Alexandra Kollontai 1918. “New Woman” from The New Morality and the Working Class. Part One

Alexandra Kollontai 1918

“New Woman” from The New Morality and the Working Class

First Published: as Novaya moral' i rabochii klass, Moscow 1918;
Source: The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman, Herder and Herder, 1971;
Translated: by Salvator Attansio;
Transcribed: for marxists. org, 2001;
Proofed: and corrected by Chris Clayton 2006.

Part One

What – the new woman? Does she really exist? Is she not the product of the creative fancy of modern writers of fiction, in search of sensational novelties? Look around you, look sharply, reflect, and you will convince yourself: the new woman is certainly there – she exists.

You already know her, you are already accustomed to meeting her in life, and indeed on all rungs of the social ladder, from the woman worker up to the young women adepts of the sciences, from the modest woman clerk to the most famous representative of the liberal arts. What is most amazing about all this is that although you meet the new woman in life with ever increasing frequency, it is only in most recent years that you have had an opportunity to find her facial features more frequently again in the heroines of literary works. Life in the last decades, under the heavy hammer blows of vital necessity, has forged a woman with a new psychological sense, new needs, and a new temper. But literature still portrayed the woman of the past, still created the decrepit, self-sublimating former type. What shining images of the nascent " new woman" was offered by the reality of Russian life in the '70's and '80's! But the poets and novelists passed them by. They neither perceived nor heard them, nor did they comprehend them or distinguish among them. Turgenev almost brought them to life with his delicate brush, but even in his novels the images are dimmer, poorer than the reality. Only in his poetry, in poems in prose that are dedicated to the Russian girl, did Turgenev bare his head reverently before the deeply affecting images of those who had dared to cross the hallowed threshold.

A long train of " nameless" ones follows the women militants, namely, those who are listed in the annals of history. They were destroyed like bees in the destroyed beehive. The rocky path to the holy, longed for, and awaited future is strewn with their corpses. Their number grew, increased year to year. But the novelists and the poets passed them by, thickly blindfolded. The poet's eye, as though it were absolutely oriented upon the traditional view of woman, was not able to grasp this novum, to appropriate it and stamp it upon his memory. Literature, in perfecting itself, developing by seeking utterly new paths, new colors and worlds, stubbornly continued to produce the betrayed, abandoned, suffering creatures, revengeful wives, bewitching predators, will-less " misunderstood natures, " pure, colorless, charming girls.

Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary at a time when George Sand, so shining a herald of the new woman awakening to life, lived near him in flesh and blood, suffering and asserting her human and feminine " ego" alike.

Tolstoy immersed himself in the feminine psyche, enslaved through the centuries by fate, of an Anna Karenina. He admired a charming, harmless Kitti, toyed with the temperamental " wifie" nature of a Natasha Rostov at a time when a pitiless reality tied the hands of an ever growing, steadily increasing number of female human beings. Even the greatest talents of the nineteenth century did not feel the necessity to replace the glamor of the womanliness of their heroines by characteristics pointing to the new woman. It is only in the last ten to fifteen years that this type, newly awakened to life, has not gone unnoticed – and, of course, only by the most modern writers and especially by women novelists – as a result of which they had no choice but to assert their claim to recognition in their most recent works. Now, this type no longer presents a sensational novelty. You meet it not only in a " pioneering" novel that tries to solve one of the pressing, complicated problems of our times, as an exemplary case, but you run across it also in the modest, unpretentious narrative.

It goes without saying that the type of the " new woman" varies from country to country, that membership in this or that social stratum gives it its particular stamp, that the psychological expression of the heroine, her strivings, her life-goals, can exhibit a significant divergence from each other. But no matter how different these new heroines may be, we perceive in them something that is common to all of them, something " species-like, " so to speak, which immediately enables us to distinguish them from the women of the past. The latter viewed the world differently, expressed themselves differently towards life. It requires no special historical or literary knowledge to discern the countenance of the new woman from the mass of women of the past. We cannot always give an account of what this novum consists of, or pinpoint wherein the difference actually lies. One thing, however, is clear: somewhere in the realm of the subconscious a criterion has been formed in us with the aid of which we can classify and determine the feminine types.

