The Renaissance
of Motherhocr
Ellen Key
By Ellen Key
The Century of the Child
The Education of the Child
Love and Marriage
The Woman Movement
Rahel Varnhagen
The Renaissance of Motherhood
The Renaissance of
Motherhood
By
Ellen Key
Author of "Love and Marriage," "The Century of the Child/' etc.
Translated from the Swedish by
Anna E. B. Fries
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
ttbe imfcfeerbocfcer press
1914
COPYRIGHT, 1914
BY
ELLEN KEY
Ube ftnfcfcerbocfcer fcress, flew H?ork
80
HAVELOCK ELLIS
IN PROFOUND ADMIRATION
AND GRATITUDE
PREFACE
TN this book I have spoken of the social
* means possible for calling forth a renais-
sance of motherhood. I have proposed the
study of eugenics; a year of social service as
preparation for motherhood ; state pensions for
mothers which does not imply that the
fathers are to be freed from the responsibility.
But the real renaissance must come through
the education of the feelings. Many women
now advance as the ideal of the future, the self-
supporting wife working out of the home and
leaving the care and education of the children
to " born " educators. This ideal is the death
of home-life and family life. No renaissance
of motherhood is possible before mothers and
teachers, through their own attitude towards
the values involved, as through the fiction
they give the girls to read, through their own
counsels and their scientific sexual enlighten-
ment, prepare the girls* hearts for love and
vi Preface
motherhood. Then young women will again
be alive to the truth, spoken by the greatest
woman poet the world ever saw:
" Passioned to exalt
The artist's instinct in me at the cost
Of putting down the woman's, I forgot
No perfect artist is developed here
From any imperfect woman. Flower from root,
And spiritual from natural, grade by grade
In all our life."
Aurora Leigh.
And then will come indeed, the new religion
of the new century, the century of the child,
now only a hope in the soul of some dreamers.
ELLEN KEY.
STRAND, ALVASTRA,
February 28, 1914.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. WOMEN AND MORALS i
II. MOTHERLINESS ..... 95
III. EDUCATION FOR MOTHERHOOD . . 123
vii
Women and Morals
IT is for women to discover what might be called
experimental morality and for us to reduce it to a
system. Woman has greater intuition and man greater
genius; woman observes and man reasons; and from
this collaboration we get the clearest light and the
most complete science of which the human mind is
capable; in other words, the surest knowledge of
one's self and of others which it is possible for human-
ity to have. 1
With these words Rousseau expresses an
ever living truth, a truth which all great
women have confirmed. They have done so
through their works as well as through their
expressions of opinions about their own sex.
Women's strength in all departments and
1 "C'est aux femmes & trouver pour ainsi dire la moral expe"ri-
mental, & nous a la reduire en systeme. La femme a plus d 'esprit
et 1 'homme plus de ge"nie; la femme observe et 1 'homme raisonne ;
de ce concours result la lumiere la plus claire et la science la plus
complete que puisse acquerir de Iui-m6me 1'esprit humain; la
plus sure connaissance en un mot de soi et des autres qui soit
a la ported de notre espece." JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.
3
4 The Renaissance of Motherhood
that of morals is no exception has not been
of the quality belonging to directly creative
genius. Their contribution to the devel-
opment of morals has grown out of their
intuition in regard to the ideal; their swift
valuations in the province of experience;
their sure eye for the shades rather than the
main lines in ethics quick sympathy in indi-
vidual cases rather than discernment of fun-
damental principles.
In the essay which follows, the word
11 morals " is used to signify the funds of
experience which humanity has gained, through
pain and joy, and of the actions which possess
a life-preserving and life-enhancing value,
for individuals as for society. That which
benefits body and soul has become good; the
opposite, evil. The development of morals
consists in an ever clearer understanding of
the most active means towards the realisation
of the aim just mentioned pursuing and en-
nobling the ideal for quickening the intensity
of life.
During this process of development (if we
except the modern Theosophic and Christian
Science movements), women have not served
morals as founders of religions; neither have
;
Women and Morals 5
they formed systems of the philosophy of
ethics. And had they been given oppor-
tunity as lawmakers, they probably would
not have created the great works of law. On
the other hand, when it comes to the applica-
tion to life of existing laws and morals, woman,
because of her willing receptiveness, her
elasticity and adaptability combined with her
power of tenacious retention, has exerted
an influence, the value of which is too vast to
be measured. Neither can its history be
written, for it would take the form of countless
histories from the animals* lair and the cave-
dwellers* hearth to our day, when the mother,
happy over some noble deed, strokes the hair
from her son's brow, to print the kiss of her
approval there ; or when with gentle words of
wisdom she draws for him the picture of those
high possibilities he may be wasting. Or it
would picture the wife who, when her husband
is called upon to choose between selfish ad-
vantage or a higher aim, urges him to sacrifice
the advantage to follow his conscience. Or
when, from the beginning of history up to our
day, women, struggling single-handed, like
Antigone of old, have illumined as by a
lightning flash the prejudices and baseness that
6 The Renaissance of Motherhood
enslaved their age. Or again when, here and
there, groups of women have stood side by
side with men in willing martyrdom for re-
ligion and country, justice and freedom. Or
as in these latter days when women, at
first one by one, afterwards in battalions,
fight for their right to equality with men,
combining their determination to have their
rights with the moral duty actively to fight
against all the sin and suffering in which
society as yet is buried.
Against these positive contributions by
women toward the growth of morals, stand
their negative influences: directly through
their own actions and indirectly through their
encouragement and acceptance of men's non-
morality in private and public life. Thus
women have sometimes retarded the ethical
evolution, sometimes led it astray. To give
one example among many: I may remind the
reader of the testimonies the Icelandic legends
bear to this influence from the day when the
men began to allow manslaughter in a family
feud to be redeemed with fines, while the
women, with tears or scorn, pricked them on
to carry out the commands of blood revenge.
Or of how, in our day, during the Boer War
Women and Morals 7
the majority of English women approved of
their own country. Every impartial retro-
spective survey of the development of morals
will show us that just as there have been times
when men and women have risen together,
there have been times when they have sunk
together. It will show us that there have
been women who have exercised not merely
all the virtues which we justly call womanly,
but also those which rightly are called manly.
Likewise it will show that women have
practised all the vices called masculine, with-
out desisting from those considered especially
feminine.
Every generalisation in regard to women
and morals of a certain age or country be-
comes misleading, unless the many exceptions
are constantly kept in mind. One such
misleading generalisation is, for example,
that men have created the code of laws, women
the code of conventions, that is, the unwritten
laws which often bind more than the written
ones. We need only remember in this con-
nection man's conception of "debts of honour "
for instance, gambling debts as compared
with his ignoring of the debt to the woman
he has betrayed; or think how sensitive his
8 The Renaissance of Motherhood
honour when prompting to duels, how lack-
ing in regard to the illegitimate children he
has brought into life. Such conceptions as
knightly honour or warrior pride, business
integrity or artistic conscience, indicate a few
of those unwritten laws which proffer sufficient
evidence that man in his sphere, to a greater
extent perhaps than woman in hers, has been
a maker of conventions, objectionable and
otherwise. It is in the province of home and
society that woman has fashioned the customs.
Here women 's approval and disapproval,
wishes and wants, have been quite as formative
and reformative as the action of the sea on
the mainland. Both in regard to what we
ought to do and what we should refrain from
doing, from table manners to the behaviour
that expresses the presence or absence of
love, from superficial refinement to large-
hearted deference, it is woman who, in home
and society, has been the leader. And to the
extent, therefore, that out ward behaviour reacts
upon inner life, woman has shaped and re-
shaped our conceptions of right or wrong.
Through quick and strong expressions of
sympathy or antipathy for certain thoughts or
actions, through a light but incessant pressure,
Women and Morals 9
she has gradually dissolved or rearranged the
strata of our ethical ideas; her persistent dis-
approval has, drop by drop, made a groove
in some strong principle; the unceasing waves
of her feelings have rounded our sharp-edged
moral commandments.
In many cases, then, woman has modified
the moral code, and again has conserved it,
by virtue of her stubborn tenacity, which is
one with her best traits tenderness, faith-
fulness, and piety. This conservatism, on the
other hand, is the reverse side of what is
intellectually the weakest of her characteristics,
her aversion to the serious mental labour
involved in the examination of new ideas,
her disinclination to the impartial quest of
truth, her lack of thirst for objective know-
ledge. These weaknesses, though less flagrant
with an advancing culture, have long made of
the average woman a fanatical defender of
blind prejudices and obsolete moral laws.
Women's ethical conservatism, however,
has been of the greatest importance. On the
one hand it gives a training in habits which
finally become instincts in regard to what is
right; on the other, by treasuring moral
assets during periods of transition, which
io The Renaissance of Motherhood
otherwise would have been swept away by
evolution when it has taken on the swiftness
of spring floods; finally, by remoulding and
thus saving certain indispensable moral gains
threatened with obliteration by a new phi-
losophy of life.
In George Eliot, we have a great yet a
typical example of women's ethical contribu-
tion to the development of moral conception.
She, who was an affirmed disciple of Comte and
Spencer; who had translated Feuerbach's
book against Christianity; who lived in a
conscience-marriage, because the man she
loved had not fulfilled the forms required for a
legal divorce, and who was therefore tied to
an unfaithful wife, she became by her works
a golden bridge between the old ethics and
the new. Or, rather, she found in her new
philosophy of life good and valid reasons for
supporting time-honoured moral laws. Her
works glorify self-sacrifice, virtue, faithfulness,
duty. She demonstrates Nietzsche's satirical
words as to the lack of consistency of the
Englishman who when discarding Christian
faith holds closer than ever to Christian
morals.
But the altruism of George Eliot, as that of
Women and Morals n
other non-Christians, has a deeper foundation.
This is upon the fact that countless people,
before and after Christianity, are Christians
by nature, and that the love of humanity has
been practised with more consistency by
many so-called heathens than by most con-
fessors of the Christian faith. To George
Eliot, life held neither beauty nor order unless
lived in altruism, in mutual helpfulness, in
sacrifice of one's own happiness for that of
others. She founded her ethics on Darwin's
then accepted theory of heredity, on Spencer's
teaching of the influence of contemporaries
and environment upon morals, on Comte's
altruistic ethics and his religious intuition
of the oneness of humanity. Because of the
relativity of morals, she considered it essential
that each generation should live in accordance
with the standard ethics of its own time.
Only thus could morals, during each age,
reach the stability necessary for building
farther and higher. She was deeply conscious
of the controlling power of the present over
the future. Every little concession to temp-
tation becomes disastrous by its consequences
not only to the individual but also to coming
generations. The recognition of this solidar-
12 The Renaissance of Motherhood
ity is more fraught with responsibility than
in the case of Christianity. Christianity
believes in the forgiveness and expunction of
sins. But the new morality is assured of the
continuous and uncontrollable consequences
of evil as well as of good actions ; consequences
which persist in wider and wider rings and thus
become determining factors for my progeny,
my age, my race, aye, the whole of human-
ity.
"Also deeds are our children, a fruitful and
immortal progeny" George Eliot, who said
these words, has crystallised the new thoughts
into art in her foremost books where, with
true psychological insight, she tells of the fall
or victory, perdition or salvation of the soul.
She reveals the norm of the ethical life of
countless women when she glorifies obedience
to the law of human love while at the same
time not in a single case does she testify to
any value in the individual's rebellion as a
means of procuring a higher morality. Tradi-
tion, piety, solidarity call forth her admiration.
And perhaps she felt a conscious need to
emphasise these virtues in order that her own
life should not be wrongly followed as an
example. Like her great Swedish counterpart
Women and Morals 13
Selma Lagerlof, she possessed so true a
womanly tenderness in her attitude toward
men and women that she discovered a treas-
ure-field of redeeming qualities in a fallen soul;
aye, she had a Christlike faith in the power of
good to overcome evil.
Thirty or forty years ago George Eliot was
an unlimited ethical power. She helped all of
us who had passed from Christianity to a new
outlook on life. She gave us strength in
self-sacrifice and comfort in suffering by assur-
ing us that nothing we had suffered would
matter a hundred years hence; that the only
thing that does matter is what we suffered
for. However severe was the education which
she offered us to fit us for our responsibilities
toward humanity, we all accepted this train-
ing with burning gratitude not the least
those of us who learned from her a sense of
sober responsibility for that new ethics which
she herself did not embrace: the right of a
great love when it proves itself a power to
elevate the life of the individual or of the race ;
the right of personal freedom of choice when
the choice blazes a glorious path to new
heights; the right of self-assertion in cases
where it brings about greater values for the
14 The Renaissance of Motherhood
present and for the future than would self-de-
nial; the right of hard-heartedness when my
self-sacrifice would harm those for whom I sac-
rificed myself; and lastly, the right of the future.
If the past held all the rights to our sacrifices
there would be no possibility of developing a
higher morality, but only of spreading the
established morality over wider areas. Not-
withstanding George Eliot and other noble
teachers of altruism, as, for instance, Tolstoy,
it is, and must ever be, an illusion that altruism
is in every case the higher virtue, while egoism
is always and in every case on a lower moral
plane. Self-preservation and self -develop-
ment are basic conditions for the practice of
altruism. They are duties toward the whole
of society as well as to the individual because
the elevation of the whole depends upon the
highest enhancement of life which each in-
dividual attains.
A day's reflection should suffice to make us
recognise this truth. On the other hand a
whole lifetime will not teach us how in each
individual case we are to draw the often
hair-splitting line between legitimate and ill-
legitimate self-assertion. Self-assertion is ille-
gitimate when it is without value for the
Women and Morals 15
whole. Therefore, if either side must be over-
emphasised it is important that women in their
ethical evolution and in the function of their
ideals have shown themselves inclined to
assert the power of human nature, especially
woman's human nature, on behalf of altruism
and sympathy. The noblest women in life
or literature have been those who have
reached the peace and harmony which are
possible only when an ethical norm is realised
in their lives. And as this harmony is more
readily attained when the norm has been long
established and observed, it is but natural
that the old-fashioned women as yet offer the
loveliest picture, ethically as well as aesthet-
ically. To these women, in our day as in all
earlier days, the duty of self-sacrifice has be-
come happiness. They have had the sanction
of their conscience as well as the outer sanction
of the patriarchal family right, and of the
Christian religion. From such conflicts be-
tween private and public duties as man's
conscience so often encounters, woman has
generally been spared. If for instance in a
period of religious transition she has hacj to
make a choice, it has only meant the exchange
of one authority for another. Even when a
1 6 The Renaissance of Motherhodd
woman has rebelled within herself against the
patriarchal family right, this rebellion only
reached her mind, not her conscience, for
"conscience is born in the recognition of the
difference between ideal and reality." But
women's power of moulding ethical ideals was
checked by authoritative religion as well as by
the conventions which their very ideals sup-
ported. Especially was it restrained by the
consciousness of the joy women alone pos-
sessed: the belief that motherhood, which
implied the highest happiness, also enjoyed
the fullest sanction as a duty. In other words,
women's foremost ethical task was not in-
volved in that progress which in other depart-
ments of life called for new ethical needs, new
aims, new efforts. The home was a closed
sphere touched only at its edge by the world's
evolution. To protect the young and tend the
old within this sphere ; to cherish and comfort,
guide and restore, train and love, to give
pleasure and to help, remained indisputably
right during all the world's changes in the
domain of home government, of religion, or
of economy. Thus in women's life theoreti-
cal and practical morals became identical, or,
in other words, what from all points of view
Women and Morals 17
was objectively right, was also subjectively
binding upon her.
With most people the ethical imperative,
" You ought, " is of little value, while through-
out centuries, superstition and fear have at
least had a restraining influence. In every
age there have been only a small number of
true Christians who have lived according to
the commandments of Christianity because
they loved God. With the rest, fear of the
punishment of society and of the torture of
Hell has been the restraining force; hope of
society's praise and heavenly reward the
incentive power. Thus a principle primarily
non-moral, yet one which has proved ser-
viceable, in the education of humanity and
in the upbringing of children, may by evolu-
tion become moral. Objective morals seldom
brought in their train other conflicts than those
between obedience and disobedience. And,
knowing that their own thought and feelings
did not suffice to answer the important ques-
tions of right and wrong, women enjoyed the
effort-saving security of mind belonging to
a life led in accordance with the Church's
interpretation of the will of God in his Ten
Commandments. If this morality of women
1 8 The Renaissance of Motherhood
had not become established through the
practice of numberless generations, its splendid
manifestation to-day in countless mothers,
who, after the day's hard labour, yet have will
and strength to promote order, morals, and
pleasure in their homes, would be inconceiv-
able.
We have now briefly sketched the pacific
relations between woman and morals. The
strong democratic movement born in the
English Civil War and the French Revolution,
which took hold of individuals and common-
wealths, included the emancipation of women.
This struggle and the struggles which have
followed it have produced much moral con-
fusion, but confusion is feared only by him
who knows not that evolution awakens needs
and desires which in their turn become motive
forces toward higher conditions than those long
honoured and accepted. Such gains are never
made without loss of some old good. Lamen-
tations over the new times are justified only
when it can be proved that a better organised
or richer life did not evolve from the confusion.
In a retrospect of the transition period we
shall often rediscover, in the new gains, values
which we had thought lost for ever, but which
Women and Morals 19
had only changed their form. Ever since
the idea of the emancipation of woman came
upon the world's stage, women have begun,
consciously and directly, to share in the trans-
formation of existing morals and to demand
a new morality, particularly in regard to the
relations between the sexes. A century has
now seen women labour with ever-increasing
energy for the renovation of sex morals. At
the same time their new position as self-
supporters has indirectly transformed many
ethical conceptions and social customs.
Therefore, when we speak of women and
morals, we must divide the subject into two
parts: the pre-emancipation and the post-
emancipation morals, the morality which
originated from the fact that woman was the
property of father, husband, and family, and
the morality which arose and is yet evolving
because this condition is being gradually, if
it is not yet entirely, abolished.
All scientific theories of the origin and devel-
opment of morals, however they may other-
wise vary, agree on this one point: that the
family is the root out of which irrespective
of differences in religious and social laws
sympathetic feelings have grown and branched
20 The Renaissance of Motherhood
in all directions. Through the child the
family became more than the union of a
man and a woman for the sake of self -pro-
tection. Preservation of the race involves
demands which even in animal life produce
ethical effects of an altruistic character. The
closer the union for common purposes the
more manifold become the ideas of "right"
in regard to married life as well as to the
larger life of society.
What the strong found serviceable became
a duty for the weak. But beside this morality
of expedience, there was at work an influence
of idealistic tendency, whose organ at this
stage was religion. Men judged the earthly
and heavenly goals presented by religion as the
highest, even when they had no tangible as-
sociation with merit or demerit. However,
the morality which sprang, not from religion,
but from life itself and its needs, remained
the most active of all influence. The affirma-
tions of the religious code of morals became
practical incentives of essential importance
only when they adapted themselves to the new
forms which social life acquired in the course
of evolution.
The necessities of family life naturally re-
Women and Morals 21
suited in the division of labour which made it
man's duty to defend and support the family
and woman's to care for the new lives. This
division of labour developed in man the so-
called manly virtues, in woman likewise the
so-called womanly virtues. The former im-
plied more directly what we now call duty
toward ourselves, the latter more directly
duty toward others. The lower the point at
which morality stands, the greater is the gulf
between these two spheres of duty.
The history of morals is pre-eminently the
history of humanity's endeavour to combine
these two spheres of duty by merging into a
single ethical system two equally indispens-
able and valuable fundamental needs, egoism
and altruism. This fusion has taken place
both within individuals and within each sex.
