Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 February 1912 — WORK FOR SOCIAL HAPPINESS [ARTICLE]

WORK FOR SOCIAL HAPPINESS

Life Plans of Ellen Key, the Swedish Reformer apd Writer, as She Outlines Them. Ellen Key, the great Swedish reformer and writer, lives at Alvastra, in southern Sweden. Only last summer did she realize the dream of her Ttmgworklife.a hom«pbf ; the country. Conning over your knowledge of Ellen Key, writes a correspondent of the Woman’s World, /you find that while you know something of her books and, are fairly familiar with her views about the education of children and her ideas about the reformation of marriage, you know little about the woman herself. You have heard that It takes two editions a year in America to supply the demand for her “The Century of the Child,” and ; you may have heard that this book in Germany is even more popular. You remember, too, how extensively her “Love and Marriage” was reviewed, and one phrase of Havelock Ellis sticks in'your ruind. “A woman whose personality is one of the chief moral forces of our time.” Then, too, there the light of enthusiastic admiration that came into the eyes of the stolid hotel porter as he brought you your tickets to Alvastra. You told him you were going there to see Ellen Key. “She is a great womap,” he says. “She is teaching us how to live.” Albert Bonnier, her Swedish publisher, has told you that Ellen Key’s books have now been translated into ten languages and that her next book is to be published' simultaneously in half a dozen world capitals. “And yet It Is not mine, this beautiful house,” she saysv. “It must be something more than that. I have made my testament telling what must' be done with it when I have passed. It was a laundress, a little Swedish laundress, now happily married and living in America, who gave me the idea, seventeen years ago. "Said she to me, ‘Rich people think that we poor people envy them their wealth. It is not so. What we do envy is their culture and their opportunities for culture. We, too, would like to have the leisure and the opportunity to see the beautiful pictures and statues, to read books and to travgL It is their culture we envy.' “As a result of that talk I started in Stockholm what we call social eve* ntngti- I got women of culture to come and talk to the women who work, to tell them of the beautiful thing* that the working women had bad no opportunity to see. “Those social evenings started sow

enteen years ago in Stockholm are still kept up. They have done much for both classes of women who shared in them. It was from those evenings that I learned much about the poor women who have to work for the better things of life. “So when I am gone this house is to be theirs. In my testament I have left it to a self-perpetuating committee of five. Each year from April to October they are to ask four working women at a time to come here for' a month ‘as the guests of Ellen Key.* The house, the pictures, the piano, the books, the baths, the servants—everything will be at their disposal. “They will be my guests, only the hostess will be absent. Never more, than four are to be invited at one time. There must be nothing of the barracks about it. I have made only one restriction. They must be working women with enough culture to appreciate the treasures I have gathered here.” As with pride she tells how she planned the house you study the woman herself. Only her whitening hair would tell that she waß sixty-one. Her sun bronzed face, homely yet beautiful, has hardly a wrinkle and glows with youthful enthusiasm as she speaks. Her forehead at once marks her as intellectual and there is strength and decision in her lips,, but her eyes, hazel gray they are, beam with kindliness and fun.