Ellen Key

“ Never has the earth seen a more complicated and contradictory being than this woman, melancholy and wistful, cold and sensitive, thirsting for life and tired of life at the same time. The blood dances otherwise in her veins, sings another song in her ears, than it has in those of any other woman since time began. She sees through her husband and is a stranger to him; his desire seems brutal to her finely-shaded and contradictory moods: she is not won, even when she allows herself to be embraced. She fears the child, since she knows she cannot fulfil its simple demands. ”

“ Here, if ever, woman’s nature reveals that its great genius is for love; that the higher a woman attains, the more certainly will her own honour, her own triumphs, her own future weigh lightly as a feather against the joy of being able to develop in all its fulness her great talent, that of loving. And when does she love more highly than in lavishing the whole superfluity of her developed feminine nature on the perfecting of her lover—for another woman? ”

“ The relentless force of nature’s uniting will shows itself not only in the way love brings together contradictions in marriage, but also in the rupture of marriage. A good wife, married to a good husband, loving and loved, is thus seized by a passion, incomprehensible to herself, for another man. Without reflection she gives herself up to her passion, to return again to the husband she has not ceased to love, but who never inspired in her the overmastering emotion whose purpose—according to the will of nature and of the woman herself—ought to have been a child. ”

“ Man feels more deeply than ever before that life gave him a poor portion, when his love has been nothing but sinking in an embrace. An ever greater number know that love is absorption into that spirit, in which one’s own finds its foothold without losing its freedom; the nearness of that heart which stills the disquiet in our own; that attentive ear which catches what is unspoken and unspeakable; the clear sight of those eyes which see the realisation of our best possibilities; the touch of those hands which, dying, we would feel closed on our own. ”

“ Never do greater possibilities exist for the happiness both of the individuals and of the race than in a love which begins so early that the two can grow together in a common development; when they possess all the memories of youth as well as all the aims of the future in common; when the shadow of a third has never fallen across the path of either; when their children in turn dream of the great love they have seen radiating from their parents. ”

“ It is true that she cannot efface her husband’s past. But she can create together with him a new and stronger generation. The man who knows what his beloved has suffered through his past; who has seen the wings of her courage lose something of their power, her confidence something of its smile, her joy something of its playfulness—he will in time teach his sons that a man may certainly become once more strong and healthy through happiness in love, but that he cannot win so beautiful and sure a happiness as self-control can prepare ”

“ Scholasticism, ever extending introspective psychology; mysticism, ever refining the life of the soul devoted to God, unconsciously pour oil upon the red flame of love as upon the white flame of faith. The Vita Nuova of love breaks out in the fire of poetry, whose most aspiring flame was Dante. It lived on in the souls of the elect among Latin peoples. The Platonism of the Renaissance refined the mediæval conception of love as the most excellent means of bringing to perfection the highest human qualities. And thus was established the right of lovers to independence of the customs of society. ”

“ To have the courage of one’s happiness, to be able to bear the pain inseparable from a rupture without pangs of conscience, is only in the power of those who act from their innermost necessity. That pairs of lovers outside the law now so often commit suicide together is no proof of the overmastering power of love; it rather proves the powerlessness of their emotion to dare and win the right of direct and immediate living and thus increasing the riches of life. For it is only to a love that is throughout a will to live that circumstances become as wax in the artist’s hand. ”

“ Collective motherliness must act more as an eternal subterranean fire and less as the soaring but soon burnt-out flame of a sacrifice. It is not enough that the instinct of mutual help and sympathy is more immediate in woman than in man. Just as affection is not sufficient for the care of children, if insight into the vital laws of the body and soul is lacking, so also do women need an understanding of the biology and psychology of society in order to fulfil their individual tasks in national economy, and to understand the problems which are summed up under the name of social organisation. ”

“ Affinity of soul is doubtless the most enduring element in love, but not therefore the only valuable one; the love that fills life with intoxication is separated from even the most lofty friendship by an ocean as deep as that which divides the India of legend from utilitarian America—a lifetime in which will not equal a single day in the other!
Great love arises only when desire of a being of the other sex coalesces with the longing for a soul of one’s own kind. It is like fire, the hotter it is, the purer ”

