And the husband and father? What does he stand to gain or lose by that
gradual readjustment of the conditions inside the home which must
inevitably follow on the improvement of woman’s position outside the
home, the recognition of her right to an alternative career and the
consequent discovery that she can be put to other uses than sexual
attraction and maternity? How will he be affected by the fact that
marriage has become a voluntary trade?
So far as one can see, he stands to lose something of his comfortable
pride in his sex, his aristocratic pleasure in the accident of his
birth, his aristocratic consciousness that deference is due to him
merely because he was born in the masculine purple. The woman who has
established her claim to humanity will no longer submit herself to
the law of imposed stupidity; so the belief in her inherent idiocy
will have to go, along with the belief in his own inherent wisdom.
No longer will he take his daily enjoyment in despising the wife of
his bosom—because nature has decreed that she shall be the wife of
his bosom and not the husband of some one else’s. There will be a
readjustment of the wage-scale, too—a readjustment of the conditions
of labour. With better conditions available outside the home, the
wife and mother—no longer under the impression that it is a sin to
think and a shame to be single—will decline to work inside the home
for a wage that can go no lower, will decline to take all the dirty,
monotonous and unpleasant work merely because her husband prefers to
get out of it. She will agree that it is quite natural that he should
dislike such dirty, monotonous or unpleasant toil; but she will point
out to him that it is also quite natural that she should dislike it.
And one imagines that they will come to a compromise. So far, under
a non-compulsory marriage system, he would stand to lose; but on the
other hand he would stand to gain—greatly.
He could be reasonably sure that his wife married him because she
wanted to marry him, not because no other trade was open to her, not
because she was afraid of being jeered and sneered at as an old maid.
That in itself would be an advantage substantial enough to outweigh
some loss of sex dignity. For it would be only his sense of sex dignity
that would be impaired; his sense of personal dignity would be enhanced
by the knowledge that he was a matter not of necessity but of choice.
His wife’s attitude towards him would be a good deal less complimentary
to his class, but a good deal more complimentary to himself. The
attitude of the girl who would “marry any one to get out of this” is by
no means complimentary to her future husband.
The fact that, under a voluntary system of marriage, he would have to
pay, either in money or some equivalent of money, for work which he now
gets done for nothing—and despises accordingly—would also bring with
it a compensatory advantage. Woman’s work in the home is often enough
inefficient simply because it is sweated; there is a point at which
cheap labour tends to become inefficient, and therefore the reverse
of cheap; and that point appears to have been reached in a good many
existing homes.
There is, it seems to me, another respect in which man, as well as
woman, would eventually be the gainer by the recognition of woman’s
right to humanity on her own account. The custom of regarding one
half of the race as sent into the world to excite desire in the other
half does not appear to be of real advantage to either moiety, in
that it has produced the over-sexed man and the over-sexed woman, the
attitude of mind which sneers at self-control. Such an attitude the
establishment of marriage for woman upon a purely voluntary basis ought
to go far to correct; since it is hardly conceivable that women, who
have other careers open to them and by whom ignorance is no longer
esteemed as a merit, will consent to run quite unnecessary risks from
which their unmarried sisters are exempt. When the intending wife and
mother no longer considers it her duty to be innocent and complacent,
the intending husband and father will learn, from sheer necessity,
to see more virtue in self-restraint. With results beneficial to the
race—and incidentally to himself. Humanity would seem to have paid
rather a heavy price for the feminine habit of turning a blind eye to
evil which it dignifies by the name of innocence.
I have sufficient faith in my brethren to be in no wise alarmed
by dismal prophecies of their rapid moral deterioration when our
helplessness and general silliness no longer make a pathetic appeal
to their sense of pity and authority. No doubt the consciousness of
superiority is favourable to the cultivation of certain virtues—the
virtues of the patron; just as the consciousness of inferiority is
favourable to the cultivation of certain other virtues—the virtues of
the patronized. But I will not do my brother the injustice of believing
that the virtues of the patron are the only ones he possesses; on the
contrary, I have found him to be possessed of many others, have seen
him just to an equal, courteous and considerate to those whom he had
no reason to pity or despise. When the ordinary man and the ordinary
wife no longer stand towards each other in the attitude of patron and
patronized the virtues of both will need overhauling—that is all.
Nor does one see how the advancement of marriage to the position of a
voluntary trade can work for anything but good upon the children born
of marriage. Motherhood can be sacred only when it is voluntary, when
the child is desired by a woman who feels herself fit to bear and to
rear it; the child who is born because of his mother’s inability to
earn her bread by any trade but marriage, because of his mother’s fear
of the social disgrace of spinsterhood, has no real place in the world.
He comes into it simply because the woman who gives him life was less
capable or less courageous than her sisters; and it is not for such
reasons that a man should be born.
And I fail to see that a future generation will be in any way injured
because the mothers of that generation are no longer required to please
their husbands by stunting and narrowing such brains as they were
born with, because ignorance and silliness are no longer considered
essential qualifications for the duties of wifehood and motherhood. The
recognition of woman’s complete humanity, apart from husband or lover,
must mean inevitably the recognition of her right to develop every side
of that humanity, the mental and moral as well as the physical and
sexual; and inevitably and insensibly the old aristocratic masculine
cruelty which, because she was an inferior, imposed stupidity upon her
and made lack of intelligence a preliminary condition of motherhood,
will become a thing of the past. Nor will a man be less fitted to fight
the battle of life with honour and advantage to himself, because he was
not born the son of a fool.
The male half of creation is still apt to talk (if not quite so
confidently as of yore) as if the instinct and desire for maternity
were the one overpowering factor in our lives. It may be so as regards
the majority of us, though the shrinkage of the birth-rate in so far as
it is attributable to women would seem to point the other way; but as
I have shown it is impossible to be certain on the point until other
instincts and desires have been given fair play. Under a voluntary
system of marriage they would be given fair play; in a world where a
woman might make what she would of her own life, might interest herself
in what seemed good to her, she would hardly bear a child unless she
desired to bear it. That is to say she would bear a child not just
because it was the right thing for her to do—since there would be a
great many other right things for her to do—but because the maternal
instinct was so strong in her that it overpowered other interests,
desires or ambitions, because she felt in her the longing to give birth
to a son of whom she had need. And such a son would come into a world
where his place was made ready for him; being welcome, and a hundred
times welcome, because he was loved before he was conceived.
Nor does one imagine that such a son, when he grew of an age to
understand, would think the less of his mother because he knew that
he was no accident in her life, but a choice; because he learned that
his birth was something more than a necessary and inevitable incident
in her compulsory trade. One does not imagine that he would reverence
her the less because he saw in her not only the breeding factor in
the family, but a being in all respects as human as himself, who had
suffered for him and suffered of her own free will; nor that he would
be less grateful to her because she, having the unquestioned right to
hold life from him, had chosen instead to give it.
* * * * *