view of monogamic marriage, namely, that it is put on like a shirt or
a coat and must be kept on however ill-fitting, comfortless, unclean,
or dangerous, and that in this mere keeping on there is virtue. There
is the further implication that marriage has nothing to do with good
behavior, which is rewarded even in penitentiaries, or with ill; that
it is, indeed, an abstract kind of fate, a magical or infernal machine,
a metaphysical trap. Once you are caught in it, you must stay caught.
To wriggle is sin.
Do I seem to be discussing the matter on too low a plane? I wish I
were. The truth is that cultivated and liberal people have not yet
freed their minds from the concepts with which that amusing picture
deals. It is in action, not in fireside talk that these things are
tested. And it is true that even such people will pay an uninhibited
respect to a depraved character, cruel, treacherous, stupid, who
practices that moving-picture theory of marriage which, in ways no
less real for being subtle and but half-conscious, they will be
tempted to withhold from a person of the utmost spiritual grace and
charm who practices that kind of marriage of which, theoretically and
outspokenly, they so eloquently approve.
This very tentative argument, then, is not directed against marriage. I
am not even ready to plead--that would be Utopian--that the relations
of the sexes be withdrawn from social control. Our first step, at
least in America, must be an attempt to sanitate marriage. This can be
done--if it can be done at all--by relating marriage and its practice
to certain notions of good and decency and honor that already have a
tenure, however feeble, upon the public consciousness. Marriage, in
brief, should be held to be created by love and sustained by love. I
shall, of course, be accused of meaning passion. I mean that precise
blending of passion and spiritual harmony and solid friendship without
which, as even those who will not admit it know, the close association
of a man and a woman is as disgusting as it is degrading. And marriage
should be dependent, though this matter is included in the first, on
good behavior. I will not keep a man or a woman as my friend whom I
discover to be a liar, slanderer, thief. Much less ought one to keep
such a person as husband or wife. Who is to judge, it will be asked?
No objective judgment is needed. A subjective conviction of this sort
suffices to reduce the union in question to dust and ashes.
Here is the one practical point; here the one possibility of hope. To
frame a rational theory of the relations of men and women is easy and
agreeable. The very fashioners of such theories, being human, will be
brought, under the discomforts of social pressure, to _seem_ to assent
to all that their minds most passionately deny. A man or a woman of
the highest philosophic insight will struggle through the ignominy
of the divorce courts not so much in order to dissolve a meaningless
legal bond as to save some one whom he or she loves and reveres from
the criticism of the vulgar. For we live in a vulgar world. There is no
safe and ultimate escape; its vulgarity in precisely these matters will
often affront us where we least expected it. To mitigate that vulgarity
must be our first task.
I do not know whether it can be done at all. But if so, then it must
be done by making an unhappy union disgraceful. People who are always
bickering with each other, who are obviously unhappy in each other’s
presence, who always hold opinions acridly opposed, who are always
trying either subtly or obviously to escape from each other--such
couples must fall under social disapproval. And this disapproval
must apply even though one of the two prefers possessiveness to
either happiness or decency or self-respect. Similarly those who are
deliberately unfaithful should be disgraced--not for the act of unfaith
but for the hypocrisy of remaining in a union which that very act,
which the temptation to that very act, shows to have lost its purpose
and its meaning.
This sort of social control is not my ideal. Love is like religion,
a matter for the individual soul. To change partners in love is very
much like changing one’s opinion on some deep and vital matter. The
spirit must bear its own inherent witness. But I promised myself not
to be Utopian. And may it not conceivably be brought home to a few
people to begin with that the men who laugh so spontaneously when
the song-and-dance man sings “My wife’s gone to the country, hurray,
hurray!” are leading immoral lives and reducing their partners to the
rôle of disagreeable prostitutes and unsatisfactory servants?