From certain points of view the weaker sex,
so-called, has travelled an easier path than the
stronger sex, to developed morality. The fear
of the serious consequences which the stronger
brought to bear upon the weaker, when the
latter had done "wrong, " that is, acted to the
master's disadvantage, the approval which
rewarded ' ' right, ' ' that is, action to the master's
advantage, has very likely developed women's
22 The Renaissance of Motherhood
"sense of duty " more swiftly, and made them
more obedient to existing laws and more
stubborn in retaining them. Experience, edu-
cation, example, heredity, laws, and religion
combined, however, in the case of both sexes
to give stability to morals and acquiescence
in the observance of moral laws. When ex-
perience, new economic conditions, and new
religious doctrines altered men's conceptions
of beneficial or harmful conduct ("right" or
"wrong") women had to change their ideas
accordingly. Their habit of obedience now
helped them to overcome the adherence to old
customs which the selfsame obedience had
created.
- In the age of cannibalism, woman consid-
ered it "right" to be foodstuff; in savagery,
to be a beast of burden; in barbarism, to be a
slave. Step by step, the treatment of women,
as well as that of the outlawed male prisoners
of war, was changed. In both cases, the
change took place in consequence of the
owner's new ideas as to the most profitable use
of his possession.
The conception of sex provided the world
with an explanation of its earliest history;
in other words, sexual cleavage was considered
Women and Morals 23
the cause of the origin and persistence of the
world. But although the female principle
was worshipped in its divine form a cir-
cumstance which was bound to influence
indirectly the estimation of woman she
remained in law and in life on a par with
domestic animals, well or ill treated as they.
According to the property conceptions of prim-
itive times, wives and children, slaves and
stock, were man's possession, to be used by
him as he pleased. He might sell, maltreat,
or kill them. It hardly needs to be pointed
out to what an extent such a view must have
retarded the development of man's altruism,
while it over-developed woman's obedience.
On the other hand, it ought to be stated that
among many ancient peoples, as for instance
the Egyptians and Babylonians, women pos-
sessed rights, in social as well as in private
life, which women of our age are still struggling
to win. Even in Rome under the Emperors
women boasted an economic, social, and do-
mestic equality with men far surpassing what
they enjoy in most European nations of the
present day.
Marriage was brought about first through
spoil, then by purchase, finally through gift.
24 The Renaissance of Motherhood
From the property-right in the wife, thus
invested in man, rose the idea that unfaith-
fulness was a theft from the latter which he
arbitrarily punished with death. This con-
ception of unfaithfulness as theft appears
plainly from the fact that the man was at
liberty to sell or lend his wife to other men.
Hence, it was not the sharing of the wife with
others which outraged the husband but that
this sharing took place without any benefit
to him. Women also had to submit when
supernumerary or weak children were killed
by the father or when he commanded the
mother herself to take their lives. With some
savage tribes the "duty" of child murder has
been a moral law against which woman
could not rebel without incurring penalty, or,
at least, the contempt of all "respectable"
persons, w
In no instance is it more clearly shown how
morality, at this stage, was bound up with
advantage than in this yielding of race-pre-
servation to self-preservation when the latter
demanded the death of the offspring either
after or before its birth. These once ' ' sacred ' '
duties gradually ceased to exist, partly be-
cause of easier conditions of life, but assuredly
Women and Morals '25
also because of the will toward the ideal
which exists in human nature. For morality
in its noblest forms remains inexplicable unless
one takes into account that power of growth
in the human soul which has led generation
after generation from lower religious and
ethical standards to higher ones which often
clash with worldly advantages. This con-
flict has caused the majority to advocate the
morality of expedience in opposition to the
new ethics. On the other hand, however,
every now and then some particular example
has given impetus to idealism; again it is
some rare soul, who from his higher plane
has found the customs and laws, supported
by the majority, utterly beneath his dig-
nity, that has given that impetus. Ob-
viously the growing motherliness of women
has exerted its idealistic and elevating influ-
ence on morality with reference to the above-
mentioned slaughter of children. Similarly
must the wifely faithfulness, in individual
women, have sprung from a tenderer feeling
for the child's father. But as a rule the
chastity of woman has not originated in
"woman's nature, " but in the mortal fear
which adultery brought in its trail. That this
26 The Renaissance of Motherhood
has in general been the true state of affairs
is best proved by those savage peoples whose
unmarried women live loosely, while the wives
remain faithful to their husbands. Moreover,
married as well as unmarried women have
lacked all continence when men have not
exacted it of them.
The sphere, on the other hand, where
woman's ethics have developed naturally,
that is, without external pressure, is mother-
liness; here the helplessness and loveliness of
the child have awakened the instincts of
natural sympathy. Tenderness has created
the first "social order" that of the mother
with her offspring. Through motherliness
woman later makes her great contributions to
civilisation.
These contributions are more humane cus-
toms and increasingly sympathetic feelings,
which gradually are transplanted to the father
from the mother. At this stage man's pro-
prietorship in wife and children contributed
to a great forward step in his ethical devel-
opment in that it awoke in him a desire to
protect those dependent on him. Neither
among ancient peoples nor present-day savages
has woman been as barbarously treated as has
Women and Morals 27
been commonly supposed. Just as customs
in civilised countries give to woman quite a
different position from that which the law
would indicate, so is it also the case in uncivil-
ised lands.
, That woman carries the pack, for example,
is due, as E. Westermarck has shown, to the
necessity for the man to be instantly prepared
for armed battle. In this, as in many other
cases, "egoism" has a deeper basis than the
seeming one.
Because of her motherhood, woman's sexual
nature gradually became purer than man's.
The child became more and more the centre
of her thoughts and her deeds. Thus the
strength of her erotic instincts diminished.
The tenderness awakened in her by her child-
ren also benefited the father. Out of this
tenderness as also out of admiration for the
manly qualities which the father developed
in the defence of herself and her children
gradually arose the erotic feeling directed to
this man alone. Thus love began. For ages
it could not reach a higher form, as woman had
no freedom of choice. First in our day and
among the highest civilised nations has woman
become a free agent in the sight of the law
28 The Renaissance of Motherhood
in choosing her life partner. Even among
many of these nations, however, the marriage
union still bears traces of the earlier times
when woman and child were man's property.
It is these traces which, for the sake of man's
as well as woman's ethical ennoblement, we
now desire to eradicate.
In marriage there must finally be perfect
equality between husband and wife, in per-
sonal freedom of action, in right to earnings and
other property, in authority over the children.
For centuries, the forces have been at work
which gradually have changed marriage con-
ditions for the better. But in the last century
alone, woman has led directly in the great
battle for higher marriage ethics. Before,
she had contributed indirectly to the elevation
of such morality. Through the demonstra-
tion of their worth, in the first place, but also
through the influence of their opinions, mother
and wife, daughter and sister, have remoulded '
man's appreciation of woman; have refined
his love and enhanced his sense of justice.
Thus the moral transformations already ap-
parent in laws and customs have after all
emanated from woman.
The influence of Christianity has been active
Women and Morals 29
at the same time and to a certain extent.
But modern moral philosophers, as for in-
stance the already mentioned Prof. Edward
Westermarck, contend that this influence has
been overrated. Christianity's new outlook
on moral values did assuredly exercise a strong
indirect influence. On the whole it may be
said that heathendom glorified the masculine
virtues while Christianity glorifies the femi-
nine virtues. Especially may the latter be
observed in the cult of the Madonna, which
brought about a greater reverence for woman,
particularly for the mother. But what the
Church gave with one hand it took back with
the other. The ancient world looked on
marriage as a duty to race and society. The
Pauline Christianity permits it, but as a
necessary recourse against temptations.
Like other Asiatic religions, Christianity
considered sexual life as impure; true purity
was attained only in celibacy. When, thus,
even the marriage sanctified by the Church
was looked upon as a lower state, it stands to
reason that when woman, outside of marriage,
tempted man to unchastity, she was looked
upon, to use the strong expression of an
Apostolic Father, as the " gate of the Devil."
30 The Renaissance of Motherhood
Every sexual relation outside of marriage was
condemned. Thus, if already during heathen-
dom woman's virtue had been judged by her
sexual morality, this became the case to still
greater degree during Christianity. A woman's
''virtue" meant her virginity before marriage
and her faithfulness afterwards. As long as
death, the pillory, and the whipping-post were
the penalties for women's digressions from the
path of virtue it was a mother's obvious desire
to train her daughter strictly to follow this
path. Uponthelossof the daughter's "honour,"
the fathers vented their curse and society its
scorn; while the son's "honour" consisted
solely in general human or manly and patriotic
qualities.
To be sure, woman's transgressions against
life, property, and character were punished in
the same way as were man's, and her strength
and courage were similarly appreciated. But
she was seldom obliged to exercise these
virtues or to resort to crime for the sake of
economic and juridical self-preservation, as
she stood under the protection of the man.
Thus man's virtue consisted in courage,
energy, pride, honour, and business ability,
while his sexual morality was in nowise con-
Women and Morals 31
nected with his "honour" and "virtue." In
certain cases, however, for example, abduc-
tion, rape, incest, bigamy, and child-murder,
the Church demanded self-control even of the
man. And certainly the Church contributed
greatly to the elevating of sexual ethics in tak-
ing a stand for monogamy. But many of these
regulations had existed before Christianity, and
monogamy was already generally practised
in the Roman Empire.
The benefit which ethical development
derived from Christianity through a stricter
marriage law is counteracted by the heavy
debt of the Church to illegitimate children,
and to the unhappily married couples held in
yoke together in obedience to the command-
ments of the Church.
In determining the influence of the Church
. upon sexual morality, account must be taken
not only of the sacrifice of the innocent just
referred to, but also of the complete falsifica-
tion of sex morals which grew out of the ec-
clesiastical point of view. Sexual slavery in
matrimony, never discountenanced by the
Church, intensified in woman all the vices
which man later called "woman's nature."
j. She gained all the blessings of life mother-
32 The Renaissance of Motherhood
hood, housewifely honour, support, protection,
and enjoyment if she pleased a man to such
an extent that he wanted to marry her. Thus
her thoughts, feelings, and actions were all
bent in one direction to please. First in the
parental home, then in the home of her hus-
band, woman's prospect of attaining her
ends depended upon her ability in shamming
obedience and fibbing assent. How then was
it possible for the average woman to escape
from becoming fawning, flattering, sly, and
hypocritical? A self-control forced by outer
pressure may, indeed, create good habits, but
may equally well result in simulated habits,
that is, in falseness. Woman became a
coward, because she was not allowed to act
on her own risk or responsibility, for, if she
made the attempt, she was rudely pressed
back into submission.
To what extent all these " woman's vices "
will disappear, when the era of woman's full
freedom is established, only the future can
determine. But already the present age gives
fair promise that the slanderers of "woman's
nature" will be found in the wrong. The
tendencies, considered especially feminine,
to self-indulgence, luxury, gossip, and scandal
Women and Morals 33
are neither womanly nor manly. They spring
in either sex from a low ethical and intellectual
culture. And as women, for centuries, have
stood on a lower plane of culture than men of
the same class, women more often have pos-
sessed these faults. But they are showing
happy tendencies to diminishing proportions,
the more woman's culture advances. Con-
stantly increasing numbers of women are
learning, through scientific studies, for instance,
subjection to truth, intellectual probity, un-
selfish perseverance. And this new ethic
must also work a change in their private lives.
In the measure that the rich women are
released from the housewifely labour through
new industrial conditions of production, they
become idle and incapable. Countless are the
women parasites who, to satisfy their craving
for pleasure and luxury, impoverish father or
husband. These lame limbs in the social
organism, which themselves accomplish no-
thing, but for whom all other limbs work, are
the most flagrant example of womanly im-
morality in the present. And they live in
this immorality without a trace of compunc-
tion. As a result of this parasitism, erotic
interest has become the whole content of life
34 The Renaissance of Motherhood
to these women. Under the influences of
many centuries of sex-slavery, the erotic life
has developed at the expense of other sides of
woman's nature. And our age unfortunately
still possesses a class of women who as sex
beings only desire sensual gratification. When
women have reached this stage, sex-hatred is
near, a hatred which is likely to be the last
phase of sex-slavery.
There are no more dangerous enemies in
the ethical campaign for the liberation of
women than this class which drags sexual
morality down to the animal plane.
II
If, as some men contend, the above-men-
tioned severe judgments of woman's morality,
during the period of sex-slavery, were all
there was to say about this morality, we
might well hasten from the past and the
present to the future. But fortunately,
woman's ethics during pre-emancipation have
brought humanity immeasurable values. In
the first place, motherhood not only developed
sympathy and altruism, it also called forth a
whole group of virtues which man seldom
noted, because to him they seemed just as
Women and Morals 35
naturally to belong to the woman as the milk
which flowed from the mother-breast to the
lips of the child. Kant's definition of virtue
as that which is difficult, that which breeds
apathy and demands self-mastery, has a long
pedigree in the estimation of morals. Because
woman's sex virtue was difficult, it perforce
became her true "virtue." Her other ethi-
cal attainments patience, considerateness,
thriftiness, etc. were taken for granted, were
considered her natural characteristics, as were
also her devotion and willingness to sacrifice
herself; like the atmosphere, they were only
noticed when absent. All the qualities de-
veloped in the care of children, as in other
early spheres of women's work, farming,
handiwork, etc., were no more "natural"
than the vices produced by sex-slavery. But
the stimulus from without to the virtues
mentioned may be traced to self- as well as
race-preservation. By reason of the power
which associations of ideas wield over feeling,
will, and thought, these virtues, which had been
produced as it were automatically, were con-
sequently little appreciated, while woman's
relation to the sex morality demanded by men
settled her ethical worth.
36 The Renaissance of Motherhood
During this one-sided moral training, right,
that is the sexual self-mastery which once
roused her disinclination because enforced,
became gradually her inclination, or in a more
beautiful word, her happiness. She realised
that man's demand that the children he sup-
ported should be his own helped to inspire his
love for them, and that thus her faithfulness
to him contributed to their welfare. She
realised that legalised motherhood gave the
children the devotion and protection of their
father, while illegal motherhood deprived them
of those blessings. She realised that she could
give the children better care because of the
protection marriage afforded. Faithfulness
then became a demand, dictated not by
superficial life alone but by its inner reality,
and a demand which won her personal ap-
proval.
That the mother grew into closer relation-
ship with the child was a natural consequence
of her greater physical and psychical con-
tribution to it. This deeper feeling of the
mother for the child was, and is, consciously
and unconsciously, the innermost reason why
chastity finally has become with many women
a second nature, which consequently costs
Women and Morals 37
them no struggle and needs no coercion. The
feelings of sympathy and consideration pro-
duced by family-life and housemother duties
scattered women's emotions in several direc-
tions, and in the degree to which they grew
cooler erotically the more sensitive did they
become in reference to their sexual integrity,
and especially did they guard this integrity
when they themselves loved.
Thus out of the animal sex instinct there
gradually evolved human love that is the
dedication of soul and senses to one individual
to the exclusion of all others. In love of the
husband, as earlier in love of the child, were
focussed all the noblest virtues of woman, Tier
most sublime self-sacrifice. Just as this love
of husband and wife also led her to criminal
deeds when her general moral level was lower
than that of her love. Hence, when, in any
ethical department, unity is attained be-
tween outer demands and inner desires,
between nature and conscience, between the
needs of society and the individual, the moral
formula is void, because inner necessity then
makes it psychically and physically impossible
to break the outer law. Thus true morality
is attained.
38 The Renaissance of Motherhood
.From woman's realisation of the fact that
her sexual morality was of greater importance
to the race than that of man, followed her
deliberate or thoughtless acceptance of the
double standard which exists even in our day.
Men continue to judge women, and the latter
to judge themselves and each other, according
to sexual relations. Such relationship has de-
termined women's honour or dishonour, mo-
rality or immorality, in a mode extremely
perilous to their general human morals. The
"fallen" woman was not she who lied or belied,
hated or intrigued ; not she who at home daily
behaved in a way which made the home a hell
for its inmates. No, not even she who stole,
murdered and committed arson; such a
woman was only " criminal", not "fallen."
"Fallen," once and for ever, was only the
woman who outside of marriage allowed her-
self the natural expression of one side of her
life. Fallen is she even if the most soulful
love caused her "fall." This estimation of
woman's morality has, consciously and un-
consciously, lowered man's respect for the
woman he has seduced or for the one who has
freely given herself to him. His conscience
has remained asleep because neither pub-
Women and Morals 39
lie opinion nor his mistress has awakened
it.
Hence the deserted women have been
tempted to all the crimes which result from
this standard for woman's morality.
It is well known that female criminals
or at least those punished by law are every-
where far less numerous than male criminals.
In Sweden, for example, only one in seventy
criminals is a woman; in England, on the
other hand, one in five, because there alcohol,
the main source of male crime, also attracts
women. In connection with woman's lesser
criminality we must remember her position,
always more protected than man's; her
greater fear of consequences, induced by her
livelier imagination; but especially must we
remember the fact that when the man, unable
or unwilling to work, becomes a thief or a
white-slaver (according to recently published
statistics, Chicago alone had 1500 white and
300 coloured men in this trade), the woman
similarly constituted becomes a prostitute.
Likewise it is this livelihood which women
with starvation wages, unemployed, or just
out of prison often resort to, while men in
the same predicament choose some expedient
40 The Renaissance of Motherhood
which brings them into more immediate
conflict with the law.
In judging the murders and thefts com-
mitted by women, we must especially take
into consideration the influence of the great
cities. Here flourish the desire to attract
-attention, the craving for luxury, all the
hysterical desires which, in both sexes, lead
to crime, or cause them to entice each other.
We know how often a woman is at the root of
a man's evil deed, and a man behind the
crime of a woman. But the main causes of
crime in the large cities are, and ever will be,
want, bad housing, and the lack of wholesome
joy. That women of the labouring classes do
not oftener become criminals under the in-
fluence of the atmosphere of the large cities
is a high testimony to woman's morality; we
know, on the other hand, that the female
parasites of luxury in the great cities often
turn out to be master- thieves, in never
paying their dressmakers and other pur-
veyors.
Nationality must also be taken into account
when we consider the crimes of women. As an
instance, with the Germanic peoples, respect
for life is greater than with the Romanic.
Women and Morals 41
Woman, however, as the bearer and guardian
of the new lives, has everywhere greater re-
spect for life than man, who for centuries,
as hunter and warrior, learned that the taking
of lives may be not only allowed, but honour-
able. Woman's greater reverence for life
probably also contributes to the fact that
suicide is comparatively rare among women.
Woman's subconscious respect for her own
body as the origin of the new race, together
with her physical timidity, probably restrains
her in regard to this crime, which, moreover, by
the Church, for many centuries, was consid-
ered the worst of all.
Most crimes committed by the female sex,
whether against written or unwritten laws,
are in some way connected with the sex
morality of the time. Abortion, child-murder,
and such crimes are women's special tempta-
tions, particularly in countries where society
passes its harshest judgments upon unmarried
mothers. And these women are certainly
not, as a rule, the worst kind. On the con-
trary, it is often because of love for the child
that they commit the crime which but a few
days' care of the baby life would have made
impossible. Prison chaplains have testified
42 The Renaissance of Motherhood
that the infant murderers constitute the moral
lite among the prisoners. A striking mani-
festation of the preposterousness of the pre-
sent norm for woman's morality!
An indirect consequence of the existing
double standard is, that most women's ideas
of right and honour in social questions have
remained just as dull as most men's conceptions
in regard to sexual questions. The easy con-
science with which women secretly trespass
against the law has often struck man with
amazement. He ought instead to wonder
that women's social morals are not worse.
Those thinkers and writers who have talked
of woman's "criminal nature," of her "moral
weakness," have never proved anything but
that the women from whom they have
gathered their experiences have been ill-
chosen by themselves. It is still more amazing
to find woman who as citizen, in many
important questions, is absolutely without
rights on great occasions in the life of the
nation showing herself fully equal to man in a
sense of duty and willingness to self-sacrifice.
