MARRIAGE AND OTHER RELATIONSHIPS
IS PASSIONATE LOVE THE SUREST FOUNDATION FOR MARRIAGE?
“There is no subject,” says Bernard Shaw in the preface to _Getting
Married_, “on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than
marriage.” And though I disagree rather violently with Mr. Shaw’s
views about marriage, he is right here. We do talk dangerous nonsense,
which need not matter very much, if we did not think absurdly, and so
inevitably have to pay the fruit in wrong action. This explains, I
think, our curious levity, our unhappiness, and fierce refusal to face
facts.
We have infested our ideals with the poison of pleasure and turned away
from essential things. Marriage is not a religion to us—it is a sport.
I say this quite deliberately. I am sure we know better how to engage
a servant, how to buy a house, how to set up in business—how, indeed,
to do every unimportant thing in life, than we know how to choose
a partner in marriage. We require a character with our cook or our
butler, we engage an expert to test the drains of our house, we study
and work to prepare ourselves for business, but in marriage we take no
such sensible precautions; we even pride ourselves that we do not take
them. We speak of _falling in love_, and we _do fall_.
The conventions of to-day are false; they are bound up with
concealments or with an equally untruthful openness. It does not,
however, follow from this that mere destruction will be enough, that
everyone’s unguided ignorance will lead to success and freedom. The
_laisser faire_ system is as false in the realm of marriage as it
is in industry and economics. While equally false, though this is
rarely recognised, is the modern spiritual view of marriage that love
can be found only in perfect harmony of character between the wife
and the husband, _and is independent of duty_. It is true that love
differs from lust in its deeper insight into the personality, deeper
interest in character, as opposed to the inexpressive smooth outline
and “untrained” physical beauty of the body. But the character and
intellect may be studied and loved as self-centeredly, as much with a
view to the enjoyment of mental excitement, as the body itself.
Of all of which what is the moral? This:
In marriage, as in other things, we fasten our chains about our own
necks. We do not find what we desire because we do not know what we
want.
The very word love is used in so general and indiscriminate a way to
denote sometimes the most transitory impulse and sometimes the most
intense feeling, that a mass of misunderstanding arises. The emotion
which most often passes under the name of love is a maudlin, sickly
sentiment or passion founded on hypocrisy, which means nothing at
bottom but the desired enjoyment of a passion which is felt but not
understood, and which professes to be everything but that which it is
in reality.
With more courage to face truth, we should have a surer ideal; there
would be much less sentimentality, but much deeper feeling about
marriage. Our romance is slightly vulgar. Vulgarity is a sign of
weakness of spirit, that spirit which is “the life that carves out
life” as Nietzsche says.
We associate romance with courtship and not with marriage. “Thank God
our love-time is ended!” cried a north country bride on the day that
marriage ended her long engagement.
Now, I do not know whether this delightful story is true, but it does
illustrate the attitude of many ordinary couples, whose love adventure
ends at the very hour it should begin.
Every marriage ought to be a succession of courtships.
A very slight knowledge of existing marriages is sufficient to convince
even the most optimistic believer that true mating is hard. I do not
believe that most marriages are unhappy, but I do know that only the
very few are happy. With many perhaps, and even with those who are
passionate lovers, the attraction of sex always seems to fall short of
its end; it draws the two together in a momentary self-forgetfulness,
but for the rest it seems rather to widen their separateness. They are
secret to one another in everything; united only in the sexual embrace.
Can we, then, ever find perfect love? Is it not like exercise of the
body? You can develop it to a certain point, but not beyond, without
danger; and very slowly, with continued patient effort. Do we not need
exercise of the soul? I do not know. Often I feel I know nothing. To
some men and women it is all simple enough, a woman is just a woman
and a man is a man. The trouble begins when any woman becomes the one
desired woman and any man the one desired man.
There is gain and development in this selective tendency of Love—and
yet, if I am right, there is terrible danger lurking in the application
of this egoistic spiritual view.
We may not safely ask too much or too little from marriage or take too
high or too low a view of it.
I am not very hopeful of improvement. At least, not for a long time,
and never unless we learn to be more honest about ourselves and about
love.
In fear, we have tried to keep the blinds down so that love may be
decently obscured. Yet how can we ever begin to understand and deal
with these problems of sex unless we will admit all the instincts and
tendencies which ever lead us backwards to the more elemental phases of
life? The deepest of the emotions is sex, and its actions, like all the
emotions that are fundamental, may be traced into a thousand bye-paths
of the ordinary experience of each one of us; it exercises its
influence on every period of our development, and works subconsciously
to control our actions in endless ways that we refuse to acknowledge.