Who, then, are these new women? They are not the pure, " nice" girls whose romance culminates in a highly successful marriage, they are not wives who suffer from the infidelities of their husbands, or who themselves have committed adultery. Nor are they old maids who bemoan the unhappy love of their youth, just as little as they are " priestesses of love, " the victims of wretched living conditions or of their own depraved natures. No, it is a wholly new " fifth" type of heroine, hitherto unknown, heroines with independent demands on life, heroines who assert their personality, heroines who protest against the universal servitude of woman in the State, the family, society, who fight for their rights as representatives of their sex. Single women are the ones who more and more determine this type. The " single woman": in the most recent past the original type of woman was the " spouse, " the wife who was the shadow of the husband, a supplement, an appendage. The single woman has ceased to play this subordinate role and to be no more than the reflex of the man. She has a singular inner world, full of general human interests, she is independent inwardly and self-reliant outwardly. Twenty years ago, a statement of this kind would have said nothing either to the mind or to the heart. The girl, the mother, the " blue stocking" (not viewed in her problematic aspects), the beloved, or the salon-lioness of the stripe of Elena Kurakina (Tolstoy, War and Peace), all these personages exemplified an understandable, traditional staple of fiction. But for the single woman there was no place either in literature or life. If women emerged in history with features that recalled contemporary heroines, they were viewed as random deviations from the norm, as psychological phenomena.

But life does not stand still, the wheel of history, which turns at an ever faster tempo, compels even persons of the one and same generation to form new concepts, to enrich their lexicon with new material. The single woman, of which our grandmothers and even our mothers had no idea whatsoever, exists. She is a real, living phenomenon.

Single women. They are the million figures, wrapped in drab clothing, who pour out of the working-class quarters in an endless train on their way to work sites and factories, who set out for the circular railways and the tramcars in that hour before daybreak in which dawn still battles with the darkness of night. Single women. They are those tens of thousands of young, already fading, women who settle down in the big cities in lonely roomcages and increase the statistic of " independent" households. They are girls and women who ceaselessly wage the grim struggle for existence, who spend their days sitting on the office chair, who bang away at telegraph apparatuses, who stand behind counters. Single women: they are the girls with fresh hearts and minds, full of bold fantasies and plans who pack the temples of science and art, who crowd the sidewalks, searching with vigorous and virile steps for cheap lessons and casual clerical jobs. We see single women seated at a worktable preparing a laboratory experiment, burrowing through archival material, rushing off to hospital patients, drafting a political speech.

How dissimilar are these images to the heroines of the recent past! To the bewitching, touching women of Turgenev, Chekhov, to the heroines of Zola, Maupassant, the impersonal, good-hearted feminine types of German and English literature, even of the '80's and of the beginning of the '90's. Life creates the new women – literature reflects them.

A succession of heroines of the new type pass in review before us in an endless motley train. The woman writer Mathilde^[1] pushes her way forward through the thick, prickly thorny undergrowth of the present reality, clearing a path with a calm, proud, determined gait. The thorns of life tear at her hands and feet till the blood flows, lacerate her breast. But there is no wincing in this face, becoming stonelike and as hard as steel as a result of life's cares and torments, even though the bitter lines around the mouth dig deeper, even though the glance, proud and unbowed, beams with bold brilliance.

