feminine beauty. He declares with refreshing honesty that in contrast
to the female body a milk jug or even a cuspidor is a thing of
intelligent and gratifying design. Of woman’s superior mental ability
he says, “A cave man is all muscle and mush. Without a woman to think
for him, he is truly a lamentable spectacle, a baby with whiskers,
a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous
caricature of God.” What a pity that women use all these advantages of
superior mentality and ability only in the age-old game of man-hunting.
But do they?
D. H. Lawrence shares this philosophy of the chief business of women,
and he is much more gloomy about it. In fact, he is decidedly neurotic
in his fear of the ultimate absorption of man. Woman he describes
perpetually as a great, magnetic womb, fecund, powerful, drawing,
engulfing. Man he sees as a pitiful, struggling creature, ultimately
devoured by fierce maternal force. “You absorb, absorb,” cries Paul
to Miriam in “Sons and Lovers,” “as if you must fill yourself up with
love because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.” The Lawrence model,
madly, fiercely possessive, differs from older forms in the abundance
of physiological and pathological trimming. His conclusion, as voiced
again by Paul to Miriam is, “A woman only works with part of herself;
the real and vital part is covered up.” And this hidden reality is her
terrific, destructive, fervid determination to drown man in her embrace.
So it goes. To Floyd Dell woman is a Mother, to H. L. Mencken a Wife,
to W. L. George a Courtesan, and to D. H. Lawrence a Matrix--always
specialized to sex. There may be men who are able to think of woman
apart from the pattern of function, but they are inarticulate. Most of
them spend their lives associating with a symbol. The set pieces they
call Mary, Martha, Elaine, or Marguerite may follow the standardized
design of grandmother, mother, or aunt. Or in more advanced circles,
the pattern may call for bobbed hair, knickers, and cigarette case.
Under any form of radicalism or conservatism the stereotype remains.
The old morality was built upon this body of folk-lore about women.
Whether pictured as a chaste and beautiful angel, remote and untainted
by life’s realities, or more cynically regarded as a devil and the
source of sin, the notion was always according to pattern. Naturally,
the relationship of men and women has been built upon the design,
and a great many of our social ideals and customs follow it. The
angel concept led, of course, to the so-called double standard which
provides for a class of Victorian dolls who personify goodness, while
their sisters, the prostitutes, serve as sacrificial offerings to
the wicked ways of men. The new morality, as yet rather nebulous and
somewhat mythical, has fewer class distinctions. The angel picture,
for instance, has had some rude blows. As portrayed by the vanguard of
radicals and interpreters, however, the changing conventions have their
roots in the old generalizations and phantasies.
Perhaps this is only to be expected, for the man or woman does not
exist whose mind has not become so filled with accepted ideas of human
beings and relationships before maturity, or even adolescence, that
what is seen thereafter is chiefly a fog of creeds and patterns. If
several hundred babies, children of good inherited backgrounds, could
be brought up on an isolated island, without a taint of superimposed
custom and never hearing generalizations about themselves--never
having standardized characteristics laid heavily upon their shoulders,
perhaps a different type of relationship founded upon actualities,
would be evolved. Without a mythology of attributes, based chiefly upon
biological functions, real human beings might discover each other and
create new and honest ways of comradeship and association. As it is
to-day, we do not know what the pristine reactions of individuals, free
from the modifications of stereotype, would be like.
It was the development of means by which beliefs could be separated
from actual facts which brought modern science into being and freed
the world from the quaint superstitions of the ages. Not until the
nature of substance could be proved and classified in contrast with the
mass of ignorant notions which clogged ancient thought was the amazing
mechanical, economic, and scientific advance of the last century
possible. The world of antiquity had standardized life and tied thought
down to speculative creeds. Empirical science discarded all supposition
and centered itself upon building up another picture--life as an
examination of its actual nature proved it to be.
In the creating of a new order which will bring with it a different
type of social and personal contact, something similar must take place.
For most of our ideas, even those classified as liberal and advanced,
are built upon the reactions of an alleged, not an actual human being.
Men have suffered from pattern-making, but never have they been
burdened with the mass of generalizations that are heaped upon women
from birth. Nobody knows what women are really like because our minds
are so filled with the stereotype of Woman. And this picture, even in
the interpretations of those who claim to understand the modern woman,
is chiefly of function, not character. It is impossible to create a
satisfying relationship between a red-blooded individual and a symbol.