I am not prepared to stress the point unendurably. True marriage,
the true and lovely union of a man and a woman, body and spirit, is
rare. But to-day it is not even an ideal, not even something admired
and striven for. Love in itself is rare and married love is perhaps
as rare as beauty or genius. Happiness, too, is rare, happiness in
any relation. But even as a man or a woman has made an obvious and
shattering mistake if his or her chosen work does not produce a
reasonable minimum of lasting inner satisfaction, so may marriage also
be tested by a reasonable minimum of lasting--let us say, preference
and blessedness. To fall below that minimum is to cheat both the self
and society, both the present and posterity, to sacrifice honor to a
fetish and vitality to decay.
Communist Puritans
By Louis Fischer
Louis Fischer
_is Moscow correspondent of the New York_ Nation.
COMMUNIST PURITANS
BY LOUIS FISCHER
The Soviet state is omnipotent and omnipresent. Bukharin, the
arch-theorist, contends that this is a transitional phase in the
development of Communism toward perfection. The Bolsheviks’ professed
aim is the _reductio ad administratum_ of the functions of the state;
they would make government the traffic cop of the nation but not the
all-pervading busybody and touch-everybody-everywhere which it is
now in Russia. The transitional period, however, may last long. In
default of a world revolution it may project itself beyond the present
generation and even beyond the next. And in the meantime it is good
Communist doctrine to maintain an Argus-eyed, Herculanean-clubbed
state. The Soviet Government is alike an administrator, politician,
statesman, merchant, manufacturer, banker, shipbuilder, newspaper
publisher, school-teacher, and preacher.
Such a state is the highest expression of the anti-individualism of
socialist philosophy. The single _simian erectus_ is nothing; it is the
class, the nation which counts.
The citizen lives for the state. Mind and muscle must ever be at its
service. A Communist who is a loose liver is an anomaly. There is
virtue even in a grain of asceticism and in “morality,” not, it is
important to note, because luxury and license are sinful and lead to
damnation and hell but because the excessive gratification of physical
desires, be they for sex or for alcohol, and any over-indulgence of
one’s selfish mental weaknesses reduce the energy and attention which
the individual can offer to the state and to society.
The Bolsheviks do not believe in evolution in the realm of politics;
they are revolutionists. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century liberalism
tended toward the survival of the fittest. But the essence of the
Russian revolution is the protection of the under dog, of the
proletarian and peasant who, unaided, would not survive in the unequal
struggle with the capitalist and landowner. The function of the Soviet
state is to support the oppressed majority against the vested and
acquired interests of the economically powerful minority.
The doctrine of the survival of the fittest, translated into every-day
life, permits freedom of action, as little restraint as possible, the
freest play for nature and human nature. Communist doctrine involves
the negation of individual freedom; human nature is discounted in the
socialist scale of weights and measures; laissez-faire is replaced by
discipline, if need be, by force. Only once did the Communists reveal
a liberal vein. It was in their treatment of conscientious objectors
during the civil wars. Russia has many sects such as the Dukhobors who
are opposed to violence on grounds of conscience. Though the Government
was engaged in a death struggle, it respected these sentiments. But in
all else, whenever its own interests have been at stake, the state has
disregarded the wishes and inclinations of the human unit. Liberty of
the individual is not as sacred an ikon as it is in the West. To give
economic freedom to the mass is a nobler aim. Thus the Communists would
explain and justify (but in my opinion this does not justify) the
absence of a free press in Russia and the activities of the G. P. U.
The aim of the Bolsheviks was not merely to overthrow one government
and to establish their own. This was a means toward creating a new
society. To that extent the Bolsheviks are as presumptuous as most
reformers. In 1917 they must have argued to themselves much to this
effect: “We are a minority. The majority has not invited us to rule
it. But we know better than the majority what is good for it.” In the
interest of the new society a powerful state was set up. The powerful
state was privileged to ride roughshod over the individual. The
Bolsheviks presume to tell the individual how to act and how to live.
This is the “superiority complex” which is one of the most essential
characteristics of puritanism. “I am perfect. Watch me. Go thou and do
likewise.” The Russian Communists are puritans without religion.
