“The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present”
Only he who treats the feelings, will and rights of a child with quite
the same consideration as those of a grown person, and who never allows
the personality of a child to feel other limitations than those of
nature itself, or the consideration, based upon good grounds, for the
child's own welfare or that of others--only he possesses the first
requisite principle of real education. Education must assuredly be a
liberating of the personality from the domination of its own passions.
But it must never strive to exterminate passion itself, which is the
innermost power of the personality and which cannot exist without the
coexisting danger of a corresponding fault. To subdue the possible fault
in each spiritual inclination by eliciting through love the
corresponding good in the same inclination--this alone is individual
education. It is an extremely slow education, in which immediate
interference signifies little, the spiritual atmosphere of the home, its
mode of life and its ideals signify on the contrary almost everything.
The educator must above all understand how to wait: to reckon all
effects in the light of the future, not of the present.
The educator believes often that he spares the child future suffering
when he "opposes his onesidedness," as it is called. He does not reflect
that in the effort to force the child in a direction contrary to that in
which his personality evinces itself, he merely succeeds in diminishing
his nature; yes, often merely in retaining the weakness in the quality,
not the corresponding strength!
But ordinarily it is indeed no such principle, but only the old
thoughtlessly maintained ideal of self-renunciation which is decisive.
We repress the child's joy of discovery and check the spirit of
enterprise; wound his extremely sensitive sense of beauty; exercise
force over his most personal possessions, his tokens of tenderness;
combat his aversions and quench his enthusiasm. Amid such attacks upon
their individual being, their feelings and their inclinations most
children, but especially girls, grow up. It is therefore not surprising
that when grown they seldom look back upon their childhood as a happy
time.
“Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.”
Of
the two thousand children investigated in this district only one hundred
and fifty-one were really sound and strong; one hundred and ninety-eight
were seriously crippled; the rest more or less under the standard of
good health. All work in the cotton industry done from six o'clock in
the morning till five in the evening changes, so this doctor says, the
hopeful ten-year-old child into the thin pallid thirteen-year-old boy.
This degeneration of the population in industrial districts is becoming
a serious danger for England's future.
After people are convinced that all civilised nations are exposed to
this same danger, industrial and street work of children will be
everywhere forbidden. This will be a victory for the principle of child
protection, which, in this as in other like spheres, was opposed at
first on both economic and industrial grounds. Among these was the
uncontested right of fathers to decide on the work of their children.
It is not alone the question of child labour that reveals the low
standpoint taken by the civil authorities of Europe, but it is proved
also by the introduction of corporal punishment. Corporal punishment is
as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is
ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other
effect than a hardening one, when the blow is delivered in cold blood
long after the act occasioning it has been done. Most of the victims
are so accustomed to blows already that the physical effect is little or
nothing, but they awaken feelings of detestation against a society which
so avenges its own faults. If the soul of the child is sensitive,
corporal punishment can produce deep spiritual torment, as was the case
with Lars Kruse, the hero of Skagen, who some years ago met his death by
drowning. Everybody knows his story from the fine account of him by the
Danish poet, Drachmann. Lars, in his childhood, had taken a plank, a
piece of driftwood, and sold it. For this he was condemned to be
punished. Till late in life, what he had suffered was ever present with
him. He was not ashamed of his action but of his punishment--a
punishment which embittered the whole life of a really great character.
The blows administered by society are inflicted on children whose
poverty and neglected education are in most cases responsible for their
faults.
“At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses”
As to presents, the same principle holds good as with emotions and marks
of tenderness. Only by example can generous instincts be provoked. Above
all the child should not be allowed to have things which he immediately
gives away. Gifts to a child should always imply a personal requital
for work or sacrifice. In order to secure for children the pleasure of
giving and the opportunity of obtaining small pleasures and enjoyments,
as well as of replacing property of their own or of others which they
may have destroyed, they should at an early age be accustomed to perform
seriously certain household duties for which they receive some small
remuneration. But small occasional services, whether volunteered or
asked for by others, should never be rewarded. Only readiness to serve,
without payment, develops the joy of generosity. When the child wants to
give away something, people should not make a presence of receiving
it. This produces the false conception in his mind that the pleasure of
being generous can be had for nothing. At every step the child should be
allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be
plucked from his roses. This is what is least understood in present-day
training. Thus we see reasonable methods constantly failing. People find
themselves forced to "afflictive" methods which stand in no relation
with the realities of life. I mean, above all, what are still called
means of education, instead of means of torture,--blows.
