WOMAN AND MARRIAGE
I
Perhaps the most pronounced conventional distinction between the sexes
is made in their relation to marriage. For man, marriage is regarded as
a state; for woman, as a vocation. For man, it is a means of ordering
his life and perpetuating his name, for woman it is considered a proper
and fitting aim of existence. This conventional view is yielding before
the changing attitude of women toward themselves; but it will be long
before it ceases to colour the instinctive attitude of the great
majority of people toward women. It is because of the usual assumption
that marriage is woman’s special province, that I have discussed its
general aspect somewhat at length before considering its relation to
women in particular. This assumption, I may remark, has been justified
expressly or by implication by all those advocates of freedom for
women who have assured the world that woman’s “mission” of wifehood
and motherhood would be better fulfilled rather than worse through an
extension of her rights. If we imagine the signers of the Declaration
of Independence, in place of proclaiming the natural right of all men
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, arguing with King
George that a little more freedom would make them better husbands and
fathers, we shall imagine a pretty exact parallel for this kind of
argument on behalf of the emancipation of women.
The belief that marriage and parenthood are the especial concern of
women is rooted in the idea that the individual exists for the sake of
the species. Biologically, this is of course true; but it is equally
true of male and female. Among primitive peoples, where individuation
has not progressed as far as among more highly civilized peoples, this
idea still prevails in regard to both sexes. Among these peoples the
man who must remain unmarried and childless is considered quite as
unfortunate as the woman who suffers the same fate. Among civilized
peoples, on the other hand, where individuation has progressed
farthest, it is not usual to look upon the male as existing solely
for the species; but it is usual for the female to be so regarded,
because, having had less freedom than the male, she has not been
able to assert to the same extent her right to live for herself. The
one-sided view that the future of the race depends solely on women
has curious results: a nation may send the best of its male youth
to be destroyed in war without overmuch anxiety being manifested in
any quarter over the effect of this wholesale slaughter upon future
generations; but if the idea of enlisting women in military service
be so much as broached, there is an immediate outcry about the danger
to posterity that such a course would involve. Yet it requires only a
moderate exercise of intelligence to perceive that if there must be
periodic slaughter it would be better, both for the survivors and for
posterity, if the sexes were to be slaughtered in equal numbers; and
more especially is this true, for obvious reasons, where monogamy is
the accepted form of marriage. Again, although it is extremely hard to
get laws passed to protect men from the hazards of industry, the laws
designed to protect women--_i.e._, posterity--which have been passed
at the instance of reformers and social workers, already constitute a
serious handicap to women workers in their necessary competition with
men in the labour-market. Yet every child must have two parents, and
certainly unfitness or disability in the father must have a bad effect
upon his offspring, even though it be less harmful than unfitness or
disability in the mother.
The view of woman as a biological function might be strongly defended
on the ground of racial strength if that function were respected and
she were free in discharging it. But it is not respected and she is
not free. The same restrictions that have kept her in the status
of a function have denied her freedom and proper respect even in
the exercise of that function. Motherhood, to be sure, receives a
great deal of sentimental adulation, but only if it is committed in
accordance with rules which have been prescribed by a predominantly
masculine society. _Per se_ it is accorded no respect whatever. When
it results from a sexual relationship which has been duly sanctioned
by organized society, it is holy, no matter how much it may transgress
the rules of decency, health, or common sense. Otherwise it is a sin
meriting social ostracism for the mother and obloquy for the child--an
ostracism and an obloquy, significantly enough, in which the father
does not share.
The motives behind the universal condemnation of extra-legal
motherhood are various and complex; but I believe it is safe to say
that the strongest is masculine jealousy. Motherhood out of wedlock
constitutes a defiance of that theory of male proprietorship on which
most societies are based; it implies on the part of woman a seizure
of sexual freedom which, if it were countenanced, would threaten the
long-established dominance of the male in sexual matters, a dominance
which has been enforced by imposing all manner of unnatural social and
legal disabilities upon women, such, for example, as the demand for
virginity before marriage and chastity after it. The woman who bears
an illegitimate child violates one of these two restrictions. On the
other hand, the man who begets an illegitimate child violates no such
restriction, for society demands of him neither virginity nor chastity;
therefore he is not only not punished by social ostracism, but he is
often protected by law from being found out.[20]
The fact that paternity may so easily be doubtful furnishes a strong
motive for the attempt to enforce chastity upon women; but that this
is not so potent as the idea of male proprietorship is evident from
the practice which exists in many primitive societies, and appears
formerly to have existed in Europe, of lending wives to visitors, as a
mark of hospitality. Adultery thus imposed on a woman by her husband
is not only regarded as quite proper, but the children that may result
are considered his legitimate offspring. The superstitious notion
that a woman’s honour is a matter of sex, and that she can not be
considered virtuous if her sex-life is not conducted in accordance with
regulations imposed by organized society, also has something to do with
the disgrace that attaches to illegitimate motherhood; but of course
this superstition itself has its source in masculine dominance. Indeed,
there is no need to emphasize the fact that the whole mass of taboo and
discrimination arrayed against the unwedded mother and her child is the
direct result of the subjection of women; for in a society where women
dominated--or even where they were the equals of men--illegitimacy
would either not exist at all, or its consequences would be made to
bear either upon the father or upon both parents equally. This may
seem an extravagant statement in view of the harshness with which
women themselves are prone to treat the unmarried mother. But it should
not be forgotten that women are what the procrustean adaptations of a
factitious morality have made them. They have been taught to believe
that motherhood out of wedlock is a cardinal sin, and the value and
fragility of reputation have been effective hindrances to any impulse
of lenience toward the sinner. Their attitude, moreover, has been
tinged with a feeling that may be termed professional. Marriage has
been, generally speaking, the only profession open to them; their
living and their social position have depended on it, and still do in
great measure; therefore the woman who commits a sexual irregularity
acts unprofessionally, somewhat as the trader who smuggles wares into
a tariff ridden country and undercuts his competitors. The position
of the unmarried mother is analogous to that of the married mother
in certain societies of which I have already spoken, whose children
are considered illegitimate because she has not been bought. Even the
prostitute, although she is a social outcast, is sooner tolerated,
because while prostitution, like marriage, has been established on a
commercial basis, it is a non-competing institution. It does not impair
the economic value of the “virtuous” woman’s chief asset. Prostitution
is condoned as a protective concession to the postulated sexual needs
of men; the prostitute has been justified, and even praised in a
back-handed way, as “the most efficient guardian of virtue”;[21] that
is to say, of the arbitrary restraints on women which pass for virtue
in a society where woman is the repository of morality. Illegitimacy,
on the other hand, or at least that large share of it which implies a
fall from conventional virtue, is an embarrassing suggestion of sexual
need in woman. Therefore, it is a disturbing phenomenon, intimating
as it does to virtuous women that the duplex morality to which their
freedom is sacrificed is unnatural and unworkable.
