of all progress in women's movement. "Votes for women," exclaims, more youthfully but not less unreasonably, Miss Christabel Pankhurst, "means a new Heaven and a new Earth." But women's suffrage no more means a new Heaven or even a new Earth than it means, as other people fear, a new Purgatory and a new h.e.l.l. We may see this quite plainly in Australasia.

Women's votes aid in furthering social legislation and contribute to the pa.s.sing of acts which have their good side, and, no doubt, like everything else, their bad side. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who devoted her life to the political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women, declared, the ballot is, at most, only the vestibule to women's emanc.i.p.ation. Man's suffrage has not introduced the millennium, and it is foolish to suppose that woman's suffrage can. It is merely an act of justice and a reasonable condition of social hygiene.

The attainment of the suffrage, if it is a beginning and not an end, will thus have a real and positive value in liberating the woman's movement from a narrow and sterilizing phase of its course. In England, especially, the woman's movement has in the past largely confined itself to imitating men and to obtaining the same work and the same rights as men. Putting the matter more broadly, it may be said that it has been the aim of the woman's movement to secure woman's claims as a human being rather than as woman. But that is only half the task of the woman's movement, and perhaps not the most essential half. Women can never be like men, any more than men can be like women. It is their unlikeness which renders them indispensable to each other, and which also makes it imperative that each s.e.x should have its due share in moulding the conditions of life. Woman's function in life can never be the same as man's, if only because women are the mothers of the race.

That is the point, the only point, at which women have an uncontested supremacy over men. The most vital problem before our civilization to-day is the problem of motherhood, the question of creating the human beings best fitted for modern life, the practical realization of a sound eugenics. Manouvrier, the distinguished anthropologist, who carries feminism to its extreme point in the scientific sphere, yet recognizes the fundamental fact that "a woman's part is to make children." But he clearly perceives also that "in all its extent and all its consequences that part is not surpa.s.sed in importance, in difficulty, or in dignity, by the man's part." On the contrary it is a part which needs "an amount of intelligence incontestably superior, and by far, to that required by most masculine occupations."[58] We are here at the core of the woman's movement. And the full fruition of that movement means that women, by virtue of their supremacy in this matter, shall take their proper share in legislation for life, not as mere s.e.xless human beings, but as women, and in accordance with the essential laws of their own nature as women.

II

There is a further question. Is it possible to discern the actual embodiment of this new phase of the woman movement? I think it is.

To those who are accustomed to watch the emotional pulse of mankind, nothing has seemed so remarkable during recent years as the eruption of s.e.x questions in Germany. We had always been given to understand that the sphere of women and the laws of marriage had been definitely prescribed and fixed in Germany for at least two thousand years, since the days of Tacitus, in fact, and with the best possible results.

Germans a.s.sured the world in stentorian tones that only in Germany could young womanhood be seen in all its purity, and that in the German _Hausfrau_ the supreme ideal had been reached, the woman whose great mission is to keep alive the perennial fire of the ancient German hearth. Here and there, indeed, the quiet voice of science was heard in Germany; thus Schrader, the distinguished investigator of Teutonic origins, in commenting on the oft-quoted testimony of Tacitus to the chast.i.ty of the German women, has appositely referred to the detailed evidences furnished by the Committee of pastors of the Evangelical Church as to the extreme prevalence of unchast.i.ty among the women of rural Germany, and argued that these widespread customs must be very ancient and deep-rooted.[59] But Germans in general refused to admit that Tacitus had only used the idea of German virtue as a stick to beat his own fellow-countrywomen with.

The Social-Democratic movement, which has so largely overspread industrial and even intellectual Germany, prepared the way for a less traditional and idealistic way of feeling in regard to these questions.

The publication by Bebel of a book, _Die Frau_, in which the leader of the German Social-Democratic party set forth the Socialist doctrine of the position of women in society, marked the first stage in the new movement. This book exercised a wide influence, more especially on uncritical readers. It is, indeed, from a scientific point of view a worthless book--if a book in which genuine emotions are brought to the cause of human freedom and social righteousness may ever be so termed--but it struck a rude blow at the traditions of Teutonic sentiment. With something of the rough tone and temper of the great peasant who initiated the German Reformation, a man who had himself sprung from the people, and who knew of what he was speaking, here set down in downright fashion the actual facts as to the position of women in Germany, as well as what he conceived to be the claims of justice in regard to that position, slashing with equal vigour alike at the absurdities of conventional marriage and of prost.i.tution, the obverse and the reverse, he declared, of a false society. The emotional renaissance with which we are here concerned seems to have no special and certainly no exclusive a.s.sociation with the Social-Democratic movement, but it can scarcely be doubted that the permeation of a great ma.s.s of the German people by the socialistic conceptions which in their bearing on women have been rendered so familiar by Bebel's exposition has furnished, as it were, a ready-made sounding-board which has given resonance and effect to voices which might otherwise have been quickly lost in vacuity.

