Women as World Builders; Studies in Modern Feminism by Dell Floyd

Author:Dell Floyd [Floyd, Dell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Women Studies
ISBN: 9781113500342
Google: 1W1ZO1EkpocC
Amazon: 1113500344
Publisher: BiblioLife
Published: 2009-08-14T18:30:00+00:00

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CHAPTER VII

ELLEN KEY

In these chapters a sincere attempt has been made not so much to show what a few exceptional women have accomplished as to exhibit through a few prominent figures the essential nature of women, and to show what may be expected from a future in which women will have a larger freedom and a larger influence.

It has been pointed out that the peculiar idealism of women is one that works itself out through the materials of workaday life, and which seeks to break or remake those materials by way of fulfilling that idealism; it has been shown that this idealism, as contrasted with the more abstract and creative idealism of men, deserves to be called practicalism, a practicalism of a noble and beautiful sort which we are far from appreciating; and as complementing these forms of activity, the play instinct, the instinct of recreation, has been pointed out as the parallel to the creative or poetic instinct of men.

Woman as reconstructor of domestic economics, woman as a destructive political agent of enormous potency, woman as worker, woman as dancer, woman as statistician, woman as organizer of the forces of labor—in these it has been the intent to show the real woman of today and of tomorrow.

There have been other aspects of her deserving of attention in such a series, notably her aspect as mother and as educator. If she has not been shown as poet, as artist, as scientist, as talker (for talk is a thing quite as important as poetry or science or art), it has not been so much because of an actual lack of specific examples of women distinguished in these fields as because of the unrepresentative character of such examples.

Here, then, is a man's view of modern woman. To complete that view, to round off that conception, I now speak of Ellen Key.

Her writings have had a peculiar career in America, one which perhaps prevents a clear understanding of their character. On the one hand, they have seemed to many to be radically "advanced"; to thousands of middle-class women, who have heard vaguely of these new ideas, and who have secretly and strongly desired to know more of them, her "Love and Marriage" has come as a revolutionary document, the first outspoken word of scorn for conventional morality, the first call to them to take their part in the breaking of new paths.

On the other hand, it must be remembered that America is the home of Mormonism, of the Oneida Community, of the Woodhull and Claflin "free-love" movement of the '70s, of "Dianism" and a hundred other obscure but pervasive sexual cults—in short, of movements of greater or less respectability, capable of giving considerable currency to their beliefs. And they have given considerable currency to their beliefs. In spite of the dominant tone of Puritanism in American thought, our social life has been affected to an appreciable extent by these beliefs.

And these beliefs may be summed up hastily, but, on the whole, justly, as materialistic—in the common and unfavorable sense.

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