The Task of Social Hygiene. Ellis Havelock
It is more interesting to consider the general conceptions which underlie this movement, and we can hardly do this better than by studying the writings of Ellen Key, who is not only one of its recognized leaders, but may be said to present its aims and ideals in a broader and more convinced manner than any other writer.
Ellen Key's views are mainly contained in three books, Love and Marriage, The Century of the Child, and The Women's Movement, in which form they enjoy a large circulation, and are now becoming well known, through translations, in England and America. She carefully distinguishes her aims from what she regards as the American conception of progress in woman's movements, that is to say the tendency for women to seek to capture the activities which may be much more adequately fulfilled by the other sex, while at the same time neglecting the far weightier matters that concern their own sex. Man and woman are not natural enemies who need to waste their energies in fighting over their respective rights and privileges; in spiritual as in physical life they are only fruitful together. Women, indeed, need free scope for their activities—and the earlier aspirations of feminism are thus justified—but they need it, not to wrest away any tasks that men may be better fitted to perform, but to play their part in that field of creative life which is peculiarly their own. Ellen Key would say that the highest human unit is triune: father, mother, and child. Marriage, therefore, instead of being, as it is to-day, the last thing to be thought of in education, becomes the central point of life. In Ellen Key's conception, "those who love each other are man and wife," and by love she means not a temporary inclination, but "a synthesis of desire and friendship," just as the air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. It must be this for both sexes alike, and Ellen Key sees a real progress in what seems to her the modern tendency for men to realize that the soul has its erotic side, and for women to realize that the senses have. She has no special sympathy with the cry for purity in masculine candidates for marriage put forward by some women of the present day. She observes that many men who have painfully struggled to maintain this ideal meet with disillusion, for it is not the masculine lamb, but much more the spotted leopard, who fascinates women. The notion that women have higher moral instincts than men Ellen Key regards as absurd. The majority of Frenchwomen, she remarks, were against Dreyfus, and the majority of Englishwomen approved the South African war. The really fundamental difference between man and woman is that he can usually give his best as a creator, and she as a lover, that his value is according to his work and hers according to her love. And in love the demand for each sex alike must not be primarily for a mere anatomical purity, but for passion and for sincerity.
The aim of love, as understood by Ellen Key, is always marriage and the child, and as soon as the child comes into question society and the State are concerned. Before fruition, love is a matter for the lovers alone, and the espionage, ceremony, and routine now permitted or enjoined are both ridiculous and offensive. "The flower of love belongs to the lovers, and should remain their secret; it is the fruit of love which brings them into relation to society." The dominating importance of the child, the parent of the race to be, alone makes the immense social importance of sexual union. It is not marriage which sanctifies generation, but generation which sanctifies marriage. From the point of view of "the sanctity of generation" and the welfare of the race, Ellen Key looks forward to a time when it will be impossible for a man and woman to become parents when they are unlikely to produce a healthy child, though she is opposed to Neo-Malthusian methods, partly on æsthetic grounds and partly on the more dubious grounds of doubt as to their practical efficiency; it is from this point of view also that she favours sexual equality in matters of divorce, the legal assimilation of legitimate and illegitimate children, the recognition of unions outside marriage,—a recognition already legally established under certain circumstances in Sweden, in such a way as to confer the rights of legitimacy on the child,—and she is even prepared to advise women under some conditions to become mothers outside marriage, though only when there are obstacles to legal marriage, and as the outcome of deliberate will and resolution. In these and many similar proposals in detail, set forth in her earlier books, it is clear that Ellen Key has sometimes gone beyond the mandate of her central conviction, that love is the first condition for increasing the vitality alike of the race and of the individuality, and that the question of love, properly considered, is the question of creating the future man. As she herself has elsewhere quite truly pointed out, practice must precede, and precede by a very long time, the establishment of definite rules in matters of detail.
