sense lifelong chastity is, in most cases, a perversion. The dictionary
defines it as “pure from all unlawful sexual intercourse.” This brings
up at once the question of what is unlawful. If by “unlawful” is meant
“contrary to statute law,” this definition is inaccurate; and there is
not always virtue in such chastity. For there is a higher law, of which
the statutory law is merely a tardy crystallization. The actual law
changes before the limping legislature alters the statute. One State,
South Carolina, denies divorce for any cause whatever. Yet parties
legally divorced and re-married outside that State, who return to it
and live in the second mating, are certainly not unchaste. If love
has left a married couple, their intercourse thereafter may be called
unchaste; and if one or both of the parties find love elsewhere, and
live it, this is chaste in the better sense.
More than this, a female animal, even living in a state of promiscuity,
as some by their natures do, is never unchaste. For she has always the
power of selecting her mate or mates. Charlotte Perkins Gilman follows
the best thought when she defines chastity, “not as abstinence, but as
selection.” In this higher sense, chastity is a virtue.
It may just as well be recognized that the moral standards of our
culture are changing, at a greater rate than for the last thousand
years. It has taken that long and much longer for woman to acquire
enough inner power to set on foot the forces that could liberate
her from her world-wide subjection to man. Now the forces have been
liberated, and for better or for worse the woman of the future will be
a freer, finer, and better rounded human being than the woman of the
past was. She has acquired education, a share in the knowledge of the
universe in which she lives. She has acquired a sound body, fit to bear
strong children. She has acquired a strong and well-functioning mind,
thereby giving a better heritage of mental aptitude to her children,
and thereby making herself more fit as a mother to direct them in their
formative years. She has acquired a part control over the essential
purse-strings, the pocket-book, the economic power; she can no longer
be bought and sold as a horse or a plough, but can herself buy her will
of the world.
The old double standard of morality, of wild oats, marriage, and
post-marital indulgence for men, and strict monogamy or prostitution
for women, has already been thrown overboard by the new woman. She
can dictate to her prospective husband now: “Come to me with a clean
body, or do not come at all. Do not expect, either before marriage or
afterwards, to indulge in sexual wanderings that I may not share.”
She is not insisting, shrewd observers say, in an absolute monogamy,
which runs counter to the sexual nature of the race; she is, instead,
lifting man higher toward the strict monogamy enforced upon her, and at
the same time is stepping consciously and intelligently a little lower
than this strict monogamy into a world that will permit intelligent and
regulated erotic experiments and experiences. For the sexual morality
of the future will not be handed down in a ready-made decalog by some
future Moses from a White House Sinai, but will gradually evolve and
crystallize out of sober and intelligent experimentation. It will never
be a hard-and-fast series of “Thou-shalt-nots”; it will be much more
liberal, offering more than one way of allowed love life.
_Sexual Morality, Today and Tomorrow._--The keynote of the new sexual
morality is freedom, on both sides. This means, first, freedom from
financial considerations. Love is a deep-rooted instinct, whose
fruition means years or a lifetime of happiness or unhappiness for the
individuals concerned, and the creation, in progeny, of the men and
women of the future. None of these things can be purchased ready-made
in the market for cash. A man can not buy a woman’s love, or a child
to do him honor; neither can woman or man sell these things. Yet under
the present system, as a hangover of the past, these things must
be bought. A woman, contemplating marriage, had to consider almost
primarily whether her prospective husband could feed and house her
and her children satisfactorily. All three, wife, kept woman, and
prostitute, had to consider the financial: all three were lowered by
the consideration. This element has been and is being taken out of the
love life entirely. The result of this elimination will be wholesome
all along the line. Love will be experienced for love, and not for
money.
Second is the realization that marriages are not made in heaven, but on
earth, and are, accordingly, human relationships, of a contractual or
quasi-contractual nature, which may be terminated like any other human
relationship. Our whole method of mating is haphazard in the extreme;
there is no provision for adequate knowledge of the proposed partner;
there is the reverse of a certainty that this woman or man, thrown in
contact with man or woman through proximity or unplanned causes, is a
human organism so sensitive physically, mentally, and spiritually that
it can co-operate helpfully with our own. Men and woman make mistakes,
in love choice as elsewhere. The new morality will propose a dignified
way of terminating such mistakes. At the present time, the divorce laws
hold in practice that the man and woman who realize their unfitness for
each other, and determine to secure a divorce, are criminals, guilty
of collusion; this, at least, is the law in many states and nations.