There is a sense, of course, in which extra-legal motherhood is, if
not sinful, at least unjust. The mother knows that the child she bears
out of wedlock will be forced, although innocent, to share with her
in the world’s displeasure at her defiance of conventional taboo,
and that the sneers of its legitimately born playmates may have a
blighting effect upon its spiritual development. She knows also,
unless she be well-to-do or especially well qualified to earn, that
her child will be at a disadvantage from the start in the matter of
livelihood and education unless the father be willing--or required
by law--to contribute to its support. There is likely to be a grim
consistency in legal injustices. Sometimes the denial of one right
makes expedient the denial of another, as when the poor, having been
reduced by legalized privilege to want and squalor, are legally
deprived of the alcohol with which they increase their wretchedness
in an attempt to find forgetfulness of their misery. The denial to
women of economic opportunity has made expedient denial of freedom in
performing the function of motherhood. Men, having enjoyed a virtual
monopoly of earning power, have been regarded as the natural providers
for women and children; therefore a woman has been required to get
a legal provider before she could legally get a child; and if one
accepted her legal disabilities without questioning their justice,
this restraint might appear quite justifiable. This may be taken as an
argument for weakness or wantonness in the unmarried mother. If so, it
must certainly apply with equal force to the unmarried father--with
double force indeed, for he knows that his act will not only add to the
difficulties, numerous enough under the best circumstances, that his
child will have to contend with, but that it means social ostracism for
the mother. Thus every illegitimate child, as society is at present
constituted, is the victim not only of social but of parental injustice.
It is hardly necessary to discuss further the economic aspects of
the question. In a society where economic opportunity is pretty well
monopolized by men, the task of the mother with children to support
is, as I have shown in the preceding chapter, extremely difficult; and
it may even be rendered impossible where the disgrace of unmarried
motherhood decreases such comparatively slight opportunity as industry,
even now, offers a woman. The effect of this disability shows clearly
in any comparison of the death-rates among legitimate and illegitimate
babies. The rate among illegitimate children is often twice as high as
that among children born in wedlock. Truly marriage is an invaluable
protection to motherhood and childhood in a society which denies them
any other.
Instead of joining in the universal condemnation of illegitimacy, it
seems more reasonable to question the ethics of a society which permits
it to exist. Certainly no social usage could be more degrading to
women as mothers of the race than that which makes it a sin to bear
a child; and nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of
morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility
for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to
abortion, infanticide, prostitution and self-destruction. I know of
no word that may be said in justification of such a code or of a
society that tolerates it. As marriage ceases to be a vested interest
with women, and as their growing freedom enables them to perceive the
insult to their humanity that this kind of morality involves, they
will refuse to stand for it. Those who prefer to regard woman as a
function will devote their energy to securing conditions under which
she may bear and bring up children with a greater degree of freedom and
self-respect than conventional morality allows her. As for those who
prefer to regard her as a human being, they will naturally demand the
abolition of all discriminations based on sex; while all women must
certainly repudiate the barbarous injustice of organized society to the
illegitimate child.
This is hardly to be regarded as a prophecy, for the revolt has already
begun. A small minority of women in Europe have for some time been
denouncing this injustice, the most prominent among them being the
famous Swedish champion of childhood, Ellen Key. Their influence
has already been reflected in the laws of several countries. In
Scandinavia, in Switzerland, and even in France, laws have already
been enacted either removing or modifying the legal disabilities of
the child born out of wedlock, and fixing the responsibilities of the
father. There are similar laws in Australia and New Zealand. These
laws vary in scope, but their general tendency is toward the abolition
of illegitimacy and recognition of joint parental responsibility for
every child brought into the world. In this country, where unjust
legal discriminations against unmarried mothers and their children are
still in force, the Woman’s Party is demanding laws recognizing every
child as legitimate, and determining the responsibilities of unmarried
parents. The abolition of illegitimacy will naturally mean that the
child of unmarried parents will have the same right to the father’s
name, and to support and inheritance, as the child born in wedlock.
There is a general impression, to which I have adverted, that marriage
is a great protection to women. Bachofen and his followers even went
so far as to suppose that she herself originally devised it for that
purpose. This school quite overlooked the fact that in so far as it has
been a protection it has been so only because society has been inimical
to her interests, and has allowed her no other defence against itself.
Marriage has certainly not protected her in the past from hard labour,
cruelty, and mental and spiritual deterioration. In spite of these
well-known facts, the notion persists that it is of inestimable benefit
to her; and those influenced by this superstition are likely to fear
that to abolish illegitimacy, with its humiliating consequences, will
be to encourage “free love” and thus to expose women to victimization
by unscrupulous men. Such a view not only carries an untenable
assumption of feminine inferiority, but it carries an equally untenable
assumption that marriage constitutes a protection against victimization
by unscrupulous men. Not only did our marriage-laws until recently give
a woman into the absolute power of her husband, however unscrupulous he
might be, but they left her no way of escape. On the other hand, they
protected the husband’s sexual monopoly of his wife and his right to be
considered the only legal parent of their children. Indeed, the law
has gone further; it has exposed women to victimization by protecting
men from detection in illegitimate parentage. Laws equalizing the
responsibilities of men and women towards illegitimate children, will
reduce temptation to unscrupulous conduct, for men will be aware
that if it result in the birth of a child they will be obliged to
acknowledge their parenthood and assume the attendant responsibilities.
I might remark here that some communities have tried to deal with
this question in what seems to me a very bungling manner, namely: by
forcing the “seducer” of a woman under the legal age of consent to
choose between marrying her and going to jail. Such laws represent
concessions to traditional prejudices, and have little relation either
to justice or common sense. They take no cognizance of the inclination
of the parties or their fitness for marriage; hence they afford a
stupid way of legitimizing the child. It would be much more sensible to
regard every child as legitimate by the very fact of having arrived in
the world, and to demand of its parents a full discharge of parental
responsibility, without complicating it with the very different
question of marital obligations. Another legal provision which is as
general as it is humiliating to women is that which permits a father to
recover damages from the seducer of his daughter. This law, which is in
force in several of our States, is supposed to find justification in
the daughter’s status as a servant in her father’s house; but since the
law grants him no similar redress for the seduction of a servant who is
not his daughter, it is evident that its real basis is in a surviving
notion of woman as the natural property of a male owner. These laws do
not lessen the disgrace that attaches to extra-legal birth; rather they
recognize and endorse it.
The importance of abolishing illegitimacy is not to be underrated,
for it means the removal of the legal sanctions which have enforced a
barbarous custom. But the abolition of illegitimacy can not be expected
entirely to remove the stigma attaching to unmarried motherhood and
birth out of wedlock. That will disappear only when the economic
independence of women shall have resulted in a spiritual independence
which will lead them to examine critically the social dogmas that
have been forced upon them, and to repudiate those which conflict
with justice. In other words, it will involve an adaptation to more
humane ethical standards; an adaptation which has begun but may be
long in reaching completion, for superstition and taboo are not easily
eradicated.
II
The assumption that justice to motherhood and childhood will undermine
the institution of marriage implies that marriage as an institution
is based on injustice; which is to assume that it is fundamentally
unsound. That it does, under present economic conditions, involve
serious injustice to both sexes I have shown in the preceding chapter.
But this notion implies something more: it implies that marriage is
acceptable to women only or chiefly because it offers them a position
of privilege--the privilege of exemption from the social and economic
consequences of illegitimate motherhood. There is some show of reason
in this; for the disabilities which marriage puts on women are in
most communities humiliating and onerous, more particularly since the
unmarried woman has so generally succeeded in establishing her right
to be treated as a free agent. The abolition of illegitimacy may
conceivably undermine institutional marriage; yet hardly before women
are economically free. For her need of society’s protection against
itself in the discharge of her maternal function has certainly had
less to do with woman’s long acquiescence in the disabilities which
marriage involves than the fact that marriage offered the only career
which society approved for her or gave her much opportunity to pursue.
