reflex upon marriage, and marriage will become a more comprehensive
partnership. The question of the married woman in gainful occupations
is related, however, to a larger economic issue. Our capitalistic and
competitive economy not only suffers parasites and drones, it compels
them by reason of its inelasticity in providing for part-time labor.
The whole workday or no work at all is the notice given to women who
would be part-day home-keepers, either in their child-bearing years or
because of other family exigency, as well as to men who are aging or
invalid. For this economic waste and loss to personal happiness and
welfare there seems to be no promise of relief in prospect. Just the
opposite, in fact, for women, since, given the increasing mechanization
of housekeeping and the ramifying organization of hospital, nursery,
and school, women at home may have a larger and larger part of the day
on their hands and their functions become less and less significant.
In this connection birth control has been for some time an important
factor. As knowledge of contraception becomes surer and more widespread
and births more spaced, even during her child-bearing period the
home-staying woman will have less and less call on her vitality and
energy.
Discussion of contraception has been active in the last decade or
so; but curiously enough its significance aside from contributing
to directly saner ways of life[1] has been little realized. Birth
control makes possible such clear-cut distinctions between mating and
parenthood that it might be expected to produce radical changes in
theories of sex attitude or relationship, forcing the discard of many
an argument for personal suppression for the good of children or the
honor of the family, and forcing redefinition of concepts of honor
and sincerity between the sexes. In such redefinition reciprocity in
passion, emotional integrity, and mutual enhancement of life might
share in the approval once confined to constancy, fidelity, and duty,
virtues that are obviously suggested by the hit or miss system of
mating and reproducing our social organization has favored. With little
or no self-knowledge or knowledge of men, a girl often marries in
order to find out how much she cares or whether or not she qualifies,
and then when her experience has but begun she finds herself an
expectant mother, and maternity begins to supersede other interests.
She may become a parent without the assurance of being well-mated, if
not, more tragically, with the certainty of being mismated. Advocates
of the monogamous family would do well to consider how essential to
an enduring union, at least in our society, experience in love may
be, together with restraint from child-bearing before experience is
achieved.
That neither such considerations nor other changes in the theory of sex
morality have yet come to the fore in current discussion is perhaps
because the technique of contraception is still in the experimental
stage, perhaps because in popular consciousness the morality of
contraception in itself is not fully established. How is it going
to be established? I doubt if through rationalism or rationalistic
propaganda. Social changes, we begin to know, are rarely due to
deliberation, in any society. In our society they are due mainly to
economic causes. Housing congestion in New York will in time affect
birth-control legislation in Albany; and fear of an overpopulated
world will drive church as well as state into a new attitude toward
multiplying to the glory of God.
As in birth control so in other matters of sex intimacy the growth
of cities and the complexity of our economy may be the more potent
factors of change. In very large communities there is an ignorance
of the personal relations of others, an inevitable ignoring which
contributes unconsciously to tolerance toward experiment and variation
in sex relations. Indifference to the private life of others is almost
an exigency of our economic organization. Attention is directed to the
efficiency of the personality encountered and away from the individual
means taken to induce that efficiency. What difference does it make
to an employer how clerk or stenographer lives after hours provided
he or she is competent, alert, and responsive to the business need?
In office or in factory one may be but a cog in the machine and yet
left larger personal freedom than in a more independent job in a small
place or than in a household. Out of such urban influences--negatively,
of indifference, and positively, of attention to personality _per
se_--come opportunities for personal freedom that will set men and
women to ordering their sex life to please themselves rather than to
please society. That is, ordinary men and women; certain outstanding
figures will have to continue to forego freedom. The President of the
United States, presidents of banks or colleges, cinematograph stars,
“society ladies,” now and again a clergyman or a prize-fighter--all
these will continue to be observed closely in their private life, and,
like the gods and goddesses of other cultures or times, will have to
conform to popular preconceptions of marriage or celibacy, chastity or
libertinism. For them, as for other personages in folk-lore, individual
adjustment or variation would be out of the picture.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Dr. Ogburn informs me that his recent and still unpublished
analysis of the census of 1920 shows that in localities where birth
control is presumedly practiced the marriage rate mounts. He states
also that in the country at large there has been a higher marriage rate
in the last census decade and that the age at marriage is earlier.
Toward Monogamy
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
_feminist, philosopher, writer was born at Hartford, Conn., July 3rd,
1860. Editor of the_ Forerunner _1909-1916; Author of “Women and
Economics,” 1898; “In This, Our World,” 1898; “The Yellow Wall-Paper,”
1899; “Concerning Children,” 1900; “The Home, Its Work and Influence,”
1903; “Human Work,” 1904; “What Diantha Did,” 1910; “The Man-Made
World,” 1910; “The Crux,” 1911; “Moving the Mountain,” 1911; “His
Religion and Hers,” 1923._
TOWARD MONOGAMY
BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
Physiologists tell us that in all our long ages of animal evolution
we have not yet completed the physical changes incident to assuming
an erect posture. Psychologists may as plainly see that in the short
centuries of social evolution we have naturally failed to complete
the changes incident to our growth from tribal to national and
international relationships.
