THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF BEHAVIOR
From the foregoing it appears that the face-to-face group
(family-community) is a powerful habit-forming mechanism. The group has
to provide a system of behavior for many persons at once, a code which
applies to everybody and lasts longer than any individual or generation.
Consequently the group has two interests in the individual,—to suppress
wishes and activities which are in conflict with the existing
organization, or which seem the starting point of social disharmony, and
to encourage wishes and actions which are required by the existing
social system. And if the group performs this task successfully, as it
does among savages, among Mohammedans, and as it did until recently
among European peasants, no appreciable change in the moral code or in
the state of culture is observable from generation to generation. In
small and isolated communities there is little tendency to change or
progress because the new experience of the individual is sacrificed for
the sake of the security of the group.
But by a process, an evolution, connected with mechanical inventions,
facilitated communication, the diffusion of print, the growth of cities,
business organization, the capitalistic system, specialized occupations,
scientific research, doctrines of freedom, the evolutionary view of
life, etc., the family and community influences have been weakened and
the world in general has been profoundly changed in content, ideals, and
organization.
Young people leave home for larger opportunities, to seek new
experience, and from necessity. Detachment from family and community,
wandering, travel, “vagabondage” have assumed the character of
normality. Relationships are casualized and specialized. Men meet
professionally, as promoters of enterprises, not as members of families,
communities, churches. Girls leave home to work in factories, stores,
offices, and studios. Even when families are not separated they leave
home for their work.
Every new invention, every chance acquaintanceship, every new
environment, has the possibility of redefining the situation and of
introducing change, disorganization or different type of organization
into the life of the individual or even of the whole world. Thus, the
invention of the check led to forgery; the sulphur match to arson; at
present the automobile is perhaps connected with more seductions than
happen otherwise in cities altogether; an assassination precipitated the
World War; motion pictures and the _Saturday Evening Post_ have
stabilized and unstabilized many existences, considered merely as
opportunity for new types of career. The costly and luxurious articles
of women’s wear organize the lives of many girls (as designers, artists,
and buyers) and disorganize the lives of many who crave these pretty
things.
In the small and spatially isolated communities of the past, where the
influences were strong and steady, the members became more or less
habituated to and reconciled with a life of repressed wishes. The
repression was demanded of all, the arrangement was equitable, and while
certain new experiences were prohibited, and pleasure not countenanced
as an end in itself, there remained satisfactions, not the least of
which was the suppression of the wishes of others. On the other hand the
modern world presents itself as a spectacle in which the observer is
never sufficiently participating. The modern revolt and unrest are due
to the contrast between the paucity of fulfillment of the wishes of the
individual and the fullness, or apparent fullness, of life around him.
All age levels have been affected by the feeling that much, too much, is
being missed in life. This unrest is felt most by those who have
heretofore been most excluded from general participation in life,—the
mature woman and the young girl. Sometimes it expresses itself in
despair and depression, sometimes in breaking all bounds. Immigrants
form a particular class in this respect. They sometimes repudiate the
old system completely in their haste to get into the new. There are
cases where the behavior of immigrants, expressing natural but random
and unregulated impulses, has been called insane by our courts.
Case No. 37 represents despair, case No. 38 revolt, Nos. 39 and 40
extraordinarily wild behavior.
37. There is a saying about the peacock, “When she looks at her
feathers she laughs, and when she looks at her feet she cries.” I am
in the same situation.
My husband’s career, upon which I spent the best years of my life,
is established favorably; our children are a joy to me as a mother;
nor can I complain about our material circumstances. But I am
dissatisfied with myself. My love for my children, be it ever so
great, cannot destroy myself. A human being is not created like a
bee which dies after accomplishing its only task.
Desires, long latent, have been aroused in me and become more
aggressive the more obstacles they encounter.... I now have the
desire to go about and see and hear everything. I wish to take part
in everything—to dance, skate, play the piano, sing, go to the
theatre, opera, lectures and generally mingle in society. As you
see, I am no idler whose purpose is to chase all sorts of foolish
things, as a result of loose ways. This is not the case.
My present unrest is a natural result following a long period of
hunger and thirst for non-satisfied desires in every field of human
experience. It is the dread of losing that which never can be
recovered—youth and time which do not stand still—an impulse to
catch up with the things I have missed.... If it were not for my
maternal feeling I would go away into the wide world.[39]
38. I had been looking for Margaret, for I knew she was a striking
instance of the “unadjusted” who had within a year come with a kind
of æsthetic logic to Greenwich Village. She needed something very
badly. What I heard about her which excited me was that she was
twenty years old, unmarried, had never lived with a man or had any
of that experience, had worked for a year on a socialist newspaper,
and a socialist magazine, was a heavy drinker and a frequenter of
Hell Hole, that she came from a middle class family but preferred
the society of the outcasts to any other. Greenwich Village is not
composed of outcasts, but it does not reject them, and it enables a
man or woman who desires to know the outcast to satisfy the desire
without feeling cut off from humanity. Hell Hole is a saloon in the
back room of which pickpockets, grafters, philosophers, poets,
revolutionists, stool-pigeons, and the riff-raff of humanity meet.