In matters of morals the Communists advocate and agitate but do not
use force. Only in the case of members of the Communist Party do
they interfere if the individual’s actions are likely “directly or
indirectly to discredit the party.” (Such a phrase permits of the
widest interpretation and misinterpretation.) Thus in an article in
the _Pravda_ on The Party and Personal Life, O. Zortzeva, an official
of the Central Control Committee, writes that “not long ago one of
the representatives of the Control Committee in the South asked for
instructions to combat the evil of divorce.” She cites an instance (and
there must be many more such instances) where a Communist was required
to explain why he left his wife. He replied he could not live with
her because she was unfit to mingle in the society of his new friends
and acquaintances. The reply was regarded as unsatisfactory. The
Soviet state enforces a most liberal divorce law. But the Communists
discourage divorce. Within the party it is looked upon with disfavor.
The war, the revolution, the civil wars have worked havoc with the
Russian family. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that family
life is crumbling. Trotzky, who has given more active attention to
these questions of personal behavior than any other Communist leader,
seeks to reënforce the collapsing buttresses of the family. (It
will be recalled that Engels, the author with Marx of the “Communist
Manifesto,” wrote the “Origin of the Family” to prove that the family
was a new, unnecessary, and reactionary institution.) Trotzky urges the
“communalization of the family household” so as to “disencumber the
family of kitchen and laundry.” Take the burden of washing, cooking,
sewing, child-raising from the family and “the relation between husband
and wife will be cleansed of all that is external, foreign, forced,
accidental. Each would cease to spoil the life of the other....”
The family life of most Communist leaders would probably find favor
in the eyes of the Bishop of New York, and we can imagine that Cotton
Mather, if he returned to the flesh and visited Moscow, would hurry to
Trotzky, slap him untheologically on the back, and say, “Thou art a
man.” There was something ascetic and impersonal in the way Lenin used
to live. There is something reminiscent of Christian self-abnegation
in Chicherin’s, Bukharin’s, Radek’s disdain for good clothes. A
Communist is required to contribute to the party treasury all the
salary he earns above $95 a month. And even if his writings bring him a
supplementary income he must not spend it for luxuries. The Communists
are the shock troops of the Soviet régime. They must be like athletes
in training. They must not consume mental and spiritual ice creams and
pastries.
Alexandra Kollontai, now Soviet ambassador in Christiania, stands for
the utmost freedom in sexual relations. But a review in the official
press of her book, “Love Among Laboring Bees,” stigmatizes her views
on the subject as “prostitution” and “intellectual tomfoolery.” “It
is imperative,” reads the last sentence of the criticism, “to guard
against the harmful influence of Comrade Kollontai.” This is the
attitude which in other countries leads to the appointment of vice
censors. Russia, fortunately, is too advanced to subject itself to such
a humiliation. Only the lives of Communists are censored. In respect
to the great mass of the people the Bolsheviks content themselves with
preaching.
Trotzky’s sermons will certainly do the people no harm. Russians
have barely a trace of puritanism. Take the instance of their
famous, many-ply “mother” oaths. Beside them the worst product of the
British navvy looks pale. Says Trotzky: “One would have to consult
philologists, linguists, and folk-lore experts to find out whether
any other people has such unrestrained, filthy, and disgusting oaths
as we have. As far as I know, there is no other.” The Communists have
initiated an anti-swearing campaign. In some factories the workers
themselves decided to fine any one who used an “expression.” Wherever
one goes, in industrial plants, in beer saloons, in clubs, one sees the
colored “Don’t Swear” poster. Even in the army, where curses once found
their most fertile field, they are becoming increasingly rare.
A Communist should not play cards. A member of the party will not, if
he is a good Communist, enter a gambling casino. (The Moscow gambling
casinos, incidentally, have been closed by order of the Government.)
Newly initiated Communists ask their instructors whether they are to
permit their wives to powder their faces. A Communist would hardly come
to her office with her lips rouged and even non-Communist workers in
many Soviet commissariats feel that it is bad form to use the lipstick.
Certainly very few if any women Communists dress to fashion. Most of
them dress badly. There are more serious things to do than to mind the
clothes on one’s back. It is unworthy of a Communist, and Communists
think it is unworthy of all Russians, to give too much thought to the
flesh. I know a non-Communist Soviet official who likes to carry a
cane, but he leaves it home when he goes to work.