Since we remained savages for some 90 per cent of the period of human
life on earth, it is to be expected that the long-practiced tribal
morals should have modified our characters more deeply than those
evolved in the recent, varied, and fluctuating relationship of larger
range. Yet we see, during the short period of progressive civilization,
such swift and amazing development in some lines, such achievement in
knowledge, in wealth, in ability, in breadth of thought, and nobility
of feeling that our coincident stupidity and senseless misbehavior
call for explanation.
The main reason for this peculiar delay and irregularity in social
evolution is that it has been limited to half the race, the other half
being restricted to domestic industry and to the still lower level of
misused sex. Our specialized knowledge, power, and skill are developed
through the organic relationships of the social group; as are also
those characteristics of mutual loyalty and love, of truth, honor, and
courage which are as natural to a human society as the distinctive
virtues of ants or beavers to their groups.
Humanity’s major error, the exploitation of the female by the male,
has not only kept her at the lowest step in social progress--solitary
hand-labor in and for the family--but has resulted in excessive
sex-development through prolonged misuse. This has made her
ultra-feminine, to a degree often injurious to motherhood; and him
ultra-masculine, his social advance confused, impeded, and repeatedly
destroyed by his excessive emotions. In social morals he has of course
outdistanced her, as he alone has entered into the relationships
which develop them; but he has carefully exempted his essentially male
activities from this elevating influence, maintaining that “all’s fair
in love and war.” Of her, domestic morality demanded but one virtue,
sex-loyalty; her mate or master taking it upon himself to be both judge
and executioner in case of failure. She might be a liar and a coward,
lazy, selfish, extravagant, or cruel, but if chaste these traits were
overlooked. If unchaste, no array of other virtues was enough to save
her. In her household labors she developed minor virtues natural to
the position; a tireless industry, an instinct for cleanliness and
order, with great capacity for self-denial and petty economy. Speaking
broadly, of a race where the young, though necessarily inheriting
from both parents, yet are divided almost from birth in training and
experience, it may be said that the social virtues have belonged to
men, the domestic virtues to women.
Our present age, counting the incredible advance of the last century
and the swift fruition of these immediate years, shows among its
newly distinguishing social movements one of supreme importance.
Within a hundred years women, in most civilized countries, have moved
from domestic into social relationship. Such a sudden and enormous
change, while inherently for the improvement of society, is naturally
accompanied by much local and immediate dislocation in previously
accepted conditions. Many are alarmed at what is considered “the danger
to the home” resultant from the refusal of an increasing number of
women to spend their lives as house-servants; they fear “the menace to
the family” due to similarly increasing numbers of women who refuse
compulsory motherhood; they are shocked at a looseness, even grossness,
of behavior between the sexes which seems to threaten marriage
itself. Few seem able to look beyond the present inconveniences to a
specialized efficiency in household management which will raise the
standard of public health and private comfort, with large reduction
in the cost of living; to such general improvement in child-culture
as will lift the average of citizenship and lower the death-rate
appreciably; and to a rational and permanent basis for our monogamous
marriage.
To understand rightly this trying period, to be patient with its
unavoidable reactions and excesses, to know what tendencies to approve
and promote and what to condemn and oppose, requires some practical
knowledge of biology and sociology. Men, though as yet beyond women
in social morality, are unreliable judges in this time of change
because their ox is gored--they are the ones who are losing a cherished
possession. The overdeveloped sex instinct of men, requiring more
than women were willing to give, has previously backed its demands
by an imposing array of civil and religious laws requiring feminine
submission, has not scrupled to use force or falsehood, and held final
power through the economic dependence of women. It is easy to see that
if women had been equally willing no such tremendous machinery of
compulsion need have been evolved.
But now that the woman no longer admits that “he shall rule over her,”
and is able to modify the laws; now that she has become braver, and
above all is attaining financial freedom, her previous master has no
hold upon her beyond natural attraction and--persuasion. Toward this
end he manifests an instant and vigorous activity. Whereas in the past
women were taught that they had no such “imperative instincts” as men,
and the wooer, even the husband, sought to preserve this impression,
now it is quite otherwise. All that elaborate theory of feminine
chastity, that worship of virginity, goes by the board, and women are
given a reversed theory--that they are just the same as men, if not
more so; our “double standard” is undoubled and ironed flat--to the
level of masculine desire.