Margaret loves this place and the people in it—so they told me—and
there she did and said extreme things in which there was a bitter
fling at decent society.
So that night, when she came with Christine, I invited her to go
with me to Hell Hole to have a drink. She drank whiskey after
whiskey and showed no effect. As soon as we were seated in the back
room alone she started to tell me about herself. I forget what
unessential thing I said to get her started. She knew by instinct
what I desired and she told me her story with utter frankness, and
with a simple, unaggressive self-respect.
“I belong to what is called a respectable, middle-class family. My
father is a prominent newspaper man. Whenever I was ill, as a child,
he gave me whiskey instead of medicine. This began at the age of
four. One of my childish amusements was to mix cordials and water to
entertain my little friends with. We lived in the city, and I had
from four years of age the run of the streets. At six or eight I
knew everything—about sex, about hard street life. I knew it wrong,
of course, for I saw it but did not feel it. I felt wrong about it
all, and feared it, wasn’t a part of it, except as an observer. I
saw no beauty or friendliness in sex feeling. I think it was this
that kept me away later from physical intimacy with men; it couldn’t
appeal to me after my early life in the street. I know it doesn’t
always happen so, but it did with me.
“When I got to be thirteen years old my father reversed his attitude
towards me; before then, all freedom; after that, all restraint. I
was completely shut in. Soon after that I became religious and
joined the church. I had a long pious correspondence with another
girl and used to brood all the time about God and about my
transcendental duties. This lasted till I was sixteen, and then
life, ordinary external life, came back with a rush and I couldn’t
stand my exclusive inner world and the outward restraint any longer,
and I wanted to go away from home. So I worked hard in the High
School and got a $300 scholarship in Latin and Greek. With this I
went to a Western College and stayed there two years, working my own
way and paying my expenses. I read a lot at this time, and liked
revolutionary literature; read socialism, and poetry that was full
of revolt. I took to anything which expressed a reaction against the
conditions of my life at home.
“I stood well in my studies, and suppose I might have completed the
college course, except that I got into trouble with the authorities,
for very slight reasons, as it seems to me. I smoked cigarettes, a
habit I had formed as a child, and that of course was forbidden. It
was also forbidden to enter the neighboring cemetery, I don’t know
why. One day I smoked a cigarette in the graveyard—a double
offense—and then, in the playfulness of my spirit, I wrote a poem
about it and published it in the college paper. In this paper I had
already satirized the Y. W. C. A. A few other acts of that nature
made me an undesirable member of the college and my connection with
it ceased.
“After an unhappy time at home—my father and I could not get on
together; ever since my early childhood he had been trying to
‘reform’ me—I got a job on the socialist _Call_, a New York daily
newspaper, at $—— a week. It was hard work all day, but I liked it
and I didn’t drink—I didn’t want to—and lived on the money without
borrowing. Later I went on the _Masses_, and there I was well off.
[Then I went to Washington to picket for the suffragists and got a
jail sentence, and when I returned the _Masses_ had been suspended.]
It was at that time that I began to go with the Hudson Dusters [a
gang of criminals] and to drink heavily. Greenwich Village seemed to
think it was too good for me, or I too bad for it. Most of the women
were afraid to associate with me. Only the Hudson Dusters, or people
like them, seemed really human to me. I went, in a kind of despair,
to the water-front, and staid three days and nights in the back room
of a low saloon, where there were several old prostitutes. And I
liked them. They seemed human, more so than other people. And in
this place were working men. One man, with a wife and children,
noticed I was going there and didn’t seem to belong to them, and he
asked me to go home with him and live with his family; and he meant
it, and meant it decently.
“I want to know the down and outs,” said Margaret with quiet, almost
fanatical intenseness. “I find kindness in the lowest places, and
more than kindness sometimes—something, I don’t know what it is,
that I want.”[40]
39. There came a day when my wife heard that there was an Atlantic
City not far from Philadelphia. So I granted her wish and rented a
nice room for her in a hotel there and sent her with the two
children to that seashore....
The next summer I did not make out so well and could not afford to
send my wife to the country, but she absolutely demanded to be sent
even if I had to “hang and bring.” ... My protestations and
explanations were of no avail. She went to Atlantic City and hired a
room in the same hotel....
I took my wife’s behavior to heart and became ill. Some of my
friends advised me to teach her a lesson and desert her, so that she
would mend her ways in the future. They assured me that they would
take care of my family, to keep them from starving. I was persuaded
by them and left Philadelphia for a distant town.
My wife in Atlantic City, seeing that I sent her no money, returned
home. Upon learning what had happened, she promptly sold the
furniture, which had cost $800, for almost nothing and went to New
York. My friends notified me of all that had occurred in my absence,
whereupon I came back.
I advertised in the papers and found my wife. My first question was
about the children and she replied she did not know where they were.
Upon further questioning she answered that she had brought the
children with her from Philadelphia but as she could do nothing with
them in her way she simply left them in the street.
After great efforts made through my lawyer, I succeeded in obtaining
the release of my children from the Gerry Society, after paying for
their two months’ keep there....