There can be no let-up, says Trotzky, in the war against alcohol.
The Government has abolished vodka, but the bootleg “samogonka” has
replaced it. The police arrest men and women (in Russia most of
the apprehended bootleggers are women) but force removes as little
of the evil here as it does in the United States. So strong is the
drink tradition in Russia that even many Communists indulge in the
permissible wines and light beers. But the party reminds its members
that they must inhibit such desires. It will not do for the best
soldiers of the state and the master-builders of a new society to
become inebriated, or lose their heads and time in the pursuit of
women, or play cards, or stop to adjust their neckties while the
foundations of the structure are being laid.
Stereotypes
By Florence Guy Seabury
Florence Guy Seabury
_is a frequent contributor to the_ New Republic _and to various popular
magazines._
STEREOTYPES
BY FLORENCE GUY SEABURY
If Clarissa Harlow could have stepped out of her pre-Victorian world
to witness some of the women stevedores and “longshoremen” now at work
along the New York water front, she would certainly have fainted so
abruptly that no masculine aid could have restored consciousness. If
we can believe the 1920 census, a goodly number of Clarissa’s timid
and delicate sex are toiling gloriously in the most dangerous and
violent occupations. Nor are they only engaged in handling steel beams
and freight, running trucks and donkey engines, but as miners and
steeplejacks, aviators and divers, sheriffs and explorers--everything,
in fact that man ever did or thought of doing. They have proved,
moreover, as successful in such a new occupation as capturing jungle
tigers as in the old one of hunting husbands, as deft in managing big
business as in running a little household.
But the census bureau, compiling all the facts of feminine industry,
forgot to note that woman might perform these amazingly varied
operations, outside the home, without changing in any measurable degree
the rooted conception of her nature and activities. She may step out
of skirts into knickers, cut her hair in a dozen short shapes and
even beat a man in a prize fight, but old ideas as to her place and
qualities endure. She changes nothing as set as the stereotyped image
of her sex which has persisted since Eve.
The Inquiring Reporter of the New York _Sun_ recently asked five
persons whether they would prefer to be tried by a jury of men or
women. “Of men,” cried they all--two women and three men. “Women would
be too likely to overlook the technical points of the law.” “Women are
too sentimental.” “They are too easily swayed by an eloquent address.”
“Women are by nature sentimental.” Almost anybody could complete the
list. Ancient opinions of women’s characteristics have been so widely
advertised that the youngest child in the kindergarten can chirp the
whole story. Billy, aged ten, hopes fervently that this country may
never have a woman president. “Women haven’t the brains--it’s a
man’s job.” A. S. M. Hutchinson, considerably older than Billy, has
equally juvenile fears: that the new freedom for women may endanger her
functions in the home. Whatever and wherever the debate, the status
and attributes of women are settled by neat and handy generalizations,
passed down from father to son, and mother to daughter. For so far,
most women accept the patterns made for them and are as likely as not
to consider themselves the weaker vessel, the more emotional sex, a lay
figure of biological functioning.
Optimists are heralding a changed state in the relationship of men and
women. They point to modern activities and interests as evidence of a
different position in the world. They say that customs and traditions
of past days are yielding to something freer and finer. The old order,
as far as home life is concerned, has been turned topsy-turvy. Out of
this chaos, interpreters of the coming morality declare that already
better and happier ways have been established between man and maid.
It sounds plausible enough, but the trouble remains, that, so far, it
isn’t true. The intimate relationship of men and women is about as it
was in the days of Cleopatra or Xanthippe. The most brawny stevedorette
leaves her freight in the air when the whistle blows and rushes home
to husband as if she were his most sheltered possession. Following the
tradition of the centuries, the business woman, whose salary may double
that of her mate, hands him her pay envelope and asks permission to
buy a new hat. Busts and bustles are out, flat chests and orthopedic
shoes are in, while the waist line moves steadily toward the thigh--but
what of it? Actualities of present days leave the ancient phantasies
unchanged.