There is another movement which counts for something in the renaissance we are here concerned with, though for considerably less than one might be led to expect. What is specifically known as the "woman's rights'

movement" is in no degree native to Germany, though Hippel is one of the pioneers of the woman's movement, and it is only within recent years that it has reached Germany. It is alien to the Teutonic feminine mind, because in Germany the spheres of men and women are so far apart and so unlike that the ideal of imitating men fails to present itself to a German woman's mind. The delay, moreover, in the arrival of the woman's movement in Germany had given time for a clearer view of that movement and a criticism of its defects to form even in the lands of its origin, so that the German woman can no longer be caught unawares by the cry for woman's rights. Still, however qualified a view might be taken of its benefits, it had to be recognized, even in Germany, that it was an inevitable movement, and to some extent at all events indispensable from the woman's point of view. The same right to education as men, the same rights of public meeting and discussion, the same liberty to enter the liberal professions, these are claims which during recent years have been widely made by German women and to some extent secured, while--as is even more significant--they are for the most part no longer very energetically disputed. The International Congress of Women which met in Berlin in 1904 was a revelation to the citizens of Berlin of the skill and dignity with which women could organize a congress and conduct business meetings. It was notable, moreover, in that, though under the auspices of an International Council, it showed the large number of German women who are already ent.i.tled to take a leading part in the movements for women's welfare. Both directly and indirectly, indeed, such a movement cannot be otherwise than specially beneficial in Germany. The Teutonic reverence for woman, the a.s.sertion of the "aliquid divinum," has sometimes been accompanied by the openly expressed conviction that she is a fool. Outside Germany it would not be easy to find the representative philosophers of a nation putting forward so contemptuous a view of women as is set forth by Schopenhauer or by Nietzsche, while even within recent years a German physician of some ability, the late Dr. Mobius, published a book on the "physiological weak-mindedness of women."

The new feminine movement in Germany has received highly important support from the recent development of German science. The German intellect, exceedingly comprehensive in its outlook, ploddingly thorough, and imperturbably serious, has always taken the leading and pioneering part in the investigation of s.e.xual problems, whether from the standpoint of history, biology, or pathology. Early in the nineteenth century, when even more courage and resolution were needed to face the scientific study of such questions than is now the case, German physicians, unsupported by any co-operation in other countries, were the pioneers in exploring the paths of s.e.xual pathology.[60] From the antiquarian side, Bachofen, more than half a century ago, put forth his conception of the exalted position of the primitive mother which, although it has been considerably battered by subsequent research, has been by no means without its value, and is of special significance from the present standpoint, because it sprang from precisely the same view of life as that animating the German women who are to-day inaugurating the movement we are here concerned with. From the medical side the late Professor Krafft-Ebing of Vienna and Dr. Albert Moll of Berlin are recognized throughout the world as leading authorities on s.e.xual pathology, and in recent times many other German physicians of the first authority can be named in this field; while in Austria Dr. F.S. Krauss and his coadjutors in the annual volumes of _Anthropophyteia_ are diligently exploring the rich and fruitful field of s.e.xual folk-lore.

The large volumes of the _Jahrbuch fur s.e.xuelle Zwischenstufen_, edited by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld of Berlin, have presented discussions of the commonest of s.e.xual aberrations with a scientific and scholarly thoroughness, a practical competence, as well as admirable tone, which we may seek in vain in other countries. In Vienna, moreover, Professor Freud, with his bold and original views on the s.e.xual causation of many abnormal mental and nervous conditions, and his psycho-a.n.a.lytic method of investigating and treating them, although his doctrines are by no means universally accepted, is yet exerting a revolutionary influence all over the world. During the last ten years, indeed, the amount of German scientific and semi-scientific literature, dealing with every aspect of the s.e.xual question, and from every point of view, is altogether unparalleled. It need scarcely be said that much of this literature is superficial or worthless. But much of it is sound, and it would seem that on the whole it is this portion of it which is most popular. Thus Dr. August Forel, formerly professor of psychiatry at Zurich and a physician of world-wide reputation, published a few years ago at Munich a book on the s.e.xual question, _Die s.e.xuelle Frage_, in which all the questions of the s.e.xual life, biological, medical, and social, are seriously discussed with no undue appeal to an ignorant public; it had an immediate success and a large sale. Dr. Forel had not entered this field before; he had merely come to the conclusion that every man at the end of his life ought to set forth his observations and conclusions regarding the most vital of questions. Again, at about the same time, Dr. Iwan Bloch, of Berlin, published his many-sided work on the s.e.xual life of our time, _Das s.e.xualleben Unserer Zeit_, a work less remarkable than Forel's for the weight of the personal authority expressed, but more remarkable by the range of its learning and the sympathetic att.i.tude it displayed towards the best movements of the day; this book also met with great success.[61] Still more recently (1912) Dr.