Many people of to-day defend blows, maintaining that they are milder
means of punishment than the natural consequences of an act; that blows
have the strongest effect on the memory, which effect becomes permanent
through association of ideas.
But what kinds of association? Is it not with physical pain and shame?
Gradually, step by step, this method of training and discipline has
been superseded in all its forms. The movement to abolish torture,
imprisonment, and corporal punishment failed for a long time owing to
the conviction that they were indispensable as methods of discipline.
But the child, people answer, is still an animal, he must be brought up
as an animal.
“Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love”
CHICAGO
CONTENTS
THE MORALITY OF WOMAN page 5
THE WOMAN OF THE FUTURE " 39
THE CONVENTIONAL WOMAN " 51
THE MORALITY OF WOMAN
(TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH)
"The law condemns to be hung those who counterfeit banknotes;
a measure necessary for the public welfare. But he who
counterfeits love, that is to say: he who, for a thousand
other reasons but not for love, unites himself to one whom
he does not love and creates thus a family circle unworthy
of that name--does not he indeed commit a crime whose extent
and incalculable results in the present and in the future,
disseminate far more terrible unhappiness than the
counterfeiting of millions of banknotes!"
C. J. L. ALMQUIST.
The simplest formula for the new conception of morality, which is
beginning to be opposed to moral dogma still esteemed by all society,
but especially by women, might be summed up in these words:
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral
without love.
The customary objection to this tenet is that those who propose it
forget all other ethical duties and legitimate feelings in order to make
the sex relationship the center of existence, and love the sole decisive
point of view in questions concerning this relationship. But if we
except the struggle for existence--which indeed must be called not a
relationship of life but a condition of life--what then can be more
central for man, than a condition decreed by the laws of earthly
life--the cause of his own origin? Can one imagine a moment which
penetrates more deeply his whole being?
That many men live content without the happiness of love, that others
after they attain it seek a new end for their activity, proves nothing
against the truth of the experience that for men in general the erotic
relation between man and woman becomes the deepest life determining
factor, whether negatively, because they are deprived of this relation
or because they formed it unhappily; or positively, because they have
found therein the fullness of life.
“For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.”
They are still not convinced that egoism on the part of the child is
justified. Just as little are they convinced of the possibility that
evil can be changed into good.
Education must be based on the certainty that faults cannot be atoned
for, or blotted out, but must always have their consequences. At
the same time, there is the other certainty that through progressive
evolution, by slow adaptation to the conditions of environment they may
be transformed. Only when this stage is reached will education begin to
be a science and art. We will then give up all belief in the miraculous
effects of sudden interference; we shall act in the psychological sphere
in accordance with the principle of the indestructibility of matter. We
shall never believe that a characteristic of the soul can be destroyed.
There are but two possibilities. Either it can be brought into
subjection or it can be raised up to a higher plane.
Madame de Stael's words show much insight when she says that only the
people who can play with children are able to educate them. For success
in training children the first condition is to become as a child
oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending
baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors.
What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the
child as the child himself is absorbed by his life. It means to
treat the child as really one's equal, that is, to show him the same
consideration, the same kind confidence one shows to an adult. It means
not to influence the child to be what we ourselves desire him to become
but to be influenced by the impression of what the child himself is; not
to treat the child with deception, or by the exercise of force, but with
the seriousness and sincerity proper to his own character. Somewhere
Rousseau says that all education has failed in that nature does not
fashion parents as educators nor children for the sake of education.
What would happen if we finally succeeded in following the directions of
nature, and recognised that the great secret of education lies hidden in
the maxim, "do not educate"?
Not leaving the child in peace is the greatest evil of present-day
methods of training children. Education is determined to create a
beautiful world externally and internally in which the child can grow.
To let him move about freely in this world until he comes into contact
with the permanent boundaries of another's right will be the end of
the education of the future.
“When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit ones imagination.”
This beautiful profile of the woman of the future, which Shelley has
traced, floats before me when I attempt here to draw her portrait in
more precise outlines.