Since this unhappy occurrence, my wife has many times wrecked our
home, selling the household goods while I was at work and leaving me
alone with the children. Whenever she feels like satisfying her
cravings, or whenever she cannot afford to buy herself enough pretty
clothes and hats, she deserts me. One time she was gone 9 months and
never saw the children during this period....
I tried to make up with her every time and give her another chance.
But her cordiality lasted only until she again took a craving for
some rag, when she would again leave home. She was even mean enough
once to leave me with a five months’ old baby who needed nursing and
the only way out seemed to be the river for me and the baby....
I assure you that everything I have written is the truth. If you do
not believe me, you may convince yourself at the Desertion Bureau
where my case has been recorded several times.[41]
40. ... She was one of the thousands of girls who are drawn to the
great city from small towns. She perished because of her thirst for
adventure.... While stopping at the Hotel Buckingham she went out
one evening and never returned. A chauffeur told the police that he
met the girl on the evening of her death and that she had been on a
tour of the cafés and cabarets with him and that at 2 o’clock in the
morning Miss Dixon became ill. She was taken to the Harlem Hospital,
where her case was diagnosed as morphine poisoning....
She came of a fine Virginia family and was educated at a fashionable
boarding school. Four years ago she was married to a Yale graduate.
[A friend] who had known her all her life said, “She had just gone
mad with love of pleasure, though at heart she was a thoroughbred
and exceedingly fine. She decided to make her own living and took a
small part in a couple of shows. The discipline and routine were too
much for her and she gave it up and went back to [her husband] from
time to time. But always the lure of New York seemed to hold her in
a spell.”[42]
The world has become large, alluring, and confusing. Social evolution
has been so rapid that no agency has been developed in the larger
community of the state for regulating behavior which would replace the
failing influence of the community and correspond completely with
present activities. There is no universally accepted body of doctrines
or practices. The churchman, for example, and the scientist, educator,
or radical leader are so far apart that they cannot talk together. They
are, as the Greeks expressed it, in different “universes of discourse.”
41. Dr. Austin O’Malley writes rather passionately about the control
of births, in the Catholic weekly, “America.” Says Dr. O’Malley:
“The most helpless idiot is as far above a non-existent child as St.
Bridget is above a committee on birth control.” Let us pause over
the idiot and the non-existent child. Must we say that all potential
children should be born? Are we to take a firm stand against
celibacy, which denies to so many possible children the right to be
baptized? And will Dr. O’Malley tell us which is the greater virtue,
to bear children that they may be baptized, or to have no children
for the glory of one’s own soul? This solicitude over the
non-existent child has certain drawbacks. How large a family, in
fact, does Dr. O’Malley desire a woman to bear? May she stop after
the fourteenth infant, or must she say to herself: “There are still
non-existent children, some of them helpless idiots; perhaps I will
bear them that they may be baptized.”[43]
Or, if we should submit any series of behavior problems to a set of men
selected as most competent to give an opinion we should find no such
unanimity as prevailed in a village community. One set of opinions would
be rigoristic and hold that conformity with the existing code is
advisable under all circumstances; another pragmatic, holding that the
code may sometimes be violated. For example, in 1919, the United States
Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board authorized the Psychological
Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University to make an investigation of
the “informational and educative effect upon the public of certain
motion-picture films”, and in this connection a questionnaire was sent
to “medical men and women who have had most to do with problems in sex
education and the actual treatment of venereal infections.” From the
manuscript of this investigation I give below some of the replies
received to question 13.
42. _Question 13_. _Do you consider that absolute continence is
always to be insisted upon? Or may it be taught that under certain
conditions intercourse in the unmarried is harmless or beneficial?_
Dr. A. I know of no harm from absolute continence. Intercourse in
the unmarried cannot be justified on any grounds of health or
morals.
Dr. B. No. For some absolute continence would be easy, for others,
impossible. It is an individual problem to be decided by the
individual, with or without advice.
Under certain conditions in the unmarried, male or female,
intercourse is harmless or beneficial; under other conditions it is
harmful and injurious (irrespective of venereal disease).
Dr. C. I think it is harmless and beneficial. But our standards are
against it. And who could possibly conscientiously teach such a
thing, no matter what he thought?
Dr. D. Certainly not. It is probably well to teach young people that
continence before marriage is in general very desirable, as
contrasted with the results of incontinence.
Dr. E. It is best to teach conformity to custom.
Dr. F. Absolute continence should always be insisted upon.
Dr. G. I know of no condition where one is justified in advising the
unmarried that intercourse is harmless or beneficial.
Dr. H. Absolute continence.
Dr. I. No. [Continence is not always to be insisted upon.]
Dr. J. The first should not be insisted on any more than the latter
should be recommended....
Dr. K. The latter may be taught.
Dr. L. Not convinced either way.
Dr. M. Absolute continence should be preached as a doctrine to the
unmarried, and let the individual adjust himself to this stern law
according to his lights.[44]
Fifty-one replies were received to this question. Twenty-four were, in
substance, “not permissible”; fifteen, “permissible”; four, “in doubt”;
eight were indefinite, as, for example: “Adults will probably decide
this for themselves.”