“ There is no day which may not bring with it a glimpse of delight in beauty. Finally there is no hour—except the heaviest hours of sorrow—in which a human being cannot feel the strength and greatness of his own soul; its independence of all external fortunes; its power of seeking itself, finding itself, enhancing itself through all and in spite of all. The words which Victor Hugo put to a young woman in sorrow:
N’avez-vous pas votre âme? ”

“ It is the pining for that human soul which is to release our own from this torment of solitude; a torment which was formerly allayed by repose in God, but which now seeks its rest with an equal, with a soul that has itself lain wakeful with eyelids heated from the same longing; a soul empowered by love to the miracle of redeeming our soul—as itself by ours is redeemed—from the sense of being a stranger upon earth; a soul before whose warmth our own lets fall the covering that the world’s coldness has imposed upon it and shows its secrets and its glories without shame. ”

“ Woman—for whom love is a life-and-death matter in a much deeper sense than for man—experiences on the approach of love those tremblings that follow a sunrise for which one has lain awake and waited. Her physico-psychical timidity takes on by turns the expressions, incomprehensible to the man who loves, of dumb avoidance, of abrupt change, of empty girlish giggling, of sullen misunderstanding. And all that is contradictory—not that which is mysterious—in woman stirs the unrest in a man’s blood. ”

“ But, on the other hand, the unmarried woman, from her own point of view as well as from that of the race, has a right to motherhood, when she possesses so rich a human soul, so great a mother’s heart, and so manly a courage that she can bear an exceptional lot. She has all the riches of her own and her lover’s nature to leave through the child as a heritage to the race; she has the whole development of her personality, her mental and bodily vital force, her independence won through labour, to give to the child’s bringing-up. ”

“ And now it is certain that the home—with its changing conditions of good and evil—is first and foremost the best means of forming an organically developing sense of solidarity with the whole community. Life itself creates in the home an inter-dependence among its members, a sympathy for others’ destiny, a contact with the realities of life, and with the seriousness of work, which no institution can create. It is by the efforts of a father and a mother that the joys of home are provided; it is affection for all which counter-balances the mutual rights of all ”

“ Marriage, in a word, has such sure allies in man’s psycho-physical conditions of life that one need not be afraid of freedom of divorce becoming equivalent to polygamy. What this freedom would abolish is only lifelong slavery.
It is evident to every thoughtful person that a real sexual morality is almost impossible without early marriage; for simply to refer the young to abstinence as the true solution of the problem is, as we have already maintained, a crime against the young and against the race, a crime which makes the primitive force of nature, the fire of life, into a destructive element. ”

“ When love has become the power in which a person lives and moves and has his being, the words of the Epistle to the Corinthians on love are fulfilled in a more beautiful way than Paul dreamed of. Great love does not only love for the sake of loving; it attains the incredible: to love the loved one more than one’s own feeling. If it were a question of thus providing for the other a more perfect happiness, this love would be able to quench its own flame and with it the fulness of pain and of joy that life had gained from this feeling. Women sometimes make such a sacrifice. ”

“ For loving is a healing medicine even for the wounds love gives. Only one thing a loving person cannot bear, to see the dear ones suffer. To take one’s self silently away in order to spare them pain is within the power of great love. And this does not mean a tame resignation watering the red stream of the blood. It means that love has become so great that it takes seriously the great words so lightly uttered in happiness, that torments caused by the beloved were dearer than joys given by others. ”

“ They wish for the love of their dreams or none at all. A lower claim, a poorer gift of love has for them no value which can be compared with their free personal life. To the man who only seeks her lips but does not listen to the words from them, who longs for her embrace but smiles or frowns when she reveals the nature of her soul, such a woman has nothing to give. Her love is now filled with the whole nourishing force of her human nature, replete with the whole sap of her woman’s nature, and she desires that the sacrament she thus dispenses shall be received with devotion. ”

“ It is therefore an indisputable necessity that every love entirely detached from the rest of humanity must die for want of nourishment.
But the band which attaches it to humanity may be woven of several materials; the gift to the race may express itself in various ways. In one case a great emotion may bring about a tragic fate, which opens the eyes of humanity to the red abysses it contains within itself. Another time it may create a great happiness, which sheds a radiance around the happy ones, illuminating all who come near them. ”