* * * * *
The storm and stress period of woman and the new social and
psychological formations thereby entailed must, indeed, extend far into
the twentieth century. This period of conflict will cease only when
woman within and out of marriage shall have received legal equality with
man. It will cease when such a transformation of society shall have come
to pass that the present rivalry between the sexes shall be ended in a
manner advantageous to both and when finally the work of earning a
livelihood as well as care of the household shall have received such
form that it will weigh less heavily than now upon the woman.
Toward the end of the twentieth century only could the type of the
nineteenth century woman have reached its culmination and a new type of
woman begin to appear.
My ideal picture of the woman of the future, and when one paints an
ideal one does not need to limit one's imagination, is that she will be
a being of profound contrasts which have attained harmony. She will
appear as a great multiplicity and a complete unity; a rich plenitude
and a perfect simplicity; a thoroughly educated creature of culture and
an original spontaneous nature; a strongly marked human individuality
and a complete manifestation of most profound womanliness. This woman
will understand the spirit of a scientific work, of an exact search
after truth, of free, independent thought, of artistic creation. She
will comprehend the necessity of the laws of nature and of the progress
of evolution; she will possess the feeling of solidarity and regard for
the interests of society. Because she will know more and think more
clearly than the woman of the present, she will be more just; because
she will be stronger, she will be better; because she will be wiser, she
will be also more gentle. She will be able to see things in the ensemble
and in their connection with each other; she will lose thereby certain
prejudices which are still called virtues.
“The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.”
A more exalted being must thou create, a being gifted with
initiative like a wheel that turns itself. A creative principle
shouldst thou create.
Marriage: I call marriage the will shared by two, to create the
one,--the one that is in itself more than its creators. Reverence
for one another, I call marriage; such reverence as is meet for
those whose wills are united in this one act of will.
CHAPTER II
THE UNBORN RACE AND WOMAN'S WORK
There are few factors in the life of the present in which the dualism
between theory and practice is greater and more unconscious than in
questions concerning woman. The protagonists of the feminist movement
are in many cases sturdily Christian. They protest with vigour against
the idea that they could have any share in the sort of emancipation of
personality that includes freedom for all the powers and activities of
the personality. Individualism, and the assertion of self are for them
degrading words with a sinful significance. That the emancipation of
women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth
century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that
history has yet seen, they have no suspicion. Freedom for the powers and
the personality of woman have never appeared to them except as an ideal
struggle for justice, as a noble victory to be won. In its deepest
meaning this is as true of every other effort at self-affirmation, the
end of which is the recognition of the right of human personality to the
full development of capacities in a sphere of freedom, where
responsibility belongs to the self alone. But just as every other such
affirmation of the individual self, of a class, of a race, easily falls
into an unjustifiable egoism, so with the emancipation of woman.
This great, deep, serious movement for woman's emancipation has in the
course of time received a new name, the "Woman Question." The change in
terminology signifies a change in the attitude of thought. From a real
emancipation movement, that is, a movement to free the restricted powers
of woman and her restricted personality, the movement has become a
question, a social institution with officers, a church system with
dogmas.
“Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity”
“The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.”
“Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.”
At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.
Love is moral even without legal marriage but marriage is immoral without love.
When one paints an ideal one does not need to limit ones imagination.
The genius of happiness is still so rare is indeed on the whole the rarest genius. To possess it means to approach life with the humility of a beggar but to treat it with the proud generosity of a prince to bring to its totality the deep understanding of a great poet and to each of its moments the abandonment and ingenuousness of a child.
At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.
Whereas nationalism still seeks power, honour, and glory through means that endanger other countries, patriotism knows that a countrys strength and honour can only be permanently safeguarded through concourse with other countries. And whereas nationalism scoffs at the idea of international laws and regulations, patriotism seeks to create such.
To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of fire - that is to give him a real moral strength.
It is not a dream that someday, nations will be able to settle their difficulties without war, just as individuals now settle their personal feuds without resorting to arguments of physical strength or sharp steel. For, then, humanity will have created international jurisdiction and a power to enforce its laws.
The storm and stress period of women and the new social and psychological formations thereby entailed must indeed extend far into the twentieth century. This period of conflict will cease only when woman within and out of marriage shall have received legal equality with man.
Happiness lies so far from man, but he must begin by daring to will it.
