now; nevertheless a whole view of life has been left behind which we
have not fundamentally questioned. The Victorians established the basis
of morals in utility; we have come to the stage when we imagine that
the basis of life itself is utility. For recreation as an end in itself
we have so little appreciation that even sport has become a kind of
duty, and nothing is more devastating than the scorn of a conscientious
athlete for those who, enjoying perfectly good health, do not go
to the trouble of keeping themselves fit. A little unpremeditated
pleasure still persists in our common lives, in fox-trotting, drinking,
and revues, but it is without either taste or resource; it is not
expression but simply relaxation, an amusing way of being tired.
The one thing that people will not pardon is the taking of pleasure
seriously as an end in itself. The æsthete, at the Renaissance a type
of the opulence of life, and quite a common, indeed an expected type,
is in our day an aberration demanding our satire when once we have
overcome our indignation. Nothing shows more disastrously how incapable
we are of entertaining the conviction that life in itself, apart from
the labor necessary to make it possible, is a thing worth living. Even
art has justified itself for several decades chiefly by its social
utility, and only now, against strong opposition, is it escaping from
the barriers set up by the generation overawed by Mr. Shaw and Mr.
Wells. The notion that men may be on the earth for something else than
sweating is dead. We have arrived at an amazing incapacity for joy;
and life is to us always less worth living than it should be.
This exaltation of means has brought about a general
instrumentalization of life. It weighs heavily upon men; but upon women
its weight is crushing, for women have not such a ready capacity as
men for transforming themselves to the image of their functions, and
they disfigure themselves more in the attempt. Consequently, as woman
has taken a large and larger part in our tentative and unsatisfactory
civilization she has undergone, in fact and in people’s minds, a
distorting process. It is true, woman, lovely woman, the fair charmer,
has passed away; but we are hardly better off now when she has become
a term like economics. After the economic man has come the economic
woman; that is, an entity almost as useful as machinery, and for the
inner culture of mankind almost as uninteresting.
How, in striving for emancipation, woman has reached such a dismal
stage in her development is one of the saddest stories of our time.
The age is an age of work; woman desires freedom, the right of every
human being; and freedom in such an age can only mean the freedom to
work. But to work, except in a few vocations such as art, is in our
time to specialize oneself, and the freedom of women has necessarily
resolved itself into a permission to do little things which can give
them no final satisfaction. Their freedom is bounded by the slavery
under which men, too, suffer; and in changing their occupations they
have not escaped from the cage, but only out of one compartment of
it into another, a little more cheerless than the first. They have
achieved a little more liberty than they had before; but this liberty
is disenchanting because it leaves them as far away as ever from the
full liberty of their spirit. Perhaps in no other age has woman been,
in a deep, instinctive sense, so skeptical as she is at present.
And for all this the age--an age in which labor has a fantastic
prominence--is responsible; for it is in a time when everybody works,
and when there is nothing conceivable that one can do but work, that
the cantankerous question of inequality arises. Only in a race can one
be slower than another; only then does the necessity to become as good
a runner as the fastest come home poignantly to every one. But if it
should happen that life is not a race at all? Where leisure is regarded
as a more important thing than work and work falls into its proper,
subordinate place as the mere means to leisure one does not think very
much about inequality, for it has no longer any urgent importance.
Nor does one set much value, except in superficials, on uniformity.
Among people free from crushing labor (as the whole human race may
some time be) there has always been delight in diversity and scorn
for uniformity; for, to people enjoying their spirit and the world,
diversity even when it is exasperating is of infinite interest, giving
a satisfying sense of the richness of life.
Comedy--and comedy is idleness tolerantly enjoying itself--is founded,
it has been said, upon a recognition of the equality of the sexes; but
it would be more just to say that it is founded upon a view of life
into which the notions of equality and inequality do not enter at all,
because they are unnecessary. To Congreve and Stendhal women were not
the inferior sex, for, in spite of the conventions in which ostensibly
they moved, they were free, and therefore interesting. And remote
as these figures are from us, they demonstrate a very useful truth,
that the way to get over our stupid obsession with inequality is to
reach a stage where diversity will be the norm, involving disadvantage
to no one. Toward that stage, which can only be made possible by a
more general leisure, we are moving, if what the reformers and the
scientists tell us is true. It will be a stage in which rules will have
more importance than laws and spontaneous actions than obligations;
and most of the things we do will be regarded as play rather than
duty. Conduct will probably be about a fourth of life, instead of the
three-fourths postulated by Matthew Arnold. And although this state
has not come yet and may not come for a long time, it would be as
sensible to found a philosophy upon it as upon a period of transition
as dismal and impermanent as ours. Moreover the values of the past are
against us as well as those of the future which we imagine. There is a
certain ignobility in the dispute over human inequality, a failure to
rise to the human level. It is not a question but a misunderstanding,
which the accumulated imaginative culture of the world might have made
impossible. A little sense of the richness of life would disperse
it. Who would be so fantastic as to say that Falstaff is greater or
less than Ophelia, or whether Uncle Toby is the exact equal of Anna
Karenina? To ask the question is to evoke at once an image of the
diverse riches of human nature and of the poverty of mind which can
reduce it to such terms, destroying all interest and all nuance.