Albert Moll, with characteristic scientific thoroughness, has edited, and largely himself written, a truly encyclopaedic _Handbuch der s.e.xualwissenschaften_. The eminence of the writers of these books and the mental calibre needed to read them suffice to show that we are not concerned, as a careless observer might suppose, with a matter of supply and demand in prurient literature, but with the serious and widespread appreciation of serious investigations. This same appreciation is shown not only by several bio-sociological periodicals of high scientific quality, but by the existence of a journal like _s.e.xual-Probleme_, edited by Dr. Max Marcuse, a journal with many distinguished contributors, and undoubtedly the best periodical in this field to be found in any language.

At the same time the new movement of German women, however it may arise from or be supported by political or scientific movements, is fundamentally emotional in its character. If we think of it, every great movement of the Teutonic soul has been rooted in emotion. The German literary renaissance of the eighteenth century was emotional in its origin and received its chief stimulus from the contagion of the new irruption of sentiment in France. Even German science is often influenced, and not always to its advantage, by German sentiment. The Reformation is an example on a huge scale of the emotional force which underlies German movements. Luther, for good and for evil, is the most typical of Germans, and the Luther who made his mark in the world--the shrewd, coa.r.s.e, superst.i.tious peasant who blossomed into genius--was an avalanche of emotion, a great ma.s.s of natural human instincts irresistible in their impetuosity. When we bear in mind this general tendency to emotional expansiveness in the manifestations of the Teutonic soul we need feel no surprise that the present movement among German women should be, to a much greater extent than the corresponding movements in other countries, an emotional renaissance. It is not, first and last, a cry for political rights, but for emotional rights, and for the reasonable regulation of all those social functions which are founded on the emotions.[62]

This movement, although it may properly be said to be German, since its manifestations are mainly exhibited in the great German Empire, is yet essentially a Teutonic movement in the broader sense of the word.

Germans of Austria, Germans of Switzerland, Dutch women, Scandinavians, have all been drawn into this movement. But it is in Germany proper that they all find the chief field of their activities.

If we attempt to define in a single sentence the specific object of this agitation we may best describe it as based on the demands of woman the mother, and as directed to the end of securing for her the right to control and regulate the personal and social relations which spring from her nature as mother or possible mother. Therein we see at once both the intimately emotional and practical nature of this new claim and its decisive unlikeness to the earlier woman movement. That was definitely a demand for emanc.i.p.ation; political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt was its goal; its perpetual a.s.sertion was that women must be allowed to do everything that men do. But the new Teutonic woman's movement, so far from making as its ideal the imitation of men, bases itself on that which most essentially marks the woman as unlike the man.

The basis of the movement is significantly indicated by the t.i.tle, _Mutterschutz_--the protection of the mother--originally borne by "a Journal for the reform of s.e.xual morals," established in 1905, edited by Dr. Helene Stocker, of Berlin, and now called _Die Neue Generation_. All the questions that radiate outwards from the maternal function are here discussed: the ethics of love, prost.i.tution ancient and modern, the position of illegitimate mothers and illegitimate children, s.e.xual hygiene, the s.e.xual instruction of the young, etc. It must not be supposed that these matters are dealt with from the standpoint of a vigilance society for combating vice. The demand throughout is for the regulation of life, for reform, but for reform quite as much in the direction of expansion as of restraint. On many matters of detail, indeed, there is no agreement among these writers, some of whom approach the problems from the social and practical side, some from the psychological and philosophic side, others from the medical, legal, or historical sides.