“ The new love is still the natural attraction of man and woman to each other for the continuance of the race. It is still the desire of the active human being to relieve through comradeship the hardships of another and of himself at the same time. But above this eternal nature of love, beyond this primeval cause of marriage, another longing has grown with increasing strength. This is not directed towards the continuance of the race. It has sprung from man’s sense of loneliness within his race, a loneliness which is ever greater in proportion as his soul is exceptional. ”

“ To-day, countless women are still being sacrificed to this doctrine of marriage, or to its unconscious effects; their exhausted wombs are a poor soil for the new generation; their crushed souls a broken support for the growth of new wills. For one woman who defends herself with the resolution lent by horror, there are thousands who have conceived and still conceive children in loathing. For one wife who is met with the modest prayer of love, there are thousands who with a feeling of humiliation concede to their proprietors the right inculcated by the Lutheran doctrine of matrimony. ”

“ To appeal to the liberty of the personality in frivolous concessions to eroticism is the same gross abuse of the idea as to use the name of this liberty in sailing a leaky yacht in a storm.
The liberty of the personality involves great risks to win great rewards; but it does not involve allowing one’s self to be driven into dangers, where for a trifle one stakes one’s own life and that of others. To drift into relations where one has not the hundredth part of the consent of one’s innermost ego, is not proving but wasting one’s personality ”

“ So it is between a woman who contracts a marriage from the longing for motherhood and one who does it from love of luxury; between a man who seeks a partner in his work and one who only wants a wife to console his creditors. But whether one, with part of one’s person, buys one’s self free from hunger or from debts, loneliness or desire; however great in itself the value one gains may be, still the transaction remains, for buyer as well as for seller, a humiliation from the point of view of the sexual morality which sees things as a whole. ”

“ People still allow themselves within the home circle a scornfulness of each other’s peculiarities, a silencing of each other’s opinions, a prying into each other’s secrets, a betrayal of each other’s confidences, which in daily life place the members of the circle on a footing of armed neutrality. In good homes, affection, and in inferior ones fear, stops them from breaking out into open war; for in both cases all know each other’s vulnerable spots so well, that they are perfectly well aware how severe the conflict would be for themselves as well as for the others. ”

“ An otherwise sensitive man may feel unnerved by eroticism to such a degree that now he will wish all women dead, to be thus freed from his thraldom; now he will desire, as Caligula did of the Romans, that they had but a single neck—but not to sever it. The hatred of these men for eroticism is that of the savage for the hideous gods on whom he believes himself dependent, and whom he knows to be making sport of his destiny. And nothing is more certain than that love, thus conceived, makes men degraded and ridiculous. ”

“ But, on the other hand, society will admit, with a freedom wholly different from that now existing, the union of people, not only in their best years, but also in their best feelings; it will perceive the present hindrances to be an injustice which falls not only upon the individuals but upon society itself—since connubial unhappiness not only interferes with the highest development of many people’s powers for the good of all, but it also deprives society of the children to whom life might have been given by a new happiness. ”

“ There is a charity which pours itself out like oil upon all wounds; there is sympathy in joy and sorrow between individuals; mutual help and mutual responsibility in society; a common feeling of rejoicing or suffering with our nation or with humanity at great moments. But all love from one human being to another which deserves that name, is in the highest degree individual; it is a selection, a separation. If it is not this, it is nothing. A woman chooses her children even when she chooses their father ”

“ If it can be shown that women have brought all these to the full perfection of which they are capable, then there will really be good reason to believe in their miraculous power in the organisation of society.
But even if we fully admit the hindrances which man’s ordering of society, his legislation, his nature have placed in the way of women—is there a single thoughtful woman who can maintain that she herself, or that women in general, have nevertheless done all that they could within their own special sphere; that they have used to the utmost the opportunities they have possessed? ”

“ It is one with the great necessity, whose hand smites and wounds us so long as we curse it, but caresses and supports as soon as we bless it.
We must not look at the victims—even if we ourselves are among them—if we would see the meaning of life in life itself. We must fix our eyes upwards. And then it is certain—since love continually and in spite of all is extending its power—that individual love, with all its victims and all its mistakes, nevertheless in the long run assists the elevation of the race. ”