A new suffering: a beam of joy – a guest who alights rarely on working-class circles – darts by without affecting her. Mathilde stands on the mountain, proud, unshakeable, wrapped in her gray shawl. A statue of sadness. But her gaze is fixed upon the unknown – she sees " the future, " she believes in it. Mathilde, steeled by earlier skirmishes with life, comes to the city. Freshness, youth, health ooze from her. So she knocked on the factory gate and entered the work site. The brick monster has swallowed another victim. But Mathilde is not afraid of life. Confident and proud, she steps over the snares that fate mockingly sets for her, the lonely, meditative girl, the dirt and vulgarities of life do not besmirch her. Mathilde bears her clear, pure human " ego" though life with an unshakable naivete. She is only a lonely, poor factory girl, but she is proud of what she is, she is proud of her inner strength, proud of the fact that she is absolutely self-reliant. Then the first inclination – tender and radiant as youth itself – the first joys of motherhood. The first sensation of loving dependency, a timid rebellion against the loss of freedom. Then again, the wave of a new, torrid passion. The pangs, torments of love, longing, hurt, disappointment and then again loneliness. But we are not in the presence of a bowed " lost" girl, of a pathetic, depressed creature – no, before us stands a proud, lonely mother – a human being turning in upon herself. Mathilde's personality grows and strengthens itself, and every new suffering, every new page of life merely shows her strong, unshakeable " ego" in bolder relief.

Compared to her the dreamy Tatiana, the girl from Riasan, ^[2] treads softly in bare feet, burnt and chapped by sun and storm. She goes around with people as homeless and as shelterless as herself. " A piece of copper on a rubbish heap of old rust-eaten iron. " Today she busies herself in Maikopa at the time of the hay harvest, and tomorrow she wanders to the Don with a troop of agreeable comrades. These people go whither they scent the possibility of earning wages.

Tatiana goes along with them. Free as the wind, lonely as the grass on the steppes. She is dear to nobody. No one will protect her. Eye to eye, breast to breast, she wages an unbroken, tireless struggle against fate. And pitiless fate ruffles her, it shows her no tenderness, it has only hardness for single women like Tatiana and Mathilde. But Tatiana does not bow under the blows of life's scourge, for a long time she does not bow and deeply hidden in her soul she bears her earthly dream, the dream that is shown to her by a clear, unruffled summer night – the future. Thus she goes through the world and seeks her happiness. But, as if to mock her, happiness only draws farther and farther away from Tatiana. The dreamy-tender girl from Riasan gleans only the crumbs of a fugitive happiness.

A passerby stirs her soul, she weeps, is inflamed and gives herself to him. Simply and straightforwardly she wrests for life her small earthly joys to which such single women – and understandably so – migrant women workers precisely give themselves. But she does not want to bind her life to the passerby: " That's not for me – no, I don't like that! Yes, if only you were a peasant! But this way, it makes no sense! That might do for an hour, but not for a whole life! "

And she goes forth, gently smiling at him in farewell, she goes forth in search of the happiness of which she dreams, she goes forth lost in her own thoughts, as though she were alone in the world, and as though everything willed to be created anew by her.

Thus Mathilde and Tatiana go thither, they break through the undergrowth of life and with their breasts and hands they clear the path to the longed-for future. But, behind them, the new women of other social strata press forward, full of zeal to reach the newly laid-out path. They, too, are torn and wounded by the branches of the prickly thorn bushes; their feet, unused to walking on sharp stones, are also sore, and their footsteps are also left behind in red streaks of blood. But there is no such thing as standing still: thick, impenetrable undergrowth over and over again closes off the new path, but the path nevertheless widens more and more. Woe to those who succumb to weakness! Woe to the enfeebled! Woe to those who look backward into the ever vanishing past! They will be pushed off the path by the serried ranks of those who are pressing forward.

And, with bowed heads, the weary sink down on the edge of the new path and look back on the gray castle of their former slavery.

In the serried ranks of those who seek a new path, we look for, we discern heroic women – physiognomies of all nations, of all social strata. In front of them all gleam the beauteous features of the actress Magda, ^[3] this artist so proud of her maidenly and human dignity with the bold motto of the new woman: " I am I – and what I am, I became oil my own ability. " Magda has broken with the traditions of a provincial bourgeois family and has challenged bourgeois morality to its face. But, proud, the " sinner" remains under her parents' roof, in the " homeland. " Magda knows the worth of her personality and staunchly defends her right to be herself. To rise above her sins is more to her than the pharisaical purity in which the bourgeois world lives.