This journal was originally the organ of the a.s.sociation for the protection of mothers, more especially unmarried mothers, called the _Bund fur Mutterschutz_. There are many agencies for dealing with illegitimate children, but the founders of this a.s.sociation started from the conviction that it is only through the mother that the child can be adequately cared for. As nearly a tenth of the children born in Germany are illegitimate, and the conditions of life into which such children are thrown are in the highest degree unfavourable, the question has its actuality.[63] It is the aim of the _Bund fur Mutterschutz_ to rehabilitate the unmarried mother, to secure for her the conditions of economic independence--whatever social cla.s.s she may belong to--and ultimately to effect a change in the legal status of illegitimate mothers and children alike. The Bund, which is directed by a committee in which social, medical, and legal interests are alike represented, already possesses numerous branches, in addition to its head-quarters in Berlin, and is beginning to initiate practical measures on the lines of its programme, notably Homes for Mothers, of which it has established nearly a dozen in different parts of Germany.

In 1911 the first International Congress for the Protection of Mothers and for s.e.xual Reform was held at Dresden, in connection with the great Exhibition of Hygiene. As a result of this Congress, an International Union was const.i.tuted, representing Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden, and Holland, which may probably be taken to be the countries which have so far manifested greatest interest in the programme of s.e.xual reform based on recognition of the supreme importance of motherhood. This movement may, therefore, be said to have overcome the initial difficulties, the antagonism, the misunderstanding, and the opprobrium, which every movement in the field of s.e.xual reform inevitably encounters, and often succ.u.mbs to.

It would be a mistake to regard this a.s.sociation as a merely philanthropic movement. It claims to be "An a.s.sociation for the Reform of s.e.xual Ethics," and _Die Neue Generation_ deals with social and ethical rather than with philanthropic questions. In these respects it reflects the present att.i.tude of many thoughtful German women, though the older school of women's rights advocates still holds aloof. We may here, for instance, find a statement of the recent discussion concerning the right of the mother to destroy her offspring before birth. This has been boldly claimed for women by Countess Gisela von Streitberg, who advocates a return to the older moral view which prevailed not only in cla.s.sic antiquity, but even, under certain conditions, in Christian practice, until Canon law, a.s.serting that the embryo had from the first an independent life, p.r.o.nounced abortion under all circ.u.mstances a crime. Countess von Streitberg takes the standpoint that as the chief risks and responsibilities must necessarily rest upon the woman, it is for her to decide whether she will permit the embryo she bears to develop. Dr. Marie Raschke, taking up the discussion from the legal side, is unable to agree that abortion should cease to be a punishable offence, though she advocates considerable modifications in the law on this matter. Dr. Siegfried Weinberg, summarizing this discussion, again from the legal standpoint, considers that there is considerable right on the Countess's side, because from the modern juridical standpoint a criminal enactment is only justified because it protects a right, and in law the embryo possesses no rights which can be injured. From the moral standpoint, also, it is argued, its destruction often becomes justifiable in the interests of the community.

This debatable question, while instructive as an example of the radical manner in which German women are now beginning to face moral questions, deals only with an isolated point which has hardly yet reached the sphere of practical politics.[64] It is more interesting to consider the general conceptions which underlie this movement, and we can hardly do this better than by studying the writings of Ellen Key, who is not only one of its recognized leaders, but may be said to present its aims and ideals in a broader and more convinced manner than any other writer.

Ellen Key's views are mainly contained in three books, _Love and Marriage_, _The Century of the Child_, and _The Women's Movement_, in which form they enjoy a large circulation, and are now becoming well known, through translations, in England and America. She carefully distinguishes her aims from what she regards as the American conception of progress in woman's movements, that is to say the tendency for women to seek to capture the activities which may be much more adequately fulfilled by the other s.e.x, while at the same time neglecting the far weightier matters that concern their own s.e.x. Man and woman are not natural enemies who need to waste their energies in fighting over their respective rights and privileges; in spiritual as in physical life they are only fruitful together. Women, indeed, need free scope for their activities--and the earlier aspirations of feminism are thus justified--but they need it, not to wrest away any tasks that men may be better fitted to perform, but to play their part in that field of creative life which is peculiarly their own. Ellen Key would say that the highest human unit is triune: father, mother, and child. Marriage, therefore, instead of being, as it is to-day, the last thing to be thought of in education, becomes the central point of life. In Ellen Key's conception, "those who love each other are man and wife," and by love she means not a temporary inclination, but "a synthesis of desire and friendship," just as the air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. It must be this for both s.e.xes alike, and Ellen Key sees a real progress in what seems to her the modern tendency for men to realize that the soul has its erotic side, and for women to realize that the senses have. She has no special sympathy with the cry for purity in masculine candidates for marriage put forward by some women of the present day. She observes that many men who have painfully struggled to maintain this ideal meet with disillusion, for it is not the masculine lamb, but much more the spotted leopard, who fascinates women. The notion that women have higher moral instincts than men Ellen Key regards as absurd. The majority of Frenchwomen, she remarks, were against Dreyfus, and the majority of Englishwomen approved the South African war. The really fundamental difference between man and woman is that he can usually give his best as a creator, and she as a lover, that his value is according to his work and hers according to her love. And in love the demand for each s.e.x alike must not be primarily for a mere anatomical purity, but for pa.s.sion and for sincerity.