“ Years later it may fall to the lot of such a man, who at one blow has lost everything—the sanctity of his memories, the meaning of his experiences, the faith of his love—himself to see the truth of the great, calm thinker’s exhortation: that one ought neither to laugh nor weep at, exalt nor curse a human being’s actions, but only to try to understand them (Spinoza) . And then there begins for him a great and difficult work, which perhaps will last as long as life lasts, the work of looking into the depths of this other soul ”

“ They use fine words about the wife’s important mission, the adapting power of love, until one asks some particular man: whether any love could make it pleasant for him, instead of drawing his own income, to be obliged to ask his wife for what she considered necessary for their joint expenditure or for his own. In spite of the consciousness of having herself brought wealth, or in spite of the knowledge of constantly making important contributions of work in the home, the necessity of asking for money is the wife’s unbearable torment. ”

“ Woman’s need of living and suffering for the race gives her love a purer glow, a higher flame, a profounder will, a more tireless fidelity than man’s. The unsatisfied longing for motherhood is released in an ever warmer, ever more self-sacrificing affection for the loved one. Man, on the other hand, who has less and less opportunity of giving, thereby comes to love less and less. ”

“ Full-blooded women, in a mental or bodily sense, are, on the other hand, the most valuable from the standpoint of generation. When these are content with one child or none, because they wish to devote themselves to their individual pursuits, then it is their work, not the race, which receives the richness of their blood, the fire of their creative joy, the sap of their thought, and the beauty of their feelings. ”

“ In a word, the most momentous conflict is not between health and sickness, development or degeneration, but between the two equally strong, healthy, and beautiful forms of life: the life of the soul or the life of the family.
Many women, who see the necessity of deciding for one or the other, choose the former and thus avoid or limit their motherhood, since they believe themselves to have another, richer contribution to make to civilisation. But would not the race have gained more by the talents of which these gifted women might have been the mothers? ”

“ Thus there are natures so simple that they become crippled, so uncomplex that they are foolish, so homogeneous as to be heavy. These are they who usually love once for all, with complete devotion. But, especially when they are women, Goethe’s words are often true of them: that a woman’s greatest misfortune is not to be charming when she loves. Only complete security gives these natures the calm of equilibrium, the courage of self-confidence, which calls forth the “smile of inward happiness” whereby they also become attractive. ”

“ In those cases where a woman suffers a lasting and unendurable clogging of her life through the want of motherhood, she must choose the lesser evil, that of becoming a mother even without love, in or out of wedlock. Necessity is its own law—and he who steals to save his life ought to go free. But she must not be made an example for others who are not placed in the same necessity.
The solution of the right of motherhood, therefore, ought not to be the encouragement of the majority of unmarried women to provide themselves with children without love ”

“ Now it is the story of a woman who breaks with the man she loves when he confesses his past; now that of a woman who forces her lover to marry another because the latter has borne him a child; and so on to infinity. Finally there is one who takes her life from grief over her husband’s past, which she thinks will ruin their future. Literature is the roll of the drum which announces the approach of the troop—that army of strong women who are to educate men to chastity by denying them their love. ”

“ If the youth of the North does not feel its soul in harmony with this mood, its life will have lost its springtime—without receiving in exchange a longer summer; for premature warmth has its revenge in life as in nature. To experience fully the peculiar beauty of each season of life is the attribute of a profounder comprehension of life’s meaning—and this truth is not less true because a Juliet was only fourteen. What Shakespeare has revealed in her is not the force of early love, incomparable with any other power ”

“ Nothing would be more unwelcome to them than possible consequences of their “love,” which passes from one relation to another, with a growing sense of emptiness, fatigue, and prostration. Unfruitfulness in every respect, that is their lot and their condemnation; for life has no use for the solitary unfruitful. Sometimes indeed they are not even capable of continuing to live—only to prove again and again that their soul cannot love, cannot create, cannot suffer, and has no other will but to free itself196 from the tree of life like a damaged bud, a spoilt fruit. ”

“ The conscious will to live, of our time, revolts against the meaningless sufferings through which the people of bygone days, above all the women, allowed themselves to be degraded, benumbed, and embittered. A finer knowledge of self, a stronger consciousness of personality, now puts a limit to one’s own suffering, since the danger is understood of taking hurt in one’s soul. This determination of individualism makes it impossible for the modern woman to be fired by the ideal of Griselda—if for no other reason, because she feels how all-suffering meekness increases injustice. ”