It is at this stage that Ellen Key comes before us with her book on _The Woman’s Movement_, first published in Swedish in 1909, and now presented to the reader in English. As Ellen Key views the Woman’s Movement, it certainly includes all that those who struggle for votes for women are fighting for; she is unable to see, as she puts it, why a woman’s hands need be more soiled by a ballot paper than by a cooking recipe. But she is far indeed from the well-intentioned but ignorant fanatics who fancy that the vote is the alpha and the omega of Feminism; and still less is she in sympathy with those who consider that its importance is so supreme as to justify violence and robbery, a sort of sex war on mankind generally, and the casting in the mud of all those things which it has been the gradual task of civilisation to achieve, not for men only but for women. The Woman’s Movement, as Ellen Key sees it, includes the demand for the vote, but it looks upon the vote merely as a reasonable condition for attaining far wider and more fundamental ends. She is of opinion that the Woman’s Movement will progress less by an increased aptitude to claim rights than by an increased power of self-development, that it is not by what they can seize, but by what they are, that women, or for the matter of that men, finally count. She regards the task of women as constructive rather than destructive; they are the architects of the future humanity, and she holds that this is a task that can only be carried out side by side with men, not because man’s work and woman’s work is, or should be, identical, but because each supplements and aids the other, and whatever gives greater strength and freedom to one sex equally fortifies and liberates the other sex. Certainly we may not all agree with Ellen Key at every point, nor always accept her interpretation of the great movement of which she is so notable a pioneer. The breadth of her sympathies may sometimes seem to lead to an impracticable eclecticism, and, in the rejection of narrow and trivial aims, she may too sanguinely demand an impossible harmony of opposing ideals. But if this is an error it is surely an error on the right side. She has not put forward this book as a manifesto of the advanced guard of the Woman’s Movement, but merely as the reflections of an individual woman who, for nearly half a century, has pondered, felt, studied, observed this movement in many parts of the world. But it would not be easy to find a book in which the claims of Feminism—in the largest modern sense—are more reasonably and temperately set forth. [Signature: _Havelock Ellis._] LONDON, May 1, 1912. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I THE EXTERNAL RESULTS OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT 23