Many mothers, besides the Spartan and the
Japanese, have sent their sons to battle for
their country; many women have become
Women and Morals 43
martyrs for the truth they themselves have
embraced. And in our day the working-
women within the socialist ranks have de-
veloped a sacrificing spirit and a solidarity
which prove that the new ethical demands of
a progressing world find the same response
in women as in men.
But on the whole, the experience that the
activity of the soul obeys the law of least
resistance has been verified even in regard to
women's social morals. As a rule these have
been focussed on the family and on charity;
among other reasons, because woman's sense
of duty seldom finds means of expression in
other directions. Man's highest morality, ex-
emplified in his sacrifices for unselfish aims,
his fearless search for' truth in the fields of
thought and faith, his burning desire for
justice for all, has only in exceptional cases and
in agitated times been achieved by woman.
The essential condition for all activity, op-
portunity to act, has been denied to woman,
and thus the stimulus of her moral ambition
and the development of her social responsi-
bility have necessarily been retarded. To be
sure, social morality has demanded even of
woman that she take her allotted place in a
44 The Renaissance of Motherhood
higher unity, that she, for instance, in times
of distress, make sacrifices for her country or
her fellows. But in everyday life this higher
unity has never been too great to be embraced
within her arms. The ethical principle, the
greatest possible happiness for the greatest
possible number for whose realisation the
struggles of the present age are raging this
principle woman in her little sphere has easily
been able to apply. What her conscience
has commanded, her heart has affirmed and
her reason has harmonised with her will.
It does not necessarily follow that women's
feeling of responsibility, even in regard to the
home, has been sufficient.
The production of the requisites of the home
during the age of domestic manufacture de-
veloped in women a great capacity for work
which was also well compatible with joy in
work. But although woman gradually im-
proved the art of cooking, of dressing, and of
other home occupations, we must admit the
truth of men's contention on the one hand,
that all ingenious creatures within this ancient
sphere of woman's labour have been men, and
on the other hand that the average level of
women's proficiency has been low; and again,
Women and Morals 45
that in the departments where the duty and
custom of centuries ought to have taught them
efficiency, the majority still bungle. This is
especially true in the field of education. Not
only is there a dearth of creative genius among
women educators, but more, the majority
of women have not an inkling even of the
purport of true education. The same may
indeed be said of many men who, as a rule,
do not accomplish the best possible in their
sphere of work. Yet the difference in woman's
and man's business pride is just as indisput-
able as its reason is easily found. Man's
work is appraised by customers and employers,
while woman's work has been uncontrolled and
irresponsible, a field of activity where man's
discontent alone could cause an improvement
if needed. Woman's want of economic means
also combined to make her practical contri-
butions toward improved labour methods of
rare occurrence. But the most important
reason was, and is, that woman's conservatism
found the old customs good enough, and that
no one has expected of her a higher insight than
the advice inherited from mother and grand-
mother in regard to the care of children and
home.
46 The Renaissance of Motherhood
The economic and moral consequences of
woman's lack of experience in handling money
are everywhere noticeable. What she ought
to purchase for money provided by the hus-
band; how to discriminate between essentials
and non-essentials; absolute or temporary
needs; when to save or when to spend all
these are conceptions of duty in domestic
management yet lacking in women. In these
questions of right, women are yet sinning
greatly through thoughtlessness and ignorance,
shiftlessness and laziness. This is where they
ought to love their neighbour; that is, the
physical and spiritual well-being of those
nearest to them. And these sins are not most
rare among classes where means are plentiful
to provide for the health and comfort of the
family.
Women's flippant self-content in the ful-
filment of their duties remained with them
when they began to enter the field of remun-
erative labour. Women accustomed to man-
ual labour soon learned through necessity to
produce satisfactory work. But women of
the upper classes for instance, widows and
daughters who, upon the death or failure of
the family supporter, were compelled to earn
Women and Morals 47
a livelihood were in no way prepared for this
necessity. When free to choose, their first
concern was to find the easiest and most
refined work, not that which they could do
well. They expected the same privileges as
the home-worker; for example, indifference
on the part of their employers to promptness,
freedom to rest unnecessarily, to waste time,
never to be ready at the time promised, etc.
And especially did the notion prevail that the
remunerative labour could be carried on with
the same dilettantism as the home work.
Stern necessity has taught women more and
more to discard these bad habits, and now
they frequently excel men in moral devotion
to business. In connection with the demand
for professional training as a condition for
women's employment, their labour efficiency
shows a rapid growth. Wives and daughters
from the well-to-do classes, who have never
come in contact with the hard conditions of
life, because a man has protected, and de-
cided for, them; who have never received the
economic ethical education which only per-
sonally earned means can bestow; who have
never handled any but " pocket money,"
"gifts" from men, such women have learned
48 The Renaissance of Motherhood
in an amazingly short time to become capable
of work, to become economically independent
members of society.
Women had grown accustomed even to
conceal as "un womanly " their longing for
knowledge, work, and economic independence.
During the days of sex-slavery woman learned
"instinctively to hide all which she thought
might detract from her in men's eyes, even
her best qualities when she imagined they
might incur man's ridicule or displeasure/' 1
Economic necessity has now forced her to
become more frank. In a generation, en-
terprise, venturesomeness, and self-confidence
have grown apace with competence. Less and
less often do you hear a woman sigh, "I want
to so much, but I cannot" or "I may not";
more and more often do you hear her express
the words formerly considered "unwomanly,"
"I want to, and what I want to do I can do. "
Among the economic ideas with a moral
bearing which it would seem that women
might have been able to originate is co-opera-
tion. Yet they have failed to take the initia-
tive. Since the movement gained a start,
however, women of the present day have
'Havelock Ellis.
Women and Morals 49
begun wisely to work together to improve
domestic as well as social work. Here they
have found new use for the most desirable
qualities developed in the best of them from
the time of primitive home-production: fore-
thought, thrift, managing ability, and sense
of beauty, all virtues which they have intensi-
fied by a methodicalness, promptness, and
discipline not possessed by their grandmothers.
To what an extent these new women still
have retained their devotion and willingness
to sacrifice themselves is best shown by the
many women, supporters of families, who now
work outside of the home for those dependent
upon them, with as much tenderness as they
formerly worked within the four walls of the
home.
It remains for women, whether working in
public or private life, to learn another duty,
the art of living. To overwork until a
nervousness sets in which finally precludes self-
control; to throw one's self into social activ-
ities to such an extent that the home-life
suffers ; to allow wrangling, nagging, and fault-
finding to mar the family life; to bring pres-
sure and constraint to bear where no ethical
values are to be gained; to miss a sense of
50 The Renaissance of Motherhood
proportion between labour and rest all these
are shortcomings in the art of living, an art
which is sadly undeveloped in modern women
as well as in men. The good old phrase
"charity begins at home" needs recognition
as a serious principle of duty. Perhaps the
most immoral consequence of the patriarchal
family conception lies in the fact that for ages
the family ties have been valued as immutable
assets and therefore without apprehension
hidden in the bottom of the chest as so much
cold gold. One locks it in; it is not supposed
to need nursing. Even those who do not fail
in the duty of "loving their neighbours " fall
short in fulfilling the duty of being lovable
at home as abroad.
The art of living demands that our interest
in bringing forth flowers in our family life equal
the interest we take in bringing them forth
in our window gardens. So long as their home-
life (esthetics have not become ethics, women
need not expect \ t&bands, children, or servants
to feel happy in the homes of their creation.
With women as with men, with the old as with
the young, with the heads of the household
as with the servants, the dying out of the
patriarchal ens' ,/ns and the fixed and authori-
Women and Morals 51
tative philosophy of life have brought in their
train a serious levity in the life of the in-
dividual, the home, and society. Everywhere
subjective inclination is followed in lieu of
objective norms. No one need fear but what
new principles will gradually crystallise out of
all this formlessness, so that the human
relationships will again be invested with a
new and noble garb. But thus far the self-
denial and self-control which made family life
beautiful in the past are sadly lacking in the
home habits and social customs of the present
day. And such traditions are not merely
empty shells. They enclose and guard a
kernel of ethical value. They are educational
means of spiritual and moral import which the
modern women utilise neither in their own
interest nor in that of their children. The
need of a change in this respect is already so
deeply felt that we hear everywhere calls for
a renaissance of the home and social life.
A more individualised ethical conviction
as the sole guide in the great private decisions
of life; a more and more uniform morality
in public life; a good tone in social life common
to all classes, sexes, and ages, this is the goal
women should set for their contribution to the
52 The Renaissance of Motherhood
growth of morals. If women really desire
to "save home and society," as they have
stated, while demanding new rights, then the
road to such salvation lies in a more deliberate
guarding of the best in the old conditions
combined with all the good gifts of latter-day
evolution. Women must, as a moral duty,
combat, in themselves and in others, inclina-
tion not only to shirk work, but to bustle in
work; they must consider as sins all habits
which disturb the healthful normal proportions
in life. They must favour all tendencies to the
saving of the human energies for higher pur-
poses; they must further all kinds of co-
operation which purposes to satisfy best and
most economically all the needs of the day;
and not least the need of rest, and joy in work.
The women who stand highest do already
exercise these duties, but on the whole, the
conception of duty in this respect is confused
by the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice on
the one hand and the zeal for social work on
the other.
in
Since women have undertaken remunerative
labour, outside of the home, an occupation
Women and Morals 53
forced upon them by the changed economic
conditions, methods of production, and their
simultaneous struggles for emancipation, the
problems of women's morals have multiplied
and women's conceptions of morals have
broadened. Out of the demand for the right
to work grew the realisation of the duty to work;
from the realisation of this duty, the honour
of labour was born, and from the honour of
labour the step to social work was short.
The more women have developed their
common human qualities, the more have they
been right in their demand that their morality
be measured by another measure than that of
sex morality, and also that man's sex morals
should be considered in the judging of his
morality. Thus the modern woman has en-
deavoured both to widen the sphere of her
moral duty and to narrow man's moral liberty.
In other words, woman has had the audacity
to apply the principle of individuality even to
sex morals and thus to proclaim that neither
in man nor in woman should blind obedience
to moral traditions, but the verdict of the
individual conscience in the first place, and
the effect on society in the second place, be-
come the determining factor. The influence
54 The Renaissance of Motherhood
on society must without question determine
our objective ethics, but such precepts need
not always nor everywhere coincide with the
subjective moral obligation. The trend of a
woman's will, her ethical ideal, must be taken
into account when judging her actions as has
long been done in the case of man. In the
sphere of morality, woman will no longer be
content to cultivate the sympathetic feelings
and sex virtue. She wants to express her
whole self in her life-plan; she will be guided
sometimes by altruism, sometimes by egoism,
with the right to decide when the one or the
other will best subserve her larger life. This
has led the modern woman into numberless
conflicts between individual and social duty.
The pictures Ibsen has drawn of such conflicts
have shaken our consciences, but even earlier
they have appeared in literature when the
latter has been great enough to mirror the
whole life of contemporary times.
Some of woman's new moral battles have
taken place in the sphere of national life; for
example, the Russian women's participation
in the political revolution, often in the form
of nihilistic attempts on life. We have an-
other example in the English suffragette's
Women and Morals 55
mode of warfare. A comparison favours the
Russian women, for the reason that they have
tried, through their actions, to expose extreme
wrongs to all, wrongs which would not be
known except through deeds of violence.
The English women have set out from the
wrong notion that because men, driven to
political despair, have committed deeds of
violence, women also should in cold blood
conceive and organise similar outrages. Thus
they do not act rashly, but with great fore-
thought, driven onward by the delusion that
they cannot win the political right to prove
how much better a world created by both
men and women would be, unless they use the
lowest weapons employed by men in this
" man-made world."
The enthusiasm and generosity even unto
death of the suffragettes are as strong as their
social thinking is weak. To commit crime
for the sake of gaining the right to benefit
society in other words, to apply the Jesuit
maxim, "The end justifies the means" is
ethically so untenable that we can overthrow
the fallacy at once with the question, May
not these women, following out their mode
of thinking, later commit election frauds or
56 The Renaissance of Motherhood
other demoralising actions during political
campaigns? In America, women have already
cheated at elections. And why should they
not do so everywhere if they were able thereby
to assure the election of the candidate in
favour of their noble reform plans? The un-
conditional no, with which even the suffragists
answer this question, stamps the entire suffra-
gette morality as a remainder of the masculine
morality in politics, a morality which would
stoop to acquire justice and power through
violence. To be sure, Spencer's opinion that
all violent transformations in the social order
are harmful, is historically proved to be an
exaggeration. But history has also proved
without a doubt that the fruits of a successful
revolution are easily lost, for the psychological
reason that those who long have lacked rights
and then take them by storm, seldom are able
to keep them, and are even less able to use
them wisely. The social reconstruction we
look forward to through woman's suffrage will
prove a structure of loose bricks without
cement to hold them together, unless a higher
morality than man has shown in the past
constitute its binding element.
In passing, it should be emphasised that the
Women and Morals 57
very idea of the emancipation of woman has
been hitherto one of the greatest stimuli of
higher idealism in modern times, and thus a
strong force for moral advance. Those who
are able to dream have had the most beautiful
visions of the woman of the future, just as
the socialist in his dreams sees the perfected
society of the future. True, neither the fu-
ture woman nor the coming state will ever
reach the beauty of our dreams. But the
dream has uplifted the dreamers ethically, and
given strength and renewed strength to mil-
lions of tired struggling men and women to
persevere in the battle without which neither
the future woman nor the future state ever
will become anything but dreams. But are we
to believe that the deeds of the suffragettes,
by virtue of the ideal sacrificial spirit which
stimulates them, are "the stuff that dreams
are made of " ? Hardly.
The present-day women, who thus through
their sense of justice have become criminals,
are fortunately few compared with all those
who, with the same burning will to self-
sacrifice and with wholly clean weapons, have
fought for their sexual rights, and for many
common human rights. These latter women
58 The Renaissance of Motherhood
ought to have atoned in the eyes of men for
their sisters' Jesuit morality.
For more than a hundred years, women at
first always called "un womanly " and " im-
moral" have worked unceasingly for the
elevation of social morals. We find them
active in movements for better care of the
sick and prisoners, in combating alcohol and
prostitution, in improving conditions of labour,
housing, and general sanitation. They are
working for the protection of motherhood and
childhood, for the education and healthful
recreation of the masses and of children.
They share generously in the care of the poor
and aged. They are a powerful factor in the
question of peace and arbitration. It is not
with words alone that they have proved their
right to full citizenship; an enormous sum of
ethical and altruistic exertions already sup-
ports such a claim. And this manifestation
of energy has brought about a corresponding
improvement in women's social responsibility,
an improvement which has reacted favourably
also upon men, who, in this department, have
not taken as broad initiatives as women.
We may well aver that men's and women's
ethical views combined have accomplished
Women and Morals 59
that awakening of the social conscience which
has manifested itself more generally in the
last century than before in a thousand years.
Social motherliness has made women's struggle
for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism
and altruism.
George Eliot's words already quoted are
true also of the modern women : the more they
have freed themselves from the authority of
ecclesiastical Christianity, the more eager they
become to convert the commands of Christian
love into social actions. And, fortunately,
women's practical sense has prevented them
from following the programme of a Tolstoy,
which is too incompatible with real life to
serve as a foundation for creative social work.
Women's contributions to this work have
ushered in the "moral sans sanction ni obli-
gation 1 ' which Guyau preached. A moral
founded on the sympathetic instincts, the
feeling of solidarity, the spirit of mutual
helpfulness, because these categories best
promote the well-being of the individual as
. well. We observe the realisation of Guyau's
optimistic assurance: that sympatHy, love,
and pity more and more become, not only a
matter of conscience, but a source of happiness.
60 The Renaissance of Motherhood
Social motherliness, unfortunately, has its
hands still bound in countless cases where they
are most needed. And if ever a right has
been demanded from altruistic motives, it is
true in the case of woman suffrage and the
married woman's right over self and property.
IV
Women's social morality, like the bean of
the Hindu fakir, lias thus grown from night
to morning to a tall stalk. But we must not
forget that the stalk throws a shadow!
As soon as one is not content with a dog-
matic simplification of the life problems, the
woman morality of our day becomes the most
complex of all modern problems. No factor
must be left out of account if this is to tally
with truth.
And the truth is that the social work, just
as much as the remunerative work, has be-
come a natural expression of women's self-
assertion and of their desires to utilise all those
personal forces to which may be applied the
Dutch proverb rust roest (rest rusts, or, in
rest rust appears). In the meantime other
forces have remained practically unused. Such
Women and Morals 61
opponents to feminism as contend that
woman's political influence will debilitate the
people's virility, weaken their laws, retard
their national self-assertion, are less likely to
prove true prophets than those who fear the
opposite: that women will become more and
more manlike.
Public life has become a strong stimulus, a
stimulus no longer found in the home. Ambi-
tion has developed into a passion which drives
women, as well as men, to great works and
small deeds. Formerly competitors in the
race for men, they are now competing in the
race for social tasks and distinctions. The
social morality of the younger women has
improved more than their personal morality,
which is the same as that of their mothers and
grandmothers. The older generation still sees
duty in the direction of overcoming tempta-
tions to anger and vengeance, arrogance and
vanity, temper and self-deception. The new
ethical will of the younger generation is for
knowledge, work, and social activity. But all
this gives little time for the daily self-examina-
tion so necessary for persistent efforts toward
ideal goals. Sweden's great saint, Birgitta,
took a bitter herb in her mouth, each time
62 The Renaissance of Motherhood
she was angry, to chastise her tongue. The
woman of the present day has not even time
to bite her tongue upon like occasions! All
that which formerly belonged to the concep-
tion of sanctification and made man in-
trospective, has small place in his present
superficial life. Ever fewer present-day men
and women find time for the individual culture
which makes the soul more serene, gentle,
wise, and at the same time broad ; which makes
the personality harmonious through its eman-
cipation from externals. And yet there is
nothing we need more in our strenuous age
than moral culture, or, if we prefer so to call
it, the morals of culture. Our lack of self-
discipline has been given a medical not a
moral name; it is called " nervousness " and
" hysteria " and is given sanatorium treatment.
But this is far from being the only cure
needed to restore balance to this age suffering
from mental St. Vitus dance. The successes
of Christian Science and similar movements
depend upon their teaching the duty of con-
tinuous self-examination and self-control, that
these are made the condition for the dietetics
of the soul about which the German physician,
Feuchtersleben, long ago wrote a splendid
Women and Morals 63
little book. Lately two Danes, L. Fejlberg and
C. Lambek, have written excellent books
dealing with the greatest possible yield of
spiritual forces and, concerning a form of cul-
ture of personality as yet unknown to most
people. I mean a culture productive of values
which cannot be called directly moral because
they determine all the conditions of the soul.
We may learn an art of living by which the
soul can grow in alertness and candour, in mo-
bility and warmth, in height and depth. And
this art women should be the first to acquire.
If we prefer, we may call it the gymnastics of
the soul by which the spiritual "organism"
is kept elastic and succulent instead of grow-
ing stiff and dry. We may make our feelings
warmer, our interests richer, our mental con-
ceptions clearer, our observations broader,
our sentiments more serene, our judgments
wiser, our will more swiftly steered toward
worthy goals. Only by considering such a
culture of the resources of our soul as an ethical
duty can we develop the fulness of personality
indicated. The essential requisites for such
culture are psychologic insight, determination,
peace, and time. But how is it possible for
the ever busy mortals of to-day to take cognis-
64 The Renaissance of Motherhood
ance of all this? Ask an active club member
if she has drawn deeply once a year from some
well of wisdom in her library; or if Sunday is
made a day of rest to body and soul; or if she
once a week receives a deep impression from
nature or music, or if when seeking such inspi-
ration, she has had the inner repose which
allows the impressions to flood the soul, and
not only to reach the eye and the ear.