The bold, clever, passionate Olga^[4] sets out determinedly on the new path. She breaks away from a patriarchial Jewish family, overcomes one obstacle after another, and plunges into the hurly-burly of life in a big European city. She is accepted in an elect circle of intellectuals, " the cream of society, " and the life of this center of culture and capitalism gaily unfolds before her. The struggle for existence, the struggle against the unemployment plaguing intellectuals, the struggle for self-assertion as human being and as woman! Olga lives, as do thousands of intellectual young women in the big urban cultural centers – alone in the struggle for existence. Olga does not fear life and boldly demands from fate her quota of personal happiness. The man whom Olga loves is at once near and far. Their life-paths cross from time to time. Building a common life together does not correspond to the interests of either. Love merely grazes her rich store of experience. Passion wanes – thereupon love also dies. They go their separate ways. And again we do not behold a young woman, weak, suffering, bowed, but a human being who bravely drains the cup in which the wine is mixed with poison. Olga is stronger than the one chosen by her. In the hours of unhappiness, even of love's sorrow, he hastens to Olga as to his only, sincere friend. In the tangled, rich experiences and struggle for existence, love's romance, for Olga, is only an introductory " episode. " In the multitude of the new women, the woman doctor Laucorojelo, ^[5] the typical single woman, strides with sure step, her beautiful head held high. Science and the practice of medicine constitute the substance of her life. The clinical wards are at once her temple and her home. She fights for recognition and respect among her male colleagues; gently but unyieldingly she rejects all attempts to win her over to marriage. She needs to be free and alone for her beloved activity, without which she cannot live. She is severe in dress, she apportions her time strictly, she struggles to acquire a practice and experiences the triumph of self-love with the victory over her male colleagues as diagnostician. The image of the " emancipated woman" as cold already begins to come across to the reader. Then, as if by accident, we glimpse another scene and, for the first time, we see the woman doctor from a wholly different aspect. It's the holiday season and with her " friend" – likewise a doctor – she is seeking recreation in the country. Here she is woman – here the femine " ego" gets the upper hand. Her clothes are now light and colorful, her smile gladsome. She makes no secret of her " bond, " and when she does not live together with the friend in Paris, this happens only because it is more " convenient" to both of them – the colleagues – this way.

The passionate Theresa, ^[6] all fire, all zeal, rushes by the great woman doctor! She is an Austrian socialist, a fiery agitator. She has served time in prison. She plunges into Party work with her whole heart and soul. But when she, too, is overwhelmed by the waves of passion, she does not deny the radiant smile of life, she does not hide hypocritically behind the faded mantle of womanly virtue – no, she reaches out her hands to the chosen one, she remains for several weeks away from the scene of her activity, in order to drink the joys of love from the goblet and to convince herself how deep it is. And when she drains it to the dregs, she casts it away without regret, without bitterness. And she goes back to her work. For Theresa, as for the majority of her male comrades, love is only a stage, only a brief respite on life's path. The aim of her life, its content, is the Party, the idea, agitation and propaganda work.

Another of the new women, Agnes Petrovna, ^[7] one of the first Russian heroines of the type of the single woman, chooses her path with calm circumspection. She is a writer, an editorial secretary, but she is " above all a working human being. " When Agnes is working, when any thought, any idea, takes hold of her, nothing else and nobody exists for her. " I cannot separate myself from it, and for this I need freedom and I will not sacrifice my freedom for any kind of love whatsoever. " But when Agnes comes home and changes her working clothes for a comfortable house dress, then it gives her joy to acknowledge herself unreservedly as woman and to try her feminine charm on men. She seeks neither the substance nor the goal of life in love, but only chat which most men also seek for in it: " Diversion, poetry, light. " But she herself does not recognize any power over herself, over her " ego, " on the part of the beloved man.

" To belong to a man like an object, to give him one's whole will, one's whole heart, one's whole understanding, and to gear the employment of all one's energies exclusively to his well-being – and to do this with full consciousness and joyfully – all that can probably make a woman happy. But why all this for only one person? ... If one must forget oneself, then I would rather do it not just for one person alone, by preparing a good noon meal and a restful slumber for him; if such be the case I will grant all that also to such-and-such other unhappy ones... "

And when Miatlev attempts to interfere with her freedom, when he dares to place his love between her and her work, her writing activity, Agnes considers the bond dissolved and they come to a parting of the ways.