The aim of love, as understood by Ellen Key, is always marriage and the child, and as soon as the child comes into question society and the State are concerned. Before fruition, love is a matter for the lovers alone, and the espionage, ceremony, and routine now permitted or enjoined are both ridiculous and offensive. "The flower of love belongs to the lovers, and should remain their secret; it is the fruit of love which brings them into relation to society." The dominating importance of the child, the parent of the race to be, alone makes the immense social importance of s.e.xual union. It is not marriage which sanctifies generation, but generation which sanctifies marriage. From the point of view of "the sanct.i.ty of generation" and the welfare of the race, Ellen Key looks forward to a time when it will be impossible for a man and woman to become parents when they are unlikely to produce a healthy child, though she is opposed to Neo-Malthusian methods, partly on aesthetic grounds and partly on the more dubious grounds of doubt as to their practical efficiency; it is from this point of view also that she favours s.e.xual equality in matters of divorce, the legal a.s.similation of legitimate and illegitimate children, the recognition of unions outside marriage,--a recognition already legally established under certain circ.u.mstances in Sweden, in such a way as to confer the rights of legitimacy on the child,--and she is even prepared to advise women under some conditions to become mothers outside marriage, though only when there are obstacles to legal marriage, and as the outcome of deliberate will and resolution. In these and many similar proposals in detail, set forth in her earlier books, it is clear that Ellen Key has sometimes gone beyond the mandate of her central conviction, that love is the first condition for increasing the vitality alike of the race and of the individuality, and that the question of love, properly considered, is the question of creating the future man. As she herself has elsewhere quite truly pointed out, practice must precede, and precede by a very long time, the establishment of definite rules in matters of detail.

It will be noticed that a point with which Ellen Key and the leaders of the new German woman's movement specially concern themselves is the affectional needs of the "supernumerary" woman and the legitimation of her children. There is an excess of women over men, in Germany as in most other countries. That excess, it is said, is balanced by the large number of women who do not wish to marry. But that is too cheap a solution of the question. Many women may wish to remain unmarried, but no woman wishes to be forced to remain unmarried. Every woman, these advocates of the rights of women claim, has a right to motherhood, and in exercising the right under sound conditions she is benefiting society. But our marriage system, in the rigid form which it has long since a.s.sumed, has not now the elasticity necessary to answer these demands. It presents a solution which is often impossible, always difficult, and perhaps in a large proportion of cases undesirable. But for a woman who is shut out from marriage to grasp at the vital facts of love and motherhood which she perhaps regards, unreasonably or not, as the supreme things in the world, must often be under such conditions a disastrous step, while it is always accompanied by certain risks.

Therefore, it is asked, why should there not be, as of old there was, a relationship established which while of less dignity than marriage, and less exclusive in its demands, should yet permit a woman to enter into an honourable, open, and legally recognized relationship with a man?

Such a relationship a woman could proclaim to the whole world, if necessary, without reflecting any disesteem upon herself or her child, while it would give her a legal claim on her child's father. Such a relationship would be substantially the same as the ancient concubinate, which persisted even in Christendom up to the sixteenth century. Its establishment in Sweden has apparently been satisfactory, and it is now sought to extend it to other countries.[65]

It is interesting to compare, or to contrast, the movement of which Ellen Key has been a conspicuous champion with the futile movement initiated nearly a century ago by the school of Saint-Simon and Prosper Enfantin, in favour of "la femme libre."[66] That earlier movement had no doubt its bright and ideal side, but it was not supported by a sound and scientific view of life; it was rooted in sand and soon withered up. The kind of freedom which Ellen Key advocates is not a freedom to dispense with law and order, but rather a freedom to recognize and follow true law; it is the freedom which in morals as well as in politics is essential for the development of real responsibility.

People talk, Ellen Key remarks, as though reform in s.e.xual morality meant the breaking up of a beautiful idyll, while the idyll is impossible as long as the only alternative offered to so many young men and women at the threshold of life is between becoming "the slave of duty or the slave of l.u.s.t." In these matters we already possess licence, and the only sound reform lies in a kind of "freedom" which will correct that licence by obedience to the most fundamental natural instincts acting in harmony with the claims of the race, which claims, it must be added, cannot be out of harmony with the best traditions of the race.

