Käte Duncker 1926
Source: International Press Correspondence, Vol. 6, No. 39, May 6, 1926, p. 612.
Online Version: Marxists Internet Archive 2021
Translated and Transcribed: Geoff
HTML Markup: Zdravko Saveski
In the last few days there occurred the death of Ellen Key, the Swedish writer at the age of 77. In the last twenty years before the war, her name was the most well-known in Western Europe in the ranks of bourgeois, champions of women rights, of reformers of marriage and education and of the pacifists, and she was generally recognised in these circles as a warm-hearted philanthropist and a magnificent master of style.
She called herself a socialist and her critics in the old social democracy never disputed her claim to this title. Nevertheless we cannot agree to this, even in the limited sense in which we speak of utopian socialism. It is true, Ellen Key had for her time sharp and courageous words of criticism for social wrongs. But this criticism did not strike deep, it did not trace thing to their economic and social causes. In her ways of thoughts se remained in the confines of a purely bourgeois, individualistic world outlook, and her practical proposals of reform reek somewhat of the drawers of a petty bourgeois household apothecary. For the most she had only in mind the educated bourgeois woman. Her psychological needs and struggles, her refined claims called forth Ellen Key's criticism of Love and Marriage. She lifted a warning finger when the bourgeois women's movement in its efforts to do just as the men, overstepped the mark. Not to render the women masculine, but to free her special feminine personality, her "motherliness", that was to be the slogan.
Where Ellen Key speaks of "misused forces of women" she means the forces which are employed for passing examinations, for "competition with men in all spheres of work", which lead to the loss of "that which is peculiar to women", of "motherliness". She does not mean that misused force of women which, after eight to ten hours in the hot and noisy factory, has to keep the house in order and fulfil the duties of a mother, not the misused forces of women in home industry, in building works, in the brick fields and the mines! Where she sings the beautiful song of womanly nature, of motherliness, she does not ask what modifications this womanly nature, this motherliness has to suffer when it is necessary to prepare a home for husband and children on 15 shillings a week in a crowded workers dwelling, four storeys high. When she proclaimed the "Century of the child", when she - with a perfect style and with a loving understanding of the nature of the child - demands a reform of education, she does not concern herself with how this reform can be realised under the present conditions of society. She only has in mind the hindrances which arise from the individual incapacity, from the indolence and lack of understanding of the parents. To remove these hindrances, to create a breach in the wall of prejudices is her sole aim.
Ellen Key has, therefore, nothing to say to the fighting proletariat. We do not cast any doubt on the sincerity of her desire and her literary talent; but she could not escape from the skin of the bourgeois philanthrophist, of the pedantic old maiden aunt. In the last two decades before the war she gave considerable inspiration to the bourgeois women; but the present generation of these women are almost entirely unfamiliar with her works. For the proletariat and its needs, for the idea of the class struggle she had no understanding. Therefore: Let the dead bury their dead!