Slowly with a tinge of insecurity, Agnes is followed by a less sharply sketched portrait of another single woman: Vera Nikodimovna. ^[8] Vera has been raised in the traditions of the old generation with a touch of modernism. She has " a past, " and this past, which ended in " an awful, awful, banal way, " has left a dark mark on her soul. It is not only the " physiological" that drives the reflective and almost frigid Vera into men's embraces. " Nobody knows how little one's feeling is involved in this, how little it all has to do with wantonness, " she confesses to her young lady friend. Something different stands behind it. What was it exactly? The longing for motherhood! Perhaps the search for a kindred, understanding soul, this dangerous angel remains fastened to the soberly reflective single women. Ever since her confession Vera is surrounded by men who adore her. But – instincts inherited from grandmothers ward off the approaches of men whom she lures with hopes. Being a temptress becomes her specialty. But in contrast to the grandmothers, unmoved, she holds onto her freedom and, besides being a drawing-room flirt, Vera Nikodimova is a working, thinking woman-human being.

The sadly smiling image of consumptive Mery^[9] floats by. Behind her comes the diminutive, courageous fighter Talia, ^[10] who looks for work in her clattering, worn-out shoes. Behind them rings the repulsive laughter of the intellectually impoverished, shallow Annette, ^[11] who in this novel and in her way is a parody of the single woman. Robust-naive Anna, Sanschar's heroine, ^[12] presses forward along the new path. Mira, Lydia, and Nelly^[13] stride forth, arm in arm. Each one has something quite special, holy, not only womanliness. We find this vanity, this ambition, even with the seemingly vapid Lydia. But as soon as love is kindled, as soon as the feminine nature demands its rights, all these young women cross the forbidden threshold without the former sentimental fear of themselves. But later the polytonal symphony of life, in which love is only an introductory melody, again tears them away. The music hall artiste glides by, dodging the sharp stones, with her finesse of soul that enchants our eyes, as though she was formed out of soft aquarelle tones. She has left her husband with her illusions shattered, a wounded heart; she has thrown down the gauntlet to the world to which she belonged. Her life now belongs to art, which she practices in mime dances and pantomime that she herself composes. It is a nomadic, wearylng, strenuous life. She seeks no adventure – she wards them off: her heart has been too deeply wounded. Freedom, independence, solitude are the substance of her personal desires. But when Rene, after a tiring long day's work, sits at the fireplace in her lovely flat, it is as though the hollow-eyed melancholy of loneliness creeps into her room and sets himself behind her chair.

" I am used to being alone, " she writes in her diary, " but today I feel so forsaken. Am I then not independent, not free? And terribly lonely? " Does not this question have the ring of the woman of the past who is used to hearing familiar, beloved voices, to being the object of indispensable words and acts of tenderness?

And when passion suddenly invades Rene on her paths, she allows herself to succumb to the advancing waves and to be borne away by them. But passion does not blind her, it does not becloud her analytical mind.

" Only my senses are attacked, " she establishes with melancholy regret. " Only my senses are intoxicated. " Rene sobers up. The new love does not give her what she had been seeking. In the embrace of the beloved she is as lonesome as before. And " la Vagabonde" flees, she fades from her love, she flees because this love is so unlike the refined demands she makes on love.

Rene's farewell letter to her abandoned friend is a document of the contemporary woman touching on the soul's new claims and demands on life. Benette's^[14] heroine steps forth behind her. She is a writer, a single woman. Ecstasy and adoration drive her into the arms of a great musician, but the experience only helps her to find and strengthen her own identity, to prove her writing talent, and to take a more sober, more reflective, and more conscious stance towards life. And when, later, a new love approaches, she does not flee from it, like the heroines of earlier English novels who, beshamed, viewed themselves as dishonored, fallen creatures. Rather, she goes towards the new love, smiling.