But where our instrumental philosophy has had the most grotesque
effect has been upon our conception of love. People have come to
regard love as merely a device for propagating the race. Now this view
of love is not new; it has always been dear to the bourgeoisie, who
have always thought it a matter of immense moment that they should
have sons to carry on their businesses when they were dead. It is the
immemorial philistine conception of love: the strange thing is that it
has been taken over by the intelligentsia and glorified. This is in
the strictest sense a revolution in thought. No one who has written
beautifully of love has thought of it as the intellectuals think. To
Plato and Dante the essence of love did not reside in procreation;
nor has procreation been anything but a divine accident to the poets.
And that is in the human tradition, and probably in the natural order
of things; for it is possible that both love and procreation are most
perfect when they are unpremeditated, and the child comes as a gift and
a surprise; for in the fruits of joy there is a principle of exuberance
which distinguishes them from the fruits of duty.
The intellectuals have destroyed the humanistic conception of love
as pure spontaneity, as expression, by setting its justification not
within itself, but in the child. In “Man and Superman” Mr. Shaw makes
Tanner say that if our love did not produce another human being to
serve the community, the community would have the sacred right of
killing us off, just as the hive kills off the drones who do not attain
the queen bee. But what does that mean? It means that happiness is of
no importance, that it is a matter of the slightest moment whether, in
a life which will never be given to us again, we realize some of the
potentialities of our being or pass through it blind to the end. If it
is worth while living at all, this must needs be the precise opposite
of the truth. The child, like everything else, is justified; but it is
not justified because it adds to the potential wealth of society, but
because it adds to our present delight, and moreover lives a life as
valid as our own. The truth is that we dare not admit that any pleasure
whatever has a right to exist without serving society, and serving it
deliberately. The joys of other generations have become our duties; and
it is significant that Mr. Shaw and the bulk of the intelligentsia are
at one on the birth-rate with the Roman Catholic Church, that church
which has on many occasions through its theologians affirmed its belief
that sensual love is a guilty thing, and, using its own kind of logic,
has exhorted man to multiply and replenish the earth.
“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”; and
that being so, it is the task of those who are a little more serious
than the serious to set about discovering the principles of glory
and enjoyment in life. And--I am setting down a truism--the main
principle of enjoyment for the human race is not art, nor thought, nor
the practice of virtue, but for man, woman, and for woman, man. The
exchange of happiness between the sexes is not only the creative agent
in human life, perpetuating it; it is also the thing which gives the
perpetuation of life its chief meaning. People have always felt this
vaguely; it has made labor endurable to them; but hardly ever have they
recognized it clearly, and to the poets and artists who know it they
have always responded a little skeptically. They have thought of love
as a justification a little too materialistic for life; but love is
only materialistic when it is regarded as a means.
To accept men and women as ends in themselves, to enter into their
life as one of them, is to partake of absolute life, that life which
at every moment realizes itself, existing for its own sake. We cannot
live in that life continuously; for the accomplishment of the intricate
purposes of society we must at certain times and with part of our
minds regard our fellow-creatures as instruments; but the more we tend
to do so the more we banish joy from life. Life does not consist,
whatever the utilitarians may say, in functioning, but in living; and
life comes into being where men and women, not as functions, but
as self-constituted entities, intersect. This is the state which in
religion as well as art has been called life; this is the final life
of the earth, beyond which there is no other. We may accept it or pass
it by; but whatever we may do with it, it is our chief end, giving
meaning to the multitudinous pains of humanity. This commerce between
men and women is not merely sexual, in the narrow sense which we have
given the word; it involves every human joy, all the thoughts and
aspirations of mankind stretching into infinity. It is the thing which
has inspired all great artists, mystical as well as earthy. It is the
point of reference for any morality which is not a disguised kind of
adaptation; for virtue consists in the capacity to partake freely of
human happiness. All reform, all economic and political theory has a
meaning in so far as it makes for this; and that was recognized by the
first reformers, the utopians who had not yet become mere specialists
in reform.
The libertarian movement has been such a dismal affair, thus, not
because it has been too free, but because it has not been free enough.
The democracies and the women of the world have been potentially
liberated; but not so very long ago they were slaves, and they have
still a slave’s idea of freedom. Instead of equal joys they have
asked for equal obligations; and the whole world is in the grip of
a psychological incapacity to escape from the idea of obligation.