She was under enormous economic and social pressure to accept those
disabilities, and she yielded, precisely as thousands of men who have
been under analogous pressure to get their living under humiliating
conditions, have yielded, rather than not get it at all.
Since we have been discussing unmarried motherhood, we may
appropriately begin our consideration of these disabilities by
examining the status of motherhood in marriage. The married mother,
particularly in modern times, is the object of a sickly pawing and
adulation and enjoys a certain formal respect--not, however, as a
mother, but as a mother of legitimate children. While she continues
to live with her husband, she may exercise considerable supervision
over the rearing of her offspring; indeed in some communities she
is, by force of custom, supreme in this province. But in case of
separation or the death of her husband, she may find herself without
any legal claim to their guardianship or custody, for until recently
children born in wedlock have been generally held to belong exclusively
to the father. The principle of joint guardianship is coming to be
recognized in modern jurisprudence, but there are communities where
the old laws still hold. In Virginia, for example, the father’s claim
is always preferred to that of the mother. In Maryland and Delaware
it is preferred to such an extent that he may even, by his will,
deprive her of the guardianship and custody of her children after
his death. This provision is a survival from English common law, and
is a logical correlative of woman’s status under that law, which was
that of a minor. Her position with regard to her children was one
of responsibilities with no compensating rights; and although the
discriminations against her have been modified here and there, this
is still pretty generally her position. In this respect the unmarried
mother is better off than the mother of legitimate children, for in
most countries, as the only legal parent of her child, she exercises
the right of guardianship and control and possesses full claim to
their services and earnings. The unmarried mother, in a word, bears her
own children; the married mother bears the children of her husband.
Usage, as every one knows, is far ahead of the laws governing the
rights of the married mother. In France, where her legal position is
notoriously bad, her relation to her family is nevertheless one of
influence and authority. In this country also her actual position is
generally far better than that allowed her by the law. But this is
merely to say that most husbands are more humane than the law; and the
fact may not be ignored that so long as legal discriminations bar her
from an equal share with her husband in the control and guardianship of
her children, she exercises parental rights only on sufferance. It is
the law which finally fixes her status in this as in other matters; and
as long as she may legally be made to suffer injustice on account of
her sex, she can hardly be called her husband’s equal, no matter what
privileges she may enjoy by virtue of his indulgence.
So much for the disabilities of the married mother. Her compensations
are the immunity that marriage affords her from society’s displeasure
and consequent persecution; the inestimable advantage of her husband’s
co-operation in making a home for her children, and in rearing and
educating them; and the fact that they have a legal claim upon him for
support and inheritance.
Her own claim for support does not depend, in law, upon her motherhood,
but upon her wifehood. She is entitled to support whether she has
children or not. On the other hand the law, in most communities, allows
her nothing more than mere support, while at the same time it maintains
certain restrictions upon her economic independence. Although most
States now allow the wife to control her own earnings in industry, her
services in the home are still pretty generally her husband’s property,
and any savings that result from economy in her domestic management
belong to him, and so does any money earned by her in her own house,
as from taking in boarders or lodgers. In short, while she works in
the home her status is that of her husband’s servant[22]. He may even,
as in Michigan, still prevent her from undertaking employment outside
the home, simply by withholding his consent. Nor is this the only
way in which the opportunities of a married woman are restricted. She
is frequently disqualified by her status for engaging in business on
her own account, or for doing so without her husband’s consent. She
may also be disqualified by law or prejudice for engaging in certain
professions, such as teaching, an occupation in which, strangely
enough, a married woman is frequently held to be incapable.
The claim for alimony which at present constitutes such a fecund source
of injustice to men and corruption among women, implies the assumption
that a woman is economically helpless, that she is a natural dependent
whose support, having been undertaken by her husband, must be continued
even after divorce, until she dies or finds another husband to support
her. It does not take into account the woman’s rightful claim to any
property that she may have helped her husband to accumulate, for
the question whether or not she shall receive alimony is within the
discretion of the court. On the other hand, the awarding of alimony may
give a woman a claim to income from property possessed by her husband
before marriage and therefore not rightfully to be enjoyed by her; it
may, furthermore, give her an equally unjustifiable lien on his future
earnings. Thus it allows women at once too little and too much. If the
community is to continue to fix the economic obligations which marriage
shall entail, it might be fairer to both sexes if those obligations
were fixed as they have been in certain of our Western States. In
those States, property acquired during marriage is regarded as common
property, and in case of separation must be divided equally. Neither
party may, during the marriage, dispose of such property without
consent of the other; nor may either party dispose of more than half
of it by will. On the other hand, either party has free disposal of
property acquired before marriage, or inherited during marriage. In
case one party dies intestate, the other shares equally with children
in his or her half of the common property, and in other property. Thus
the law raises woman above the status of a dependent and recognizes
marriage as an equal partnership. Such laws, of course, do not fit
all cases, for all marriages are by no means equal partnerships; but
so long as the State insists upon maintaining a blanket-regulation of
the marital relation, some such arrangement would seem to be more
nearly just, both to men and women, than the laws now in force in most
communities.
I have given only a partial list of the economic disabilities enforced
upon a good many millions of married women. Their status in the various
countries of the civilized world ranges all the way from complete
subjection to their husbands to complete equality with them[23]. The
subjection of women, like all slavery, has been enforced by legally
established economic disadvantages; and upon the married woman these
disadvantages, or some of them, are still binding in most communities.
The law deprived her of the right to her own property and her own
labour, and in return gave her a claim upon her husband for bare
subsistence, which is the claim of a serf. Since woman’s partial
emergence from her subjection, and the consequent modification of the
discriminations against her, laws which were logical and effective when
her status was that of a chattel have been allowed to survive other
laws which made them necessary. The result is a grotesque hodge-podge
of illogical and contradictory provisions which involve injustice to
both sexes, and should be abolished by the simple expedient of making
men and women equal in all respects before the law, and sweeping away
all legal claims which they now exercise against one another by virtue
of the marriage-bond.
This would mean, of course, that a woman might no longer legally claim
support from her husband by virtue of her wifehood; nor should she
in fairness be able to do so when all his claims to her property and
services had been abolished. There is no reason why the disabilities
which marriage imposes on women should be done away with and those
which it imposes on men retained. To take such a course would be to
turn the tables and place women in a position of privilege. The fact
that women are still at considerable disadvantage in the industrial
world might appear to justify such a position; but there is a better
way of dealing with their economic handicaps than the way of penalizing
husbands and demoralizing a large number of women by degrading
marriage, for them, to the level of a means of livelihood, gained
sometimes through virtual blackmail. Given complete equality of the
sexes, so that prejudice may no longer avail itself of legal sanction
for excluding women from the occupations in which they may elect
to engage, the economic handicaps from which they may still suffer
will be those resulting from the overcrowded condition of the general
labour-market. The ultimate emancipation of woman, then, will depend
not upon the abolition of the restrictions which have subjected her
to man--that is but a step, though a necessary one--but upon _the
abolition of all those restrictions of natural human rights that
subject the mass of humanity to a privileged class_.
This phase of woman’s problem is the main thesis of my book; and since
it will come in for detailed consideration in subsequent chapters, I
leave it for the present and proceed to discuss some probable results
of sex-equality and the removal of legal claims which marriage now
gives husband and wife against one another.