As another example of a general defining agency, the legal system of the
state does not pretend to be more than a partial set of negative
definitions. An English jurist has thus described the scope of the law:
“If A is drowning and if B is present, and if B by reaching out his hand
can save A, and if B does not do this, and if A drowns, then B has
committed no offense.” All that the law requires of B is that he shall
not push A into the water. The law is not only far from being a system
capable of regulating the total life of men, but it does not even
regulate the activities it is designed to regulate.
43. A misdemeanor may be much more heinous than a felony. The
adulterator of drugs or the employer of child labor may well be
regarded as vastly more reprehensible than the tramp who steals part
of the family wash. So far as that goes there is an alarming
multitude of acts and omissions not forbidden by statute or
classified as crimes which are to all intents ... fully as criminal
as those designated as such by law.... For example, to push a blind
man over the edge of the cliff so that he is killed ... is murder,
but to permit him to walk over it is no crime at all. It is a crime
to defame the character of a woman if you write on a slip of paper,
but no crime at all in the state of New York if you rise in a
crowded hall and ruin her forever by word of mouth. It is a crime to
steal a banana off a fruit stand, but no crime at all to borrow ten
thousand dollars from a man whose entire fortune it is, although you
have no expectation of returning it.... It is a crime to ruin a girl
of 17 years and 11 months, but not to ruin a girl of 18.... Lying is
not a crime, but lying under oath is a crime, provided it relates to
a _material_ matter, and what is a material matter jurists do not
agree on.... Many criminals, even guilty of homicide, are as white
as snow in comparison with others who have never transgressed the
literal wording of the penal statute. “We used to have so and so for
our lawyer,” remarked the president of a street-railway corporation.
“He was always telling us what we couldn’t do. Now we have Blank and
pay him $100,000 a year to tell us how we can do the same
things.”[45]
The definition of the situation is equivalent to the determination of
the vague. In the Russian _mir_ and the American rural community of
fifty years ago nothing was left vague, all was defined. But in the
general world movement to which I have referred, connected with free
communication in space and free communication of thought, not only
particular situations but the most general situations have become vague.
Some situations were once defined and have become vague again; some have
arisen and have never been defined. Whether this country shall
participate in world politics, whether America is a refuge for the
oppressed of other nationalities, whether the English should occupy
India or the Belgians Africa, whether there shall be Sunday amusements,
whether the history of the world is the unfolding of the will of God,
whether men may drink wine, whether evolution may be taught in schools,
whether marriage is indissoluble, whether sex life outside of marriage
is permissible, whether children should be taught the facts of sex,
whether the number of children born may be voluntarily limited,—these
questions have become vague. There are rival definitions of the
situation, and none of them is binding.
In addition to the vagueness about these general questions there is an
indeterminateness about particular acts and individual life-policies. It
appears that the behavior of the young girl is influenced partly by the
traditional code, partly by undesigned definitions of the situation
derived from those incidents in the passing show of the greater world
which suggest to her pleasure and recognition. If any standard prevails
or characterizes a distinguished social set this is in itself a
definition of the situation. Thus in a city the shop windows, the
costumes worn on the streets, the newspaper advertisements of ladies’
wear, the news items concerning objects of luxury define a proper girl
as one neatly, fashionably, beautifully, and expensively gowned, and the
behavior of the girl is an adaptation to this standard.
44. Supreme Court Justice Tierney remarked in the course of a trial
between two women over the purchase of silk lingerie and paradise
feathers yesterday, “The workings of the feminine mind are beyond
me.”...
The articles which Mrs. Small admits buying and the prices asked by
Mme. Nicole are as follows:
Six suits of silk underwear, $780; six suits linen underwear, $780;
six pairs silk stockings, $180; paradise feathers for fan, $1,480;
handle for fan, $720.[46]
45. ... My sweetheart remarked that she would like to have a great
deal of money. When I asked her what she would do with it, she
replied that she would buy herself a lot of beautiful dresses. When
I said that it was all right to have them but it ought to be all
right without them too, she protested that she loved fine clothes
and this to such extent, that—
Here she made a remark which I am ashamed to let pass my lips. I
would sooner have welcomed an open grave than to have heard those
words. She said that she would sell her body for a time in order to
procure nice clothes for herself.
And since that day I go around like a mad person. I neither eat nor
sleep. In short, I am no more a man.
She afterward excused herself, claiming that it was said in a joke,
and that as long as one talks without actually doing it there is no
harm in it. But this is not reassuring to me. I have a premonition
that she would go further than mere talk after marriage, for if she
carries such notions in her head now, what might happen after we are
married.[47]
Intermediate between the home and work (or the school) there are certain
organized influences for giving pleasure and information—the motion
picture, the newspaper, the light periodical—which define the situation
in equivocal terms. They enter the home and are dependent upon its
approval, and are therefore obliged to present life in episodes which
depict the triumph of virtue. But if they limited themselves to this
they would be dull. The spectacle therefore contains a large and
alluring element of sin over which virtue eventually triumphs. The moral
element is preserved nominally but the real interest and substance is
something else.