It will be noticed that a point with which Ellen Key and the leaders of the new German woman's movement specially concern themselves is the affectional needs of the "supernumerary" woman and the legitimation of her children. There is an excess of women over men, in Germany as in most other countries. That excess, it is said, is balanced by the large number of women who do not wish to marry. But that is too cheap a solution of the question. Many women may wish to remain unmarried, but no woman wishes to be forced to remain unmarried. Every woman, these advocates of the rights of women claim, has a right to motherhood, and in exercising the right under sound conditions she is benefiting society. But our marriage system, in the rigid form which it has long since assumed, has not now the elasticity necessary to answer these demands. It presents a solution which is often impossible, always difficult, and perhaps in a large proportion of cases undesirable. But for a woman who is shut out from marriage to grasp at the vital facts of love and motherhood which she perhaps regards, unreasonably or not, as the supreme things in the world, must often be under such conditions a disastrous step, while it is always accompanied by certain risks. Therefore, it is asked, why should there not be, as of old there was, a relationship established which while of less dignity than marriage, and less exclusive in its demands, should yet permit a woman to enter into an honourable, open, and legally recognized relationship with a man? Such a relationship a woman could proclaim to the whole world, if necessary, without reflecting any disesteem upon herself or her child, while it would give her a legal claim on her child's father. Such a relationship would be substantially the same as the ancient concubinate, which persisted even in Christendom up to the sixteenth century. Its establishment in Sweden has apparently been satisfactory, and it is now sought to extend it to other countries. 65
It is interesting to compare, or to contrast, the movement of which Ellen Key has been a conspicuous champion with the futile movement initiated nearly a century ago by the school of Saint-Simon and Prosper Enfantin, in favour of "la femme libre." 66 That earlier movement had no doubt its bright and ideal side, but it was not supported by a sound and scientific view of life; it was rooted in sand and soon withered up. The kind of freedom which Ellen Key advocates is not a freedom to dispense with law and order, but rather a freedom to recognize and follow true law; it is the freedom which in morals as well as in politics is essential for the development of real responsibility.
People talk, Ellen Key remarks, as though reform in sexual morality meant the breaking up of a beautiful idyll, while the idyll is impossible as long as the only alternative offered to so many young men and women at the threshold of life is between becoming "the slave of duty or the slave of lust." In these matters we already possess licence, and the only sound reform lies in a kind of "freedom" which will correct that licence by obedience to the most fundamental natural instincts acting in harmony with the claims of the race, which claims, it must be added, cannot be out of harmony with the best traditions of the race. Ellen Key would agree with a great German, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who wrote more than a century ago that "a solicitude for the race conducts to the same results as the highest solicitude for the most beautiful development of the inner man." The modern revolt against fossilized laws is inevitable; it is already in progress, and we have to see to it that the laws written upon tables of stone in their inevitable decay only give place to the mightier laws written upon tables of flesh and blood. Life is far too rich and manifold, Ellen Key says again, to be confined in a single formula, even the best; if our ideal has its worth for ourselves, if we are prepared to live for it and to die for it, that is enough; we are not entitled to impose it on others. The conception of duty still remains, duty to love and duty to the race. "I believe in a new ethics," Ellen Key declares at the end of The Women's Movement, "which will be a synthesis growing out of the nature of man and the nature of woman, out of the demands of the individual and the demands of society, out of the pagan and the Christian points of view, out of the resolve to mould the future and out of piety towards the past."
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It is remarkable that in early times in Spain the laws recognized concubinage (
"La femme libre," in quest of whom the young Saint-Simonians preached a crusade, must be a woman of reflection and intellect who, having meditated on the fate of her "sisters," knowing the wants of women, and having sounded those feminine capacities which man has never completely penetrated, shall give forth the confession of her sex, without restriction or reserve, in such a manner as to furnish the indispensable elements for formulating the rights and duties of woman. Saint Simon had asked Madame de Staël to undertake this rôle, but she failed to respond. When George Sand published her first novels, one Guéroult was commissioned to ascertain if the author of