advance as when she learned to
read. For next to the power to form decisions for one's self stands in
culture value the ability to understand what opinions one does not
possess and the courage to recognize one's delicacy.

Courage and truth--that is what women lack above all. And these are the
qualities which they must cultivate if the feminine personality is to
grow. This does not result because women devote themselves to study, be
it ever so thorough, or to social tasks, be they ever so responsible.
Both further the development of woman's personality in the measure only
in which her own investigations, her own choice, make her means of
culture and her work an organic part of herself. To develop woman's
personality from within--that is the great woman question. To free woman
from conventionality--that is the great aim of the emancipation of
woman.

Such a conception of the woman question is for me the ideal conception
of this present great movement. And ideality does not mean to adopt as
the conception of life that which the majority considers ideal. Ideality
means to live for the ideal, which has inflamed our consciousness and
not to violate this consciousness by adapting it to such ideals as we
feel with our whole soul are lower.

If it is true that "the lack of genius is the lack of courage," so then
is it still more true in regard to the lack of personality. Here lies
one of the reasons why individuality is less often found among women
than among men. A man is more fully inflamed with his idea, the object
of his work; he is more intense in that which he knows and which he
wills. He becomes thus often--just as the child--more onesided, almost
always more egoistic, but much more absolute than a woman in like
position. She is rarely, except in love, wholly penetrated by that which
occupies her. It is then easier for her to be considerate, to look about
continuously upon all sides. She is more mobile, more quickly sensitive,
more manysided and more supple than man, and therein lies her strength.
But just as that of man, it is bought at the price of corresponding
weakness. For equipoise is still so difficult in human nature that a
good quality is often not the product of a multiplication, but is the
remainder after a subtraction.

The man becomes thus especially creative through his greater courage to
dare, his more intense power to will; the woman becomes the often
anxious conservator. She cherishes with fidelity, not only the customs
and memories of the home, but also society's traditional sentiments and
conceptions of right. But this very conspicuous conservatism of the
woman is exactly that which has obstructed the development of
exceptional femininity.

The personal independence of man is hampered because he must work
ordinarily in close association with others; whereby he is bound by
party discipline and party spirit, by considerations for preferment or
other interests.

The personality of woman on the other hand is more fettered by
conventional conceptions of morality and a conventional ideal of woman.
She will not distinguish the self-sacrifice which is of value from that
which from all points of view is valueless. She does not rely upon her
own instinct for right if this instinct deviates only a hair's breadth
from the generally accepted idea. She pardons the one who sins against
established conceptions of right, provided only he recognizes their
validity; but she condemns the one who has acted contrary to this
conception in sincere conviction, because his idea of right differs from
that of the majority! She confounds in her judgment temperament and
opinions, doctrine and life--a confusion which is the origin of all
spiritual tyranny, of all social intolerance. Especially does this
obtain in questions which concern the relation of the sexes. Every one
who expresses an opinion at variance with the conventional ideal of
morality has then incurred intrusive conclusions and blasting defamation
of his private life. On the part of women then--if it is a question
concerning a woman--it must all the more be accepted that it requires
not only a glowing red belief but also a snow-white conscience to dare
defy society in its most sensitive prejudices.

Conventionality of the woman attains its culminating point in the
thoughtless and conscienceless repetition of others' words by which most
women lower their spiritual level, distort, disfigure their character
and eventually stultify their personality.

A woman who makes any pretensions to fineness, evinces this among other
things, by avoiding all borrowed or sham luxury. She scorns spurious
effects, tinsel, and disdains therefore in her dress and her home all
artificial ornamentation.

But this same woman utters boldly counterfeited opinions and spurious
judgments as her own. Even if she possesses it she dare not express a
fresh, original opinion, a warm direct feeling. And her forgeries are
then transmitted by other plagarists from circle to circle. Thus "Public
Opinion" is formed upon the most delicate life problems, the most
serious life work. Thus the most noble actions become dubious and the
vilest calumnies positive authentic truths. Thus the air becomes
congested with the grains of sand, under which a man's works of honor
are buried.

But a work or a renown which has been interred can be exhumed. It is the
blind re-echoers of others' words, themselves, who must at length
disappear forever.





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Morality of Woman and Other Essays, by 
Ellen Key

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