Against the unreasonable solemnity which this has imposed on everything
there is little left for us except a deliberate and reasonable
light-heartedness; this, and the faith that the human race will some
time attain the only kind of freedom worth striving for, a freedom in
joy.
Virtue for Women
By Isabel Leavenworth
Isabel Leavenworth
_is an instructor in philosophy at Barnard College_.
VIRTUE FOR WOMEN
BY ISABEL LEAVENWORTH
In the turmoil of discussion regarding present modes of sex life one
can discern a pretty general approval of just one element in the whole
situation: the ideal by which the good woman has for so long been
controlled. It is commonly held that if changes are to be made they
should be in the direction of persuading men, and also the few women
who have been at fault, to be just as good as our good women have
always been. Thus the young girl of to-day is criticized on the ground
that instead of raising men to her level she is descending to theirs.
Even those who are inclined to belittle the damage which she is doing
to the social structure accompany their mild defense with the consoling
reminder that human nature does not change and that in the end the girl
of to-day will turn out as well as did the girls of yesterday; that is,
she will finally come around to the good old feminine way of doing
things.
It seems to me most unfortunate that the majority of people hope to
improve matters through an extension of the feminine ideals of the
past. In the established scheme of things one finds a peculiarly gross
form of immorality, an immorality incommensurably greater than the
dreaded evil of promiscuity; and it is only as an element in this total
scheme that woman’s ideals have any significance. The fact that they
have always constituted one side of a “double standard” is not merely
something which may be said about their relation to other elements
after their essential characteristics have been considered. These
characteristics can be described only in terms of the double standard
and of its attendant evils. It would be as impossible, then, to destroy
the double standard and still keep the feminine ideal intact as it
would be to preserve the convex nature of a mathematical curve while
destroying the concave. According to the present system there is a
standard of conduct set up for women which is to constitute virtue.
This standard is a combination of specific positive commands and, more
especially, of specific prohibitions. There are certain things which
no nice woman will do--a great many things, in fact. She must learn
them by heart and accept them on faith as the Pythagoreans must have
had to learn their curious list of taboos, a list running from the
taboo against eating beans to that against sitting on a quart measure.
This ideal of virtue does not apply with equal rigidity to men; quite
different things are expected of them and accepted for them. It is
obvious that two such conflicting ideals by the very nature of their
combination will produce a class of women who do not live up to the
standard of virtue set them as members of their sex. This class is not
merely an excrescence but an integral part of the situation created by
the total sex ideal of society. The function of women of this class is
to make possible for men the way of life commonly considered as suited
to their sex and to make possible a virtuous life for the remainder of
womankind. In fulfilling this function such women lose, in the eyes of
society, their moral nature and forfeit the right to live within the
pale of social morality. They are considered unfit for normal social
intercourse and are denied those relationships and responsibilities
which ordinarily serve as the basis for moral growth. From all normal
responsibility toward them society regards itself as released. That
which is personal, the inner life, the character, the soul--whatever
one prefers to call it--having been sacrificed in the service of the
social scheme, one is to treat what is left as of no value in itself,
but merely as an instrument to be used in the service of man’s pleasure
or woman’s virtue. The prostitute is to society that one thing, defined
by the purpose which she serves, and that is all she is, all she is
allowed to be. The depersonalization, the moral non-existence, one
might call it, of a large number of women is, then, implicit in the
social system currently accepted. It is not a punishment meted out to
those who fail to act in accordance with the social scheme (though
it is as such, of course, that society defends it) but is itself an
absolutely essential element in the social scheme, an element woven in
and out through the entire fabric of current sex morality.
It is curious how many people feel that a choice between the present
system and any other is reducible to a choice between different
degrees of promiscuity. Promiscuity would be an evil, but it does
not in itself involve this particular immorality. The worst evils in
the present situation are due not to the “lower” half of the double
standard but to the doubleness itself.
It is true that the ideal of womanly virtue is only one element in the
conventional system of sex morality. But, like a Leibnitzian monad, it
reflects the whole universe within itself--the universe of sex mores.