If women's new social morality shall in
truth lift humanity not only out of misery,
but up to a nobler spiritual affluence, then
their own soul culture must attain heights not
yet dreamed of by the majority even of our
most excellent women to-day. The dishearten-
ing evidence of the truth that woman's soul-
culture has not developed to the extent that
her desire for freedom has grown is found in
the domain of sexual ethics. First we observe
as a sad result of present economic conditions
an increasing number of women who, although
well fitted to propagate the race, yet invol-
untarily are doomed to remain dry branches on
the tree of life. The consequence is a mani-
fold degeneration even in the sphere of
morality, because the never appeased yearn-
ing for love and motherhood causes many
Women and Morals 65
abnormal situations and mental conditions.
Further we find married women losing ability,
or will, to become mothers, some on account
of overwork, others on account of a frivolous
desire for pleasure. Finally we note how in
the last hundred years, the severe labour con-
ditions wreck mothers as well as children.
It will take another century of unceasing
effort to overcome all this psychical and
physical degeneracy.
This demoralisation alone shows us plainly
enough to what a pass the world, governed
exclusively by men, has come.
But besides these facts of a purely statis-
tic nature, which prove that "evolution" is
not always synonymous with progress, there
are other evidences that do not admit of
being stated in figures, which give similar
testimony.
George Eliot was the highest representative
of womanly conservatism in the sphere of
morality. Another woman, George Sand,
is the fiery proclaimer of woman's right to
freedom, particularly in the same department.
She utters one of the few truths which have
eternal life, when she calls legal marriage
without mutual love immoral, but true love
5
66 The Renaissance of Motherhood
even without legal marriage moral. The
consequence of this maxim is that all the
remainders of sex-slavery in present-day
marriage make it immoral as an institution
even when the individuals stand higher than
the institution. Only the free giving under per-
fect equality can make the marriage relationship
moral, that is, found it on an inner necessity,
not an external coercion. But unfortun-
ately George Sand herself showed by the long
string of her misadventures that the great-
est problem is to find and to keep the one
and true love. Alas, she became herself an
argument against her creed, an argument
which may be condensed into the question:
Is love always moral? Are many successive
unions really of higher value for the life
enhancement of the individual and the race
than the unbroken or loveless marriage?
And even if we answered yes for the individuals
themselves there is the next question: Are
the children better served by the successive
marriages and free unions than by a home
where the parents are held together not by love
but by a sense of duty toward the children?
At present these questions can only be an-
swered in each separate case.
Women and Morals 67
But in spite of all the confusion and error
brought about by the new sex morals, it is
nevertheless on these that woman must build
further in order to secure for the future a higher
morality. This good must include the best of
what we have gained genetically in the matter
of sex morality, namely, a love invested with
a will to faithfulness and continuity together
with the best of the new morality, namely,
the conviction that chastity consists in the
harmony between soul and senses, and that
no sexual relationship is moral without such
harmony. Women's greatest ethical task
is first to combine these two principles and
then to bring them into full accord with
reality.
Hitherto women, unfortunately, have not
proved themselves competent to this mission.
Their instincts are injured, partly by centuries
of asceticism and resignation, partly by the
present day's violent rebellion against these
very limitations. Love, in common with other
great powers, as the demands for freedom,
and justice, is a valuable incentive to ethical
action only when dictated by objective as
well as subjective morals in harmony with
each other. In other words, incentive for
68 The Renaissance of Motherhood
actions that directly may promote the richer
life of the individual while by their conse-
quences they similarly must benefit the whole.
That two persons' love may cause other per-
sons to suffer just as the demands of justice
and liberty often have caused such sufferings
does not prove that any of these feelings in
themselves have been illegitimate. When
choosing our ethical positions we must not
allow these sufferings to become the deter-
mining factor. And on the whole they have
never had such an effect. Indeed the road of
all ethical progress has been marked by the
sufferings of individuals, of classes, and of
whole nations. The question to be answered
is: Will the action which brings pain to others
promote an advancing, not a retrogressive,
evolution? But this examination has been
shirked by many who, in word or deed, have
led the struggle against sex-slavery. During
this time of sex emancipation, we have come to
see that the sex morality beaten into woman
was neither so general nor so deep-rooted as
one might have expected after all the ages of
pressure of law and custom. Very few of the
women who have given themselves in free love
to a man have had a right to plead the words
Women and Morals 69
in which Kant's disciple, Schiller, expressed
a great truth:
A man who loves passes so to speak beyond the
bounds of all other ordinances and stands beneath the
laws of love alone. There is an exalted condition
in which many other duties, many other moral
standards, are no longer binding upon him.
The feelings that have determined the actions
of these women have not brought forth " an ex-
alted condition. " Their love has never been
the great love the essential characteristic of
which is its ability to kindle soul and senses,
but also, beyond that, to increase the personal-
ity's value to life, not only life's value to the
personality of the lover. Above all, the great
love also kindles that tenderness which is indis-
pensable to lovers. In the great love, desire
becomes loathing if the soul remains solitary.
With most present-day so-called " soul-mates"
the right to happiness has revealed itself as
a paltry desire for stimulation in new enjoy-
ments. The demand to "live one's life" has
resulted in a more and more vulgar gratifica-
tion of an ever more inane desire. Not even
The Great Passion ever grazed these peo-
ple with its wing; much less did The Great
70 The Renaissance of Motherhood
Love ever enter their dreams. Soulless lust,
idleness, sentimentality, flights of fancy, van-
ity, the excitement of flirtation and sport
all of these have been the cause of hasty
divorces, loose relations, repeated trial mar-
riages, all distinguished by a greater minus
of soul and a steadily growing plus of coarse-
ness. How many wives are there not and
among them even mothers, who in their
children possess the richest life stimulus or
how many home girls with splendid life possi-
bilities, who, more or less secretly, lead the life
of a courtesan. The only difference is that
these women are not paid. On the contrary,
they themselves often pay, that is, in form of
"loans," which those invertebrates, to whom
alcohol, nicotine, silk-linings, and automobiles
are necessities of life, do not. hesitate to
solicit, once these women have become their
" comrades. " These weaklings often belong
to literary and artistic bohemian circles where
men have the leisure to win women from the
social strata here referred to. These milksops
try to make up for their lack of creative genius
by all kinds of pleasure sensations, especially
the enjoyment of women. Our age has also
produced a type of women, the counterpart of
Women and Morals 71
these moral mollusks and with the same kind
of life cravings equally intense. Add the
pristine feminine needs of luxury and pleasure,
and you meet a class of modern women of
the same variety as the men referred to who
use the property of their mistresses for their
private ends or coax their earnings from
them.
It is not alone man's craving for pleasure
that women have made their own, but also
the masculine bad manners in outward de-
meanour. One had hoped that women's com-
panionship with men would check coarseness.
And this is true in coeducational schools.
But where freer forms for social intercourse
prevail, we observe nonchalant and flirtatious
young women adopting the manners of their
masculine companions. Many young girls re-
semble noisy, ill-mannered schoolboys. The
real reason for this is the womanly fear
of displeasing the man friends by so-called
"womanishness." But in proportion as the
social intercourse between the sexes loses in
courteousness and modesty, the erotic life
sinks to a lower plane. If the young women
want to prevent this, they must raise the
standard for men, not lower their own.
72 The Renaissance of Motherhood
Obviously the love which is lacking in will
for continuity must also be devoid of the
yearning for perpetuity which reaches after
the child. Motherhood is avoided or pre-
vented. Sometimes it is the man who for
selfish reasons is undesirous of progeny. In
such cases, he has himself to blame if the wife
in love adventures seeks the life interest which
a child would have given her. All this is
called the new immorality of our age. But we
know very well that it is not new; history often
shows similar conditions during transitional
periods. I would not have touched upon them
here were it not that the modern courtesans
define their mode of life as the new morality
instead of owning to its ancient designation:
"unchasttiy." Through this confusion of
ideas the lives of many worthy men and women
are ruined. And the consequence will not be
a new morality, but, on the contrary, a violent
reaction back to the old sex morality!
The revision of this old morality among its
many other good results has changed our point
of view in regard to the "fallen 11 women, so
named even when in true love they became
mothers. In the fifties, Mrs. Gaskell in her
Women and Morals 73
novel Ruth, and Hawthorne in The Scarlet
Letter, made the first earnest attempts to effect
a revision of the judgment over unmarried
mothers, a revision which has been going on
ever since. The most important new gain in
the department of sexual ethics is this very
changed attitude toward unmarried mothers,
who, together with their children, are now
beginning to get the care long refused them by
society. But even in this department the
humaneness of modern times has been at fault
through too much sentimentality and too little
forethought. For instance, we call mother-
hood holy, oblivious of all the miserable
human progeny which, married as well as
unmarried, mothers cast upon society. A
greater severity in the judgment of such
mothers must supplement the new conception
of the unmarried mothers' status; otherwise,
the intrinsically necessary protection of moth-
ers will result in a diminished sense of re-
sponsibility. What can be more immoral
than to ask the strong and healthy members of
society to burden themselves with increasingly
heavy taxes in order to support the vicious
human offscum, and, moreover, allow this class
to propagate its kind? The bygone custom
74 The Renaissance of Motherhood
of putting children to death showed a much
higher morality from the point of view of
social ethics. The changed conception of sex-
ual morals has influenced also our attitude
toward the woman prostitute. Van Lennep's
book Klaasje^ Levenster filled a crying need in
that it acquainted " virtuous" women with
the fact that there are many innocent victims
among the prostitutes. And besides the direct
prey of the white slave traffic, there are the
indirect victims of the starvation wage still
suffered by millions of women. Happily a
Dumas, a Tolstoy, and other writers have
shown us that great love and genuine human-
ity may be the possession of the so-called
harlot. On the other hand, there are a
number of books that give a very false and
unwholesome representation of women prosti-
tutes, books which would have us believe that
a brothel is a leaden casket containing nothing
but genuine pearls.
All this confusion in thought and action,
where sexual ethics are concerned, only goes
to prove that women; bewildered by centuries
of sex-slavery, have been unable to lead the
sexual emancipation with a firm purpose.
Many of them have been overhasty in con-
Women and Morals 75
demning the monogamous marriage, the evo-
lutionary attainment of ages, and which, all
its mistakes notwithstanding, invested the
husband and father with solemn responsi-
bilities. Too many have shown scant respect
for the duty to faithfulness and sexual self-
control, which, when everything is said,
contributes great ethical values. In a word,
women have not to the extent hoped for
thirty to forty years ago shown themselves
capable of a moral development, at once pro-
gressive and conservative. Earlier feminists
firmly believed that love in its highest form
would be secured by women's emancipation;
they believed that women's self-support would
eliminate all but love-marriages; that their
equality with men in studies and work, in
home and society, would bring about purer /
and higher morals, a more beautiful home-life,
a more perfect motherhood. They little sus-
pected, what has here been pointed out, that
the self-support for many women has been so
severe a task that marriage, on any condition,
meant a deliverance; that women's purity
and self-control, far from reforming men, fre-
quently became a total loss; that the great
love, for which the new women were to save
76 The Renaissance of Motherhood
themselves, often degraded into erotic adven-
tures; that motherhood often is looked upon
as an unwelcome interference in work or
pleasure.
But even if the first apostles of feminism had
suspected alLthis it would no more have si-
lenced them than Jesus, had he been told that
auto-da-fe and inquisition would follow Chris-
tianity. Because faith, among other things,
signifies strength to endure the greatest of all
disappointments the shortcomings of the dis-
ciples. None of the worst disciples of woman-
emancipation, not any of the errors brought
about by the new morality, can nullify the
truth that only woman's perfect equality with
man in ' education to work, in opportunity to
work, in wages for work, in duty to work, is
the fundamental condition for final victory
over sexual immorality, legal or illegal.
Every transition has brought in its train
similar confusion of ideas and laxity in morals.
Our race has never, in any province, reached
the high morality born from within until the
bands which upheld the morals imposed from
without have first been loosened. At pres-
ent we are living in a chaos where ancient
and low instincts, in women as in men, fer-
Women and Morals 77
tilised with new and high ideas, have given
birth to many monstrous forms of life. First,
when these high new ideas have grown from
thought to feeling and from feeling to instinct,
the new morality will gather strength and
stability. This morality is forcing its way
in two hitherto quite diverging lines: the indi- ~\
victual's ethical right to self-assertion in love,
and society's right to limit this self-assertion on
behalf of the welfare of the race. The first de- /
mand is based upon the growing insight into
the immense differences between individuals in
regard to the constitution of their souls in
general and to their erotic needs in particular.
The second demand follows the evolutionary
birth of a new ethical principle eugenics.
This idea shows, by the swiftness with which
it is gaining ground, that the morality which
is organically bound up with life possesses a
power of growth quite independent of estab-
lished laws, customs, and creeds. The moral
laws of eugenics sometimes cause one of those
so-called " crimes " which suddenly reveal the
existence of a new moral condition of mind.
Such ethical "crimes" are repeated until they
give rise to new conceptions of right and finally
to new laws. A "crime" of this sort is com-
78 The Renaissance of Motherhood
mitted by the mother who puts to death a
child which is in every particular unfit for life.
Another such "crime" where the motive is
individual egotism in compact with social
altruism is the deliberate motherhood of
certain unmarried women. Working hard
for their livelihood these women have after-
wards supported their children and sometimes
also the children's father when his inability or
disinclination to work rendered him without
means. Many earnest authors, for instance,
Grant Allen in The Woman who Did, and
the Dutch Cecilia de Jongbeck van Donk in
her book The Dawn, have described a "crime"
of this kind, the moral motherhood of an
unmarried woman ; and at the same time they
have shown the moral blindness of those who
condemn such a one while they are glad to see
their own and their friends' daughters make
"good marriages" with degenerate but rich
men. In many cases it is still considered a
moral "crime" for a wife to dissolve a mar-
riage which she feels to be degrading when
there is no spiritual bond.
These divorces are deliberate indictments
of the proprietorship that marriage yet is
supposed to invest in man. Such divorced
Women and Morals 79
wives have often exchanged an economically
splendid existence for a life of severe labour,
all on account of their conscience.
Another ethical " crime " is "race suicide"
in cases where the mother knows that the
child would suffer degeneracy in consequence
of the father's iniquities. Ethical may also
be called women's revolt against the unrea-
sonable waste of energy, personal and social,
in bringing more children to life than may
well be cared for.
Woman's new realisation of her human right
to self-preservation, of her duty to cultivate
her spiritual and physical energies and to use
them also in her own interest, not alone in that
of the race, is perfectly compatible, even when
revealed in the " crimes " mentioned, with the
new eugenic will: to produce a qualita-
tively better, not a quantitatively larger, new
race.
That these new ethics sometimes make the
actions of the most moral women similar to
the actions of the most immoral ones ought
at least not to excite those men and women
who on the one hand advocate capital pun-
ishment for single murder, yet on the other hand
glorify murder en masse in war! In the latter
8o The Renaissance of Motherhood
case, one is told that the motive determines
ethics. But the very same people refuse to
consider the motive in connection with women* s
above-mentioned ' ' crimes. ' '
During all these passionate conflicts about
sexual morality, we are, on the whole, quietly
and constantly advancing in regard to the
elevating of future generations. A more
rational care of children has already been
introduced, a forward step demonstrable by
the decrease of infant mortality. Further
advance may be recognised in the fact that
many women and men now break an engage-
ment or a marriage when they find out that
either party suffers from some hereditary
disease. Increasingly numerous are the men
and women who abstain from erotic relation-
ship when they know themselves victims of
such heredity. To be sure the great majority
are still ignorant, or unscrupulous, in regard to
the commands of eugenics. But public opin-
ion is fast developing in this respect and is
already beginning to influence conventions,
which in turn will influence the laws. The
demand of eugenics will finally become just
as deep-rooted an instinct as the duty to
defend the home country against outer foes,
Women and Morals 81
who, however, not even in the bloodiest
battles, take as many lives or waste as many
homes as do alcoholism, syphilis, tuberculosis,
and mental diseases. A thoughtful modern
person is tempted to agree with Spitteler,
who presented a satirical description of a
prize competition that resulted in the creation
of the world. In this competition the laurel
wreath was accorded to the artist who created
a small perfect earth inhabited by only twelve
supermen; which served as a suitable antithe-
sis to the present bungle-globe, swarming with
mortals.
Every person whose mind is not paralysed
by the present nationalistic war colonisation
and industrial politics, but who can still bend
his thoughts toward culture, must recognise
that the improvement of the race can only take
place through a strict selection of the human
material; hence the diminution in nativity
need not in itself be a national evil symptom,
but what is dangerous and immoral is that
the worst element is allowed to multiply with-
out restrictions while the women best fitted
for motherhood are unable or unwilling to
fill the high office; and finally that those of
them who do become mothers are beginning
82 The Renaissance of Motherhood
to preach a "mother's sacrificial duty" not
to bring up the children herself but to leave it
to the community to train and educate them
collectively. In later pages I shall return to
this question which is for humanity so vital.
Here I wish, only for the sake of completeness,
to emphasise the fact that this at the same
time is the most important of all woman
questions. The answer to this question will
determine whether women will continue to
be the standard bearers of the morality they
attained while upbuilding home and family,
or if their morals will become more manlike in
good, and also in evil, since every virtue that
possesses substantiality also has its shadow.
Only he who believes in "divine" moral laws
can doubt that women's self-assertion must,
on the whole, help to elevate humanity. But
the very one who hopes this will likewise hope
that the ancient womanly virtues the moth-
erly sacrificial spirit, and the wifely faith-
fulness, these virtues which were woman's
before any one had dreamt of her independ-
ence never shall rank among "outgrown"
virtues, which a later age calls "weaknesses."
On the contrary, these virtues will be all
the more needed when love is made the
Women and Morals 83
ethical norm for the relationship between men
and women. Notwithstanding the countless
individual differences which will appear more
and more in these relationships, they are
governed by a law as inflexible as the neces-
sity for the presence of both oxygen and nitro-
gen in the air, namely, that love implies a
"will to eternity " in the dual desire for faith-
fulness between husband and wife and for
projected life in the new race. No emancipa-
tion must make women indifferent to sexual
self-control and motherly devotion, from which
some of the highest life values we possess on
this earth have sprung. Let us remember that
the best qualities of the sailor are still needed
by the aviator, though the latter has a wider
space in which to sail. Unless we realise this
truth now we will learn it later by the number
of victims sacrificed.
We are not helped to an understanding
of the modern woman's moral uncertainty
by the talk of the religious disbelief and
the evil of the times. We face the results
of the fact that women neither have been, nor
are yet, fully liberated; the fact that for thou-
84 The Renaissance of Motherhood
sands of years they have learned to consider
their value as sex beings as that by which they
must buy all life enhancement whether noble
or ignoble ; the fact that sex has been the only
sphere of woman's power, and that these 1
circ^ll&t'anar liave made her ' over-sexed " |
as Charlotte Perkins Oilman rightly has
pointed out. Hence it is unreasonable to
speak of woman's morality in its present
phase as of her new morals. Only a long
enjoyed liberty will clearly show the social
and psychological results of the efforts of the
present age to equalise sex character, which,
during the long period of woman's bondage,
has been so differently developed in man and
woman. First after some centuries of ethical
and social culture on a par with man's, and
of legal and economic equality, through a
work which is so well paid that it does not
exhaust either body or soul first then will it
be known whether women have developed a
new "nature," or if the typical womanliness
remains typical even of the daughters of the
future. But in our calculations of probabili-
ties we must not forget that within the next
hundred years we shall witness another evolu-
tion which will have an enormous influence just
Women and Morals 85
in regard to woman's prospective "nature."