46. A young girl may be taught at home and church that chastity is a
virtue, but the newspapers and the movies feature women in trouble
along this line, now painting them as heroines, now sobbing over
their mystery and pathos. Apparently _they_ get all the attention
and attention is the life blood of youth. The funny papers ridicule
marriage, old maids and bashful men. The movies, magazines, street
conversation and contemporary life are filled with the description
of lapses that somehow turn out safely and even luxuriously. If the
modern young girl practises virtue she may not believe in it. The
preliminaries to wrong-doing are apparently the accepted manners of
the time. When the girl herself lapses it is frequently because of
lack of a uniform, authoritative definition of the social code.[48]
Among well-to-do girls a new type has been differentiated, characterized
by youth, seeming innocence, sexual sophistication and a relatively
complete de-pudorization.
47. The modern age of girls and young men is intensely immoral, and
immoral seemingly without the pressure of circumstances. At whose
door we may lay the fault, we cannot tell. Is it the result of what
we call “the emancipation of woman”, with its concomitant freedom
from chaperonage, increased intimacy between the sexes in
adolescence, and a more tolerant viewpoint toward all things unclean
in life? This seems the only logical forbear of the present state.
And are the girls causing it now, or the men? Each sex will lay the
blame on the heads, or passions, of the other, and perhaps both
sexes are equally at fault.
Whosesoever the fault may be (and that is not such an important
question, since both sexes are equally immoral), the whole character
of social relations among younger people is lamentable. The modern
dances are disgusting—the “toddle” and its variations and
vibrations, the “shimmy” and its brazen pandering to the animal
senses, and the worst offspring of jazz, the “camel-walk.” There is
but one idea predominant in these dances—one that we will leave
unnamed.
It is not only in dancing that this immorality appears. The modern
social bud drinks, not too much often, but enough; smokes
considerably, swears unguardedly, and tells “dirty” stories. All in
all, she is a most frivolous, passionate, sensation-seeking little
thing.[49]
48. “Flappers” usually are girls who believe personality is
physical, who consider all advice as abstract, who love continual
change, who converse in generalities and who are in many higher
institutions of learning.
To present a picture of the normal girl as she exists today is a
daring venture. She has no average, she has no group tie. She is a
stranger to herself—sometimes especially to members of her own
family—and cannot be compared with her kind of a previous age.
We are tempted to think of her as living in a spirit of masquerade,
so rapidly and completely can she assume different and difficult
rôles of accomplishment.
She tantalizes us by the simpleness of her artfulness and yet
unrealness. We find her light-hearted, which is the privilege of
youth. She believes with Stevenson that to have missed the joy is to
have missed it all. We find her harboring secrets and imbedded
emotions which are her hidden treasure in the mysterious discovery
of herself as a private individual. If we do not understand these
symptoms we call it temperament and try to dispose of the girl as
difficult or as needing discipline.[50]
Formerly the fortunes of the individual were bound up with those of his
family and to some degree with those of the community. He had his
security, recognition, response, and new experience in the main as group
member. He could not rise or fall greatly above or below the group
level. Even the drunkard and the “black sheep” had respect in proportion
to the standing of his family. And correspondingly, if a family member
lost his “honor”, the standing of the whole family was lowered.
Individualism, on the other hand, means the personal schematization of
life,—making one’s own definitions of the situation and determining
one’s own behavior norms. Actually there never has been and never will
be anything like complete individualization, because no one lives or can
live without regard to a public. Anything else would be insanity. But in
their occupational pursuits men have already a degree of
individualization, decide things alone and in their own way. They take
risks, schematize their enterprises, succeed or fail, rise higher and
fall lower. A large element of individualism has entered into the
marriage relation also. Married women are now entering the occupations
freely and from choice, and carrying on amateur interests which formerly
were not thought of as going with marriage. And this is evidently a good
thing, and stabilizes marriage. Marriage alone is not a life,
particularly since the decline of the community type of organization.
The cry of despair in document No. 37 is from a woman who limited her
life to marriage, probably by her own choice, and is now apparently too
old to have other interests. But on the other hand document No. 49 is a
definition of marriage as exclusively a device for the realization of
personal wishes and the avoidance of responsibility. This may be
compared with No. 71 (p. 122) where a girl organizes her life similarly
without marriage.
49. Girls, get married! Even if your marriage turns out badly, you
are better off than if you had stayed single. I know half a dozen
women whose first marriages were failures. They got rid of their
first husbands easily and have made much better marriages than they
could have made if they had stayed single. Their new husbands
idolize them. One of my women acquaintances who has been married
four times is the most petted wife I know.
My own marriage has turned out well. Everything seemed against it. I
was well known in my profession, and when I married I was making as
much money as my husband. We were of different religions. He drank.
But he had one big quality. He was generous. Since our marriage he
has refused to let me work. Girls, be sure the man you pick is
generous. Look out for a tightwad. If a man is liberal with his
money he is sure to be easy to get along with. Liberal men in money
matters do not annoy their wives in the other concerns of life....
But even if my marriage had turned out badly, I would have been
better off than if I had neglected the opportunity to become
married. I met new friends through my husband. If I had divorced him
at any time, I know many of his men friends would have courted me.
There is something about the magic letters “Mrs.” that gives a woman
an added attraction in the eyes of men. There is a middle-aged widow
in our apartment house that has more men taking her to theatres and
dances than all the flappers and unmarried young women....