The wife would no longer be humiliated by the assumption that as a
married woman she is the natural inferior of her husband, and entitled
to society’s protection against the extreme results of the disabilities
that her status involves. If she became his housekeeper, she would
do so by free choice, and not because her services were his legal
property; and her resultant claim on his purse would be fixed by
mutual arrangement rather than by laws allowing her the claims of a
serf. The marriage, if it became an economic partnership, would be
so by mutual consent and arrangement, and would thus no longer be a
one-sided contract, legally defined, in which all the rights were on
the side of the husband, but compensated in too many cases by unjust
privileges on that of the wife. At the same time, the temptation to
marry for economic security or ease would be lessened. This temptation
besets both men and women, though not in the same degree, because men,
through the economic advantage enjoyed by their sex, are oftener in
a position of ease than women are. It is the temptation, arising out
of man’s natural desire to gratify his needs with the least possible
exertion, to live by the means of others rather than by one’s own
labour. Its gratification through marriage would not be rendered
impossible by the mere abolition of coercive laws governing the
marriage relation; but at least its cruder manifestations, such as the
frequent attempts of unscrupulous or demoralized women to use marriage
for purposes of extortion, would no longer assail the nostrils of the
public. Its reduction to a minimum must await the establishment of an
economic order under which self-support will be easy and certain.
More general and binding, even, than the economic obligations that
marriage entails are the personal claims that it creates. In so far
as these claims are psychological--those of affection and habit, or
attachment to children--their regulation and abrogation will always
afford a problem which must be solved by the two persons concerned.
There is at present a strong tendency to equalize the incidence of the
laws whereby the State defines these relations and imposes them on
married people. The old assumption of feminine inferiority in sexual
rights is gradually yielding to a single standard for both sexes. So,
also, the requirement that the wife shall in all matters subordinate
her will and judgment to the will and judgment of her husband, tends to
be modified by the new view of woman as a free agent rather than a mere
adjunct to man. Qualifications for marriage and grounds for divorce
tend to become the same for both sexes as the State is forced to
relinquish its right to regard as offences in one sex actions which it
does not recognize as offences in the other. It would appear, indeed,
that the time is not far distant when the marriage-law, however
humiliating its provisions may be, will bear equally on men and women.
But mere equalization of the law’s incidence leaves untouched the
previous question whether any third person--and the State assumes the
rôle of a third person--has a legitimate right to define and regulate
the personal relations of adult and presumably mature people. So
long as the basic assumption goes unchallenged that the State may
grant to man and woman lifelong monopoly-rights in one another, or
monopoly-rights which shall endure, despite the inclination of the
persons concerned, during the State’s pleasure, so long will complaints
of harsh or unjust marriage or divorce laws prove the truth of Mill’s
dictum that “no enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once
... those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by
complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise.”
Marriage under conditions arbitrarily fixed by an external agency is
slavery; and if we allow the right of an external agency--be it State,
family, or community--to place marriage in so degrading a position, we
necessarily deny the freedom of the individual in this most intimate
of relationships, and put ourselves in the position of petitioners for
privilege when we sue for an improvement in the rules to which we have
subjected ourselves.
When this fundamental fact is borne in mind, it becomes at once
apparent that marriage will gain in dignity through the abolition
of all legal sanction upon the personal claims that it involves. In
a community which had renounced all claim to prescribe legally the
nature of the marriage-bond, its duration, and the manner of its
observance, there would be no washing of soiled domestic linen in the
squalid publicity of courtrooms and newspaper-columns; no arbitration
of noisy domestic differences by judges whose only qualification for
the office is that they have had enough political influence to get
themselves elected; none of the demoralizing consequences that the
sense of proprietorship in one another has on the dispositions of
married people. Marriage might still be publicly registered; it would
no longer be publicly regulated. Its regulation would be left to the
people whom it concerned, as it properly should be and safely could
be; for as Mill remarked, “the modern conviction, the fruit of a
thousand years experience, is that things in which the individual is
the person directly interested, never go right but as they are left to
his own discretion, and that any regulation of them by authority, save
to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous.” The only
way to protect married people against the bad faith which one may show
toward the other, is to leave the door wide open for either of them
to be quit of the union the minute it ceases to be satisfactory. If
society for any reason sees fit to close the door to freedom, it sets
union by law above the union by affection on which alone true marriage
is based; and in so doing it is responsible for an amount of injustice,
spiritual conflict, and suffering which no attempt at equitable
regulation can ever compensate. Such attempts are in reality mere
efforts to adjust the marriage-relation to the fundamental injustice of
the marriage-law.
Perhaps the most serious objection to the union by law is that it is
so often an effective barrier against the union by affection; for the
union by law complicates marriage with a great many uses that are not
properly germane to it; such as the custom of taking on one another’s
family and friends, and the setting up of a common menage where this
most intimate and delicate of relationships is maintained in a trying
semi-publicity under the critical and unwavering scrutiny of relatives
and friends. The influence of the expected extends to the regulation of
the menage and the division of labour. A lover would hardly, perhaps,
require his mistress to darn his socks; but if she became his wife
he would probably yield to the immemorial expectation that a married
woman shall do her husband’s mending. So, likewise, a woman may refuse
to accept support from her lover so long as he is only her lover, and
accept it as a matter of course when the union has been legalized. All
conventional uses have a purely fortuitous and incidental connexion
with marriage; yet they often fret it into failure. As Jane Littell
remarked not long ago in the _Atlantic Monthly_, “being friends with
someone to whom the law binds one is not so easy as it sounds.” This
is especially true where the law assumes a natural inferiority in one
party to the contract, as it almost universally does.
I have not forgotten the children. One could hardly do so in an age
when sentimentalism offers them as the final and unanswerable reason
for continuing to tolerate the injustice involved in institutionalized
marriage. But the very fact that it is the sentimentalist who thus
defends established abuses is in itself enough to warrant considerable
wariness in dealing with his arguments; for when the defenders of any
cause have recourse to sentimentality, it is likely to be for want
of solid ground under their feet, or in order to obscure a doubtful
ulterior motive. Sentimentalism is a sugar coating on the pill of
things as they are, which makes it easier for many people to swallow
it than to contemplate a dose which is at once more salutary and more
formidable, namely: things as they ought to be. When one hears the
sentimentalist proclaiming the sacredness of marriage, one may agree
with him; but at the same time one must wonder what kind of marriage
he means; whether it is the ceremony performed by a minister or a
magistrate, or the union which two people have made sacred through
mutual respect, confidence and love. Such marriages as this last have
sometimes been without benefit of clergy--Would these be as sacred to
the sentimentalist as the marriage which has been sanctified only in
law? Again, when one listens to the good old saws about the glory of
motherhood, one may be interested to know the conditions under which
it is proposed to call it glorious; and when domesticity is held up
to admiration as woman’s natural vocation, one wonders whether the
sponsor of domesticity is willing to put his argument to the test
by leaving her free to choose that vocation or not, as she will, or
whether his praise is a mere preface to the demand that she be forced
into this natural vocation by the method of denying her an alternative.
So, likewise, when one hears the argument that marriage should be
indissoluble for the sake of children, one cannot help wondering
whether the protagonist is really such a firm friend of childhood,
or whether his concern for the welfare of children is merely so much
protective coloration for a constitutional and superstitious fear of
change.