I mean the transformation of our conceptions
of property and conditions of labour. There
is no more ethically promising aspect of
woman's liberation than the r61e it plays in j
the great democratic revolution; that it coin-
cides quite naturally with the increasingly
individualised socialism and the increasingly
socialised theory of evolution. Nowadays we
know that the " struggle for existence " is
counterbalanced by mutual helpfulness; that
the right of the stronger need not rob the weple
of his rights. Woman has good prospects
during her economic activity to escape demo-
ralisation through unearned riches, unchecked
competition, unbridled enterprise. For all
this will gradually pass and simultaneously
the growth of women will experience self-
confidence that comes from economic inde-
pendence and the consciousness of being
productive members of society. If we com-
pare the innumerable wives, who still do an
enormous daily labour in the homes without
receiving any other compensation than the
husband's gifts, with their self-supporting
sisters, we best realise the significance of
economic independence for morality. We
86 The Renaissance of Motherhood
grasp how the whole woman sex will rise
to an ethically higher plane through the in-
dependence that comes from well-paid work,
when she need no longer use her cunning or
her beauty to cajole the man into giving her
what she needs for her development or her
pleasure. To the extent that animals de
luxe and beasts of burden in the shape of idle
and worn-out women vanish, sexual morality
will automatically rise above its worst blemish:
the commercial value of the woman^body.
But, some one asks, is the social morality
really such, in a majority of women, that,
having attained their full equality with man,
legally, economically, socially, and politically,
they are likely to deliberately collaborate in
the social reconstruction? May not women
in the classes which ought to be leading
because they possess the highest culture
show the same lack of social conscience as
the men of the same classes? To be sure
women are now showing great solidarity in
the struggle for their rights. Women of all
classes, labourers and duchesses, work together
in the suffrage campaign and all national
antipathies are bridged over by the common
Women and Morals 87
interest. And already this solidarity is in
itself an ethical gain. But has it really
penetrated deep enough into women's con-
sciences, so that, when their own aims are
won, it has power to overcome the class ego-
ism which sustains the class struggle and the
national egoism which maintains war? More-
over a victory is often followed by fatigue
and apathy. Hence women's sacrifices, en-
thusiasm, and co-operation during their strug-
gle for equal rights do not prove that women
really have risen to a higher altruism, a wiser
sympathy, a common fellow-feeling. The
deciding evidence will be the use women make
of their new rights. In this respect the present
shows discouraging as well as hopeful signs.
" The gravest danger is that so many of the
\ best women do not realise the duties of
>J/ I motherhood, which are the most valuable to
the race, to the nation, and to humanity at
jarge. Hence it is all-important to regain on
a higher plane the ethical synthesis of self-
assertion and self-sacrifice which motherhood
accomplishes already in earlier stages.
Ten years ago, in my book Love and Mar-
triage, I presented a reform programme further
developed in the following essays in opposi-
88 The Renaissance of Motherhood
tion to collective upbringing of the children
and work outside of the home for the mothers
the socialist and woman's-right platform
common at the time. In the meantime, the
ideas of evolution and eugenics have emphas-
ised the importance of the child; the suffer-
ings of children have received more attention ;
it has become recognised that education is
fraught with great responsibility and con-
sequently there is need of thorough prepara-
tion in the educator. I have recently noticed a
socialist writer, of the capacity of Mr. Wells,
point out that parentage "as a private enter-
prise, managed at the parents' own risk/' must
cease to exist. As a curative, he offers the same
solution that I do, and emphasises strongly
that socialism disapproves both of the childless
loose sexual relationship and of the patrK
archal family rights. Socialism wishes to in-
stitute a free marriage in which husband and
wife, in every respect perfect equals, with
social subsidies and responsibilities to so-
ciety, will be well able to bring up the new
generations.
For the time being, the conflicts may become
sharper between subjective and objective
Women and Morals 89
morality; between the rights of the individual
and the rights of society; between woman's
demands for herself and the demands made
upon her by the family. The easiest stage
of woman emancipation will soon be a thing
of the past, the stage of struggle for rights.
Then follows the most difficult period of
struggle for production ; for simultaneous crea-
tion of men and works, or two creative
impulses which cannot at the same time be
wholly satisfied nor be entirely segregated to
fill two different periods in a woman's life.
Many women have become morally vacillating
just because of this dilemma. Some have
tried to get out of it by treating love and
motherhood as incidentals. But, if the race is
to rise ethically, women should^not_learn of men
to take love and parental duty a,s an episode.
On the contrary, man should learn of woman
to consider it as a matter of vital importance.
In this respect, we note encouraging signs of
the times among young men, who in many
respects have adopted a higher sex morality,
probably because evolutionistic philosophy
has entered more deeply into the minds of the
young men, and probably also because the
greater difficulty to win a woman's love has
-
90 The Renaissance of Motherhood
refined man's erotic emotions. It is a sad
feature in the history of woman's morality
that it is now often the woman who makes
immodest advances to the man> and that
when a child is the result the man is often
more pleased than the woman. Obviously
nothing will more certainly destroy what pre-
ceding generations have tried to build up in
manly sex morality than that women them-
selves take this morality lightly.
Not until women look upon love and
motherhood as holy powers of life, to be
reverenced as solemn and sacred, shall the
sexual morality of both sexes follow an
ascending, not a descending curve. And
whatever our philosophy of life otherwise may
be, we must all confess ourselves believers
in what a German thinker has called "Der
Ascendismus, " if life, and particularly moral
life, is to have a meaning. Only by improving
the quality of the human race in successive
generations, through a more and more re-
sponsible, enlightened, and loving parentage,
shall we attain a more beautiful future. No
individual morality, be it that of men or
women, is sufficient to raise the value of life,
even if the world were delivered from capital-
Women and Morals 91
istic production, armed peace, and senseless
war. All that the women now promise them-
selves and humanity of a new order of exist-
ence in which purity and responsibility shall
characterise the relationship of the sexes, as
love and justice the life of the peoples, will not
materialise in the near future, even if all the
women of the world are enfranchised. And
naturally so, because the social and political
work of the best women can no more succeed
in changing the morality of the majority
than the work of the best men has succeeded
in so doing, neither will external transforma-
tions change the fact that the majority of
women and men stand on a low plane physi-
cally, morally, and intellectually; hence im-
proved social conditions cannot eliminate
want and crime.
Yet all that we dream of the future may at
last be realised, and realised through the
women, if the mothers of the next thousand
years will consider as their highest happi-
ness the duty to promote in their children the
evolution necessary to attain ahigher humanity.
Motherhood, which is the fountainhead of
altruistic ethics, and which has been wo-
man's particular field for moral action, must
92 The Renaissance of Motherhood
consequently become the culmination of her
functions as an ethically thinking, feeling,
and acting being. But not merely in a direct
sense. When women, in youth and early
middle age, have fulfilled their, at that time,
highest moral duty to bear and rear the new
race and in this work have employed all the
culture which their new rights enable them to
acquire, then the time for spiritual motherhood
has arrived and will occupy the latter part
of their lives. Frederik van Eeden has well
expressed the function of this motherhood
in words something like these:
In the age when woman, according to the old theory,
was worn out and done with, she may now possess a
new and great mission: to increase the common fund
of human knowledge by contributing her own stored
treasures of intuitive wisdom.
It was woman's intuition which the ancients
worshipped in the form of the Nome and the
Sybil. It is this intuition which again must
be respected and active in order that humanity
may rise ethically and aesthetically as it has
already risen materially, intellectually, and,
especially, technically.
Women and Morals
Men have gathered the materials for build-
ing a more beautiful and moral world it can
be built only by women and men working
together.
II
Motherliness
Womanliness means only motherhood;
All love begins and ends there.
ROBERT BROWNING,
95
FIFTY years ago no one would have thought
of writing about the nature of mother-
liness. To sing of motherhood was then just
as natural for ecstatic souls as to sing of the
sun, the great source of energy from which we
all draw life; or to sing of the sea, the mys-
terious sea, whose depth none has fathomed.
Great and strong as the sun and the sea,
motherhood was called; just as tremendous
an elemental power, a natural force, as they
alike manifest, alike inexhaustible. Every
one knew that there existed women without
motherly instincts, just as they knew of the
existence of polar regions on the globe; every
one knew that the female sex, as a whole, was
the bearer of a power which was as necessary
for life's duration as the sun and the sea, the
power not only to bear, but to nurture, to love
and rear and train. We knew that woman,
as a gift from Nature, possessed the warmth
7 97
98 The Renaissance of Motherhood
t
which, from birth to death, made human life
human; the gift which made the mother the
child's providence, the wife the husband's
happiness, the grandmother the comfort of all.
A warmth which, though radiating most
strongly to those gathered around the family
hearth, also reached those outside the circle
of her dearest, who have no homes of their
own, and embraced even the strange bird
as it paused on its journey. For motherliness
was boundless; its very nature was to give,
to sacrifice, to cherish, to be tender, even as it
is the nature of the sun to warm, and of the
sea to surge. Fruitfulness and motherhood
received religious worship in the antique
world, and no religious custom has withstood
the changes of the times so long as this.
Many ideas have become antiquated and
many values have been estimated afresh, while
the significance of the mother has remained
unchallenged. Until recently, the importance
of her vocation was as universally recognised
as in the days of Sparta and Rome. The
ideas of the purpose for which she ought to
educate her sons changed, but the belief in
the importance of training by the mother
remained. Through the Madonna Cult the
Motherliness 99
Catholic Church made motherhood the centre
of religion. The Madonna became the symbol
of the mother-heart's highest happiness and
deepest woe, as embodied in the Virgin-
Mother's holy devotion at the manger and the
sacred grief of the Mater Dolorosa at the cross.
The Madonna became the symbol of woman's
highest calling, that of giving to humanity
its saviours and heroes those heroes of the
spirit, so many of whom have borne witness to
the importance of the intrinsic power of
womanhood as a guide, not only to earthly
life, but also to those metaphysical heights
about which the greatest of them all has tes-
tified that: Das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan.
Das Ewigweibliche is nothing but the well
of maternal tenderness, that power of love
whereby woman's intuition takes a short cut
to the heights which man's thought reaches
by a more laborious path. Great poets have
perceived that motherhood is not only the
mighty race-renewer. B jornstjerne B jornson
says that "all creating is of mother origin";
in other words, that all the qualities which
the child craves of the mother, the work craves
of its creator: the vision, the waiting, the
hope, the pure will, the faith, and the love;
ioo The Renaissance of Motherhood
the power to suffer, the desire to sacrifice, the
ecstasy of devotion. Thus, man also has his
"motherliness, " a compound of feelings cor-
responding to those with which the woman
enriches the race, oftener than the work, but
which in woman, as in man, constitutes the
productive mental process without which
neither new works nor new generations turn
out well. Man's experience of the mother's
influence on his life causes him at least
among the Romanic peoples to include the
mother in his worship of the Madonna. And
whenever a man dreams of the great love, he
sees a vision of motherly tenderness fused with
the fire of passion.
In Art, that great undogmatised church,
man has not wearied of interpreting that
dream, of glorifying that vision in word and
colour. Even the woman-child, with motherly
action straining the doll to her breast, kindles
his emotion; he would kneel to the maiden
who, unseen, displays her tender solicitude for
a child, to the "Sister" who brightens the
sick-room, to the old nurse in whose face
every wrinkle has been formed as a cranny of
goodness. They all touch his emotion in
revealing the loveliest of his possessions in
Motherliness 101
mother or wife; if he has neither, then the
things which he most yearns to have, and which
he most warmly desires about him in his last
hours. Whether the individual was doomed
to yearn in vain or not, that motherliness
existed has always been felt to be as certain
as that the sun existed, even though the day
be overcast. Humanity could, one thought,
count on the warmth of motherliness, as for
millions of years we may still rely on the
warmth of the sun.
II
During those earlier periods, motherliness
was but a mighty nature-force; beneficial,
but violent as well; guiding, but also blind.
As little as they discussed the question of
the natural division of labour, which had
arisen because the woman bore, nurtured, and
reared the children, and in literal as well as
in spiritual sense kept the fire on the hearth,
even less did they doubt the natural "mother
instinct " being sufficient for the human family.
The instinct sufficed to propagate the race,
and the question of not only propagating, but
elevating, had not yet been thought upon.
102 The Renaissance of Motherhood
Even such as it has been, motherliness has
achieved enormous gains for progress. Al-
though not yet consciously cultivated, it has
been the greatest cultural power. Through
research into the origin of humanity and into
its early history, it became clear to us as
previously explained that motherliness was
the first germ of altruism, and that the sacri-
fices for their progeny which the higher animals,
and even the lowest races of mankind, im-
posed upon themselves were the first expres-
sions of the consciousness of kind, out of which
later the social feeling gradually developed
with its countless currents and unmeasurable
deeps.
With the primitive peoples, who lived in a
state of war of all against all, there was only
one spot where battle did not rage, where the
tender feeling, little by little, grew. Among
the older people, mutual depredation was the
established order; only the child craved help;
and in helping the child, father and mother
united. The child made the beginning of a
higher relation between the parents. In the
man, the fatherly duty x of protection took the
form of war and hunting, which developed
the self-assertive, " egoistical' ' qualities; while
Motherliness 103
the woman's duties developed the self-sacri-
ficing, altruistic feelings.
Motherliness, which in the beginning was
but the animal instinct for protecting the
young, became helpfulness, compassion, glad
sympathy, far-thinking tenderness, personal
love a relation in which the feeling of duty
had come to possess the strength of instinct,
one in which it was never asked if, but only
how, the duty should be fulfilled. And though
the manner of showing the feeling has under-
gone transition, the feeling itself, during all
the ages that it has acted in human life, has
developed until, in our day, it has grown far
beyond the boundaries of home. The man's
work is to kindle the fire on the hearth, the
woman's is to maintain it; it is man's to defend
the lives of those belonging to him; woman's,
to care for them. This is the division of labour
by which the race has reached its present
stage.
Manliness and womanliness became syn-
onymous with the different kinds of exercise of
power belonging to each sex, in their separate
functions of father and mother. That the
mother, through her imagination dwelling on
the unborn child, through her bond with the
104 The Renaissance of Motherhood
living child, through her incessant labors,
joys, and hopes, has more swiftly and strongly
developed her motherliness than the father
his fatherliness, is psychologically self-evident.
The modern psychologist knows that it is not
the association of theory, but the association
of feeling, which is the most important factor
in the soul-life. But besides feeling, which
belongs to the unconscious sphere, and which,
like the roots of the plant, must remain in the
dark soil that the tree may live, we have will
to guide our thoughts. What is present in the
soul, what directs our action, what spurs our
effort, that is what we, with all our will, as
well as feeling, hold dear. Thus there accu-
mulated in the female sex an energy of mother-
liness, which has shown itself so mighty and
boundless a power that we have come to claim
it as a constant element and one not subject
to change. And this energy grew so great
because the hitherto universally conflicting
elements in human life reached their oneness
in mother-love; the soul and the senses, al-
truism and egoism, blended.
In every strong maternal feeling there is
also a strong sensuous feeling of pleasure,
which an unwise mother gives vent to in the
Motherliness 105
violent caresses with which she fondles the
soft body of her baby a pleasure which thrills
the mother with blissful emotion when she
puts the child to her breast ; and at that same
moment motherliness attains its most sublime
spiritual state, sinks into the depths of eter-
nity, which no ecstatic words only tears
can express. Self-sacrifice and self-realisation
come to harmony in mother-love. In a word,
then, the nature of motherliness is altruism N
and egoism harmonised. This harmony makes \
motherhood the most perfect human state;/
that in which the individual happiness is a
constant giving, and constant giving is the
highest happiness. Bjornson's words, "a
mother suffers from the moment she is a
mother/' and the declaration of countless
women that they never realised the meaning
of bliss until they held the child to their breast,
are fully reconcilable in the nature of mother-
hood.
What torrents of life-force, of soul, tender-
ness, and goodness have flowed through
humanity from the motherliness of the true
mothers, and the mothers who have not borne
children. All the bodily pangs and labours
which motherhood and mother-care have cost
io6 The Renaissance of Motherhood
age after age, is the least of their giving. All
the patient toiling which millions of mothers
have imposed upon themselves when they
alone have reared and fed their children, all
the watchful ' nights, all the tired steps, all
that mothers have denied themselves for the
sake of their children, is not the greatest of
their sufferings. Their greatest sorrow is
that expressed in the poem, written by a man,
wherein the mother throws her heart at her
son's feet. The son, as he angrily stumbles
over it, hears it whisper, "Did you hurt your-
self, my child ?"
During the thousands of years that mother-
liness was of this sort, women had not yet
been seized with the modern and legitimate
desire, sich auszuleben, to drain the wine of life.
The one desire of their souls was sich ein-
zuleben to lose themselves in the lives of
their dear ones in their own world, often
narrow indeed, yet for them a world grown
great and rich through the joy of motherhood in
creating. The mother had labour and trouble
no less than the working-woman of to-day, but
then she was in the home. She could quiet
the crying of the little child, take part for a
moment in its play, give correction or help;
Motherliness 107
she was at hand to receive their confidences
when the children came in with their joys or
griefs. Thus she wove of little silken threads
a daily-stronger-growing band of love, which,
throughout all the changes of life, and wher-
ever the children afterwards went into the
world, held their hearts close to her own.
And when a mother, later, sat alone and
yearned, how she lived in and through her
children !
Though all were not like Goethe's mother,
Goethe, whom we could have loved even
more if he had oftener visited his glorious
mother, yet she is typical of the many, many
mothers in whom motherliness has been so
strong that it has lived by its own strength,
so great that it has developed all the powers
of their beings. And these mothers became
complete individualities of dignity and worth,
although their life-interest was centred, not in
a work of their own but in the child to whom
they had given the best of themselves. They
were mothers of whom great sons have testified
that from them had they got their own essen-
tial qualities. Those mothers were not "char-
acterless" beings, upon whom the women of
our day, bent on the complete expression of
io8 The Renaissance of Motherhood
their wonderful lives, look down. No, they
were in the noblest sense liberated. Their
personalities were enriched through wisdom
and calm power. They were ripened into a
sweetness and fulness through a motherliness
which not only had tended the body, but
which had been, in deepest meaning, a spiritual
motherhood.
Besides these glorious revealers of mother-
liness, there has always been the great swarm
of anxious bird-mothers, who could do no
more than cover their young with their wings;
great flocks of " goose-mothers, " mothers who
with good reason were called unnatural, just
because it was never doubted that mother-
liness was the natural thing, something one
had a right to expect the wealth which could
have no end.
in
Scientific investigation into the form
through which, consciously or unconsciously,
the power of motherliness was expressed in
the laws and customs of the past, and fur-
ther research into that compound of feelings
and ideas which shaped and gave rise to the
traditions of savage tribes, came simultane-
Motherliness 109
ously with the era of Woman-Emancipation.
At the same time there took place a deep
transformation in the view of life, during
which all values were estimated anew, even
the value of motherliness. And now the
women themselves borrow their argument
from science, when they try to prove that
motherliness is only an attribute woman shares
with the female animal, an attribute belonging
to lower phases of development, whereas her
full humanity embraces all the attributes,
independent of sex, which she shares with man.
Women now demand that woman, as man,
first of all be judged by purely human qualities,
and declare that every new effort to make
woman's motherliness a determining factor
for her nature or her calling, is a return to
antiquated superstition.
