The Task of Social Hygiene. Ellis Havelock

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СКАЧАТЬ has apparently been satisfactory, and it is now sought to extend it to other countries. 65

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

      People talk, Ellen Key remarks, as though reform in sexual morality meant the breaking up of a beautiful idyll, while the idyll is impossible as long as the only alternative offered to so many young men and women at the threshold of life is between becoming "the slave of duty or the slave of lust." In these matters we already possess licence, and the only sound reform lies in a kind of "freedom" which will correct that licence by obedience to the most fundamental natural instincts acting in harmony with the claims of the race, which claims, it must be added, cannot be out of harmony with the best traditions of the race. Ellen Key would agree with a great German, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who wrote more than a century ago that "a solicitude for the race conducts to the same results as the highest solicitude for the most beautiful development of the inner man." The modern revolt against fossilized laws is inevitable; it is already in progress, and we have to see to it that the laws written upon tables of stone in their inevitable decay only give place to the mightier laws written upon tables of flesh and blood. Life is far too rich and manifold, Ellen Key says again, to be confined in a single formula, even the best; if our ideal has its worth for ourselves, if we are prepared to live for it and to die for it, that is enough; we are not entitled to impose it on others. The conception of duty still remains, duty to love and duty to the race. "I believe in a new ethics," Ellen Key declares at the end of The Women's Movement, "which will be a synthesis growing out of the nature of man and the nature of woman, out of the demands of the individual and the demands of society, out of the pagan and the Christian points of view, out of the resolve to mould the future and out of piety towards the past."

      No reader of Ellen Key's books can fail to be impressed by the remarkable harmony between her sexual 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 asserted 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 entitled 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 sexual 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 ennoblement 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 sexual morality which Ellen Key has developed with such fervour and insight. It scarcely seems probable that the methods of sexual 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 institution 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 sexual union will do good by stimulating the champions of marriage to increased activity in the reform of that institution. In such matters a certain amount of competition 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 entitled 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 emancipation, 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 assertion 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 СКАЧАТЬ