Children are really as helpless as women have always been held to be;
and in their case the reason is not merely supposition. Woman was
supposed to be undeveloped man. The child _is_ undeveloped man or
woman; and because of its lack of development it needs protection. To
place it in the absolute power of its parents as its natural protectors
and assume that its interests will invariably be well guarded, would
be as cruel as was the assumption that a woman rendered legally and
economically helpless and delivered over to a husband or other male
guardian, was sure of humane treatment. No human being, man, woman, or
child, may safely be entrusted to the power of another; for no human
being may safely be trusted with absolute power. It is fair, therefore,
that in the case of those whose physical or mental immaturity renders
them comparatively helpless, there should be a watchful third person
who from the vantage-point of a disinterested neutrality may detect
and stop any infringement of their rights by their guardians, be they
parents or other people. Here then, is a legitimate office for the
community: to arbitrate, in the interest of justice, between children
and their guardians.
But the community has a more direct and less disinterested concern in
the welfare of children: every child is a potential power for good or
ill; what its children become, that will the community become. It is
knowledge of this that prompts the establishment of public schools
and colleges, and all the manifold associational activities intended
to promote the physical and spiritual welfare of children. It is back
of the mothers’ pension system, which is properly, as the Children’s
Bureau insists, a system of assistance for children. From all this
activity it is only a step to the assumption by the community of
entire responsibility for the upbringing and education of every child.
This idea has some advocates; it is a perfectly logical corollary
of the modern conception of the child’s relation to the community.
Yet it invites a wary and conditional acceptance. It is fair that
the community should assume the burden of the child’s support and
education, particularly so long as the community sanctions an economic
system which makes this burden too heavy for the great majority of
parents, and a political system which may force male children to
sacrifice their lives in war as soon as parents have completed the task
of bringing them up. But the advisibility of accomplishing this purpose
through the substitution of institutionalized care for parental care
is more than a little doubtful; for to institutionalize means in great
degree to mechanize. To establish such a system and make it obligatory,
would be to remove many children from the custody of parents entirely
unfitted to bring them up; but it would likewise involve the removal
of many children from the custody of parents eminently well fitted for
such a responsibility. It would imply an assumption that the people who
might be engaged to substitute for parents would be better qualified
for their task than the parents themselves; and such an assumption
would be dangerous so long as the work of educators continues to be as
little respected and as poorly paid as it now is. Moreover, so long as
society remains organized in the exploiting State, the opportunity to
corrupt young minds and turn out rubber-stamp patriots would be much
greater than that which is now afforded by the public school system,
whose influence intelligent parents are sometimes able to neutralize.
Perhaps the best argument against such a system is that it would not
work. If experience teaches anything, it is that what the community
undertakes to do is usually done badly. This is due in part to the
temptation to corruption that such enterprises involve, but even
more, perhaps, to the lack of personal interest on the part of those
engaged in them. Those people who advocate bringing up children in
institutions do not take into account the value of parental interest in
the child; nor do they respect the parental affection which would cause
many parents to suffer keenly if they were forced to part with their
children. The family is by no means always the best milieu for young
people; but before we seek to substitute a dubious institutionalism,
it would be wise to ascertain whether the change is imperative. In
a matter which touches, as this one does, the most profound human
instincts, there is need to observe Lord Falkland’s dictum that “where
it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” As I
have shown in the preceding chapter, parents are at present under heavy
economic handicaps in discharging their parental duties, handicaps
which not only render those duties a heavy burden, but lengthen
inordinately the period for which they must be undertaken. Until those
handicaps are removed, it will not be fair to say that the family is a
failure; and until they are removed, we may be certain that any other
institution charged with the care of the young will be a failure, for
it will be filled with people who are there less because of their
understanding of children and their peculiar fitness to rear them, than
because such work offers an avenue of escape from starvation.
These same considerations apply to the argument that the rearing of
children should be institutionalized in order to emancipate women
from the immemorial burden of “woman’s work.” There is a simpler way
of dealing with this problem, a way which eliminates an element that
dooms to failure any scheme of human affairs in which it is involved,
namely: the element of coercion. To contend that all mothers should be
forced to devote themselves exclusively to the rearing of children,
or that they should be forcibly relieved of this responsibility, is
to ignore the right of the individual to free choice in personal
matters. There is no relation more intimately personal than that of
parents to the child they have brought into the world; and there is
therefore no relationship in which the community should be slower to
interfere. This is a principle universally recognized: the community
at present interferes only when the interest of the child, or that of
the community in the child, is obviously suffering. The emancipation
of women by no means necessitates the abandonment of this principle.
It necessitates nothing more than a guarantee to women of free
choice either to undertake themselves the actual work of caring for
their children, or to delegate that work to others. There is nothing
revolutionary about this: well-to-do parents have always exercised
this choice. In mediaeval Europe people of the upper classes regularly
sent their children to be brought up by other people, and took the
children of other people into their own houses. In Renaissance Italy
the wealthy urban dwellers, almost as soon as their children were born,
sent them out of the plague-infested cities to nurse with peasants. In
modern times people who can afford it often place their children in
boarding schools at an early age, and keep them at home only during
vacations--when they do not place them in camps. Under a system of
free economic opportunity all people, instead of a few, would have
this alternative to rearing their children at home, for they would all
be able to afford it. Even under the present economic order it would
be possible if the system of children’s assistance were extended to
include every child, whether the parents were living or not. But under
a system of free opportunity there would be greater certainty that the
child would not suffer through separation from its parents; for the
paid educator would be in his position because it interested him. If
it did not, he would take advantage of the opportunity, freely open to
him, to do something that did.
So long as responsibility for the care and support of children
continues to be vested in the parents, so long, for the sake of the
child, will it be the duty of society to insist that parents shall not
neglect this responsibility. But when society had renounced all claim
to regulate the affairs of married people, it would content itself
with holding all parents, married or unmarried, jointly liable for
the support and care of their children. If the parents were married,
then the apportioning of this burden between them would be arranged by
mutual agreement, and the community’s only interest in the contract
would be that of arbiter in case of a dispute between the parties,
precisely as in case of other contracts. To assume that the community’s
interest in children justifies its claim to “preserve the home” by
making marriage indissoluble or dissoluble only under humiliating
conditions, is to confuse issues. The practice of perpetuating
marriage merely for the sake of children defeats its own end; for
it is, far from being good for children, likely to be injurious to
them. It condemns them to be brought up in what Mr. Shaw has well
called a little private hell. For the home, as other critics than Mr.
Shaw have pointed out, is a proper place for children only when it
provides harmonious conditions for their development; and harmony is
not characteristic of homes where mutual love and confidence no longer
exist between the parents. The demand that the freedom and happiness
of parents shall be sacrificed to the so-called interest of the child
is in reality a demand that injustice shall be done one person for
the sake of another; and where this demand is effective it serves no
end but that of frustration and discord, as might be expected. It is
far better, as modern society is coming to realize, for the community
to content itself with insisting upon the discharge of parental
responsibility, without prescribing too minutely the conditions under
which it shall be done.
It is not, perhaps, so much a concern for the preservation of the home
that makes people afraid of divorce, as it is for other time-honoured
concepts; such, for instance, as the idea that marriage is a sacrament,
that it is made in heaven and is therefore indissoluble in this world.