Current patterns for women, as formulated by the man in the street, by
the movies, in the women’s clubs and lecture halls can be boiled down
to one general cut. Whatever she actually is or does, in the stereotype
she is a creature specialized to function. The girl on the magazine
cover is her symbol. She holds a mirror, a fan, a flower and--at
Christmas--a baby. Without variety, activity, or individuality her
sugary smile pictures satisfying femininity. Men are allowed diversity.
Some are libertines, others are husbands; a few are lawyers, many are
clerks. They wear no insignia of masculinity or badge of paternity and
they are never expected to live up to being Man or Mankind. But every
woman has the whole weight of formulated Womanhood upon her shoulders.
Even in new times, she must carry forward the design of the ages.
One of the quaint hang-overs of the past is that men are the chief
interpreters of even the modern woman. It may be that the conquest of
varied fields and the strain of establishing the right to individuality
has taken all her time and energy. Or it may be that the habit of
vicarious expression has left her inarticulate. Whatever it is, in the
voluminous literature of the changing order, from the earnest tracts on
“How It Feels to Be a Woman,” by a leading male educator to the tawdry
and flippant syndicated views of W. L. George, masculine understanders
take the lead. And the strange part of their interpretations is that
they run true to ancient form. Old adages are put in a more racy
vernacular, the X-ray is turned on with less delicacy, but when the
froth of their engaging frankness disappears, hoary old ideas remain
thickly in the tumbler.
Take the intimate life story of a girl of the younger
generation--Janet March--written by that good friend of women, Floyd
Dell. The blurb on the jacket of the book announces that she moves
toward “not a happy ending but an intelligent one.” And the end? Janet
finds her mate and the curtain falls to the soft music of maternity.
“One has to risk something,” Janet cries. “All my life I’ve wanted to
_do_ something with myself. Something exciting. And this is the one
thing I can do. I can”--she hesitated. “I can create a breed of fierce
and athletic girls, new artists, musicians, and singers.”
As a conclusion this is acceptable to any one with a heart, but wherein
is it intellectual and not happy? Queen Victoria, the Honorable Herbert
Asquith, or the Reverend Lyman Abbott would be equally pleased by its
one hundred per cent womanliness. And how does it differ from our
cherished slogan, “Woman’s place is in the home”? Only because Floyd
Dell cuts Janet in a large, free-hand design. The advance pattern calls
for a wealth of biological and gynecological explanation, pictures the
girl as a healthy young animal who “smoked but drew the line on grounds
of health at inhaling,” and, following the fashion of peasants in
foreign countries, consummated the marriage before it was celebrated.
Yet Janet, who claimed her right to all experience and experiment,
finally raises her banner on the platform of fireside and nursery.
Despite its unquestionable orthodoxy, Janet March was retired from
circulation. But no one has successfully dammed the flowing tide of W.
L. George. He draws with somewhat futuristic effect, at times, but his
conclusions are those of the old masters. “No woman,” he enunciates
authoritatively, “values her freedom until she is married and then she
is proud to surrender it to the man she has won.” Or take this: “All
women are courtesans at heart, living only to please the other sex.”
Wherein does this differ from the sentiment of Alexander Pope who,
one hundred and fifty or more years before the birth of W. L. George,
declared:
Men, some to business, some to pleasures take,
But every woman is at heart a rake.
H. L. Mencken, stirred by debates about the intelligence of woman and
her newer activities, essayed “In Defense of Women,” to put his old
wine in a fancy bottle, but it was the same home brew. Generously
conceding brains to women, he proves his point on the evidence that
they are used to ensnare men, who weak-minded and feeble in flight are
usually bowled over in the battle of wits. “Marriage,” he says, “is
the best career a woman can reasonably aspire to--and in the case of
very many women, the only one that actually offers a livelihood.”...
“A childless woman remains more than a little ridiculous and ill at
ease.”... “No sane woman has ever actually muffed a chance.”... “The
majority of inflammatory suffragettes of the sex hygiene and birth
control species are simply those who have done their best to snare a
man and failed.”