Ellen Key would agree with a great German, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who wrote more than a century ago that "a solicitude for the race conducts to the same results as the highest solicitude for the most beautiful development of the inner man." The modern revolt against fossilized laws is inevitable; it is already in progress, and we have to see to it that the laws written upon tables of stone in their inevitable decay only give place to the mightier laws written upon tables of flesh and blood.

Life is far too rich and manifold, Ellen Key says again, to be confined in a single formula, even the best; if our ideal has its worth for ourselves, if we are prepared to live for it and to die for it, that is enough; we are not ent.i.tled to impose it on others. The conception of duty still remains, duty to love and duty to the race. "I believe in a new ethics," Ellen Key declares at the end of _The Women's Movement_, "which will be a synthesis growing out of the nature of man and the nature of woman, out of the demands of the individual and the demands of society, out of the pagan and the Christian points of view, out of the resolve to mould the future and out of piety towards the past."

No reader of Ellen Key's books can fail to be impressed by the remarkable harmony between her s.e.xual ethics and the conception that underlies Sir Francis Galton's scientific eugenics. In setting forth the latest aspects of his view of eugenics before the Sociological Society, Galton a.s.serted that the improvement of the race, in harmony with scientific knowledge, would come about by a new religious movement, and he gave reasons to show why such an expectation is not unreasonable; in the past men have obeyed the most difficult marriage rules in response to what they believed to be supernatural commands, and there is no ground for supposing that the real demands of the welfare of the race, founded on exact knowledge, will prove less effective in calling out an inspiring religious emotion. Writing probably at the same time, Ellen Key, in her essay ent.i.tled _Love and Ethics_, set forth precisely the same conception, though not from the scientific but from the emotional standpoint. From the outset she places the s.e.xual question on a basis which brings it into line with Galton's eugenics. The problem used to be concerned, she remarks, with the insistence of society on a rigid marriage form, in conflict with the demand of the individual to gratify his desires in any manner that seemed good to him, while now it becomes a question of harmonizing the claims of the improvement of the race with the claims of the individual to happiness in love. She points out that on this aspect real harmony becomes more possible. Regard for the enn.o.blement of the race serves as a bridge from a chaos of conflicting tendencies to a truer conception of love, and "love must become on a higher plane what it was in primitive days--a religion." She compares the growth of the conception of the vital value of love to the modern growth of the conception of the value of health as against the medieval indifference to hygiene. It is inevitable that Ellen Key, approaching the question from the emotional side, should lay less stress than Galton on the importance of scientific investigation in heredity, and insist mainly on the value of sound instincts, unfettered by false and artificial constraints, and taught to realize that the physical and the psychic aspects of life are alike "divine."

It would obviously be premature to express either approval or disapproval of the conceptions of s.e.xual morality which Ellen Key has developed with such fervour and insight. It scarcely seems probable that the methods of s.e.xual union, put forward as an alternative to celibacy by some of the adherents of the new movement, are likely to become widely popular, even if legalized in an increasing number of countries.

I have elsewhere given reasons to believe that the path of progress lies mainly in the direction of a reform of the present inst.i.tution of marriage.[67] The need of such reform is pressing, and there are many signs that it is being recognized. We can scarcely doubt that the advocates of these alternative methods of s.e.xual union will do good by stimulating the champions of marriage to increased activity in the reform of that inst.i.tution. In such matters a certain amount of compet.i.tion sometimes has a remarkably vivifying effect.

We may be sure that women, whose interests are so much at stake in this matter, and who tend to look at it in a practical rather than in a legal and theological spirit, will exert a powerful influence when they have acquired the ability to enforce that influence by the vote. This is significantly indicated by an inquiry held in England during 1910 by the Women's Co-operative Guild. A number of women who had held official positions in the Guild were asked (among other questions) whether or not they were in favour of divorce by mutual consent. Of 94 representative women conversant with affairs who were thus consulted, as many as 82 deliberately recorded their opinion in favour of divorce by mutual consent, and only 12 were against that highly important marriage reform.