Curiously enough, this idea of the essential holiness and consequent
indissolubility of the marriage-bond has coexisted in Christian society
with the most cold-blooded practice of marrying for convenience, for
money, for social prestige, for place and power, for everything that
ignores or negates the spiritual element in sexual union. The marriage
arranged for social or mercenary reasons by the families of the
contracting parties, who might not even meet before the wedding-day,
was as sacred as if it had been founded upon an intimate acquaintance
and tender passion between them. Thus was utilitarianism invested
with a spurious holiness. Small wonder that a mediaeval court of love
denied the possibility of romantic attachment between husband and
wife. The Church, to be sure, introduced the principle of free consent
of the contracting parties; but so long as the subjection of women
endured, there could be little more than a perfunctory regard for this
principle. There can be no real freedom of consent when the alternative
to an unwelcome marriage is the cloister or lifelong celibacy at the
mercy of relatives whose wishes and interests one has defied, in a
society where to be unmarried is, for a woman, to be nobody. A son,
because of the greater independence that his sex gave him, might
safely exercise some degree of choice in marrying. A daughter might
safely exercise none. As women have become more independent, and their
economic opportunities have increased, consent has become more closely
related to inclination, and in many places, notably the United States,
it is actually dependent upon inclination;[24] but while women remain
at an economic disadvantage it is hardly to be expected that the
motives behind inclination and consent will always be entirely free
from an ignoble self-interest.
So long as woman’s economic and social welfare was bound up with
marriage, indissoluble marriage undeniably offered her a certain
kind of protection. It did not, as I have remarked, protect her from
cruelty and infidelity on the part of her husband; but it generally
assured her of a living and a respected position in society--that is,
so long as she violated none of the conventional taboos against her
sex. Even now the chivalrous man often feels that he must endure an
unhappy marriage rather than cause his wife to incur the economic and
social consequences of divorce. He generally feels that her chance of
finding another husband to support her would be considerably worse than
his of getting another wife to support; a feeling which, considering
the relative desirability of supporting and being supported, will be
justified so long as it is considered tolerable for women to be an
economic dead weight on the shoulders of men.
III
The sanctions of monogamic marriage have been enforced on women
only. The Christian Church, after some indecision, finally decided
that indissoluble monogamy was the only allowable form of marriage;
and in theory it exacted from man and woman the same faithfulness
to the marriage-vows. Practically, of course, it did no such thing.
Being dominated by men, it eventually came to condone the sexual
irregularities of men, if it did not sanction them; but sexual
irregularity in the subject sex continued to be both theoretically
and practically intolerable. Woman became the repository of morality
in a society which regarded morality as chiefly a matter of sex. But
since she was at the same time the means of satisfying those sexual
needs which Christianity disparaged, she also bore the brunt of
social displeasure at violation of the ascetic creed. Womankind, as
I have already remarked, was divided into two classes: the virtuous
wives and cloistered virgins who embodied Christian morals; and
those unfortunate social outcasts who sold their bodies to gratify
un-Christian desires. The prostitute, the “companion” of the Greeks,
who had been in the Greek world the only educated woman, the only woman
who enjoyed comparative freedom, became in the Christian world a social
outcast, reviled and persecuted, a convenient scapegoat for man’s sins
of the flesh, who atoned vicariously by her misery for his failure to
live up to the Christian ideal of sexual purity. Nothing reflects more
discredit upon the dominance of the male under Christianity than the
fact that he took advantage of the economic helplessness which forced
millions of women to sell their sex for a living, and then persecuted
them outrageously because he had outrageously mistreated them. For
prostitution, however much it may reflect upon the morality and, more
especially, upon the taste, of men, has nothing whatever to do with the
morality of women. It is, with women, a question of economics, purely
and simply. The man who buys gratification of his sexual desire has at
least an option in the matter; he will not starve if he abstains; but
the woman who sells her body indiscriminately to any man who will buy,
does so because her need to earn a living for herself or her family
forces her to do violence to her natural selective sexual disposition.
This economic pressure has been strikingly illustrated in Central
Europe since the war, where thousands of women of gentle breeding
have been literally driven to the streets by the compelling scourge
of want. The men upon whom these women in normal times would have
depended for a living had been either killed or incapacitated in the
war, or their power to earn had disappeared in the economic collapse
which followed. When men, in a society so organized as to give them
an economic advantage over women, can no longer earn enough to
maintain their dependents even at the subsistence-level, the chance
of women, for the most part untrained to breadwinning, to do so will
be poor indeed. Under such circumstances the woman thrown on her own
resources may, through some extraordinary stroke of luck, find a way to
self-sufficiency through labour; but more often she is obliged, after
her possessions have been disposed of, to take refuge from starvation
by selling the only marketable commodity that is left her--her sex.
Of course there is the alternative of starvation, which for herself
she may choose; but if this choice would involve starvation for her
children or other dependents she is likelier to choose prostitution,
precisely as so many German and Austrian mothers and daughters have
done. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy’s little story of Vienna after the war,
“Viennese Medley,” depicts a situation which is not untypical. A
middle-class Viennese family which had enjoyed a mediocre prosperity
before the war, is suffering, with all that suffering city, from the
nightmare of want that followed a savage peace. In the background,
unspoken of, the only ray of hope across the bleakness of their
extremity, moves the sister who sells her beauty to foreign officials
and native, war-made millionaires. It is she who, when the young
half-brother is struck by the dreaded plague of tuberculosis, sends
him to the mountains and health. It is she who helps the sister-in-law
to establish herself in trade, after the brilliant young surgeon, her
brother, has come back a nervous ruin from the war. It is she who
buries, with decent ceremony, the child of a sister whose husband, once
a distinguished professor, is now able to do little more than starve
with his numerous family. She even saves from want the young nobleman
whom she loves, and his family as well. Not every woman who has sold
herself in stricken Europe could command so high a price, but there is
no doubt that many of them stood between their suffering families and
death.
War releases all that is brutal in man, and places woman in a
peculiarly helpless position; therefore it is a prolific immediate
source of prostitution. But the ultimate and permanent source is the
source of war itself, the economic exploitation of man by man. So long
as society is organized to protect the exploiter, so long will peace
be an incessant struggle--for more wealth with the privileged classes;
for existence with the exploited masses--and war will be, as it has
always been, merely a final explosion of the struggling forces. So long
as human beings may starve in the midst of plenty, so long will woman
be under temptation to sell the use of her body. She may prostitute
herself because she has literally no other way to get a living; she
may do so in order to eke out an insufficient wage; she may do so
because prostitution seems to offer a relief from hopeless drudgery;
she may do so because she has made what the world calls a misstep and
is cut off thereby from respectability and the chance to earn a decent
living; or she may prostitute herself legally, in marriage, as women
have been forced to do from time immemorial. In every case there is
one motive force, and that motive force is economic pressure, which
bears hardest upon women because of the social, educational, and
economic disadvantages from which they are forced to suffer in a world
dominated by men. No amount of masculine chivalry has ever mitigated
this evil, and no amount ever will; for chivalry is not compulsory,
while prostitution is. No amount of exhortation, no amount of devoted
labour on the part of reformers will touch it; for it is not a question
of morality. No amount of persecution--of arrests, of manhandling,
of night-courts, public insult, fine and imprisonment--will check
it, for the necessity which prompts it is too imperious to be balked
by the uncomprehending guardians of public decency. The peril of
this necessity threatens all womankind; one turn of fortune’s wheel
may bring its stark aspect before the eyes of the most sheltered
of women. It is the sheltered women, indeed, who are peculiarly in
danger; those women whose preparation for the struggle to wrest a
living from economic injustice has consisted in waiting for men to
marry and support them. The parent who, in a world where celibacy and
prostitution are on the increase, fails to give a girl child education
or training which will enable her to get her living by her own efforts,
forces her to take a dangerous risk; for the woman who is brought up
in the expectation of getting her living by her sex may ultimately
be driven to accept prostitution if she fails to find a husband, or,
having found one, loses him.