Hence the conflicts which manifest themselves so strangely and so
fiercely in our lives. The emotional-self refuses, at times, to be
controlled by the reason-self. Restraint cannot do much, and indeed,
often brings deeper evils. For our unconscious selves are stronger than
all the pretenses and guards we have set up by our conscious wills,
either as individuals to encourage our own conceit and egoism, or
collectively as a so-called civilized people in the hope of controlling
conduct.
That is why so much that is said to-day about sexual conduct is so
foolish. The real question is not what _people ought to do_, but what
they _actually do_ and _want to do_, and, therefore, are likely _to
go on doing_. It is these facts that the reformers of marriage almost
always fail to face.
To me, one thing, at least, is certain, the romantic view of marriage
has failed us.
But we cannot change the ideal of to-day unless we have ready a new
ideal to inspire our conduct. We cannot destroy a sanctuary unless we
first build a sanctuary.
There is a strange idea among some young people to-day that sexual
happiness can be gained by breaking away from all the traditional
bonds, it is the visible sign of our confusion as a people, and the
want of happiness in our lives. The new generation should not set at
naught the experience of the ages.
The individual household where both parents share in the common
interest of bringing up the children, is the foundation on which
marriage has been built up, and on which it must stand. If the
conditions of the home are seriously changed, and the bearing and
caring for children is no longer considered an essential part of
marriage, a change in marriage itself will follow. I do not think you
can hold the one if you let the other go. For Westermark is right, and
children should not be regarded as the result of marriage, but marriage
as the result of children. And love between men and women implies
duties and responsibilities that go out beyond themselves; without
this, even love of the most passionate kind, loses its quality and
tends to become an ephemeral or even a corrupt thing.
There is much stupidity in the view of many reformers of marriage
who fail to see that, however hard it is to live faithfully to the
obligation, and unchecked responsibilities of love, the old ideal of
marriage does so appeal to our emotional nature, that men and women are
seriously unhappy in trying to destroy it.
Not all who cry “It is useless,” can do without the limiting safeguards
of children and of legal marriage. We still feel the serpent’s sting of
jealousy and the old questions, “Where do you come from?” “What have
you been doing to-night?” “Who handled your body till daytime, while I
watched and wept?” “In what bed did you lie and whom did you gladden
with your smile?” are still felt, even if not uttered by the lips, of
the most emancipated husbands and wives. For our sex-judgments are not
intellectual, nor are they merely moral; they are not just questions of
understanding and forgiving, but they are also physical, of the nerves,
of the blood, of the fiercest instinct.
Fortunately it is easier to talk of love’s freedom, than it is to act
as if it ever could be free. And in spite of what advanced people say,
some feeling of duty in sex will always exist as long as it hurts us
at all to hurt others. The immorality that says, “Do what you desire
irrespective of others,” is as yet beyond most of us.
Attempts to solve these problems quickly are bound to fail.
Intellectual revolutionists are, I think too hopeful with regard to
what may be done to produce a harmony of sexual needs. The optimism
that once prevailed in regard to economics is being transformed to
sexual matters. Once people supposed that if every one followed his own
interests a harmony would automatically establish itself in the economy
of society. Now they tend to say the same about sex.
Intellectual views of life and what is right and wrong always act
to break people into groups, each struggling to explain everything
according to one theory, built on a single principle. And as the result
of caring so much for one thing, people seem quite unable to grasp
any facts that do not refer to their own particular reform; they are
not able even to consider it as part of a world in which there is
anything else. All the evil in marriage? is due to too large families
and populations pressing upon the food supply, we are told by one
class of enthusiasts, while others point to men’s tyranny over women.
Emancipation for women, with an equal moral standard, would have a
magical effect: men are all bad say some. The father is a parasite,
unnecessary except for his share in begetting the child; the mother is
the one parent. All would be well if legal marriage were abolished and
motherhood made free, is the view common among one class of reformers.
Eugenical breeding and sterilisation of the unfit is the remedy brought
forward by others. Many suggest economic changes and the endowment of
motherhood.
But the matter is not so simple as these reformers seem to believe.
And I doubt if any outward change is really capable of producing the
prompt kind of penny-in-the-slot results that its supporters claim that
it can. The complexity of marriage (in particular, the occurrence of
sexual disharmonies so present and active for misery to-day) is ignored
by all intellectual reformers. It is because they have no emotional
hold on life as a whole that they find it easy to squeeze all life into
their magic theories. For myself I can see no sure remedy—though in a
later essay I shall try to suggest a palliative: but were I asked to
state my deepest belief, I could say only “A few thousand years more of
development, a growth towards consciousness and a fuller understanding
of the meaning of life.”
