Ellen Key

Works

• 1896Misused Womanpower

  Lecture and essay arguing that the women’s movement should not measure women by men’s work: women’s strength lies in motherhood and care, which society should value – a position that set her against much of the equality feminism of her time.

• 1900The Century of the Child

  Essays announcing that the twentieth century should be the century of the child: schools should follow the child’s own development and end corporal punishment and rote learning; the book opens with a chapter on “the right of the child to choose its parents”.

Position

Key is on the map as a widely read thinker of the reform movements around 1900. “The Century of the Child” demanded that education start from the child’s own nature and development: no corporal punishment and no drill, fewer lessons and more freedom, a school close to home and nature, so that each child could become a personality. Her feminism differed from the equality feminism of many contemporaries. In “Misused Womanpower” (1896) she argued that women should not imitate men’s work; in “Love and Marriage” she defended love, not legal form or convention, as what makes a union moral, together with public support for mothers. Behind this stood a “faith in life” drawn from Goethe, Herbert Spencer and evolutionary thought, which made the growth of life and personality the measure of value. Her ideas reached as far as Japan, where Hiratsuka Raichō translated her and adopted her view of motherhood. Historians of education credit her with giving the reform movement its slogan; they also point out how strongly the book draws on the hereditarian thinking of its time, which is set out under “Context & critique”.

Life & context

Ellen Key was born on 11 December 1849 at Sundsholm in Småland, the daughter of the liberal politician Emil Key, and was educated at home. She worked as her father’s secretary, and after the family estate was sold she taught from 1880 to 1899 at a girls’ school in Stockholm and lectured for many years at the Stockholm Workers’ Institute. Her books “Barnets århundrade” (1900) and “Lifslinjer” (1903–06), which includes “Love and Marriage”, made her known across Europe, above all in German translation; she lectured widely in Germany and Austria and corresponded with writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1910 she settled in her house Strand on Lake Vättern, which she left as a place of rest for working women. She died there on 25 April 1926.

Further main works

• Missbrukad kvinnokraft (1896)
• Lifslinjer (3 vols., 1903–06), including Kärleken och äktenskapet (Love and Marriage, 1911)
• Kvinnorörelsen (1909; The Woman Movement, 1912)