The restless, temperamental Maya's impetuously pushes forward. She has an ironical disposition. To her, all experiences are but stages on the way to herself – to the shaping of her personality: struggle with her relatives for independence, separation from the first husband, a brief romance with an Oriental hero, a second marriage, full of refined psychological details. Thereupon, a bitter struggle is waged in Maya's soul between the old and the new femininity; there is another separation, again a new seeking until Maya finally finds the man who exhibits respect for her inner " voice, " this symbol of personality, who recognizes her importance and knows how to create an inwardly free love bond about which Maya has dreamt all her life.

Maya's life harbors a profusion of psychological complications and experiences. But all that from which a woman of the old stamp would have broken long ago (the infidelity of the beloved man, the break with two men) serves Maya only as education, allows her to arrive at self-understanding all the more surely. Unconsciously, she follows Goethe's counsel: " to begin one's life anew every day, as though it were just beginning... " " My stronger, more courageous will, which nothing could break, saved me – my unconscious will to self-preservation. It led me through life like a guardian angel, " says Maya of herself. ^[15]

Nevertheless there are still enough episodes in Maya's life that recall the old breed. The new, independent, inwardly free woman constantly struggles with the atavistic inclination to be the " shadow of the husband, " his echo. How familiar in her is the naive conscientious effort to arrange herself inwardly so as to accord with the taste of her husband whom she loves, to perfect herself fully in keeping with the ideal that her chosen one had formed of her. As though she had no worth of her own, as though her personality was to be appraised only according to the relation men had towards her. This atavistic trait in women is so strong that even so splendid, brilliant, bewitching a personality as George Sand could be tempted to wish to forsake the world for the sake of a rapturous Musset and then, later, to renounce the flight to the stellar world of artistic creation for the sake of sober politics. But the strong personality of George Sand drew a line against such experiments. The moment came when George Sand sensed that she was about to lose her identity, that by such adjustment the woman in her – Aurore Dudevant – was directing George Sand, the bold, rebellious, passionate dreamer, to destruction and stifling her.

Then George Sand tore the former bonds with no regrets. And when once such a decision was born in her soul, nothing could hold her back, no power, not even her own passion was able to break the will of this great human being with the bewitching, tender-receptive, feminine soul.

When Aurore Dudevant leaves her estate on a gloomy autumn day for a last brief farewell with her lover, even though the decision to break with him is already ripened and formalized – we need have no concern over George Sand – we feel that this encounter cannot have the force to change her decision, it is nothing else but the last gift of a dissolving passion which George Sand flings to the weeping Aurore. The stage is surpassed, the experience is closed, and that is all.

Meisel-Hess's Maya, naturally, is not of the same stature of George Sand, she is much weaker. But in her, too, a limit is set to her adaptation to the beloved. Her atavistic inclination to self-denial, to self-alienation and dissolution in love, collides with her already developed, distinct human personality. Maya also understands how to straighten herself out in a given moment and she goes forth in order to save her " voice. "

How difficult it is for today's woman to cast aside this capacity, internalized in the course of centuries, of millenniums, with which she tried to assimilate herself to the man whom fate seemed to have singled out to be her lord and master. How difficult she will find it to convince herself that woman must reckon self-renunciation as a sin, even a renunciation for the sake of the beloved and for the sake of the power of love.

The cold, reflective, ambitious Uta^[16] steps impressively alongside Maya. Uta is an actress, her whole life is a continuous display and adornment of her own " ego" which to her stands far higher than anything else in the world. It is as though art, too, is dear to her only as a further means for the unfoldment and revelation of her strong personality, only more fully and in a many-faceted way. It shows the natural reaction against the centuries – long self-abasement of woman and her submissive renunciation of the right to be a personality with a characteristic value of her own. Strong, passionate ambition, cold reasoning, extraordinary selfishness and a striking talent for the stage get the upper hand in her and drive Uta into a dark corner. Calmly, she passes up personal happiness, Klodt's boundless devotion. She appreciates his love, because she loves to glimpse her splendor reflected therein, as in a mirror. When Klodt, confused by Uta's glamor, tormented by her cold indifference, betrays her before her eyes, she weeps. But it is not the woman in her that is offended. Rather it is the artist who is exposed to all admiring gazes, whose particular worshipper has dared to go over to her rival, to the hated Fronchini. It is not outraged love that weeps in her, but wounded egotism. Uta remains true to herself up to the end of the novel – she carries her spiritual coldness and her adoration of her own " ego" through life. But, in Uta, is it not the absence of that " holy flame" which makes " great" artists, which makes the frivolous, temperamental " wifie" Fronchini carry off the victory over the clever, cultivated Uta, who is much more developed and even " important, " in her art, but devoid of temperament?