I often wonder what men get married for. They take heavy financial
responsibilities. They mortgage their free time to one woman. What a
wife’s clothes cost them would enable them to enjoy expensive
amusements, extensive travel and better surroundings generally.
Then, too, a bachelor, no matter what his age or social position,
gets more attention socially than a married man. Children, too, give
less pleasure and service to a father than a mother.
But for women, marriage is undoubtedly a success. It raises their
position in the community. In most cases, it releases them from the
danger of daily necessary work and responsibility. It brings them
more attention from other men. Even when incompatibility intervenes,
alimony provides separate support without work. In such cases, it
also provides a more strategic position for a new and better
marriage.[51]
In the same connection, the following cases show the growing tendency
toward individualized definitions of sexual relations outside of
marriage. In case No. 50 an immigrant girl explicitly organizes her life
on the basis of prostitution instead of work. In No. 51 the girls
commercialize a series of betrothals. In No. 52 the girl has worked out
her own philosophy of love and calls herself a missionary prostitute.
50. [When I left Europe] my little sister’s last words were, “Here,
in hell, I will dream through the nights that far, far, across the
ocean, my loving brother lives happily.” And my last words were, “I
shall forget my right hand if I ever forget you.”
I suffered not a little in the golden land.... Five years passed. I
loyally served the God of gold, saved some money and sent for my
sister. For three years I believed myself the happiest of men.... My
sister bloomed like a rose in May and she was kind and motherly to
me. We were tied by a bond of the highest love and on my part that
love had until now remained the same. But listen what a terrible
thing occurred.
About a year ago I noticed a marked change in my sister—both
physically and spiritually. She grew pale, her eyes lost their fire
and her attitude toward me changed also. She began to neglect her
work (I taught her a good trade), until half a year ago she entirely
gave up the work. This angered me very much and I began to shadow
her in order to discover the mystery in her life, for she had
recently avoided talking to me, particularly of her life. I
concluded that she kept company with a boy and that caused her
trouble.
But I soon noticed that she was wearing such expensive things that a
boy could not afford to buy them. She had a couple of diamond rings
and plenty of other jewelry. I investigated until I discovered, oh,
horrible! that my sister was a prostitute....
You can understand that I want to drag her out of the mire, but ...
she tells me that I do not understand life. She cannot conceive why
it should be considered indecent to sell one’s body in this manner.
When I point out to her the end that awaits her she says in the
first place it is not more harmful than working by steam for twelve
to fourteen hours; in the second place, even if it were so, she
enjoys life more. One must take as much as possible out of life.
When I call her attention to the horrible degradation she replies
that in the shop, too, we are humiliated by the foreman, and so
on....
I know that if I could convince her that I am right, she would be
willing to emerge from the swamp, but I am unfortunately too
inadequate in words, she being a good speaker, and I am usually
defeated.[52]
51. I read in the “Bintel” the letter of a young man who complained
that his fiancée extorted presents from him and that when, as a
result of unemployment, he was unable to buy her everything she
demanded, she began to make trouble for him—that she was evidently
playing to have him desert her and leave her the property she had
extorted.
Well, I am a woman myself, and can bear testimony that there are
unfortunately such corrupted characters among my sex, who rob young
men in this disgraceful manner. With these girls it is a business to
“trim” innocent and sincere young men and then leave them. To them
it is both business and pleasure. It gives them great joy to catch a
victim in their outspread net and press as much of his hard-earned
money out of him as possible.
I know a girl who ... extracted from her naïve victim everything she
laid her eyes on. When he stopped buying her so many things she
began to treat him so shamefully that the poor boy was compelled to
run away to another town, leaving all his gifts with the girl. The
poor fellow was not aware that his so-called fiancée merely tricked
him into buying her all kinds of jewelry and finery. He was afraid
she would sue him for breach of promise and this fear caused him to
leave town.
And don’t think for a moment that that girl is ashamed of her deed.
Not at all. She even boasts of her cleverness in turning the heads
of young men and their pockets inside out. She expects to be admired
for that....
I attempted to explain to her that she is a common swindler and
thief, but she replied that not only is it not wrong but a
philanthropical act. Her argument was that there are many men who
betray innocent girls and it is therefore no more than right that
girls should betray men also.[53]
52. [After the marriage of a brilliant man who had flirted with her
but never mentioned marriage] she went on the stage, and was immoral
in an unhappy sort of way. She met a young artist whose struggles
for success aroused her pity and motherly instinct. With the memory
of her faithless lover uppermost she plunged into a passionate
realization of sex, more to drown her feelings than anything else.
She roused the best in this boy, made a man of him, and steadied
him. With her sexual tempests there came an after-calm when she
forbade any familiarity. This was not studied but an instinct. She
hated men, yet they fascinated her, and she them.
She studied stenography and worked as private secretary in a
theatrical company. She tried to face life with work as her only
outlet, but the restlessness of her grief made her crave excitement.
She made friends easily, but her sexual appeal made it difficult for
her to fit into a commonplace social atmosphere. She married the
artist to the girl he loved, after a terrible struggle to make him
realize it was not herself he loved. Later he came and thanked her.