A changed morality cannot successfully emerge when half of those who
participate are regarded not as people but functions. As long as women
are pictured chiefly as wife, mother, courtesan--or what not--defining
merely a relationship to men--nothing new or strange or interesting is
likely to happen. The old order is safe.
Women and the New Morality
By Beatrice M. Hinkle
Beatrice M. Hinkle
_is a physician and psycho-analyst who follows in general the beliefs
of Jung. She is the author of “Recreating the Individual.”_
WOMEN AND THE NEW MORALITY
BY BEATRICE M. HINKLE, M.D.
In the general discussions of morality which are the fashion just now,
sex morality seems to occupy the chief place. Indeed, judging from
the amount of talk on this subject one would be inclined to think it
the outstanding problem of our time. Certainly the whole of humanity
is concerned in and vitally affected by the sexual aspect of life.
Sexuality in its capacity as an agent of transformation is the source
of power underlying the creativeness of man. In its direct expression,
including its influence upon human relationships in general, it is
woman’s particular concern. The position of importance it is assuming
seems, therefore, to be justified, regardless of the protests of the
intellect and the wish of the ego to minimize its significance.
A general weakening of traditional standards of ethics and morals and
their gradual loss of control over the conduct of individuals have
long been observed in other activities--in business affairs and in
the world of men’s relations with each other. This has taken place so
quietly and with so much specious rationalizing that sharp practices
and shady conduct which formerly would have produced scandals, shame,
and social taboos now scarcely cause a protest from society. These
aspects of morality belong to the masculine world in particular and
produce little agitation, while the upheaval in sex morals particularly
affects the feminine world and by many people can scarcely be
considered calmly enough for an examination. The changes in this field
are the most recent and are being produced by women; they are taking
place in full view of all with no apologies and with little hesitation.
They appear, therefore, most striking and disturbing. It can be said
that in the general disintegration of old standards, women are the
active agents in the field of sexual morality and men the passive,
almost bewildered accessories to the overthrow of their long and firmly
organized control of women’s sexual conduct.
The old sex morality, with its double standard, has for years been
criticized and attacked by fair-minded persons of both sexes. It
has been recognized that this unequal condition produced effects
as unfortunate for the favored sex as for the restricted one, and
that because of this it could not be maintained indefinitely by a
psychologically developing people. As a matter of course, whenever
the single standard was mentioned, the standard governing women was
invariably meant, and the fact was ignored that it is easier to break
down restrictions than to force them upon those who have hitherto
enjoyed comparative freedom. Furthermore, it was not realized that a
sex morality imposed by repression and the power of custom creates
artificial conceptions and will eventually break down.
This forced morality is in fact at the present time quite obviously
disintegrating. We see women assuming the right to act as their
impulses dictate with much the same freedom that men have enjoyed for
so long. The single standard is rapidly becoming a _fait accompli_, but
instead of the standard identified with women it is nearer the standard
associated with men. According to a universal psychological law,
actual reality eventually overtakes and replaces the cultural ideal.
Although this overthrow of old customs and sex ideals must be chiefly
attributed to the economic independence of women brought about through
the industrialism of our age, it is safe to say that no man thought
ahead far enough or understood the psychology of women sufficiently
to anticipate the fruit of this economic emancipation. As long as
women were dependent upon men for the support of themselves and their
children there could be no development of a real morality, for the
love and feelings of the woman were so intermingled with her economic
necessities that the higher love impulse was largely undifferentiated
from the impulse of self-preservation. True morality can only develop
when the object or situation is considered for itself, not when it is
bound up with ulterior and extraneous elements which vitiate the whole.
The old morality has failed and is disintegrating fast, because it was
imposed from without instead of evolving from within.
A morality which has value for all time and is not dependent upon
custom or external cultural fashions can arise only from a high
development of the psychological functions of thinking and feeling,
with the developed individual as the determiner of values instead of
general custom or some one else’s opinion. The function of feeling and
the realm of the emotions have been universally regarded as woman’s
special province; therefore it is women who are specially concerned
with testing out moral values involving sexual behavior. Women have
been reproached by men again and again as being only sexual creatures,
and they have meekly accepted the reproach. Now, instead of examining
the statement, they have accepted the sexual problem of men as though
it were their own, and with it the weight of man’s conflict and his
articulateness. For sexuality as a problem and a conflict definitely
belongs to man’s psychology; it is he primarily who has been ashamed
of his domination by this power and has struggled valiantly to free
himself; his egotistic and sexual impulses have always been at war with
each other. But whoever heard of women being ashamed of yielding to the
power of love? Instead they gloried in the surrender of themselves and
counted themselves blessed when love ruled. It is this need of man to
escape from the power of the sensual appeal that has made him scorn sex
and look upon the great creative power of life as something shameful
and inferior, and in modern days treat it as a joke or with the
indifferent superficiality which betrays emasculation and inadequacy.