Clothed in the solemn, newly invented terms of psychoanalysis, a theory
of sex is urged upon us which bases all our activities upon this one
function. It is exalted as not only an imperative instinct, but as
_the_ imperative instinct, no others being recognized save the demands
of the stomach. Surely never was a more physical theory disguised in
the technical verbiage of “psychology.” We should not too harshly blame
the ingenious mind of man for thinking up a new theory to retain what
the old ones no longer assured him; nor too severely criticize the
subject class, so newly freed, for committing the same excesses, the
same eager imitations of the previous master, which history shows
in any recently enfranchised people. Just as women have imitated the
drug-habits of men, without the faintest excuse or reason, merely
to show that they can, so are they imitating men’s sex habits, in
large measure. Those who go too far in such excesses will presumably
die without issue, doing no permanent harm to the stock. This wild
excitement over sex, as if it were a new discovery peculiar to our
time, will be allayed by further knowledge. Even a little study of the
common facts of nature has a cooling and heartening influence.
The essential facts are these: That all living forms show the tendency
to maintain and to reproduce themselves; that some, in differing
degree, show tendencies to vary and to improve; that after an immense
period of reproduction without it (showing that as the “life force”
it was quite unnecessary) the distinction of sex appeared as a means
to freer variation and improvement; that the male characteristics of
intense desire for the female, personal display, and intermasculine
combat, as well as the female’s instinct of selection, are visible
contributions to the major purpose of improvement; that in the higher
and later life-forms further and more rapid improvement has been made
through the development in the female of new organs and functions
for the benefit of the young; through her alone have come the upward
steps of viviparous birth, the marsupial pouch, and that crowning
advantage, the mammary glands; the female solely is responsible for the
development of nature’s aristocracy, Order Mammalia.
In the human species she adds to her previous contributions to racial
progress the invention of our primitive industries, which were evolved
by her in service to the young, and later carried out by men into the
trades and crafts which support human life. In the developing care
and nurture of her children she laid the foundation for those social
functions of government, education, and coöperative industry which are
so vitally important to social progress that we have called the family
“the unit of the state.”
This is an error. The family is the prototype of the state, a tiny
primitive state in itself, often quite inimical to the interests of
the larger state which has developed through the wider interaction of
individuals. The state does not elect families, tax families, punish
families, nor thrive where physical inheritance is made the basis of
authority. Where the family persists too powerfully, as in China, there
is a commensurate lack in the vitality and efficiency of the state. By
restricting women to the family relationship, with its compulsory woman
service and domestic morality, we have checked and perverted social
growth by keeping out of it the most effective factor in that growth,
the mother.
The world having been for so long dominated by the individualistic
and combative male, with that vast increment of masculine thought and
emotion embodied in our literature, our religion, our art, modifying
all our ideals, it is not to be wondered at that the newly freed women
are as yet unable to see their opportunity, their power, and their
long-prevented sex duty--race improvement.
The collapse of the arbitrary and unjust domestic morality of the past
will presently be followed by recognition of the social morality of
the future. Rightly discarding artificial standards of virtue based
on the pleasure of men, we shall establish new ones based on natural
law. Repudiating their duty to an owner and master, women have yet
to accept and fulfill their duty to society, to the human race. This
is not generally clear to them. In their legitimate rebellion against
domestic service and compulsory sex-service they almost inevitably
confuse these things with marriage, with which indeed they have been
long synonymous. Some of our most valuable women, as well as many of
negligible importance, speak of marriage as if it were an invention
of Queen Victoria. Surely no excessive education is needed to learn
that monogamy, among many of the higher carnivora and birds, is as
natural a form of sex union as the polygamy of the grass eaters or
the promiscuity among insects, reptiles, and fish. Monogamy appears
when it is to the advantage of the young to have the continued care
of both parents. This means that the parents share in the activities
of supporting the family; it does not mean that the female becomes
the servant of the male. Because of the united activities and mutual
services of the pair love is developed, and stays. Such profound
affection is found in some of these natural “marriages” that if one
of a pair is killed the other will not mate again. Mated leopards
or ostriches do not remain together because they are “Victorian” or
“puritanical,” but because they like to. They could form as many and as
variegated “free unions” as Greenwich Villagers if they choose; there
is nothing to stop them.
But natural monogamy is as free from sex service as from domestic
service. The pairing species adhere to their mating season as do the
polygamous ones, or even the promiscuous. Man is the only animal using
this function out of season and apart from its essential purpose.
These natural monogamists are not “ascetics.” They are not dominated
by religious doctrine or civil law. They fulfill their natural desires
with the utmost freedom, but these desires do not move them out of
season.