There is only one remedy for prostitution, and that remedy is economic
freedom--freedom to labour and to enjoy what one produces. When women
have this freedom there will be no more prostitution; for no woman will
get a living by doing violence to her deep-rooted selective instinct
when opportunities are plentiful and a little labour will yield an
ample living. There may still be women who are sexually promiscuous;
but there is a vast gulf between promiscuity and prostitution: the
sexually promiscuous woman may choose her men; the prostitute may not.
It is the abysmal gulf between choice and necessity.
IV
Marriage, illegitimacy and prostitution are so closely related,
as social problems, that it is impossible to draw firm lines of
demarcation between them. The unlegalized union--which is betrayed by
illegitimate birth--may be a marriage in all but law; the legalized
marriage may be merely a respectable form of prostitution; prostitution
may take the form of a more or less permanent union which may even
assume the dignity of a true marriage. Illegitimacy, marriage, and
prostitution do not exist independently; they exist in relation to one
another and are often confused in people’s minds--as when it is assumed
that all mistresses are essentially harlots. They are the three faces
of mankind’s disastrous attempt to impose arbitrary regulation upon the
unruly and terrifying force of sex; they form a triptych of which the
central panel is institutionalized marriage and the other panels the
two chief aspects of its failure. The title might appropriately be “The
Martyrdom of Woman.”
Experience has amply proved that as individualism progresses, it
becomes increasingly difficult to impose upon people more than an
appearance of conformity in sexual matters. Society can not really
regulate anything so essentially personal and private in its nature
as the sexual relation: it can only take revenge upon its natural
result--and thereby encourage the prevention of that result by
artificial means. For every unmarried mother who is persecuted
by society, there are ten unmarried women who escape the social
consequences of an unauthorized sexual relation. For every faithful
husband there is another who deceives his wife with other women;
nor are wedded wives by any means always faithful to their marriage
vows. There are people who live together in the sexual uncleanness of
loveless marriages; and there are those who live purely in extra-legal
union. The sexual impulse is too variable and too imperious to be
compressed into a formula.
Christian society, as I have remarked, early surrendered its
uncompromising asceticism and settled down to an easy acceptance of the
mere appearance of conventional sexual virtue--that is, so far as men
were concerned. Women, as inferior and evil beings, who, incongruously
enough, at the same time embodied Christian morality, must naturally
be under the rigid surveillance of their male tutors, and no deviation
from established rules might be allowed them. Thus worldly motives
in marrying might be united with sacramental monogamy; for the man
might avail himself of extra-marital union as a safety-valve for the
emotional needs to which marriage gave no scope. The needs of the
woman were not considered, save when savage punishment was visited
upon their illicit satisfaction. Thus hypocrisy and deceit were tacitly
encouraged, and the monogamic ideal was degraded; and countless
generations lived a gigantic social lie which distorted and perverted
their spiritual vision as only an accepted lie can distort and pervert
it.
I do not mean by this that there have not been millions of really
monogamous marriages. To intimate that the greater sexual freedom
allowed men by law and custom has led all men into licence would be
as stupid as to assume that repression and surveillance have kept
all women chaste. But the institution of marriage, in Christian
society, has represented compromise, and the fruit of compromise is
insincerity--such insincerity, for example, as the Government of
South Carolina shows when it forbids divorce, and fixes by law what
proportion of his estate a man may leave to his concubine.
Any people which wishes to attain dignity and seriousness in its
collective life must resolve to cast aside compromise and insincerity,
and to look at all questions--even the vexed one of sex--squarely and
honestly. The person who would do this has first some prepossessions
to overcome: he must forget tradition long enough to appraise
institutionalized marriage by its value to the human spirit; he must
resolve for the time to regard men and women as equally human beings,
entitled to be judged by the same standards, and not by different sets
of traditional criteria; and he must put away fear of sex and fear of
autonomy. If he can do these things, he may be able to look clear-eyed
down the long vista of the centuries and realize the havoc that has
been wrought in the souls of men and women by a sexual code and a
system of marriage based on a double standard of spiritual values and
of conduct. He may perceive how constant tutelage degrades the human
spirit, and how much greater would be the sum of human joy if freedom
were substituted for coercion and regulation--if men and women were
without legal power to harass and bedevil one another simply because
the State, through the marriage-bond, allows them humiliating rights
in one another; if virginity and chastity were matters of self-respect
and taste, instead of being matters of worldly self-interest to women
and unconcern to men; if the relations between the sexes were based on
equality and regulated only by affection and the desire to serve and
give happiness.
The modification which institutionalized marriage has been undergoing
since the partial emergence of woman, its chief victim, have been
in the direction of equality and freedom. The relative ease with
which divorce may now be had marks a long step towards recognition
of marriage as a personal rather than a social concern; and so does
the tendency to abolish the legal disabilities resulting from the
marriage-bond. Nothing augurs better for the elevation of marriage to
a higher plane than the growing economic independence of women and the
consequent improvement in the social position of the unmarried woman;
for only when marriage is placed above all considerations of economic
or social advantage will it be in a way to satisfy the highest demands
of the human spirit.
But the emergence of women has had another significant effect, namely:
an increase in frankness concerning extra-legal sexual relations, if
not in their number. Of late there has been much public discussion of
the wantonness of our modern youth; which, being interpreted, means
the disposition of our girls to take the same liberty of indulgence
in pre-nuptial sexual affairs that has always been countenanced
in boys. This tendency is an entirely natural result of woman’s
increased freedom. The conditions of economic and social life have
undergone revolutionary change in the past half-century; and codes of
morals always yield before economic and social exigency, for this is
imperious. It is for this reason, as Dr. A. Maude Royden has acutely
observed, that women of the lower classes have always enjoyed a certain
immunity from the taboos that reduced women of the middle and upper
classes to virtual slavery. “If among the poor,” says Dr. Royden,
“these ‘protections’ have been dispensed with, it has not been because
the poor have thought either better or worse of their women, but merely
because they are too poor to dispense with their labour, and labour
demands some small degree of freedom.” Labour not only demands, it
gives freedom. The woman who is economically independent need no longer
observe rules based on male dominance; hence the new candour in woman’s
attitude towards the awe-inspiring fetich of sex.
If there is about this attitude an element of bravado, akin to that
of the youth who thinks it clever and smart to carry a hip-pocket
flask, it bears testimony, not to the dangers of freedom, but to the
bankruptcy of conventional morality. The worst effect of tutelage is
that it negates self-discipline, and therefore people suddenly released
from it are almost bound to make fools of themselves. The women who are
emerging from it, if they have not learned to substitute an enlightened
self-interest for the morality of repression, are certainly in danger
of carrying sexual freedom to dishevelling extremes, simply to
demonstrate to themselves their emancipation from unjust conventions.
There is no reason to expect that women, emerging from tutelage, will
be wiser than men. One should expect the contrary. It is necessary to
grow accustomed to freedom before one may walk in it sure-footedly.
