Ellen Key

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [ 55 ] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [ 29 ] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The ever clearer consciousness that love can dispense with marriage yet marriage cannot dispense [ 18 ] 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!" ”

“ Thus will youth learn to consider the love-marriage [ 27 ] 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. ”