MARRIAGE REFORM
Many people seem to be in fear that any change in the marriage laws
will destroy marriage. “Hands off! No tinkering with marriage!” they
cry in a panic of timidity and moral anger.
I marvel at this want of faith. Do they, indeed, believe that the
institution of marriage rests on a trembling quicksand, so that its
supporters are compelled to build a scaffolding of lies to sustain its
foundations?
The laws of marriage are only the register of what marriage is: they
do not control marriage. There are no laws, for instance, to regulate
the perfect love-unions of birds, whose faithfulness and family life
present a beautiful and high standard of conduct.
Let there be no mistake here. I have been told that I wish to destroy
permanent marriage, that I do not consider the welfare of children and
the best interests of the race. I deny these charges; they are untrue.
My ideal of marriage is one that many will call old-fashioned. It
demands the consecration of the mother in service to her husband, to
their children, and the home. That is why I advocate the recognition
and regulation of other forms of union, not because I have a low ideal,
but to prevent the degradation of marriage by forcing into it those who
do not desire, and, therefore, are unsuited for, its binding duties.
The immense failure of marriage to-day arises from the confusion of
our desires and our ceaseless search for individual happiness. We
have no firm ideal, no fixed standard of conduct either for women
or for men. And the existence of many standards of what ought to be
done; the liberty permitted to the man, the liberty permitted to the
woman; if the wife shall continue her work or profession or remain
at home dependent on the husband’s earnings; whether the marriage
shall be fruitful or sterile—these are but a few of the questions
left undecided. And thus to leave men and women unguided, with their
own ideas of what is good to do and what is evil, is the dry-rot very
surely destroying the ideal of marriage.
Every couple starts anew and alone, and the way is too difficult for
solitary experiments.
This modern delusion of looking at marriage as an individual affair is
of course, the essence of the selfish, egocentric habit of life—it
focuses desire on personal adventure and personal needs. With more
courage to face the realities of love we should have a surer ideal.
There would be less sentimentality, but much deeper feeling about
marriage.
This, then, is what I would teach: No longer must marriage be regarded
solely as a personal relationship. Marriage is a religious duty.
“To be mothers were women created, and to be fathers, men.”
This was the ideal which gave the breath of life to marriage among the
men and women in our earlier England, who were more fixed in character
and less selfish than we are to-day.
It is this ideal we have lost.
TO-DAY’S IDEAS ON MARRIAGE
ARE WE SEEKING VAINLY AFTER HAPPINESS?
The love-story of to-day differs in one essential way from the
love-story of yesterday. Yesterday’s love-story always had a youthful
hero and heroine, and ended with the marriage bells. To-day’s, which
is a far harder love-story to write, begins with marriage. Moreover,
the bride and bridegroom are rarely young, nor are they ravishingly
beautiful.
Earlier authors in short, shirked the real problem of marriage. They
ended where they should have begun. For the main difficulties, in that
always difficult adventure of the two learning to live as one, do
not lie in youth, the period of quick adaptation, of easy falling in
love. The trouble does not often begin in the courtship or honeymoon
days; but it comes later in the struggle to harmonise and bend the
character to the demands and lessons of marriage, and in the continued
effort of maintaining love _after knowledge of love has come_. There
is the difficulty. The preservation of love when all the passionate
preliminaries are over.
Love is not walking round a rose garden in the sunshine; it is living
together, working together. And the honeymoon is as trifling as the
hors d’oeuvre in comparison with wedded life, and as unable to satisfy
the deep needs of women and men. And the greatest difficulty rests in
the fact that very few of us understand what our deeper needs are.
Even to ourselves we are strangers. That is one reason why marriage is
always difficult.
You see so often the partner one falls in love with does not make a
good life companion. It’s all very well to moralise, but you can hardly
ever be certain beforehand how these relations will turn out. There is
physical attraction and passion, and there is affection—just being pals
with each other. Who is to know which is the more necessary—the better
for happiness of these two? You ought to have both, but few couples are
so fortunate as that. We are almost all of us divided in our desires
and our wills as also in our love.
The boys or girls to-day are, I think, more natural. There is much
greater openness and less pretence. Even our novelists frankly say that
every woman looks with special interest on a well formed man. There
is no convention marking this as improper, “the baser side of love.”
We Victorians were everlasting children in an everlasting nursery; we
did not play with love, but we fiercely refused seriousness towards
the fundamental emotions. Perhaps that is why we lost the old firm
tradition of marriage and its duties, and why we have succeeded in
putting nothing in its place.