“Everything,” says Goethe, “which frees our spirit without increasing
our self-control, is deteriorating.” This so-called wantonness, this
silly bravado, simply shows that the new freedom is a step ahead of the
self-discipline that will eventually take the place of surveillance
and repression. It would not be so, perhaps, if girls and boys had
ever been enlightened concerning the real sins of sex, and their true
consequences. Women, in the past, have been taught to keep virgin or
chaste for the sake of their reputations, of their families, of their
chances in the marriage-market; they have been scared into chastity in
the name of religion; but they have not been taught to be chaste for
the sake of the spiritual value of chastity to themselves. Men, having
been expected to “sow their wild oats”, have been taught to sow them
with a certain degree of circumspection. Girls have been intimidated
by pictures of the social consequences of a misstep; boys have been
warned of the physical danger involved in promiscuous sexual relations.
This may not have been the invariable preparation of youth for the
experiences of sex; but it has unquestionably been the usual one, and
it is one of utter levity and indecency.
The real sins of sex are identical for men and women; and they differ
from infractions of the conventional moral code in this respect among
others: that they do not have to be found out in order to be punished.
They carry their punishment in themselves, and that punishment is their
deteriorative effect upon the human spirit. They are infractions of
spiritual law; and there is this significant distinction to be observed
between spiritual laws and the laws of men: that regulation plays no
part in their administration. The law of freedom is the law of God, who
does not attempt to regulate the human soul, but sets instinct there
as a guide and leaves man free to choose whether he will follow the
instinct which prompts obedience to spiritual law, or the desire which
urges disregard of it. The extreme sophistication of the conventional
attitude towards sex has dulled the voice of instinct for countless
generations, with the inevitable result of much unnecessary suffering
and irreparable spiritual loss.
A healthy instinct warns against lightness in sexual relationships;
and with reason, for the impulse of sex is one of the strongest motive
forces in human development and human action. It touches the obscurest
depths of the soul; it affects profoundly the functions of the mind
and the imagination--can not, indeed, be dissociated from them. The
fact that it is also strongly physical leads to misunderstanding and
disregard of its relation to the mind and spirit; a misunderstanding
and disregard which are immensely aggravated in a society where woman,
because of her inferior position, may be used for the gratification
of physical desire, with no consideration of her own desires or her
spiritual claims. Prostitution, for example, has exerted a most
deleterious influence on the attitude of men toward sex and toward
women. But degradation of the sex-impulse is inevitably punished. The
sheerly physical indulgence to which it leads produces a coarsening of
spiritual fibre, an incapacity for appreciation of spiritual values.
Moreover, it produces a cleavage between passion and affection which
renders impossible the highest and most beautiful form of the sexual
relation, the relation in which passion and affection are fused in a
love which offers complete understanding and fulfilment. It is to this
fusion (and not to monogamy, which, Spencer thought, developed love)
that we owe “the many and keen pleasures derived from music, poetry,
fiction, the drama, etc., all of them having for their predominant
theme the passion of love.” True monogamy, the product of this
highest love, is not a regulation to be observed; it is an ideal to
be attained, and it will not be attained by the person who fails to
recognize and to respect the spiritual aspects of the sexual relation.
Nor will it be attained by the person who mistakes excitement for
love, and who flits from one temporary attachment to another, thinking
always to find the beautiful in the new. Such promiscuous philandering
not only precludes depth of affection and thus renders constancy
impossible; it also blunts perception. Its effect was never better
expressed than by Burns, who was one of its unhappy victims.
I waive the quantum o’ the sin,
The hazard of concealin’,
But och! it hardens a’ within,
And petrifies the feelin’.
This is the penalty of levity in human relations: that it _petrifies
feeling_. One pays the price in spiritual deterioration. There is
probably no more striking testimony to this than the first part of
Goethe’s “Faust.” Consider what we know of the nature of Goethe’s
relations with women; and then consider the spiritual insensitivity,
the failure to perceive and draw upon the inexhaustible spiritual
treasures that life holds in store, that are implied in his failure
to devise for Faust, brought back from the brink of the grave at cost
of his immortal soul, any more animating employment for his new-found
youth than a low intrigue with an ignorant peasant girl.
I will pass by the contention that men are by nature polygamous and
women monogamous; for it rests on evidence created by a dual standard
of conduct for the sexes. Certain women of independent spirit are at
present rather conspicuously engaged in proving themselves not merely
polygamous but promiscuous; and a great many men have always proved
themselves to be monogamous. Probably human beings vary in respect of
these tendencies as of others. All people, perhaps, can not attain the
highest plane in love, either for want of capacity or of opportunity;
nor can all people conform to a single mode of conduct. But all people
can attain sincerity in sexual relations, and at least a certain degree
of self-knowledge. Sincerity, self-knowledge, respect for oneself and
for other people; these are essential to a genuine ethic of sex; and
they are uncontemplated by the sanctions of conventional morality. Yet
the person who violates this ethic sins against his own spirit, which
is to sin against the Holy Ghost, and on the spiritual plane he will be
punished.
An increase in extra-legal relationships does not of itself imply
spiritual retrogression. It might imply instead one of two things, or
both, namely: an increase in the economic obstacles to legal marriage;
or a growing disinclination to admit an affair so personal as the
sex-relation to sanction and regulation by people whom it did not
concern. If men and women were economically equal and independent,
the number of marriages might increase enormously; on the other hand,
institutionalized marriage might be superseded by marriage without
legal sanction, which before the birth of children might not be even
known or recognized as marriage.[25] Free people would probably want
less of official interference in their personal affairs, rather than
more. But for those who wanted to avoid the terrors of autonomy there
would still be marriage; and for those who wanted to walk in the strait
and ennobling way of freedom, there would be the right to love without
official permission, and to bring forth children unashamed. Those who
wished to sell themselves would be free to do so if they could find
buyers; but no one would be forced to live by violating the law of love
which is the law of life. Freedom implies the right to live badly, but
it also implies the right to live nobly and beautifully; and for one
who has faith in the essential goodness of the human spirit, in the
natural aspiration towards perfection which flowers with touching
beauty even in the bleak soil of that hardship, degradation and crime
to which injustice condemns the mass of humanity--for one who has this
faith in the human spirit, there can be no question what its ultimate
choice would be.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] Code Napoléon: “_La recherche de la paternité est interdite_.”
This provision was expunged in 1913. In Massachusetts, the father’s
name may not be given in the record of birth except on the written
request of both father and mother. No similar protection against
publicity is provided for the mother.
[21] Lecky, “History of European Morals.” Chapter V.
[22] A recent decision in the State of New York declared that a husband
is not required to fulfil his promise to return money loaned him by his
wife, when she has accumulated it through economy in her housekeeping;
because every saving of the kind is the property of the husband, as are
the services of the wife. The wife has no money of her own.
[23] The State of Wisconsin has made men and women equal before the law.
[24] In countries where the custom of dowry persists the parents are
obviously in a position to exact a great degree of regard for their
wishes, more particularly where economic opportunity is no longer
plentiful. In this country, where abundance of free land made the
support of a family comparatively easy and secure, marriage early
became a matter to be arranged by the contracting parties. In modern
France, on the other hand, it is still largely a matter to be arranged
between families.
[25] Several feminists have already, indeed, urged public sanction
of extra-legal sexual relations, and C. Gasquoine Hartley, with
a genuinely Teutonic passion for order, has even advocated their
regulation by the State. This is probably impossible, for people who
choose such relationships usually do so to escape regulation.