Divorce laws in harmony with the new morality will permit a man and
woman, who have erred in their love choice to part as friends, rather
than as enemies.
Thirdly, the new morality will by no means insist that all mating be
within the strict palings of monogamous marriage. If a man or a woman,
having carefully considered what will be lost and what gained by a
wider type of love relationships, determines to risk the experiment,
without taking advantage of other women or men, this is an individual
choice; and the new morality in all matters is giving the individual as
much intelligent choice as it can, consonant with social safety. Such
relationships are like laboratory experiments in eugenics for the good
of the race; they may result in unhappiness, but the very discovery
that unhappiness has resulted is a social fact which may aid future
decisions. If, to the contrary, happiness results, this is also a
social fact which may aid future decisions.
The question of the home and the children is linked with this. Neither
of these, as at present conducted, are matters of great human glory;
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s extended studies of each should be read, to
get a new and intelligent slant upon our homes and our child-rearing.
Motherhood is a great benefit to society; motherhood pensions and
similar remedies are steps toward a social repayment for this benefit.
More than this, if Haldane is at all correct, reproduction and sexual
union may be separated in fact in the future; in which case, much
greater liberality of union will be the usual thing. These matters
are all experimental; the important thing is to look at them with
something of a scientific detachment, rather than with a bitter bias
and prejudice, based upon what Moses reported was said to him out of
the thunders above a South Arabian mountain, or what the English common
law or the Latin ecclesiastical law provided a thousand years ago. We
are tending toward efficiency in all human concerns upon the industrial
field; we are tending, more slowly but no less certainly, upon the
extension of efficiency to matters connected with the home.
Woman’s labor, or rather, the labor in the home, will not always remain
upon the low domestic stage: man’s labor moved out of the domestic
stage into the stage of factory and commercial house several centuries
ago. Scientific information and the care of experts are invaluable
in home management and child rearing, no less than in the rotation
of crops and the development of fatter hogs or slimmer dahlia stems.
Child rearing will slowly be included in matters where efficiency and
modern methods will prevail; and, if this involves in the end some
form of institutional raising, in greater or less degree, it should
be understood in advance that this will date from a period where our
culture is determined by human beings as well as by money; and that the
institutions of the future will be administered by those who today make
a success of their individual establishments, rather than by those who
today make a failure of the institutions committed to their care. The
fact that institutions for the feeble-minded today are a failure is no
proof that institutions for the sound-minded tomorrow will be failures.
No one recommends that the business of the U. S. Steel Company or the
great railroad lines be taken out of the office, and put back in the
individual homes. No one, in a more enlightened age, will desire to see
the anarchic and haphazard era of domestic rearing of children and of
domestic home management, by paid or unpaid domestics, ever return to
a world that has known a better system.
_The Ideal of Purity._--To the man facing the future, these things may
be said in conclusion. First, guard well your youth; it is your day of
growth, and not your day for sexual indulgence. Second, guard well your
mating period. It is not an hour for excessive indulgence. It is an
hour for engendering mutual happiness and satisfaction in yourself and
your mate; and an hour for intelligent direction of the upbringing of
your children, so that they may be free from the poisonous and vicious
ignorance that may have blighted or come near blighting your own life.
Third, broaden yourself constantly. Keep your body at the peak of its
physical fitness, and your mind at the peak of its mental fitness.
Bodily fitness will go far toward preparing you for mental fitness;
if you will feed your mind as carefully as you feed your body, with
the food of man’s best knowledge of the facts concerning the whole
universe, and his highest dreams as embodied in art and literature, you
will thereby make your soul or spirit fit as well.
You will, if you are wise, elect an ideal of purity. Purity means a
recognition that love is a matter, not of barter and sale, but of
desire permeating body and mind and spirit. Love looks backward, around
it, and forward: it is built upon the past, it controls today, it
builds for the future. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall
see god, said a great ancient teacher. It may well be that the pure
in heart will be blessed, because they shall see god within. Only by
a life fit in every particular shall man attain to a development of
that inner light, that innate godhead, that contribution toward the
development of the race’s highest idealism in practice and thought,
which is perhaps man’s highest achievement on this dusty planet.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Typos silently corrected, but inconsistencies in hyphenation have been
left unchanged.
Missing word “are” added to page 60: “Neither of these, as at present
conducted, are matters of ...”