One has only to “listen in” where any large group of men, young or
old, are gathered together in easy familiarity (the army camps were
recent examples on a large scale) to discover the degree to which
sexuality still dominates the minds of men, even though its expression
is confined so largely to the jocose and the obscene. Many men can
corroborate this report from a military camp--“we have sexuality in
all its dirty and infantile forms served daily for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner.” It is the inferior and inadequate aspect of masculine
sexuality that has made it necessary for man to conceive it as
something shameful and unclean, and to insist that woman must carry his
purity for him and live the restrictions and suppression that rightly
belonged to him. Woman on her part became an easy victim of his ideas
and convictions, because of the very fact that the function of feeling
and the emotions so largely dominate her psychology. The translation
of feeling into thought-forms has been slow and difficult. About
herself woman has been quite inarticulate and largely unconscious.
This inarticulateness inevitably made her accept man’s standards and
values for her, for little directed thinking is achieved without form
and words. Because of her sexual fertility and fruitfulness woman had
no sexual conflict; therefore, man easily unloaded his psychological
burden upon her, and claimed freedom for the satisfaction of his own
desires.
Thus, woman was made a symbol or personification of man’s morality. She
had to live for him that which he was unable to live for himself. This
was the reason for his indignation at moral transgressions on her part.
She had injured the symbol and revealed his weakness to him. However,
with the discovery by women that they could be economically independent
of men, they commenced to find themselves interesting. As they have
gradually come to think for themselves about fundamental questions,
there has begun a tremendous activity and busyness in regard to the
very subject which was previously taboo.
A recent writer boasts that men have changed their attitude regarding
sexual problems very little and are not much concerned in the new
interest of women. This is probably true, for man has contributed
all he has to give to the subject. He has laid down his taboos and
externalized his restrictions, chiefly applicable to the other sex,
and he is finished with the subject--bored by having it thrust forward
as an unfinished problem needing reconsideration. All of his knowledge
or understanding of the sexual aspect of life--the aspect underlying
human creativeness, the faulty development of which is responsible
for a large part of his woes, “can be told in two hours to any
intelligent sixteen year old boy,” another writer recently stated. It
is this youthful ignorance and assurance that the last word has been
spoken on this subject that has awakened women, no longer dependent
economically, to the fact that they must also become independent of men
intellectually if they wish to gain expression for their knowledge
or to form their own rules of conduct based on their psychology. In
the true scientific spirit of the age they are now experimenting and
using nature’s method of trial and error to find out for themselves by
conscious living experience what feeling has vaguely told them. This is
the first step towards objectifying and clarifying woman’s intuitive
knowledge.
With the revolt of women against the old restrictions and the demand
for freedom to experience for themselves, there has appeared a most
significant phase of the changed morality--the new relation of women
toward each other. The significance of this enormous change which
has been taking place very quietly and yet very rapidly is scarcely
appreciated. However, when one realizes that only a generation ago the
newspapers were still publishing their funny paragraphs at the expense
of women (“The dear creatures; how they love one another”), the great
difference in their relations today becomes evident. The generally
accepted distinction between the personal loyalties of the sexes can be
summed up in the statement that women are loyal in love and disloyal
in friendship, while men are loyal in friendship and disloyal in love.
It is this attitude of women that is gradually disappearing with the
awakening of a new sense of themselves as individuals. Their changed
attitude towards each other--the recognition of their own values, and
the growing realization that only in solidarity can any permanent
impression be made on the old conception of woman as an inferior,
dependent creature, useful for one purpose only--constitutes the most
marked difference between their present social condition and that of
the past.
