Philosophical thinking
In her three-part manifesto Lifslinjer I–III [Lifelines I–III], published 1903 to 1905, Ellen Key explains her religious convictions. She aligned herself with freethinkers and new spiritual radicals of the time in an evolutionary monism, influenced by Herbert Spencer, Baruch Spinoza and Ernst Haeckel. With intellectual inspiration from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German Romantics, and the so-called Oriental Renaissance and with impressions from Buddhism and Theosophy, human existence should be viewed as a holistic unity, constantly in dialectical and spiral-shaped development toward ever higher stages of perfection.
In line with this conviction and in opposition to Christianity's dualism, Key advocated for an elevation of the material world, which would affect the position of women, children and the prioritization of their welfare by society. She believed that a reevaluation of and responsibility for earthly life only could be accomplished by shifting the focus from the afterlife to the worldly. At the same time, Key elevated physical life to a spiritual dimension, the one inseparable from the other.
Because of her Life Faith and evolutionary monism, Key believed that humans had the potential to evolve into a higher form of being. Alongside her utopian desire to advance, develop, and educate humanity for the better, Key had a dystopian fear of human degeneration. The tension between evolution and degeneration, as well as her critique of Christian dualism, is important to understanding her embrace of eugenics.
At the turn of the twentieth century, eugenics was an emerging scientific field that sought to “improve” humanity biologically through deliberate and selective reproduction. Key discussed her views on eugenics in the first chapter of Barnets århundrade [The Century of the Child], which was published in Swedish in 1900. In this work, Key argued that children with hereditary diseases and “bad dispositions” were deprived of the possibility for optimal physical and emotional well-being. She therefore proposed eugenic measures to regulate marriages among people with hereditary diseases.
Although eugenics in this historical context is often associated with the idea of the advancing of a particular nationality or race, it should be noted that the future citizens that Key envisioned were not explicitly national or racial, but rather, were related to humanity as a whole.