It is probably unnecessary to discuss the opinions of other leaders in this movement, though there are several, such as Frau Grete Meisel-Hess, whose views deserve study. It will be sufficiently clear in what way this Teutonic movement differs from that Anglo-Saxon woman's rights'

movement with which we have long been familiar. These German women fully recognize that women are ent.i.tled to the same human rights as men, and that until such rights are attained "feminism" still has a proper task to achieve. But women must use their strength in the sphere for which their own nature fits them. Even though millions of women are enabled to do the work which men could do better the gain for mankind is nil. To put women to do men's work is (Ellen Key has declared) as foolish as to set a Beethoven or a Wagner to do engine-driving.

It has probably excited surprise in the minds of some who have been impressed by the magnitude and vitality of this movement that it should have manifested itself in Germany rather than in England, which is the original home of movements for women's emanc.i.p.ation, or in America, where they have reached their fullest developments. This, however, ceases to be surprising when we realize the special qualities of the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic temperaments and the special conditions under which the two movements arose. The Anglo-Saxon movement was a special application to women of the general French movement for the logical a.s.sertion of abstract human rights. That special application was not ardently taken up in France itself, though first proclaimed by French pioneers,[68] partly perhaps because such one-sided applications make little appeal to the French mind, and mainly, no doubt, because women throughout the eighteenth century enjoyed such high social consideration and exerted so much influence that they were not impelled to rise in any rebellious protest. But when the seed was brought over to England, especially in the representative form of Mary Wollstonecraft's _Vindication of the Rights of Women_, it fell in virgin soil which proved highly favourable to its development. This special application escaped the general condemnation which the Revolution had brought upon French ideas. Women in England were beginning to awaken to ideas,--as women in Germany are now,--and the more energetic and intelligent among them eagerly seized upon conceptions which furnished food for their activities. In large measure they have achieved their aims, and even woman's suffrage has been secured here and there, without producing any notable revolution in human affairs. The Anglo-Saxon conception of feminine progress--beneficial as it has undoubtedly been in many respects--makes little impression in Germany, partly because it fails to appeal to the emotional Teutonic temperament, and partly because the established type of German life and civilization offers very small scope for its development. When Miss Susan Anthony, the veteran pioneer of woman's movements in the United States, was presented to the German Empress she expressed a hope that the Emperor would soon confer the suffrage on German women; it is recorded that the Empress smiled, and probably most German women smiled with her. At the present time, however, there is an extraordinary amount of intellectual activity in Germany, a widespread and ma.s.sive activity. For the first time, moreover, it has reached women, who are taking it up with characteristic Teutonic thoroughness. But they are not imitating the methods of their Anglo-Saxon sisters; they are going to work their own way. They are spending very little energy in waving the red flag before the fortresses of male monopoly. They are following an emotional influence which, strangely enough, it may seem to some, finds more support from the biological and medical side than the Anglo-Saxon movement has always been able to win. From the time of Aristophanes downwards, whenever they have demonstrated before the masculine citadels, women have always been roughly bidden to go home. And now, here in Germany, where of all countries that advice has been most freely and persistently given, women are adopting new tactics: they have gone home. "Yes, it is true," they say in effect, "the home is our sphere. Love and marriage, the bearing and the training of children--that is our world. And we intend to lay down the laws of our world."

FOOTNOTES:

[52] In 1787 Condorcet declared (_Lettres d'un Bourgeois de New Haven_, Lettre II) that women ought to have absolutely the same rights as men, and he repeated the same statement emphatically in 1790, in an article "Sur l'Admission des Femmes au Droit de Cite," published in the _Journal de la Societe de 1789_. It must be added that Condorcet was not a democrat, and neither to men nor to women would he grant the vote unless they were proprietors.

[53] Leopold Lacour has given a full and reliable account of Olympe de Gouges (who was born at Montauban in 1755) in his _Trois Femmes de la Revolution_, 1900.

[54] It is noteworthy that the Empire had even a depressing effect on the physical activities of women. The eighteenth-century woman in France, although she was not athletic in the modern sense, enjoyed a free life in the open air and was fond of physical exercises. During the Directoire this tendency became very p.r.o.nounced; women wore the scantiest of garments, were out of doors in all weathers, cultivated healthy appet.i.tes, and enjoyed the best of health. But with the establishment of the Empire these wholesome fashions were discarded, and women cultivated new ideals of fragile refinement indoors. (This evolution has been traced by Dr. Lucien Nars, _L'Hygiene_, September, 1911.)

[55] Concerning the rise and progress of this movement in England much information is sympathetically and vivaciously set forth in W. Lyon Blease's _Emanc.i.p.ation of English Women_ (1910), a book, however, which makes no claim to be judicial or impartial; the author regards "unregulated male egoism" as the source of the difficulties in the way of women's suffrage.