The artist Tania, ^[17] spoiled by life, shines forth in the multitude. Although Tania is a married woman, one cannot but include her in the type of " single woman, " as with Maya, even though she was formally married three times. It is in keeping with her inner physiognomy. For instance, does not Tania, although she lives together with her lawful spouse under the same roof, remain free and independent as before and as a human being, " herself"? She frowns when her husband introduces her to his friends without mentioning her own name. Each of them lives in a world of his own, she in the world of art, he in the world of his professorship, of science. They are good friends, comrades, strong bonds unite them, but as good friends they do not curtail one another's freedom.

Tania's blind, physiological passion for the handsome " manikin" Stark invades this pure atmosphere. In Stark, naturally, Tania does not love the intellectual physiognomy, not his soul, but the " eternal masculine" with which he drew her like a magnet at their first meeting. She flits by his soul, just as up to now men have flitted by the souls even of passionately loved women, stretching their arms in defensive helplessness when the " adored" Anna, Manya, or Lisa, amid tears, utter the familiar reproach: " But your soul, your soul, that you don't give... " Tania's attitude towards Stark altogether bears the stamp of the male. We feel that she, as a personality, is both clearer and stronger, as well as richer than he. Tania is too much a human being, too little " wifie" for naked passion to be able to satisfy her. She herself admits that her passion for Stark does not enrich her soul, but impoverishes it, dries it out. It is characteristic that Tania suffers less from the consciousness of her infidelity to her husband than from the tormenting realization that comes to her in moments when she yields to amorous rapture, of the irreconcilability of such love with planful, enduring work without which she cannot live.

Passion consumes her energies, her time and makes free, creative work impossible. Thus, Tania begins to lose herself and that which to her is the dearest thing in life. Tania goes back to her husband but not because " duty" enjoins it, and even less out of pity, but out of love for herself, in order to save her identity and her personality. [18]

She can lose herself with Stark. She goes back and is with child by Stark. She goes back, but not because the passion is already extinct. Where is the heroine of the novels of the good old times who would have possessed so much bravery as to act like Tania?

Tania faces the choice which in her time was faced by one of the first heroines of the psychologically new type of woman – Ibsen's Ellida. Since the " man from the sea" demands that she follow him, and her husband accords her full freedom of choice – Ellida remains with her husband. She remains in the consciousness that, thereby, she is saving her inner freedom, whereas she would forfeit it if she were to go off with the " man from the sea. " Ellida has understood that she was threatened by the most terrible captivity imaginable for a woman – the captivity of passion, a power that he held over her feminine heart.

The psychically stoic, the spiritually strong Josepha^[19] modestly clears her path and proffers a helping hand to those on the edges of the path beset by the still protruding, prickly branches of the thorny bushes of life. She helps the women of bourgeois society beat a path to economic independence, she shows them the way to the professions. The sensitive, cautious Christa Ruland^[20] gropes hesitantly along the path. We have here a bewitching, portrayal of a grown woman who with big, wide-opened eyes peers questioningly into the world in which she seeks the new rights for woman, and, at the same time, first begins to become conscious of herself. Her motto is: " I – and I and you – are you, we are one only in love. "

The heroine of Juschkevitsch's novel, Elena, ^[21] hiding the tragedy of her soul, the tormenting, strange world-weariness which is not comprehensible even to her, presses forward on the margin of the path to the " new rights. " She is not single and not even one of the " new women" in the actual sense of the word. In her psyche, the traits of the new and the old type have entangled and formed a complicated knot. The eternal feminine is clear and strong in her, but her mind, her human " ego, " fills the tender feminine soul with grave questions. She is sacrificing, affectionate, full of feminine contradictions and even of slavish mendacities, but her rebellious, endlessly seeking, questioning mind makes out of Elena a figure of a new kind. Juschkevitsch has presented her in soft tones and treated the character so circumspectly, so affectionately as though fearful of breaking with a word this sensitive, fragile feminine soul whose tragic situation finally destroys her.