As long as women remained psychologically unawakened, their individual
values were swallowed up in their biological value for the race. They
were under the unconscious domination of their sexual fruitfulness
and an enemy of themselves as individuals. Weininger gives as the
chief difference between the masculine and feminine creeds that “Man’s
religion consists in a supreme belief in himself--woman’s in a supreme
belief in other people.” These other people being men, the sex rivalry
among women that has so long stood in the way of their further
development is easily understood. It has been a vicious circle which
could only be broken by women’s gaining another significance in the
eyes of the world and in their own eyes. This other significance is the
economic importance which they have acquired in the world of men.
It makes little difference within the social structure how many
individual women exist who have forged a position for themselves and
have won a freedom and independence equal to that possessed by the
ordinary man, so long as they are isolated phenomena having little
understanding of the peculiar difficulties and problems of women as a
whole, and no relation with each other. These women have always existed
in all culture periods, but they have produced little effect upon the
social condition or psychology of women in general. There was no group
action because the majority of women were inarticulate. The woman who
was different became abnormal in the eyes of the world.
This lack of an adequate self-consciousness among women, their
general inability to translate feeling into form capable of being
understood by the masculine mind, accounts for their acceptance of the
statements made about them by men in an effort to understand creatures
apparently so different from themselves. There is no doubt that woman’s
inarticulateness about herself, even when her feelings were very
different from those she was told were normal, has been responsible for
a vast amount of the nonsense written about her.
This passive acceptance of the opinions of others has been most
disastrous for woman’s development. Her superior psychological
processes consist of feelings and intuitions, and when these are
stultified or violated by being forced into a false relation, or are
inhibited from development, the entire personality is crippled. The
inadequate development of the function of thought and the dominating
rôle played by the function of feeling in the psychology of woman have
produced an obviously one-sided effect and have caused men to postulate
theories about her, which are given forth as though they were the last
word to be said--fixed and unchangeable. Indeed the statement that
women are incapable of change and that no growth is possible for them
is one of the favorite assertions of the masculine writers upon the
subject of women’s psychology. As the present is the first time in our
historical period in which there has been any general opportunity for
women as a whole to think for themselves and to develop in new ways,
the basis for this assertion does not exist, and it obviously conceals
an unconscious wish that women should not change.
The effect of collective ideas and cultural traditions upon the
personality is immeasurable. The greatest general change that is
taking place today is the weakening of these ideas and the refusal
of women to be bound by them. Women are for the first time demanding
to live the forbidden experiences directly and draw conclusions on
this basis. I do not mean to imply that traditional moral standards
controlling woman’s sexual conduct have never been transgressed in the
past. They have very frequently been transgressed, but secretly and
without inner justification. The great difference today lies in the
open defiance of these customs with feelings of entire justification,
or even a non-recognition of a necessity for justification. In other
words, there has arisen a feeling of moral rightness in the present
conduct, and wrongness in the former morality. Actually the condition
is one in which natural, long-restrained desire is being substituted
for collective moral rules, and individuals are largely becoming a law
unto themselves. It is difficult to predict what will be the result
of the revolt, but it is certain that this is the preceding condition
which renders it possible for a new morality in the real sense to be
born within the individual. It has already produced the first condition
of all conscious psychic development--a moral conflict--and woman has
gained a problem.
In the general chaos of conflicting feelings she is losing her
instinctive adaptation to her biological rôle as race bearer, and is
attempting adaptation to man’s reality. She is making the effort to win
for herself some differentiation and development of the ego function
apart from her instinctive processes. This is the great problem
confronting woman today; how can she gain a relation to both racial and
individual obligations, instead of possessing one to the exclusion of
the other? Must she lose that which has been and still is her greatest
strength and value? I for one do not think so, although I am fully
conscious of the tremendous psychic effort and responsibility involved
in the changing standards. It is necessary that women learn to accept
themselves and to value themselves as beings possessing a worth at
least equal to that of the other sex, instead of unthinkingly accepting
standards based on masculine psychology. Then women will recognize
the necessity of developing their total psychic capacities just as
it is necessary for men to do, but they will see that this does not
involve imitation of men or repudiation of their most valuable psychic
functioning. The real truth is that it has at last become apparent to
many women that men cannot redeem them.
It is not the purpose of this article to deal with the practical
issues involved in the new moral freedom. One thing however is clearly
evident: Women are demanding a reality in their relations with men
that heretofore has been lacking, and they refuse longer to cater to
the traditional notions of them created by men, in which their true
feelings and personalities were disregarded and denied. This is the
first result of the new morality.
Transcriber’s Notes
A few minor errors in punctuation have been corrected.