[56] Thus, in 1911 the National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage took an impartial poll of the women voters on the munic.i.p.al register in several large const.i.tuencies, by sending a reply-paid postcard to ask whether or not they favoured the extension to women of the Parliamentary franchise. Only 5579 were in favour of it; 18,850 were against; 12,621 did not take the trouble to answer, and it was claimed, probably with reason, that a majority of these were not in favour of the vote.

[57] It must not be too hastily a.s.sumed. Unless we go back to ancient plots of the Guy Fawkes type (now only imitated by self-styled anarchists), the leaders of movements of political reform have rarely, if ever, organized outbursts of violence; such violence, when it occurred, has been the spontaneous and unpremeditated act of a mob.

[58] _Revue de l'Ecole d'Anthropologie_, February, 1909, p. 50.

[59] O. Schrader, _Reallexicon_, Art. "Keuschheit." He considers that Tacitus merely shows that German women were usually chaste after marriage. A few centuries later, Lea points out, Salvia.n.u.s, while praising the barbarians generally for their chast.i.ty, makes an exception in the case of the Alemanni. (See also Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of s.e.x_, Vol. VI, "s.e.x in Relation to Society," pp. 382-4.)

[60] Thus Kaan, antic.i.p.ating Krafft-Ebing, published a _Psychopathia s.e.xualis_, in 1844, and Casper, in 1852, was the first medical authority to point out that s.e.xual inversion is sometimes due to a congenital psychic condition.

[61] Both Forel's and Bloch's books have become well known through translations in England and America. Dr. Bloch is also the author of an extremely erudite and thorough history of syphilis, which has gone far to demonstrate that this disease was introduced into Europe from America on the first discovery of the New World at the end of the fifteenth century.

[62] This att.i.tude is plainly reflected even in many books written by men; I may mention, for instance, Frenssen's well-known novel _Hilligenlei_ (_Holyland_).

[63] In most countries illegitimacy is decreasing; in Germany it is steadily increasing, alike in rural and urban districts. Illegitimate births are, however, more numerous in the cities than in the country. Of the const.i.tuent states of the German Empire, the illegitimate birth-rate is lowest in Prussia, highest in Saxony and Bavaria. In Munich 27 per cent of the births are illegitimate. (The facts are clearly brought out in an article by Dr. Arthur Grunspan in the _Berliner Tagblatt_ for January 6, 1911, reproduced in _Die Neue Generation_, July, 1911.) Thus, in Prussia, while the total births between 1903 and 1908, notwithstanding a great increase in the population, have only increased 2.6 per cent, the illegitimate births have increased as much as 11.1 per cent. The increase is marked in nearly all the German States. It is specially marked in Saxony; here the proportion of illegitimate births to the total number of births was, in 1903, 12.51 per cent, and in 1908 it had already risen to 14.40 per cent. In Berlin it is most marked; here it began in 1891, when there were nearly 47,000 legitimate births; by 1909, however, the legitimate births had fallen to 38,000, a decrease of 19.4 per cent. But illegitimate births rose during the same period from nearly 7000 to over 9000, an increase of 35 per cent. The proportion of illegitimate births to the total births is now over 20 per cent, so that to every four legitimate children there is rather more than one illegitimate child. It may be said that this is merely due to an increasing proportion of unmarried women. That, however, is not the case. The marriage-rate is on the whole rising, and the average age of women at marriage is becoming lower rather than higher. Grunspan considers that this increase in illegitimacy is likely to continue, and he is inclined to attribute it less to economic than to social-psychological causes.

[64] I have discussed this point in _Studies in the Psychology of s.e.x_, Vol. VI, "s.e.x in Relation to Society," chap. XII.

[65] It is remarkable that in early times in Spain the laws recognized concubinage (_barragania_) as almost equal to marriage, and as conferring equal rights on the child, even on the sons of the clergy, who could thus inherit from their fathers by right of the privileges accorded to the concubine or _barragana_. _Barragania_, however, was not real marriage, and in many regions it could be contracted by married men (R. Altamira, _Historia de Espana y de la Civilazacion Espanola_, Vol.

I, pp. 644 et seq.).

[66] "La femme libre," in quest of whom the young Saint-Simonians preached a crusade, must be a woman of reflection and intellect who, having meditated on the fate of her "sisters," knowing the wants of women, and having sounded those feminine capacities which man has never completely penetrated, shall give forth the confession of her s.e.x, without restriction or reserve, in such a manner as to furnish the indispensable elements for formulating the rights and duties of woman.