“The quiet women make the best wives,” he said, “but my wife would
not have loved me if you had not made me into a man. She cannot,
however, give me what I get from you. I wish I could come to you
once in a while?”
She said yes, and he came. That was five years ago and that is why
she calls herself a prostitute. Her women friends have no idea she
is not the quiet, dignified woman she appears to be, and men, many
of them married men, want her for their own. She has no use for the
man about town; only the man with brains or talent fascinates her at
all. She says, “I suppose every one would think me a sinner; I am. I
deliberately let a married man stay with me for a time. It is an
art. I have learned to know their troubles. They tell me they are
unhappy with their wives, wish to go away, are desperate with the
monotony of existence. It is generally that they are not sexually
mated, or the wife has no sex attraction. Of course she loves him,
and he her. I give them what they need. It is weary for the brain to
understand men, it is harder on me mentally than physically. I
control them only because I have self-restraint. I send them away
soon. They are furious; they storm and rage and threaten they will
go to some other woman. What do I care? They know it and I send them
back to their wives. They will go to her; they would not go to any
other woman. That is where I do good. This sex business is a strange
thing. I am a missionary prostitute. I only do this once in a while,
when I think a man needs me and he is one who will come under my
influence. I know I have managed to avert the downfall of several
households. If the wives knew? Never mind; they don’t. I am not
coarse; I can be a comrade to a man and doubt if I harm him. I make
him sin in the general acceptance of the term, the common
interpretation of God’s commandments. How do we know God didn’t mean
us to use all the powers he gave us?”[54]
In the two cases following, adjustment to life is highly individualized
but moral and social. The one is a response adjustment, recognizing
freedom for new experience, particularly for creative work, and in the
other marriage is based on the inherent values of the relationship, and
on nothing else.
53. Being firmly of the opinion that nine out of ten of the
alliances I saw about me were merely sordid endurance tests,
overgrown with a fungus of familiarity and contempt, convinced that
too often the most sacred relationship wears off like a piece of
high sheen satin damask, and in a few months becomes a breakfast
cloth, stale with soft-boiled egg stains, I made certain resolutions
concerning what my marriage should not be.
First of all, I am anxious to emphasize that my marriage was neither
the result of a fad or an ism, but simply the working out of a
problem according to the highly specialized needs of two
professional people.
We decided to live separately, maintaining our individual
studio-apartments and meeting as per inclination and not duty. We
decided that seven breakfasts a week opposite one another might
prove irksome. Our average is two. We decided that the antediluvian
custom of a woman casting aside the name that had become as much a
part of her personality as the color of her eyes had neither rhyme
or reason. I was born Fannie Hurst and expect to die Fannie Hurst.
We decided that in the event of offspring the child should take the
paternal name until reaching the age of discretion, when the final
decision would lie with him.
My husband telephones me for a dinner appointment exactly the same
as scores of other friends. I have the same regard for his plans. We
decided that, since nature so often springs a trap as her means to
inveigle two people into matrimony, we would try our marriage for a
year and at the end of that period go quietly apart, should the
venture prove itself a liability instead of an asset....
On these premises, in our case at least, after a five-year acid
test, the dust is still on the butterfly wings of our adventure. The
dew is on the rose.[55]
54. I am a college graduate, 27, married five years and the mother
of a three-year-old boy. I have been married happily, and have been
faithful to my husband.
At six I had decided upon my husband. Jack was his name; he was a
beautiful boy, fair, blue eyes, delicate and poetic looking. He was
mentally my superior, he loved poetry and wrote good verses. He read
a great deal and talked well. He loved me and I loved him, yet there
was no demonstration of it in embraces. We played together
constantly, and we spoke of the time when we might marry. His great
desire was to have a colored child with light hair and blue eyes for
a daughter, and we had agreed upon it. All of our plans were spoken
about before our parents, there was no effort made to hide our
attachment. I was by nature rough and a great fighter, Jack was calm
and serious, and at times I fought his battles for him. I was
maternal towards him. His mother died during our friendship, and I
tried to take her place. It was a pure love, nothing cheap or silly.
He was killed in the Iroquois Fire and my life was dreary for a long
time. I remember the hopeless feeling I experienced when I heard the
news. I did not weep, I turned to my mother and said, “I don’t want
to live any longer.”
We had always been allowed to sit across from each other at school,
and after Jack’s death, I was granted permission to keep his seat
vacant for the rest of the year, and I kept a plant on the desk
which I tended daily as a memorial to my friend.
... In college, a coeducational school, I was not allowed to remain
ignorant long. I was young and healthy and a real _Bachfisch_ in my
enthusiastic belief in goodness. I was fortunate in having a
level-headed senior for my best friend. She saw an upper classman
[girl] falling in love with me, and she came to me with the news.
Then she saw how innocent I was and how ignorant, and my sex
education was begun. She told me of marriage, of mistresses, of
homosexuality. I was sick with so much body thrown at me at once,
and to add to the unpleasantness some one introduced me to Whitman’s
poetry. I got the idea that sex meant pain for women, and I
determined never to marry.