When the Woman Movement began, in the
middle of the last century, and many expressed
fears that " womanliness " would suffer, such
contentions were answered by saying that that
would be as preposterous as that the warmth
of the sun would give out. It was just in
order that the motherliness should be able to
penetrate all the spheres of life that woman's
liberation was required.
no The Renaissance of Motherhood
And now? Now we see a condition of things
alluded to in the first chapter, a constantly
decreasing birth-rate on account of an in-
creasing disinclination for motherhood, and
this not alone' among the child-worn drudges
in home and industry, not alone among the
lazy creatures of luxury. No, even women
strong of body and worthy of motherhood
choose either celibacy, or at most one child,
often none. And not a few women are to
be found eager advocates of children's up-
bringing from infancy outside of the home.
Motherhood has, in other words, for many
women ceased to be the sweet secret dream
of the maiden, the glad hope of the wife, the
deep regret of the ageing woman who has
not had this yearning satisfied. Motherli-
ness has diminished to such a degree that
women use their intelligence in trying to prove
not only that day-nurseries, kindergartens,
and schools are necessary helps in case of need,
but that they are better than the too devoted
and confining motherliness of the home, where
the child is "developed into a family-egoist,
not into a social modern human being! "
Motherliness in
IV
Some years ago, I wandered through the
Engadine, the place where the two men
who, for our day, have strongly emphasised
the importance of motherliness found inspira-
tion Nietzsche, summer after summer, and
Segantini, year after year. Segantini has
often painted, not only the human mother,
but also the animal mother. And he has
done both with the simple greatness and
tenderness of the old masters who, in the
Madonna and the Child, glorified the wonder-
ful mystery of mother-love. Segantini, who
lived and died in the Alpine world where life
is maintained under great difficulties, noted
principally the importance of the mother-
warmth during the mere physical struggle for
existence. Nietzsche again, the lonely writer
and seer of humanity's future, emphasised
not only the significance of motherliness in a
physical sense, but also in a sense hitherto
barely perceived, of consciously re-creating the
race. He knew that the instinct first of all
must be developed in the direction of sexual
selection, so as to promote the growth of
superior inborn traits. He knew also that
ii2 The Renaissance of Motherhood
women needed to be educated to a perfected
motherliness, that they, instead of bungling
this work as they are apt to do to-day, may
come to practise the profession of motherhood
as a great anil difficult art.
This new conception is ignored by those who
advocate community-upbringing instead of
home-rearing, because most mothers, among
other reasons, are to-day incapable as educa-
tors, and because parents to-day often make
homes into hells for children. What hells
institutions can be, seems to be forgotten!
Almost every child is happier in an ordinary,
average home than in an admirable institution,
because every child needs has needed, and
will continue to need a mother's care; but
we must see to it that this care will become
increasingly efficient. And what a strange
superstition, that the teachers of the future will
all be excellent, but that the parents will
remain incorrigible.
As yet have we even tried to educate
women and men to be mothers and fathers?
This, the most important of all social duties,
we are still allowed to discharge without pre-
paration and almost without responsibility.
When the words of Nietzsche, "A time will
Motherliness 113
come when men will think of nothing except
education/' have become a reality, then we
shall understand that no cost is too great when
it comes to preserving real homes for the
purpose of this new education. And there is
nothing which in a higher degree utilises all
the powers of womanhood (not alone those of
motherliness) than the exercise of them in the
true, not yet tried, education of the new
generation.
All women, even as now all men, must learn
a trade whereby they can earn their livelihood,
in case they do not become mothers, as well
as before they so become, and after the years
of their children's minority; but during those
years they must give themselves wholly to the
vocation of motherhood. But for most wo-
men it ought still to be the dream of happiness,
some time in their lives, to have fulfilled the
mission of motherhood, and during that time
to have been freed from outside work in which
they only in exceptional cases would be likely
to find the same full outlet for their creative
desire, for feeling, thought, imagination, as
is to be found in the educative activity in the
home. But so unmotherly are many wo-
men of this age, that this view is considered
8
ii4 The Renaissance of Motherhood
old-fashioned and (with the usual confusion
of definitions) consequently impossible for the
future.
When already they say the women of to-day
want to be "freed" from the inferior duties of
mother and ^housewife, in order to devote
themselves to higher callings, as self-support-
ing and independent members of society, how
much more will that be the case with the
women of the future! As these "higher
callings, " however, for the majority consist,
and will continue to consist, in monotonous
labour in factory, store, office, and such occu-
pations, it is difficult to conceive how these
tasks can possibly bring greater freedom and
happiness than the broad usefulness in a
home, where woman is sovereign yea, under
the inspiration of motherhood, creator in her
sphere, and where she is directly working for
her own dear ones. Neither can it be under-
stood how the care of one's own children can
be felt as a more wearisome and inferior task
than, for instance, the laborious work of a
sick-nurse, or school teacher, who, year in and
year out, works for persons with whom only
in exceptional cases she comes in heart-con-
tact.
Motherliness 115
If women meanwhile continue to look upon
the work of mothers and house-mothers as
in itself burdensome and lowering, then,
naturally, the care of children and of the
home will gradually be taken over by groups
of women who, on account of their mother-
liness, choose to occupy themselves with
children and household duties.
If this "freedom" is the ideal of the future,
then, indeed, my view of motherliness, as
indispensable for humanity, is reactionary;
but it is reactionary in the same way that
medicine reacts against disease. And has our
race ever been afflicted by a more dangerous
disease than the one which at present rages
among women : the sick yearning to be " freed ' '
from the most essential attribute of their sex?
In motherliness, the most indispensable human
qualities have their root.
Women who summon all their intelligence
and keenness in their endeavour to prove that
motherliness is not the quinta essentia of
womanhood verily need a Minerva Medica,
as portrayed in the Vatican relief, the goddess
of wisdom with the symbol of the art of heal-
ing! And she will surely come when the
time most needs her.
n6 The Renaissance of Motherhood
The phrase, "the course of progress tends
to the dissolution of the home," shows how
little we understand the words we use. Pro-
gress implies also dissolution, decay, retro-
gression, and death. In the progress of a
disease attacking culture, a new renaissance
must come, if not for the people, then for the
truths, which though temporarily dimmed will
be seen in a new light by new peoples. From
time to time has this been the case with the
emotions of patriotism, of religion, and of
liberty. No fundamental values, indispens-
able to humanity, are lost; they return rein-
forced. Motherliness has not been lost even
in those who show a lack of it in their personal
lives. They have converted it into general
service. When women at last have become
fully emancipated, then the enormous sums
of energy which now are invested in agitation
will be set free: to be used partly for social
transformation, partly to flow back with
fresher and fuller power into the home.
Very likely there will always be a number
of unmotherly, of sexless, but useful working
ants. Women geniuses, with their inevitably
exceptional position, may increase. Possibly
also the type of hetaira frequent in our day
Motherliness 117
women who devote themselves to a career
which makes them independent of marriage.
They wish to be lovers, but lovers who cap-
tivate not alone by beauty, but also by in-
tellectual sympathy. That these women do
not want the care of children, when they do
not even want motherhood, is but natural.
In that future of which I dream, there shall
be neither men who are ill-paid and harassed
family supporters, nor wives who are unre-
warded and worn-out family slaves. Then
all home arrangements shall be as perfectly
adjusted as they are now the reverse, and all
home duties be transformed by new ways of
work, which shall be lighter, cheaper, quicker.
Thus, woman will actually be "freed" in re-
spect to those burdens of the home-life from
which she ought to and may be freed, freed
so as to be spared the necessity of giving over
the care of her children to nurseries and kinder-
gartens, where even the most excellent teacher
becomes mediocre when her motherliness must
embrace dozens of tender souls.
If, on the other hand, "progress" takes the
road leading toward the breaking up of the
home, the ideal of the future for the maternal,
then the future state will be a state of herd-
n8 The Renaissance of Motherhood
people. But the more our laws, our habits
of work, and our feelings become socialised,
the more ought education itself in home and
school to become individualised, to counteract
the danger of getting fewer personalities
while institutions increase. And individual
upbringing can be carried on only in homes
where mothers have preserved the nature-
power of motherliness and given this power a
conscious culture.
The supposition that motherliness has its
surest guide in its instinct is therefore a su-
perstition which must be conquered. In order
to be developed, motherliness must exist
in one's nature. The matter must be there
so as to be shaped; this is obvious. But the
feeling in itself may, like all other natural
forces, work for good or for evil; the feeling
itself often shows, even in motherliness, the
need of the evolution in humanity which the
poet foreshadows, when we at last shall see
"the ape and tiger die. "
As motherliness has been sung more than
it has been understood, we have lived in the
Motherliness 119
illusion not only that it was inexhaustible,
but that its instinct was infallible, that for
this sacred feeling nature had done every-
thing and no culture was needed. Hence
motherliness has remained until this day
uneducated. The truth that no one can be
educated to motherliness any more than a
moon can be made into a sun has been con-
founded with the delusion that the mother-
instinct is all-sufficient in itself. Hence
it has often remained blind, crude, violent;
and " instinct " has not hindered mothers from
murdering their children by ignorance, and
from robbing them of their most precious
mental and physical possessions.
This sentimental view of motherliness as
the ever holy, ever infallible power, must be
abandoned; and even this province of nature
brought under the sway of culture. Mother-
liness is as yet but a glorious stuff awaiting
its shaping artist. Child-bearing, rearing,
and training must become such that they
correspond to Nietzsche's vision of a race
which would not be fortgepflanzt only, but
hinaufgepflanzt.
Motherliness must be cultivated by the
acquisition of the principles of heredity, of
120 The Renaissance of Motherhood
race-hygiene, child-hygiene, child-psychology.
Motherliness must revolt against giving the
race too few, too many, or degenerate children.
Motherliness ,must exact all the legal rights
without which woman cannot, in the fullest
sense of the word, be either child-mother or
social-mother. Motherliness thus developed
will rescue mothers not only from olden -time
superstition, but also from present-day excite-
ment. It will teach them to create the peace
and beauty in the home which are requisite
for the happy unfolding of childhood, and
this without closing the doors of the home on
the thoughts and demands of modern times.
Motherliness will teach the mother how to
remain at the same time Madonna, the mother
with her own child close in her arms, and Cari-
tas, as pictured in art: the mother who at her
full breast has room also for the lips of the
orphaned child.
Many are the women in our day who no
longer believe that God became man. More
and more are coming to embrace the deeper
religious thought, the thought that has given
wings to man created of dust, the thought that
men shall one day become gods! But not
Motherliness 121
through new social systems, not through new
conquests of nature, not through new institu-
tions of learning. The only way to reach this
state is to become ever more human, through
an increasingly wise and beautiful love of
ourselves and our neighbours, and by a more
and more perfect care of the budding person-
alities. Therefore, if we stop to think, it is
criminal folly to put up as the ideal of woman's
activity, the superficial, instead of the more
tender and intimate tasks of society. How
can we hope for power of growth when the
source of warmth has been shut off?
The fact that the thought of our age is
shallow in regard to this its most profound
question the importance of motherliness for
the race does, however, by no means prove
that the future will be just as superficial.
The future will probably smile at the whole
woman-question as one smiles at a question on
which one has long since received a clear and
radiant answer! This answer will be the
truly free woman of the future, she who will
have attained so fully developed a human-
ity that she cannot even dream of a desire to
be ' 'liberated " from the foremost essential
quality of ht^ womanhood motherliness.
Ill
Education for Motherhood
123
"A time will come when men will think of nothing
except education."
NIETZSCHE.
THE optimism with reference to the
mothers of the future which I have ex-
pressed in the foregoing is based on my habit
of counting by epochs in judging the probable
future of humanity. The optimist is often
right. But only if he can wait some hund-
red years!
The modern woman's view of motherhood,
as I have endeavoured to show in the first
essay, is not calculated to nourish optimism.
This view is the natural result of the spirit of
the age which is determined fundamentally
by the two great vital forces, physical and
spiritual, which, since the morning of the race,
have had decisive influence on its destinies,
economics and religion. During the last
century, economic conditions have been re-
125
126 The Renaissance of Motherhood
garded as of greater importance, and religion
of less. The souls of nations, as well as the
individual soul, have been earth-bound in
the fullest sense of the word. Investigations
of earth and nature and the utilisation of all
resources have occupied a race which has made
the spirit of Aladdin's lamp a slave of utility;
which, with greedy heart, has gained the whole
world, but in the meantime has heedlessly
forfeited its own soul.
Science and desire for gain have marvellously
broadened the sphere of man's power over
an external world. Simultaneously with this
the emancipation of woman has proceeded.
The world invaded by woman, both needing
and demanding work, has not been a world
in which holy voices have spoken of high things.
It has been a world in which strong and hot
hands have grasped what to their age seemed
the kingdom of heaven : material wealth which
gave its possessors the power, the honour, and
the glory. Gain has been God, and man this
God's prophet. Work has been divine wor-
ship, especially such work as produced riches.
The possibilities of satisfying steadily increas-
ing cravings for pleasure, and of living an
ever more care-free and secure life, have
Education for Motherhood 127
multiplied. And women did not stem the
tide; they followed it.
In logical conjunction with the raising of util-
ity as the highest of life-values, a highly gifted
American woman has offered her programme
for the solution of the conflicts between
woman's labour and motherhood, namely, the
rearing and educating of children outside the
home. Successive institutions are suggested
for the bottle-period, kindergarten, and school-
age, and so on. Thus, she contends, will the
parents, who are usually poor educators,
be supplanted by trained and "born" educa-
tors; the children would stand in visiting
relations to the individual home with its too
warm and emasculating tenderness, while in
the institutions they would get the bracing
air and the training for social life demanded in
this age, instead of the egotistical attitude
of family life. The social activities of the
mothers of the well-to-do classes and the
outside work of the wage-earning mothers
make mother-care only a figure of speech, and
the children are neglected. But, on the
other hand, by this plan of reform, the bodies
as well as the souls of the children would be
well cared for by specialists. The mothers
128 The Renaissance of Motherhood
could calmly devote themselves to their gain-
ful work and their social duties. The child's
need of the mother and the mother's need of
the child is 'a prejudice which must vanish
with all other superstitions from lower stages
of culture, if the mothers are to be coequal
with men, community members, capable of
work, and if the children are to be well reared
for the social vocations which must soon
determine the trend of all lives.
This view of Charlotte Stetson (now Mrs.
Oilman) coincides somewhat with that of the
great African author, Olive Schreiner. Both
these writers emphasise rightly the fact that
since woman's home work no longer has the
same productive value that it had in an age
when she was the one to prepare the raw
materials and to produce all the necessities
for the household, the women of the leisure
class, under the shibboleth "the care of the
home, " have become the largest class of social
parasites of contemporary times, who pay
with their body for the freedom from work
that the men gain for them. Women have
become "over-sexed" because to enhance
their sexual attraction has been the surest
means of obtaining an idle life through
Education for Motherhood 129
matrimony. Until this and similar econo-
mic interests vanish from marriage, love
cannot be pure nor can the position of the
wife be one of true human dignity. Long
ago, in the eighteen-thirties, these truths
were expressed by the great Swedish writer,
C. J. L. Almqvist. 1
If the Spartan plan above mentioned were
really a solution of the problem, there would
be no occasion for further talk about general
education for motherhood. In that case, all
young girls could go straight on toward pro-
fessional training with a remunerative vocation
as their goal. And this would be not only a
personal, but a national economic gain. For
the personal energies and the money spent in
acquiring a profession would not be wasted,
as is now so often the case, if motherhood were
1 C. J. L. Almqvist fled from Sweden in 1851 and went to
New York in the fall of the same year, there calling himself
Professor Gustavi. He supported himself by teaching languages
and acting as reporter on newspapers; he travelled extensively,
visiting Upper Canada, Niagara, St. Louis; lived in Belleville,
in Chicago, and Philadelphia, and was in St. Louis at the time of
the Civil War. Enthusiastic Unionist and admirer of Lincoln,
he hastened to Tejas in Mexico, lost some manuscripts in Tejas,
and with difficulty reached Washington, where he met Lincoln.
He returned to Europe in 1865. In case any one in America
should happen to remember anything about him, communication
thereof would be most gratefully received. THE AUTHOR.
9
130 The Renaissance of Motherhood
but a short interruption in a woman's pro-
fessional work.
This programme, outlined but briefly since
it is well tnown in the United States as in
Europe, has the enormous advantage of
making clear the dilemma before which
many women who work for their livelihood
play ostrich, namely, that a woman cannot
be a competent outside worker, working from
eight to ten or more hours a day, and at
the same time a housewife and mother
who performs well the duties these voca-
tions demand. That which many women
with exceedingly small claims upon them still
insist on that they are well able to manage
outside work, housekeeping, and the rearing
of children simultaneously is just what the
reform-programme refutes, making it plain
that the present attempts at compromise have
resulted in a lessening of value together with an
enormous overstrain.
I, too, am convinced that the present state
of affairs is untenable from the economic,
hygienic, ethic, and aesthetic point of view.
A radical transformation is needed. But I
hope that this will go in an opposite direction
from the one indicated above.
Education for Motherhood
The programme for the abolition of home-
training rests on three unproved and un-
demonstrable assumptions: first, that women's
mental and spiritual work in the home the
creating of the home atmosphere, the manage-
ment of the housekeeping and the upbringing
of children is of no " productive" value;
secondly, that parents are incapable of acquir-
ing proficiency as educators unless they are
"born" educators; thirdly, that nature amply
provides such "born" educators, so that the
many thousands of institutions with a pro-
fessional mother for about every twenty chil-
dren could be supplied with them in sufficient
quantity and of excellent quality.
These assumptions emanate from a com-
parison between the present untrained mothers
and trained educators, and between all the
dark sides of the home and the light sides of
collective upbringing. But on so warped a
comparison we certainly cannot base a de-
mand for the discontinuance of the upbringing
in the home.
II
The past gives us proof enough that
woman's creation, the home, has been her
132 The Renaissance of Motherhood
great cultural contribution to civilisation.
And even the present main trend of the desires
and feelings of the race shows that the home
has not lost its value. But nothing is more
certain than that there has awakened a need
within the people for a renaissance of the
home. In. my opinion, such a ^renaissance
can come only through a new marriage, where
the perfect equality and liberty of both
husband and wife are established; through
a strict responsibility towards society in regard
to parentage outside as well as within marriage ;
through education for motherhood ; and, lastly,
through rendering motherhood economically
secure, recognising it as a public work to be
rewarded and controlled by society.
Thus the problem seems to me more com-
plex, involving greater expense, and therefore
more difficult of solution.
And yet, it must be solved. The socially
pernicious, racially wasteful, and soul-wither-
ing consequences of the working of moth-
ers outside the home must cease. And this
can only come to pass, either through the
programme of institutional upbringing, or
through the intimated renaissance of the
home. The self-supporting women of the
Education for Motherhood 133
present day do not want again to become
dependent solely upon tjie husbands' main-
tenance in order to be able to fulfil the duties
of a mother in the home. And thus there re-
mains only institutional upbringing or moth-
erhood regarded as a social work.
During the child's first seven years, years
that determine its whole life, its educator
cannot well fulfil her mission without having
a daily opportunity to observe the child's
nature, in order by consistent action to influ-
ence it, encouraging certain tendencies and
restraining others. This alone precludes the
mother's working outside the home. To an
even greater degree must her work outside
the home be rejected in favour of that most
essential education, the indirect, which ra-
diates from the mother's own personality,
from the spirit she creates in the home. Like
the direct education, the indirect cannot be
accomplished in stray moments snatched from
professional work. A home atmosphere is not
a condition which stays permanent of itself,
one of those works erf art which once created
remain unchanged. The creating of a home is,
on th^ contrary, a kind of art which has this
in common with all art of life that it de-
134 The Renaissance of Motherhood
mands the artist's continuous presence in
body and soul. A home life where the mother's
unceasing C9ntribution of self is lacking is like
a drama on a film.
Wherever the great and beautiful work of
art, a home, has come into being, the wife and
mother has had her paramount existence in
that home though her interests and activities
have not necessarily been limited to its sphere.