It is in no real sense any “higher” than the ideal by which men have
lived. They are warp and woof of the same fabric. According to this
ideal it is woman’s prime duty to keep aloof from evil. This sounds
commendable enough. And it would be at least innocuous if one could
interpret it as meaning that woman should hold herself aloof from some
imagined evil that would become existent were she to embrace it. This
is not, however, a possible interpretation of the varied collection of
prohibitions which it is her duty to respect. Their import is clearly
enough that she is to keep aloof from evil which is already existent,
which is an acknowledged part of her background. She is to shun all
of those vulgarities, coarsenesses, and immoralities which are to
enter into the lives of men and for which, one is forced to conclude,
the “other” women are to provide. And from this other class of women
she is, of course, to keep herself absolutely separate, distinct. I
recently heard an elderly Boston lady make a remark which expresses the
horror commonly aroused by any conduct which endangers the distinction
between the two classes. “Do you know,” she said, “I heard that a young
man of our set said he and his friends no longer had to go to girls of
another kind for their enjoyment. They can get all they want from girls
of their own class.” This was the outrage. The nice girls were allowing
the classes to become confused. Much the same attitude is revealed in
the frequent remark that the young girl of to-day appears like “any
chorus girl” or like any “common woman.” The horrid picture is usually
rounded off with the comment that you simply can’t tell the difference
any more between the nice girl and the other kind. One can imagine that
this might cause considerable inconvenience. Each of the two classes
of women has served a special purpose and it is, to say the least,
disconcerting for a person not to know which way to turn when he knows
very well which purpose he wants fulfilled.
The precautions which a good woman takes to preserve her purity are
indeed legion. There are places where no nice woman will go, situations
with which she must have no immediate acquaintance, people with whom
she must not associate; there are various embodiments of evil, in
short, to which she must not expose herself. That these evils should
exist, that they should be tolerated as meeting certain needs in the
lives of men and be made possible by other women--all this the average
good woman swallows without repulsion, or, more commonly, ignores.
She is aroused to a state of true indignation only when her own moral
exclusiveness, or that of her kind, is threatened. The same woman who
accepts with a good deal of equanimity the fact that men she associates
with also associate with “gay” women would be considerably upset if
these men were to attempt to associate with both kinds of women at
the same time. Why is the average woman so upset if a man of her
acquaintance makes “improper advances”? Is it that she is horrified to
find that he is willing to indulge his irregular sex desires? No. She
is outraged because he thinks she is willing to indulge hers, because
he holds her virtue too lightly. Sex evils, coarsenesses are then to be
part of the good woman’s environment in the intimate sense that they
often enter into the lives of the men she accepts as friends, even of
the men with whom she is to have the most personal and supposedly ideal
relationships. Her sole function is to turn her back on these evils.
The point of prime importance to her is that they should not pollute
her; and the first demand which she makes upon men is that they shall
show their respect for this ideal by keeping her apart.
The acceptance of this situation is implied in the ideals which are
passed down to girls by the good old-fashioned parent. Do the mothers
who insist that their daughters shall not go with boys on certain
occasions and at certain hours unchaperoned expect boys to refrain
from seeing any girls except on occasions thus carefully timed and
adequately supervised? I doubt it. Whatever their expectations may be,
it is certain that they would rather that the good girl should cling
to protection, letting the man seek gayety where he may, than that she
should take the chance involved in seeking gayety by his side. They
would rather have what they consider the evil sex element taken care
of by men and by a class of women devoted by society to that purpose
than to risk any slip in conduct on the part of their own daughters.
Purity purchased at such a price may be purity in some magical sense,
similar to that secured in the ancient mysteries by passing through
fire or going in bathing with sacred pigs. Purity in any moral sense
it certainly is not. It is simply a social asset, like physical beauty
or pleasing accomplishments, so tremendously valuable to woman that
for it she has been willing to pay any moral price, however degrading.
Its non-moral character is revealed in the common assumption that any
man can, without injury to himself, pass through experiences or be
placed in situations from which, since they would pollute her, every
good woman must be guarded. This assumption, so obviously insulting to
women, is at present complacently accepted by them as something of a
compliment.
William Graham Sumner in his remarkably unemotional and objective
treatment of social customs devotes some pages to a description of the
houses of prostitution established and run by the cities of medieval
Europe “in the interest of virtuous women.” In this connection Mr.
Sumner for once indulges in terms of opprobrium, judging the custom
as “the most incredible case” illustrating “the power of the mores
to extend toleration and sanction to an evil thing.” The inmates of
these houses were dedicated entirely to this special function, wore
distinctive dress, and were taboo to all “good” women whose virtue,
according to the scheme of things, they made possible. Authority for
such a custom can be found, as Sumner points out, in Saint Augustine,
the reformed rake. “The bishop,” writes Sumner, “has laid down the
proposition that evil things in human society, under the great orderly
scheme of things which he was trying to expound, are overruled to
produce good.” Is not this the position taken by people who hold
that it is better to have prostitution in order to provide for the
assumed sex irregularity of men than to risk the loss of a woman’s
“virtue” through the removal of those conventions and taboos which
prevent her from coping with the situation herself and making her own
moral decisions? I can see no difference. Has man at any period of
his checkered moral career devised a more unpleasant method of saving
his own soul? The good woman sits serenely on the structure upheld
for her by prostitutes and occasionally even commits the absurdity of
attempting to “reform” these women, the necessity for whose existence
is implied by the beliefs according to which she herself lives.