realize that the senses have. She
has no special sympathy with the cry for purity in masculine candidates
for marriage put forward by some women of the present day. She observes
that many men who have painfully struggled to maintain this ideal meet
with disillusion, for it is not the masculine lamb, but much more the
spotted leopard, who fascinates women. The notion that women have higher
moral instincts than men Ellen Key regards as absurd. The majority of
Frenchwomen, she remarks, were against Dreyfus, and the majority of
Englishwomen approved the South African war. The really fundamental
difference between man and woman is that he can usually give his best as
a creator, and she as a lover, that his value is according to his work
and hers according to her love. And in love the demand for each sex
alike must not be primarily for a mere anatomical purity, but for
passion and for sincerity.

The aim of love, as understood by Ellen Key, is always marriage and the
child, and as soon as the child comes into question society and the
State are concerned. Before fruition, love is a matter for the lovers
alone, and the espionage, ceremony, and routine now permitted or
enjoined are both ridiculous and offensive. "The flower of love belongs
to the lovers, and should remain their secret; it is the fruit of love
which brings them into relation to society." The dominating importance
of the child, the parent of the race to be, alone makes the immense
social importance of sexual union. It is not marriage which sanctifies
generation, but generation which sanctifies marriage. From the point of
view of "the sanctity of generation" and the welfare of the race, Ellen
Key looks forward to a time when it will be impossible for a man and
woman to become parents when they are unlikely to produce a healthy
child, though she is opposed to Neo-Malthusian methods, partly on
aesthetic grounds and partly on the more dubious grounds of doubt as to
their practical efficiency; it is from this point of view also that she
favours sexual equality in matters of divorce, the legal assimilation of
legitimate and illegitimate children, the recognition of unions outside
marriage,--a recognition already legally established under certain
circumstances in Sweden, in such a way as to confer the rights of
legitimacy on the child,--and she is even prepared to advise women under
some conditions to become mothers outside marriage, though only when
there are obstacles