But the next year I felt very differently about sex. I was used to
the knowledge and I went with a crowd of girls who were wise, and I
had a crush. I had never been stirred before, but I was by her. She
told me her ambitions, and I told her mine; it was the first time I
had ever been a person to any one, and I was her loyal and loving
friend. I kissed her intimately once and thought that I had
discovered something new and original. We read Maupassant together
and she told me the way a boy had made love to her. Everything was
changed, love was fun, I was wild to taste it. I cultivated beaux, I
let them kiss me and embrace me, and when they asked me to live with
them, I was not offended but pleased. I learned my capacity, how far
I could go without losing my head, how much I could drink, smoke,
and I talked as freely as a person could. I discussed these
adventures with the other girls, and we compared notes on kisses and
phrases, and technique. We were healthy animals and we were
demanding our rights to spring’s awakening. I never felt cheapened,
nor repentant, and I played square with the men. I always told them
I was not out to pin them down to marriage, but that this intimacy
was pleasant and I wanted it as much as they did. We indulged in sex
talk, birth control, leutic infection, mistresses; we were told of
the sins of our beaux, and I met one boy’s mistress, an old
university girl. This was life. I could have had complete relations
with two of these boys if there had been no social stigma attached,
and enjoyed it for a time. But instead I consoled myself with
thinking that I still had time to give up my virginity, and that
when I did I wanted as much as I could get for it in the way of
passionate love. Perhaps the thing that saved me from falling in
love was a sense of humor. That part of me always watched the rest
of me pretend to be swooning, and I never really closed my eyes. But
there was a lot of unhealthy sex going around because of the
artificial cut off. We thought too much about it; we all tasted
homosexuality in some degree. We never found anything that could be
a full stop because there was no gratification.
During this period of stress and heat I met a man, fine, clean,
mature and not seemingly bothered with sex at all. I kissed him
intimately too, but it was very different. He had great respect for
me, and he believed in me. I respected him, admired his artistic
soul and his keen mind. There was no sex talk with him, it was music
and world-views and philosophy. He never made any rash statements,
nor false steps. He could sense a situation without touching it, and
I felt drawn to him. I knew he had never been with a woman and he
told me once that he could never express more than he felt for a
person, and could sustain. After five years of friendship we
married. There was no great flair to it; it was an inner necessity
that drove us to it; we could no longer escape each other. We tried
to figure it out, but the riddle always said marry. Sexually I had
more experience than he, I was his first mistress, his wife, his
best friend, and his mother, and no matter what our moods were, in
one of these capacities I was needed by him. Our adjustment was
difficult; he had lived alone for thirty years. I was used to having
my own way, and he was a very sensitive man, nervous, sure of his
opinion, and we quarreled for a while, but never very bitterly.
Sexually we were both afraid of offending the other and so that was
slow. But in four months we had found our heads again and were well
adjusted. He was, and is, the best friend I ever had. I love him
more as I know him longer. We can share everything, we are utterly
honest and frank with each other, we enjoy our sex life tremendously
as well as our friendship. But it was difficult for us to abandon
ourselves. To allow any one to know you better than you know
yourself is a huge and serious thing and calls for time and love and
humor.
I have never known any one as fine as my husband. He is generous,
honest, keen, artistic, big, liberal, everything that I most want in
a person. I have never been tired of him. I feel confident that he
loves me more now than ever before and that he thinks me very fine,
a good sport. We have been thrown together a great deal through
poverty, and I feel that we are alone in the world and facing it
together, a not too friendly world at that. Yet with all this love
and closeness, I don’t feel that I possess my husband, nor that he
does me. I am still the same old girl, the same personality, and my
first duty is to develop my own gifts. I have no feeling of
permanency with him because we are legally married, but at present a
separation is unthinkable. I am worth more to myself with him, and
life is infinitely sweeter and richer within the home than any other
place.
But if I had married the average American husband who plays the
business game as a religion, then I should long ago have been
unfaithful to him. I could never disclose myself and be happy with a
man who had any interest more important to him than our
relationship.
As long as our relationship continues as it is I think we will both
be faithful to each other. But I need to have freedom to move about
now with all this. And perhaps part of my happiness consists in the
fact that I do have freedom. I have had intimate friendships with
other men since I am married, kissed them, been kissed, been told
that they would like to have me with them. But none of this seems to
touch my relation with my husband. I want, and I need to be,
intimate on my own hook in my own way with other people. I don’t
honestly know whether I would take a lover or not. If my husband
gave me the assurance that he would take me back, on the old basis,
I think I would try it to see if it’s as great as it’s said to be.
But if I had to give up my husband, I would not. I need him as I
need my eyes and hands. He is the overtone in the harmony, and I am
that for him. I like to experiment, but from past experience I
believe the cost would be greater than the gain. I am free at home
as I am not anywhere else. I love it, I express myself freely and
completely emotionally, and the only reason I could have for being
unfaithful would be experimentation. And if I were unfaithful I
should have to tell my husband the whole affair; I could not enjoy
it otherwise. I have no feeling against it, and no urge towards it.
I can honestly say that I am a happy woman, that I have every
opportunity to develop my potentialities in my present relation,
that I am free as any one can be, that my husband is superior, as a
mate for me, to any one I have ever seen. I regret nothing of the
past; it could have been improved tremendously, but it was pleasant
and human.[56]