there can be little doubt that at the present moment what is called the “woman’s movement” is entering a critical period of its development. a discussion of its present problems and its present difficulties by one of the most advanced leaders in that movement thus appears at the right time and deserves our most serious attention.
the early promulgators of the woman’s movement, a century or more ago, rightly regarded it as an extremely large and comprehensive movement affecting the whole of life. they were anxious to secure for women adequate opportunities for free human development, to the same extent that men possess such opportunities, but they laid no special stress on the abolition of any single disability or group of disabilities, whether as regards education, occupation, marriage, property, or political enfranchisement. they were people of wide and sound intelligence; they never imagined that any single isolated reform would prove a cheap panacea for all the evils they wished to correct; they looked for a slow reform along the whole line. they held that such reform would enrich and enlarge the entire field of human life, not for women only, but for the human race generally. such, indeed, is the spirit which still inspires the wisest xiiand most far-seeing champions of that movement. it is only necessary to mention olive schreiner’s woman and labour.
when, however, the era of actual practical reform began, it was obvious that a certain amount of concentration became necessary. education was, reasonably enough, usually the first point for concentration, and gradually, without any undue friction, the education of girls was, so far as possible, raised to a level not so very different from that of boys. this first great stage in the woman’s movement inevitably led on to the second stage, which lay in a struggle, not this time always without a certain amount of friction, to secure the entry of these now educated women to avocations and professions previously monopolised by the men who had alone been trained to fill them. this second stage is now largely completed, and at the present time there are very few vocations and professions in civilised lands, even in so conservative and slowly moving a land as england, which women are not entitled to exercise equally with men. concomitantly with this movement, however,—and beginning indeed, very much earlier, and altogether apart from any conscious “movement” at all,—there was a tendency to change the laws in a direction more favourable to women and their personal rights, especially as regards marriage and property. these legal reforms were effected by parliaments of men, elected exclusively by men, and for the most part they xiiiwere effected without any very strong pressure from women. it had, however, long been claimed that women themselves ought to have some part in making the laws by which they are governed, and at this stage, towards the middle of the last century, the demand for women’s parliamentary suffrage began to be urgently raised. here, however, the difficulties naturally proved very much greater than they were in the introduction of a higher level of education for women, or even in the opening up to them of hitherto monopolised occupations. in new countries, and sometimes in small old countries, these difficulties could be overcome. but in large and old countries, of stable and complex constitution, it was very far from easy to readjust the ancient machinery in accordance with the new demands. the difficulty by no means lay in any unwillingness on the part of the masculine politicians in possession; on the contrary, it is a notable fact, often overlooked, that, in england especially, there have for at least half a century been a considerable proportion of eminent statesmen as well as of the ordinary rank and file of members of parliament who are in favour of granting the suffrage to women, a much larger proportion, probably, than would be found favourable to this claim in any other section of the community. that, indeed,—apart from the delay involved by ancient constitutional methods,—has been the main difficulty. neither among the masculine electors nor among their womenfolk xivhas there been any consuming desire to achieve women’s suffrage.
the result has been a certain tendency in the woman’s movement to diverge in two different directions. on the one hand, are those who, recognising that all evolution is slow, are content to await patiently the inevitable moment when the political enfranchisement of women will become possible, in the meanwhile working towards women’s causes in other fields equally essential and sometimes more important. on the other hand, a small but energetic, sometimes even violent, section of the women engaged in this movement concentrated altogether on the suffrage. the germs of this divergence may be noted even thirty years back when we find miss cobbe declaring that woman’s suffrage is “the crown and completion of all progress in woman’s movements,” while mrs. cady stanton, perhaps more wisely, stated that it was merely a vestibule to progress. in recent years the difference has become accentuated, sometimes even into an acute opposition, between those who maintain that the one and only thing essential, and that immediately and at all costs, even at the cost of arresting and putting back the progress of women in all other directions, is the parliamentary suffrage, and on the other hand, those who hold that the suffrage, however necessary, is still only a single point, and that the woman’s movement is far wider and, above all, far deeper than any mere political reform.
xvit is at this stage that ellen key comes before us with her book on the woman’s movement, first published in swedish in 1909, and now presented to the reader in english. as ellen key views the woman’s movement, it certainly includes all that those who struggle for votes for women are fighting for; she is unable to see, as she puts it, why a woman’s hands need be more soiled by a ballot paper than by a cooking recipe. but she is far indeed from the well-intentioned but ignorant fanatics who fancy that the vote is the alpha and the omega of feminism; and still less is she in sympathy with those who consider that its importance is so supreme as to justify violence and robbery, a sort of sex war on mankind generally, and the casting in the mud of all those things which it has been the gradual task of civilisation to achieve, not for men only but for women. the woman’s movement, as ellen key sees it, includes the demand for the vote, but it looks upon the vote merely as a reasonable condition for attaining far wider and more fundamental ends. she is of opinion that the woman’s movement will progress less by an increased aptitude to claim rights than by an increased power of self-development, that it is not by what they can seize, but by what they are, that women, or for the matter of that men, finally count. she regards the task of women as constructive rather than destructive; they are the architects of the future humanity, and she holds that this is a task that can only be xvicarried out side by side with men, not because man’s work and woman’s work is, or should be, identical, but because each supplements and aids the other, and whatever gives greater strength and freedom to one sex equally fortifies and liberates the other sex.
certainly we may not all agree with ellen key at every point, nor always accept her interpretation of the great movement of which she is so notable a pioneer. the breadth of her sympathies may sometimes seem to lead to an impracticable eclecticism, and, in the rejection of narrow and trivial aims, she may too sanguinely demand an impossible harmony of opposing ideals. but if this is an error it is surely an error on the right side. she has not put forward this book as a manifesto of the advanced guard of the woman’s movement, but merely as the reflections of an individual woman who, for nearly half a century, has pondered, felt, studied, observed this movement in many parts of the world. but it would not be easy to find a book in which the claims of feminism—in the largest modern sense—are more reasonably and temperately set forth.
_havelock ellis._
london, may 1, 1912.