But husband and children have been able to
count on her in the home as they could count
on the fire on the hearth, the cool shade under
the tree, the water in the well, the bread in
the sacrament. Thus upon husband and
children is bestowed the experience which a
great poet gained from his mother. "All
became to her a wreath !" A wreath where
every day's toil and holiday's joy, hours of
labour and moments of rest, were leaf and
blossom and ribbon.
The wise educator is never one who is
"educating" from morning to night. She is
one who, unconsciously to the children, brings
to them the chief sustenance and creates the
supreme conditions for their growth. Pri-
marily she is the one who, through the seren-
ity and wisdom of her own nature, is dew and
Education for Motherhood 135
sunshine to growing souls. She is one who
understands how to demand in just measure,
and to give at the right moment. She is one
whose desire is law, whose smile is reward,
whose disapproval is punishment, whose caress
is benediction.
Sometimes fathers, too, are endowed with
this genius for education. And it would not
be the least of the consequences of outside
upbringing if the children were to lose not
only the daily influence of the mothers but
also that of the fathers. Because the fathers
are the breadwinners, and also because of their
lack of training for fatherhood, this influence
is as a rule insignificant. But it is very
important that this state of affairs be changed.
According to the testimony of an American
author, 1 the increasing predominance of wo-
men teachers in America is already cause for
anxiety, and with good reason, for the good
order of things in school, in the home, in the
community, demands that men and women
co-operate as equals, having like authority
and like responsibility. But since a division of
labour on the whole is unavoidable, this di-
vision must be determined by the experience
1 Earl Barnes, in Woman in Modern Society. THE AUTHOR.
136 The Renaissance of Motherhood
that in the labour market, in the majority of
cases, men are just as able as women, and
often better able, to perform the work women
perform.
In the home, on the other hand, men can-
not supplant the spirit and activities of
women. Neither can the contribution of the
wives and mothers to the homes be replaced
by that of professional women within or out-
side the homes. Can the heart in an organism
be replaced by a pumping engine, however
ingenious? Any reform programme which
does not consider these realities falls under the
wise judgment of the shrewd Catherine II.:
"Reforms are easily accomplished on the
patient paper. But in reality they are writ-
ten on the human flesh, which is sensitive. "
Especially is this true of the child who, more-
over, must submit to the influence of his
educators, unable to choose or evade them.
The author of the programme means that the
mothers who are gifted as educators should
bring up about twenty other children, together
with their own. But each young soul needs
to be enveloped in its own mother's tenderness,
just as surely as the human embryo needed the
mother's womb to grow in and the baby the
Education for Motherhood 137
mother's breast to be nourished by. Accord-
ing to the programme referred to, each child
would be allotted a twentieth part of mother-
liness; the mother's own children would re-
ceive no more than the others.
Of the real outcome of this plan a prominent
American woman gave me a touching illus-
tration. As sole support of her son, she had
been compelled to send him to a boarding-
school where many little motherless boys were
brought up. When she went to visit her boy,
the other boys fought with him for a place on
her lap, so hungry were they for a moment's
sensation of motherly affection!
That many children are unhappy in their
homes does not prove that the same children
would be happier in an institution; only of
such children as were transferred from bad
homes to good institutions could this be
hoped. That many a careful home education
has failed does not prove that the children
brought up in a particular home would have
turned out better in an institution. The
very best institution cannot show the consid-
eration for a child's individuality, or furnish
the peace and freedom for the development of
a talent, that an average middle-class home
138 The Renaissance of Motherhood
can. T The more individual a child is, the more
it suffers by the uniformity and the levelling
forces which t are imposed upon it already by
the day school. And how much more must
this be the case in a boarding school !
On the other hand, we have the manifold
testimonies given by great personalities of
the boundless influence of a mother 's, of a
father's, understanding affection, in the devel-
opment of the child's individuality. In the
children's resemblance to the parents, the
latter have a guide to the understanding of
the children's inherent qualities, which the
teachers lack. And if, on the one hand, these
resemblances contain the seeds of conflict, on
the other, they furnish various possibilities
of influence.
1 The excellent French writer, Rosny (aine), in Le Fardeau de la
Vie touchingly describes the sufferings a child experiences in
always having witnesses to everything: his rest and his play,
his tears and his joys; of never having a corner to himself; of
ever being surrounded by cries, laughter, noise, and jokes; of
never having an hour's perfect peace or liberty; of always feeling
every emotion of the soul and every action observed, every
occupation subjected to interruption.
The children of the poor experience similar sufferings in their
homes, a condition which can be remedied only by better housing
conditions. Similarly, it would only be institutions furnishing
a separate room for each child which, in some degree, might
alleviate the torture described by the French writer. THE
AUTHOR.
Education for Motherhood 139
As against all the cases where the tyranny
of the parents now increasingly rare has
forced the children into an erroneous walk of
life, may be put those where the parents have
discovered their children's talents and have
encouraged them in the right direction. Some-
times a good teacher has done the same. But
ateacher, with some tens of children, has not the
same opportunity to observe the individual
child as have the parents. The mistakes of
the teacher are, therefore, far more numerous
than those of the parents. If these children
would, in many cases, have chosen other
parents, they would, in most cases, have
chosen other teachers.
"Born educators" with keys to the child-
ren's souls in their pockets are, indeed, the
unredeemable promissory notes of the in-
stitutional programme. The assurance that
the children in collective institutions would be
cared for only by "born educators" is as
untenable as would be a promise that their
musical training would be directed by nobody
short of a Beethoven! "Born educators" are
not only as rare as other geniuses, but are
also most difficult to discover. For how can
they demonstrate their genius except in the
140 The Renaissance of Motherhood
practice of educational work? And often
they find no opportunity to educate; an ex-
amination can, for instance, just as little
reveal their soul power as it can that of a poet.
The brilliant and eloquent graduate often is,
and will continue to be, victorious in com-
petition with the "born educator." And, as
everybody knows, the result frequently is
that the greatest abominations occur at
institutions where perverse principals infer-
nally torment the children principals chosen
by boards of trustees who have felt convinced
of having made the best choice! But even
in those cases where the choice has been good,
how much remains to be desired !
One pedagogue, for instance, may have
excellent ideas, but be lacking in nobility of
character. Another may possess great psy-
chological insight, but no ability in the
psychologically correct treatment of children.
Here may be found pedagogical genius, but
without warmth of heart. There, heart but
no sagacity. Another is of a despotic nature,
and in spite of all pretty talk of children's
rights, he violates them to make the little
ones conform to his ideas. Still another is
vacillating and has no authority.
Education' for Motherhood 141
And if thus already the first-rate teachers
are deficient, how much more so will this be
the case with those mediocre teachers of
whom every school and boarding-school has a
majority!
These professional educators, as they are
called in the programme for upbringing out-
side of the home, so far from being wholly
filled by their calling, spiritually liberated
from all side interests, which, according to
the same programme, are supposed to impede
the parents' capabilities as educators, these
professionals are very much like other peo-
ple, absorbed by their own sympathies and
antipathies, conflicts and rivalries, in which
the children frequently become involved.
The parents would stand in the same rela-
tion to all these institutions as they now do
to the day schools, in that what they objected
to they could seldom change. But if the
parents were not content to remain simply
automata, who deliver the child-material to the
institutions, they must, on the one hand, en-
deavour to assert their own opinion as against
the institutions which cause contentions, and,
on the other, try to make use of the children's
home visits for counteracting such influence
142 The Renaissance of Motherhood
of the school as they consider unfavourable.
But here they would meet with the same
fundamental 'difficulty which arises in cases
where children, as a consequence of divorce,
are periodically with either father or mother.
So many requisites for understanding are
lacking: constraint and strangeness have to
be overcome; a nervous tenderness or a cold
criticism often destroys attempts at intimacy.
In a word, even the best institutions would
show the same dark sides as do the homes,
or similar ones, but unaccompanied by the
bright sides of the homes, which outweigh
their shortcomings.
Let us assume, however, that the choice of
principal in one of these proposed institutions
has been a happy one. Yet such a teacher has
not the spontaneous love for the child which
may, to be sure, on the one hand, cause paren-
tal blindness, but, on the other hand, gives
the clearness of vision which belongs to love
alone. At best the teacher extends to the
children a general love, or a personal love to
one child here and there. But it is just this
personal love which the human soul needs in
order to burst into blossom.
The conditions here indicated furnish one
Education for Motherhood 143
of tHe reasons why children from charitable
institutions hardly ever become prominent
members of society. The main reason, it is
true, is that the children for whom society has
had to care in institutions have often sprung
from poorly equipped parents. Moreover, to
be sure, the prominent individuals in a nation
are always few in comparison with the others.
Still, if we can expect one great genius in each
million of inhabitants, one in a million in-
stitutional children may be expected to be
really excellent. But has a single one ever
appeared? Is not, on the contrary, the in-
significance of such children a rule with few
exceptions? And must not this partly depend
on this very system of upbringing? 1
Even where the child-material is excellent,
as for example in the English country schools
for boys, observations have led to the belief
that these schools are more favourable for the
preservation of the national type for good
as well as evil than for the development of the
individual. Here, as in other boarding-schools,
certain social virtues are developed, certain
1 In America this question has been answered in the affirma-
tive by some investigator, who at the same time came to the
conclusion that the "Cottage" system gives better results in
every way than the large institutions. THE AUTHOR.
144 The Renaissance of Motherhood
qualities useful in public life. But the spring-
ing up of new types, stronger individual
aptitudes, more sensitive and fine soul life is
not favoured by any kind of collective edu-
cation extending through the larger part of
youth. A period of institutional life has
often been a splendid thing for children who
have been lonely or spoiled at home, has
hardened them, forced them to subordinate
their own egotism, taught them consideration
for others, and common responsibilities. But
even if institutions can thus rough-plane the
material that is to become a member of so-
ciety, nevertheless they cannot if they take
in the major part of the child's education
accomplish that which is needed first of all
if we are to lift ourselves to a higher spiritual
plane in an economically just society: they
cannot deepen the emotional life. Continuity
of impressions is a first condition for such a
deepening. But the upbringing outside of the
home, which would leave the nursing infants
in Miss A.'s hands, the kindergarten children
to Miss B., the primary school children to
Miss C., the higher grades to various Misses,
would again and again disrupt the fine fibres
with which the child-heart has become tied
Education for Motherhood 145
to these various mother-substitutes. At last the
heart would lose its power of attachment, just as
is the case when children spend their lives trav-
elling and only get into hotel relations, never in-
to home or homeland relations with the world.
The psychological progress of the develop-
ment of the emotions indicates that the child
should learn to love a few in the home and
in its native place; that the soul should
broaden to feelings for the comrade circle,
finally to embrace society and humanity.
Every effort to change the order in this pro-
gress of growth is as fruitless as to put plants
in the ground blossom downward and roots in
the air. Want of insight into those spiritual
conditions of growth is the principal error
in the programme or collective upbringing.
What youth would have left of soul after such
an education would barely be sufficient for
social and community purposes; for the needs
of the personality it would not suffice.
And even if collective education, when the
school age is reached, were arranged as it is
in some of the German (in many ways excel-
lent) Landerziehungsheime, 1 where a small
1 These schools were founded by Dr. Herrmann Lietz after the
pattern of Abbotsholme in England. His schools are: Ilsenburg
146 The Renaissance of Motherhood
number of children and teachers live in a
separate cottage and constitute the so-called
"family," in the long run it would be only a
poor substitute for the natural family, where
care and anxiety, help and comfort, memories
and hopes, work and festivity crystallise
around a nucleus, combine and intensify
the emotions, while in a larger, often-changing
circle even the most beautiful impressions be-
come weakened and shallow.
The very worst suggestion which has ap-
peared from any side is that of the family
colony, with common kitchen and dining-room,
common play-room and care of the babies,
et cetera. Even this would give the mothers
freedom to pursue professional work and yet
in some measure retain the home for the
children. But if Satan announced a prize
competition for the best means of increasing
hatred on earth, this reform proposition ought
to receive the first prize. That seclusion and
introspection which are necessary for mutual
communication between husband and wife,
for small boys, Haubinda for the intermediary grades, and for the
high-school period Bieberstein. Paul Schub's Landerziehungsheim
Odenwaldschule has provided for the home feeling and the
individual development to the greatest extent possible in a
boarding school. THE AUTHOR.
Education for Motherhood 147
if they want to grow into complementary
personalities, would be as difficult to attain
as silence in the market-place for the enjoy-
ment of music. The unfortunate children
growing up in such a family colony would
be cross-questioned, commissioned, corrected,
and teased. Such a colony, far from broad-
ening the children's interests outside their
own circle as the proposers contend and
teaching them amiable social ways, would cause
torment to independent spirits, and increase
dulness in the constrained. Besides, children
seldom have more affection to spend than they
abundantly need for their parents, and parents
seldom have more patience than they abun-
dantly need for their own children.
Countless causes for friction would arise
among the grown-ups as a result of differences
between the children, between husbands on
account of wives, and between wives on account
of husbands. Though in the beginning all
were harmony, it would end in discord, after
the well-known pattern of most similar or even
less intimate groupings.
These reasons against the disintegration of
the home might be multiplied. I wish now
only to emphasise one point of view, which I
148 The Renaissance of Motherhood
have often advanced before. Women have
always, and not least in America, 1 by the trend
their own social work has taken, been able to
show to what an extent society needs that the
specially womanly, that is, motherly, feelings
and outlook be asserted in action. These
motherly ways of feeling and thinking have
acquired their characteristics and their sta-
bility by reason of the hitherto existing divi-
sion of labour, in which the task of making the
home and rearing the children created " wo-
manliness" with its strength and its weakness,
just as the outward struggle for existence,
the competitive field of labour, created the
strength and weakness of " manliness."
That women, during their protected, in-
wardly concentrated life, would acquire other
emotional standards, other habits of thought
than men, is obvious. Hitherto, however,
they have had very small opportunities to
invest their stored wealth in the upbuilding
of this " man-made world." Consequently,
there is a crying need of womanliness, especially
motherliness, in public life. But motherliness
* x I have received valuable information in this respect through
Rheta Child Dorr's book, What Eight Million Women Want. THE
AUTHOR.
Education for Motherhood 149
is no more permanent than any other state of
the soul. Soul sources are like the water in
nature, sometimes abundant, sometimes scant,
clear to-day, turbid to-morrow, now flowing,
then again frozen all according to the soil
through which it finds its way, and the tem-
perature it meets. If now the division of
labour be changed to such an extent that all
women during the whole work-period that
is, about forty years devote themselves to
outside occupations, while a minority of wo-
men, who are often not mothers themselves,
professionally fill the need for child-rearing,
then motherliness will diminish generation
after generation. For it is not alone the
bearing of children, neither is it the upbringing
alone, that develops motherliness, but both
together are needed. The result will be that
women's contribution to society will be similar
to that of men. They will fill with stones the
''springs in the valley of sorrow " which the
homes, in spite of everything, have been
hitherto in our hard and arid existence. The
new world, which the women soon will have a
hand in making, will be no more beautiful, no
warmer, than the present. Even a very much
more rational and just social order cannot
150 The Renaissance of Motherhood (
furnish compensation for all the subtle and
immeasurable riches which directly and in-
directly have flowed from the home.
If the destruction of the homes were the
price the race must pay for woman's attain-
ment of full human dignity and citizenship,
then the price would be too high. If the
female parasites cannot be gotten rid of in
any other way than by driving all women out
of the homes to outside departments of labour,
let us rather, then, allow the parasites to
flourish, since of two social evils this would be
the lesser.
But humanity will not have to choose
between two such evils. The parasitical
family woman just as much as the worn-out
family drudge, the family egoism piling up
wealth and the economically harassed family
life, as well as other ignoble constituents which
riches as well as poverty bring into the homes,
are all part and parcel of the present social
order. A society which sharply restricts
inheritances, but protects the right of all
children to the full development of their
powers; which demands labour of all its
members, but allows its women to choose
between the vocation of motherhood or out-
Education for Motherhood 151
side work; a society in which attempts to live
without work will be dealt with in the same
manner as forgery such a society is coming.
In this society, mother-care will be a well-paid
public service to which an effectual supervision
is given, and for which state control is accepted.
Without such radical social transformations,
renaissance of the family life is not even
conceivable. And it is not likely to become
actual before the changing orders of econo-
mics and a new religion combine their forces.
in
As I have already stated, economy and
religion determine the trend of life, espe-
cially that of family life. And for this reason
the tide of the age, which has already turned
women outward, is likely to wax stronger
until a new religion once again shall kindle
the soul of the people with a burning desire
for great spiritual values.
Certain signs have appeared, indicating
that the religious as well as the economic
transformation is in progress. The heart-
beat of humanity has always gone thus: after
the outflowing, the inflowing from the sur-
152 The Renaissance of Motherhood
face back to the heart. The new religion will
probably not be a " refined " Christianity.
But the deepest experiences of the race, to
which Christianity gave expression in myths
and symbols now worn out, will reassert
themselves in a new form. And the highest
ideas which Christianity has given to human-
ity will again become life-determining forces,
although on other grounds.
The crisis through which all the assets
generally considered " Christian " and " fem-
inine" are now passing arose out of their sharp
contrast to the present social development or
outlook on life. Women have no longer that
Christian faith, as a mainstay against the
power of the times, which among other things
made them willing to accept as many children
as it "pleased God to send/' Implicit devo-
tion and self-sacrifice are no longer women's
ideal. The legitimate individualism which
has made the modern women determined also
"to live their own lives" has, with many,
resulted in a decision to throw off "sexual
slavery in the family. " From this individual-
ism women can be converted only through a
new religious belief, namely, that every human
being "lives his own life" in the greatest and
Education for Motherhood 153
most beautiful sense when his will is in har-
mony with that mighty will to create of which
the whole evolution of culture as well as of
nature bears witness.
But the will to create, which is the mysteri-
ous innermost nature of life, nowhere reveals
itself more simply or more strongly than in
that love out of which new beings spring, and
in the parental devotion to these new beings.
From the point of view of the new religion,
the professional and social work, which by
many modern women is considered an obstacle
to motherhood and of greater social value than
the latter, will only be a ''tithe of mint and
anise and cummin" when husbands and wives,
well equipped for parenthood, do not give the
race their flesh and blood. All that the in-
telligence and genius of men and women can
do for eugenics and the care of infants, for
education and schools, is of small conse-
quence so long as it is lavished on a human
material constantly shrinking in value because
produced by physically and psychically in-
ferior parents, while those who have the
making of good parents cannot afford, or have
not the will, to supply children to the race.
Or, as a famous botanist has vigorously ex-
154 The Renaissance of Motherhood
pressed it: "A single microscopic cell from
which one great human being springs is of
greater importance to the race than the pains-
taking efforts of a hundred thousand child-
rearers and educators with a child-material
below par."
This conception must become dominant
before any " education for motherhood" can
be effective. Thoughts and emotions, will
and imagination, must be converted and sanc-
tified through a religion that considers the
present superficial culture as a fall of man.
The low ideal of happiness held by an irre-
ligious race a more and more luxurious, easy,
gliding, automobile existence will lose its
attraction for humanity through the religious
awakening. Men and women will once more
dream of noble and dangerous deeds. We
will have an epoch of aviation also in a
spiritual sense. The heroic attitude toward
and in life, which the world of antiquity and
Nietzsche in the modern world represent,
will again become the ideal of happiness which
guides the leaders of the race. Even the
many will again desire the deep feeling, the
strong emotions and difficult tasks, despite
the dangers, sufferings, and sorrows they may
Education for Motherhood 155
bring. For the ideal of happiness will not
then, as now, be the easiest existence, but the
one which allows the greatest expenditure of
power.