We distinguish Renate Fuchs^[22] in the multitude of the new women, this " rebellious soul" who succeeds in preserving her spiritual purity while she goes through shame, dishonor, and dirt. A lofty calm is spread over her countenance and in her virginal hands she holds the little child, the " new man" of the future. Alongside her steps Greni Allena's heroine^[23] proudly guiding by the hand her little daughter, the child of her love from a union which demonstratively had avoided the legal form. The chemist Maria^[24] sets foot into her laboratory with officious gestures – her smile is radiant; she has found life's harmony. The prostituted Mylada^[25] with head held high bears her " holy mission" through the filth of life which has robbed her of her eyesight.

The social-revolutionary Anna Siemenovna, ^[26] while concealing herself behind the mask of the coquettish " wifie, " deliberately strides through her own passion beginning to end. Leaving the world's prejudices far behind, the emancipated student English-woman Fanny^[27] glides along with soaring steps and carries her fragrant clothes unhurried through life's thorny underbrush. Another familiar face beams at us, that of the woman student from the far north – Anna Mahr^[28]... Thus do the different heroines of Bjö rnson, ronas Lie (The Commandant's Daughters), Jakobsen, Lö ffler torment themselves on the new path. Jenny, ^[29] the heroine of the Norwegian woman novelist Undset, enters upon the new path full of restlessness, and always as though she was harking to voices in her soul reminiscent of the woman of the past. Like Nagrodskaya's Tania, she leaves the father of her still unborn child so that motherhood may not strengthen the love that has begun to be burdensome to her. Now she presses forward on the new path, with increasing boldness, but a voice of the past lives in her, reawakens forgotten feelings, conceptions, and ideas. Jenny pauses in her forward march and looks back – and thereupon she falls to pieces...

But ever new figures of awakening, " rebellious, " seeking women press forward beyond her.

The tender, bewitching silhouette of Francoise Houdon, ^[30] with her comradely love for Christophe and her passion for another, with her flaming temperament, full of insatiable artistic ambition, with an iron will and a fragile, tender soul. On the same line with her steps the unvarnished, living type of the working woman Cecile, ^[31] holdling her soul in balance unconscious of the fact that the new truth stamps itself in her calm " arrival. " The suffragette Julia France, ^[32] Marie Antin, ^[33] the refugee from Russia, the Jewish girl who clears herself a path to American citizenship, to a secure position ^[34], and all the heroines of Rikarda Huch, Gabriele Reiner, Sarah Grande, Nemfz Word Krandiewskaia, the symptomatic Baborinin of the salon novelist Marcel Prevost. ^[35]

There are many of them and they cannot all be listed in this brief sketch. But precisely the fact that there is such a profusion of these new women, who daily appear on the scene in ever new and larger numbers so that their tainted likeness is found even in the boulevard-literature of a Verbitzkaia, proves that life creates and shapes these new types of women without let-up.

This new woman brings with her something alien, that at times repels us because of its newness as a breed, so to speak. We peer at it closely, looking for the familiar, agreeable traits of which our mothers and grandmothers were the bearers. But the type who stands before us has broken with the past and harbors within herself a whole world of new feelings, experiences, and demands. Doubt rises in us, we are almost disappointed. Where is the engaging feminine submissiveness and softness of yore? Where is the customary ability of the woman to adjust herself in marriage, to give herself, even vis-a-vis the insignificant husband and to accord him primacy in life?

Before us stands woman as personality, before us stands a human being possessing a characteristic value, with her own individuality, who asserts herself – in short, the woman who has broken the rusted fetters of her sex.

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