The human species, with all its immense advantages, has made many
conspicuous missteps. Its eating habits are such as to have induced a
wide assortment of wholly unnecessary diseases; its drinking habits
are glaringly injurious; and its excessive indulgence in sex-waste has
imperiled the life of the race.
Domestic morality vaguely recognized some duty to society and sought
through religion to limit masculine desires or at least to restrict
their indulgence to marriage. But the desires of a vigorous polygamist
are not easily restricted to one wife; and our polygamous period was
far longer than that of the recently established monogamy. It is a most
reassuring fact in social evolution that monogamy, naturally belonging
to our species, has persisted among the common people and in popular
ideals: even in “The Arabian Nights” the love story is always about
one man and one woman, never of the mad passion for a harem! So with
the accelerated progress of recent centuries monogamous union becomes
accepted, and is carefully buttressed by the law, while religion, with
commandments and ceremonies, does its best to establish “the sanctity
of marriage.” But as religion, law, and family authority were all in
the hands of men, they naturally interpreted that sanctity to suit
themselves, ignored the religious restrictions, and so handled the law
as to apply its penalties to but one party in a dual offense.
Social morality requires the promotion of such lines of conduct as are
beneficial to the maintenance and improvement of society. It will
demand of both man and woman the full development of personal health
and vigor, careful selection of the best mate by both, with recognition
on her side of special responsibility as the natural arbiter. It
will encourage such sex relations as are proved advantageous both to
individual happiness and to the race. We are as yet so hag-ridden
by domestic morality, with its arbitrary restrictions, and by the
threats and punishments of law and religion, that we shrink from the
broader biological judgment as if it involved blame, punishment,
compulsory reform. Not at all. Men and women are no more to blame for
being oversexed than a prize hog for being over-fat. The portly pig
is not sick or wicked, he is merely overdeveloped in adipose tissue.
Our condition does not call for condemnation, nor can we expect any
sudden and violent change in our behavior resting on foolish ideals of
celibacy, of self-denial, or of “sublimated sex.” It will take several
generations of progressive selection, with widely different cultural
influences, to reëstablish a normal sex development in _genus homo_,
with its consequences in happier marriage, better children, and wide
improvement in the public health.
It is to this end, with all its widening range of racial progress, that
social morality tends.
Women--Free for What?
By Edwin Muir
Edwin Muir,
_poet and essayist, has been assistant editor of the_ New Age
(_London_) _as well as dramatic critic for the_ Scotsman _and the_
Athenæum. _He was a frequent contributor to_ The Freeman.
WOMEN--FREE FOR WHAT?
BY EDWIN MUIR
In the beginning of the Scottish Shorter Catechism there is a beautiful
affirmation. “The chief end of man,” it says, “is to glorify God and
enjoy Him forever.”
To any one nourished on the literature and thought of the last
half-century that sentence, which defines the chief purpose of life as
praise and enjoyment, comes like an audacious blasphemy, a blasphemy,
however, bringing light and freedom. The terms of the dogma are a
little antiquated now, but it would be easy to restate them in modern
language. For “God” we might substitute “nature and man” or, if we
were metaphysically inclined, “God in nature and man.” The authors of
the Shorter Catechism, entangled as they were in a gloomy theology,
recognized that the significance of life cannot reside in the labor by
which men maintain it, but in some kind of realization of ourselves
and of the world which is the highest enjoyment conceivable of both.
Let us go back for a few decades and see if we can catch the values of
our time confusedly shaping themselves within the framework of human
life. I say shaping themselves, for as Nietzsche said fifty years ago,
the time of the conscious valuers has passed; our values for a century
have not been created, they have happened. They happened because men
had become skeptical not merely of God, or of the existence of a moral
order, but of life itself, and could not set before themselves any
purpose justifying life, but only its bare mechanism, work, duty,
the preservation of society. It has been, thus, one of the main
achievements of modern thought to banish from the world the notion
of enjoyment. This was begun first in a philosophical way by the
utilitarians, who were reasonably convinced that, factories existing
for the first time as far as they knew in history, it was incumbent
on men to work in them. A fine philosophy, truly; yet men believed in
it. After the utilitarians came the advocates of self-help, who showed
that the utilitarian policy might not be without individual advantage;
that if one cut off one’s pleasures, or at least those which cost
money, one might win a bizarre, undreamed-of success. The anchorites of
wealth arose, the great men who, when they had acquired riches which
might have built a new Florence, if scarcely a new Jerusalem, could
make no use of them, preferring to teach in Sunday-schools and endow
universities. In the eyes of these men wealth was justified only if
it could not be enjoyed, for enjoyment was the one thing which went
against all their ideas, all those instincts which had set them where
they stood. Wealth, thus, could not be enjoyed, could not be used, for
when they had reached their end the means still remained means.