For the majority of women family life
offers this more toilsome and troubled, but
also more rich and joyous existence. But not
family life alone! Power expands also in tak-
ing part in the organisation of a more and more
perfect society, in a more concerted progress
toward a wiser and higher moral goal. This
too is a collaboration with the Will to create,
an adjusting of one's own individuality to
individual assets beyond, or, in other words,
a form of the new religious worship.
The morning star which augurs the birth
of the new religion is already visible on the
horizon. Not only economic and democratic
forces are at work for the new social order;
there are also religious ones. To the same
extent that these forces increase in strength
we shall draw nearer to that state which is
to relieve the present chaotic and energy-
wasting society, the present soulless and aim-
less existence.
And not until then are we likely to have
mothers well trained for the vocation of
156 The Renaissance of Motherhood
motherhood and well cared for by society
during the discharge of this duty.
A new time comes, as a rule, with quiet and
small steps, only rarely with great, swift
strides. One small step is the training of girls
and boys in sexual hygiene and in their duties
toward themselves as future parents. An-
other is the realisation that by a better
physical development through gymnastics,
athletics, dancing, etc. a development highly
important for the new race strength and
beauty will be gained also for the children.
A third is the recognition in Europe, as well
as in America, of the obvious need of a train-
ing for the inherently womanly vocations.
To begin with, we have discovered that it is
only an empty phrase to assert that industry
has wholly supplanted the business of the
household, since very many tasks remain
which have to be done in the home. And
further, we have grown to understand that to
purchase all the necessities of life ready-made
lowers the family's standard of living and
increases the cost more than if the wife per-
formed certain work in the home. We have
begun to see that the value of the wife's
industrial work does not, from a national
Education for Motherhood 157
economic point of view, compensate for the
family's higher cost of living, the women's
indisposition toward motherhood, and incapa-
city for it, the neglect of the children and the
home and the consequent increase of alcohol-
ism and criminality, and finally the constantly
growing expense to the state of the rearing and
care of the children in public and charitable
institutions.
As a result of these observations, women
especially, but also men, have begun to ad-
vocate cooking-schools, courses in domestic
science and household economics. Such
courses are given in conjunction with the
public schools and colleges, or as independent
courses, whether or not combined with the
care of children. "Mother schools," child-
training schools, kindergarten schools, lecture
courses in child-psychology and in experi-
mental psychology, everywhere are springing
into existence. In a word, efforts are being
made to remedy the ignorance of the young
women of the present generation as to the
mission of the home an ignorance which is the
result, on the one hand, of the early entering
into industrial labour, on the other hand, of the
long studies.
158 The Renaissance of Motherhood
We are ready to deplore the colossal mis-
management which has gone on century after
century in allowing women to come unpre-
pared to their most important vocation,
for society and for the race, the bearing and
rearing of children. Information as to sexual
matters is still, by many, considered an
abomination in Germany a girl was expelled
from a boarding-school because she possessed a
scientific book on the " sex-life of plants" ! but
it is now everywhere imparted by all thought-
ful educators. The moderate feminists, at
least in Europe, are using all these measures in
their endeavour to make women professionally
capable in their old department of labour.
They understand that only increased capa-
bility can give the inwardly directed expendi-
ture of woman's power a new dignity, make
it a new social asset.
Considering this training by itself, I believe
that the cooking course has its right place in
the early teens when it is enjoyed by most
girls as a change from book-studies, and as a
knowledge of which they may easily make
use. But I do not believe that that age is
the psychologically correct time for the
more serious and important education in
Education for Motherhood 159
the art of home-making and the duties of
motherhood.
The fundamental evil of the present school-
system is its tendency to line up the manifold
desirable teachings for the young like soldiers
on parade, namely, on graduation day. This
is an insurmountable obstacle to thoroughness
and veracity in instruction, qualities which
cannot be fully attained without perfect peace
for both teachers and pupils a peace which
is never associated with fixed courses and
examinations. Without serenity, no know-
ledge can fully ring out, vibrating through
thought, feeling, will, and imagination. But
only by such a resonance does the knowledge
manifest itself as living, only thus does it
become a power for growth within the indi-
vidual.
And this is what education for motherhood
must accomplish; otherwise it is a failure.
During the early " teens " the young girls'
minds are already crammed with abstract
knowledge which frequently they have neither
desired nor needed. Then comes this educa-
tion for motherhood for which they have no
direct use, and it comes at a time when their
minds are mostly filled with thoughts and
i6o The Renaissance of Motherhood
dreams about the unknown life which attracts
all their yearning, though as yet in indefinite
forms. It consequently follows that they
will come absent-minded to the instruction
in the vocation of motherhood, and when
later in life they stand before the reality, they
will have forgotten most of this teaching, as
they forget so much of the other instruction
they have received without longing for it,
and without the personal assimilation referred
to above.
Even if one takes this instruction as seri-
ously as, for example, the German woman
suffragists desire, who endeavour to intro-
duce an obligatory year-long course for all
girls, as a preparation for motherhood,
such preparation, for the reasons mentioned
heretofore, would in reality be far from as
effective as a training given some years later.
In my opinion, girls as well as boys, after
having at about the age of fifteen finished the
common preparatory school which ought to
be entirely free from examinations should
devote themselves to their special professional
training, which, in the case of the majority,
would be completed at about the age of twenty.
And this is the age at which I would advocate
Education for Motherhood 161
a year of social service for women as well as
for men. In the states that enforce military
training, such a period of service is already
required of the men and it often lasts several
years. I consider a parallel service for women
the right education for the care of home and
children. And this period of training should
be set at the psychologically well adapted
age when many of the young women already
look forward to a home of their own, or at
least have become conscious of a longing for
home and children.
The year of training should be divided into
three courses:
1 . A theoretic course in national economics,
the fundamental hygienic and aesthetic prin-
ciples for the planning of a home and the
running of a household. This course would
hardly need to include practical exercises,
since sewing and cooking classes, and the like,
form a part of the curriculum in the present-
day schools, and thus the first principles of
domestic science are there imparted.
2. A theoretic course in hygiene, psycho-
logy, and education for normal children, with
directions for the recognition of abnormalities.
3. A theoretic course in the physical and
162 The Renaissance of Motherhood
psychical duties of a mother before and after
the birth of a child, and the fundamental
principles of eugenics.
To these theoretic courses must be added
practical training in the care of children, which
should embrace knowledge of the child's
proper nourishment, clothing, and sleep; its
physical exercise, play, and other occupations;
and its care in case of sickness and accident.
Children's asylums, day-nurseries and hos-
pitals, and mother-homes (where mothers with
children would find refuge for shorter or longer
periods) would give opportunity for such train-
ing led by the teachers.
Already in the year 1900 (in The Century of
the Child, first edition), I had proposed a ser-
vice for women similar to the compulsory
military service for men. Such propositions
had been made in Sweden even earlier from
several quarters. But they had only referred
to the obligatory training of women in the care
of the sick and their compulsory service as
nurses in time of war. My plan, on the other
hand, was that the training should principally
comprise domestic science and the care of
children, although the rudiments of hygiene
and therapeutics ought also to be considered.
Education for Motherhood 163
In 1900, no one took up my proposition, not
even in order to attack it. During the last
twelve years, this same proposition, but quite
independently of me, has been put forth from
many sides, not alone from Sweden, but from
Norway, Germany, and elsewhere, and by men
as well as women. Some of these rather
unfortunately in my opinion have connected
the question of such a year of social service for
woman with the question of woman suffrage.
This has come from quarters where it is con-
sidered that men's right to suffrage answers
to their military duty. For my part, I have
never connected these two questions, since
I consider that the duty of paying taxes, equal
for men and women, corresponds to their equal
rights of suffrage, and, besides, that society's
need of the women's point of view as well as of
that of men fully justifies their eligibility to
office. And, if we seek a parallel to man's
sacrifice of life and limb or health on the
battlefield, we find it in child-bearing, a bat-
tlefield where many women give their lives or
become invalids for the rest of their days.
The duty of training for social service as
mother or soldier, in my opinion, naturally
follows from the education that society has
1 64 The Renaissance of Motherhood
given the young, an education which, in
regard to professional training, they must repay
by efficient work in their various professions,
but also by preparing themselves to defend
and promote the culture of which they are
beneficiaries. The natural division of labour
will then be that the men prepare themselves
to defend the country in case of an impending
peril, and to be helpful in times of disaster,
while the women prepare themselves to de-
fend and care for the new generation on which
the future depends.
In the distant future, when military service
shall no longer be needed, and at present, in
countries where it is not enforced, all young
men ought to have some such training as that
of which the Scout movement is, in a certain
sense, a beginning a training in readiness and
ability to assist in case of natural calamities
and other accidents which may befall society
or individuals. Even now, it is the soldiers
and seamen who, at times of fire, railroad and
mine accidents, floods and earthquakes, show
themselves the best helpers, because of their
habits of discipline, and of swift and efficient
action. .Boys ought to be taught as is
done here and there already the preparation
Education for Motherhood 165
of the plainest dishes and the simplest mending
of clothes, in order that they may not be
utterly helpless in any situation in which they
may find themselves in life. And the young
man should, during his year of social service,
receive instruction in the first principles of
eugenics and hygiene.
Young men and women ought also, as a
matter of course, to get some knowledge of the
essential features of the structure of society.
This may be given already during the school
period as has very successfully been tried
at an excellent coeducational reform school
in Sweden if the knowledge be not imparted
through dry discourses. In this school, the
young people are allowed, under the guidance
of an expert teacher, to play at parliament
two hours a week during some years. They
have elections, committee-meetings, party
divisions, motions, and discussions, just as
in the national legislature. Even the rudi-
ments of national economy can in such a
manner be made living and interesting.
That all of this directly belongs to woman's
education for social motherhood, and in-
directly <\lso to her vacation as the mother of
future members of society, needs no further
1 66 The Renaissance of Motherhood
proof. For men, as well as for women, the
social-service year would not be wasted even
if many would have no occasion personally to
use for their own individual benefit all the
knowledge gained. There exists no woman
who does not, in some way or other, come into
contact with children. And it is increasingly
rare for women not to find opportunities in
social work to use the knowledge gained during
a year's instruction in the care of children,
hygiene, eugenics, domestic science, and na-
tional economy. But far beyond and above
the benefits which understanding of this or
that individual case would bring, is the awak-
ening to social responsibility and the levelling of
class distinction which such a year of obligatory
social service would bring to the daughter
of the millionaire and the factory girl alike.
As guides in the instruction of young women
I would choose noble matrons, serene as
priestesses, who themselves have fulfilled the
mission of motherhood women ripened into
sweetness of wisdom, and with power to
impart vividly the fruits of their experience to
the young who, some day standing before the
serious task of making a home and bringing
up children, may perhaps by a single word of
Education for Motherhood 167
advice remembered in time' save life's happi-
ness for themselves.
As a transition toward a legally established
social-service year for women, I think it might
be a good plan to make a course in housekeep-
ing and the care of children a condition of
the right to marry. This would result in the
private establishment of such courses every-
where. But, on the one hand, the state would
have no control over their character, and on
the other, these courses would mostly be taken
during the above-mentioned and least appro-
priate age, while in cases when this would not
be true, they might come as an unwelcome
compulsion later on. In consideration of all
these reasons, it is best to fix our eyes upon an
obligatory year of service for women as a goal
to be realised in the near future. The nation
which tried this out would find its health and
prosperity increased after a few generations
in a measure that would thoroughly com-
pensate for the cost involved. Such a cost need
not, however, be as great as it is for the com-
pulsory military training of men. To be sure,
certain buildings would have to be erected,
suitable homes for the teachers and students
who were not living in the neighbourhood of
1 68 The Renaissance of Motherhood
the training centres, but appropriate lecture-
halls would, in most cases, already be found on
the spot. And while the service of the men
does not confer any direct benefit to society
in times of peace, the service of the women
would place a large working force at the dis-
posal of society for the care of the sick and
of children and of all in need. In each centre,
various energy-saving combinations would be
possible. As an example may be irientioned
that in Stockholm the feeding of poor child-
ren has been combined with the schools of
domestic science. These embrace not only
cooking and similar subjects, but also a course
in the care of children, which in turn is com-
bined with day-nurseries. Dining-rooms for
working-women are also combined with the
cooking-school. By wise, womanly organisa-
tion, there are consequently not less than six
socially useful enterprises which directly sup-
port each other.
These suggestions suffice to show in what
direction one must go in order to make prac-
ticable the use of the year of social service for
women. Different conditions in different na-
tions, and in various districts within each
country, would dictate a variety of applica-
Education for Motherhood 169
tions and a detailed programme would be as
impossible as unnecessary.
Only certain essential conditions would need
to be established everywhere. In the first
place, a higher marriage age for women,
the making of the legal marriage age for women
the same as for men, twenty-one, has been
proved to be conducive to the betterment of
society and the race. Secondly, that the year
between twenty and twenty-one be established
as the year for social service, although as is
now the case for men- an earlier or later enter-
ing into service for valid reasons might be
allowed. Thirdly, that complete freedom
from service must be granted for reasons
similar to those which now exempt men from
military service.
In analogy with men, the women under
obligation to serve ought to have free choice,
within certain limits, in regard to the place
of training, and also in regard to the selection
of the practical and theoretic courses in which
they would participate. For example, it
would be foolish to waste time on such courses
as have already been taken during medical
or normal-school studies, and so forth. And,
similarly, it would be a great waste of energy
170 The Renaissance of Motherhood
if one already graduated as a trained nurse
were commanded to do duty in a hospital, or
if a capable and well-informed child-nurse
were sent to a children's home, and so on.
The object should be so to arrange the training
that each one to the greatest possible extent
would fill up the gaps in her knowledge.
After some generations of such earnest
education, it would be found that, just as the
training for the teacher's calling has supplied
the countries with good teaching forces, while
the same forces untrained would have re-
mained insignificant; the education for moth-
erhood would supply the various nations with
many good mothers well able to fulfil the
duties of the home. Such "born educators"
as did not become mothers would find work
enough in institutions where children must be
cared for by society because of the death or
the viciousness or the work of their parents.
The attitude of the women, once they have
gained full suffrage, toward the questions
herein dealt with, will be the great test of the
nature of their social motherliness. If they
comprehend that the education of the mothers,
and the rendering secure the functions of the
mothers, is the life-question of the race, they
Education for Motherhood 171
will then succeed in finding the means of
meeting these demands.
This sounds too optimistic to many readers.
But did humanity ever halt helplessly before
any of its vital needs? Least of all could this
happen in America, where the very air rever-
berates with songs of faith in the power of
will, with the hope of realisation of most
wonderful dreams. From the Pilgrim Fathers,
from the wars of independence and secession,
we have strong evidence of the power of will
over the destiny of the American people.
Ever since, in my youth, I listened to Emer-
son's prophetic words, and Whitman's songs
of the creative power of the soul and of the
pliability of life in the moulding grasp of this
power, I have again and again received new
impressions through thinkers, moralists, and
sects of this typically American spirit. To
be sure, it may sometimes lapse into boastful-
ness, or degenerate into superstition, as, for
instance, when it is believed that the will can
conquer every disease and even abolish death.
But in itself this sovereign assurance of the
victory of will, faith, and hope is the world's
greatest power for overcoming evil with good.
By ELLEN
The Century of the Child
Cr.fi . With Frontispiece. Net $150. By mail
$1.65
CONTENTS: The Right of the Child to Choose His
Parents, The Unborn Race and Woman's Work, Education,
Homelesstjess, Soul Murder in the Schools, The School of
the Future, Religious Instruction, Child Labor and the
Crimes of Children. This book has gone through more
than twenty German Editions and has been published in
several European countries.
"A powerful book." #. Y. Times.
"A profound and analytical discussion by ft great Scandinavian
teacher, of the reasons why modern education does not better
educate." N. Y. Christian Herald.
The Education of the Child
Reprinted from the Authorized American Edition of
The Century of the Child With Introductory Note by
EDWARD BOK.
Cr. 8. Net 75 cents. By mail 85 cents
"Nothing finer on the wise education of the child has ever been
brought into print. To me this chapter is a perfect classic; it points
the way straight for every parent, and it should find a place in every
home in America where there is a child." EDWARD BOK, Editor
of the Ladies' Home Journal.
"This book, by one of the most thoughtful students of child life
among current writers, is one that will prove invaluable to parents
who desire to develop in their children that strength of character,
self-control and personality that alone makes for a wen-rounded 1
ful and happy lite."-Baltimore Sun.
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York London
By ELLEN
Love and Marriage
Cr. 5. Net $150. By mail, $1.65
"One of the profoundest and most important pronouncements of
the woman's movement that has yet found expression. . . . Intensely
modern in her attitude, Miss Key has found a place for all the
conflicting philosophies of the day, has taken what is good from each,
has affected the compromise, which is always the road to advance-
ment, between individualism and socialism, realism and idealism,
morality and the new thought. She is more than a metaphysical
philosopher. She is a seer, a prophet. She brings to her aid
psychology, history, science, and then something more inspiration
and hope." Boston Transcript.
The Woman Movement
Translated by Namah Bouton Borthwick, A.M.
With an Introduction by Havelock Ellis
72. Net $1.50. By mail $1.65
This is not a history of the woman's movement, but a statement
of what Ellen Key considers to be the new phase it is now entering
on, a phase in which the claim to exert the rights and functions of
men is less important than the claims of woman's rights as the
mother and educator of the coming generation.
Rahel Varnhagen
A Portrait
Translated by Arthur E. Chater
With an Introduction by Havelock Ellis
72. With Portraits. Net $1.50. By mail, $1.65
A biography from original sources of one who has been described
as among the first and greatest of modern women. The book is a
portrait sketch of Rahel Varnhagen, and her characteristics, as " a
prophecy of the woman of the future," are illustrated by copious
extracts from her correspondence.
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York London
Ellen Key
Her Life and Her Work
A Critical Study
By Louise Nystrom Hamilton
Translated by Anna E. B. Fries
12. With Portrait $1.25 net.
The name of Ellen Key has for years been
a target for attacks of various kinds. Friends
have in connection with the issues that have
arisen in regard to the influence of her work
become enemies and friction has been caused
in many homes. Her ideals and her purposes
have been misquoted and misinterpreted until
the very convictions for which she stood have
been twisted so as to appear to be the evils that
she was attempting to combat. Her critics, not
content with decrying and distorting the mes-
sage that she had to give to the world, have
even attacked her personal character; and as
the majority of these had no direct knowledge
in the matter, strange rumors and fancies have
been spread abroad about her life. The
readers of her books, who are now to be
counted throughout the world by the hundreds
of thousands, who desire to know the truth
about this much discussed Swedish author,
will be interested in this critical study by
Louise Hamilton. The author is one who has
been intimate with Ellen Key since her youth.
She is herself the wife of the founder of the
People's Hospital in Stockholm, where for over
twenty years Ellen Key taught and lectured.
The volume gives an admirable survey of
the purpose and character of Ellen Key's
teachings and of her books.
New York 6. P. Putnam's Sons London
Problems of the Sexes
SEp- Jean Finot
Author of " The Science of Happiness," etc.
Translated under authority of the author
by Mary J.Sal lord
8. $2.00 net. By mail, $2.20
A masterly presentation of the attitude of
the ages toward woman and an eloquent plea
for her further enfranchisement from imposed
and unnatural limitations. The range of
scholarship that has been enlisted in the writ-
ing may well excite one's wonder, but the tone
of the book is popular and its appeal is not to
any small section of the reading public but to
all the classes and degrees of an age that, from
present indications, will go down in history
as the Century of Woman. The plea which
the author makes for a deeper participation in
life of a sex that has too long been regarded
as predestined to domesticity, is made as much
in the interest of the race as in that of woman
herself. The book, unassailably sound in its
conclusions, merits the closest attention.
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York London
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