The disease of our wills and the sickness of our souls has rust-eaten
into marriage. We are doing nothing because we are too frightened to be
serious. We have sought to drown our unhappiness and the exhaustion of
our souls, to fill emptiness with pleasure; to place the personal good
in marriage above the racial duty; to forget responsibility, and, in so
doing, inevitably we have turned aside from essential things.
We have missed happiness in trying to grab at it.
Cannot you see what is wrong? We are so terribly tired of this search
for something that we never find. We are like little lost children, we
run, this way and that, we cry and make much noise, in fear, seeking
for our mothers. Yes, our adventures are the tricks of the child who
fantasies so as to pretend that everything is right when in reality
everything is wrong.
Love is a dream to those who think but a terrible reality to those who
feel.
The frequent and tragic failure of so many marriages arises from a
confusion of our values and our undisciplined wills. In one way we
expect too much from love, while in another we expect too little. What
we have lost is any fixed standard of duty. I have said this before: I
must say it again.
Marriage has ceased to be a discipline, it has become an adventure.
It is, little as we may believe it, the search for deeper and more
perfect love that so often endangers love. Seeking, always for the one
satisfying mate, we must find a partner corresponding in every respect
to our ideal. The man in Mr. Hardy’s novel, “The Well-Beloved,” spent
forty years in trying to do this, and his ultimate failure is typical
of the experience of most of us.
Fools and blind, we neither understand nor seek the cause of our
failure.
We need a new consciousness of our social spirit and racial
responsibilities in marriage: the idea of handing down, at least as
much as we have received. We are the guardians of the Life Force. Let
us honour ideals of self-dedication; of fixed obligations of the one
sex to the other, of duties to our children long before they are born,
and let us spread the New Romance of Love’s Responsibility to Life;
then there will be in society in general and not in a mere fraction of
it, happiness in marriage and passionate parenthood.
WHY MEN ARE UNFAITHFUL
There is a question I would ask all wives, whose husbands having left
them, are to-day seeking relief in the divorce courts. What was it that
first sent your man away from you? What was it that first turned him
from the safe happiness of marriage to seek the restless unhappiness of
unregulated love?
It will not do to dismiss this question with the old unreasoning
condemnation of men; nor will it serve to talk of their polygamous
nature and uncontrolled passions. Let us look at the matter a little
more closely, and with greater regard to truth.
In marriage the woman dominates more often than usually is known. For
one thing she has the children on her side. I think marriage is more of
a duel than usually is acknowledged. One partner wins, kills the other,
kills all that makes joy and life—makes the one who conquers a captain;
the other—the conquered one, a servant, slave—what you will. It is so
always, more or less. And in this marital duel there is no quarter;
and, nine times out of every ten, it is the woman who holds the cards;
she who wins. If she is clever, she knows this—knows the game is in her
hands. But the dice she has to throw is her sex, and she has only been
allowed one throw! And when she has thrown wastefully—Yes, it is here
that disaster enters into marriage and makes tragedy of the game of
life.
But there is another side—and a side that is of immense importance to
women.
Undeniably the greatest function of any man in the life of the average
woman is to be the father of her child. All other things he means to
her are secondary to this. For this reason, after the birth of her
first child, she frequently ceases, though she does not know it, to
love her husband as a man, and for himself.
The feeling of a child against a woman’s bosom is more to her than
the kiss of a lover or the devotion of a husband. What is it that she
feels? It is a liberating power; a sensation of unaccustomed unity—like
a strong tide that carries her over everything, makes her unconscious
of the worry of the days. It is life itself. It irradiates all the
world about her, all that belongs to her—her very soul. She has become
one with life—a creator, as a god.
That is why so often the man—the husband and the father, finds himself
left outside this charmed circle of life.
And even when the marriage is childless (as happens most frequently in
the marriages that come to the divorce courts), this same passionate,
grasping maternity acts—indeed, acts sometimes with added fierceness
and even more disastrously. She mothers her man, but she does not love
him. She gives him the protection that she should have given to her
children but she holds back the inspiration and the spur that he most
needs from her.
The woman’s life so often is filled with attending her children or her
husband, whom she loves (I must press this home again), where she has
no children, not as a mate, but as a child. She ceases to consider him
as a man—to belong to him as completely as he belongs to her.
She holds back more and more of herself—the vital part that he wants,
while, at the same time, she demands more and more from him. The man
feels that he is losing, giving up his individuality with all that he
cares for most, and, after a period of loneliness and unhappiness,
broken, probably, with some bluster and conflict, he gives in and
begins not to care.
The result in the end is almost certain. The lower types of husband
from time to time, will break away and find compensation in wild
love. Some will seek distraction in work, or will develop a temper
and nerves. Other men of more refinement will suffer much more, till
they too break away at last; they will turn from the reality of life
to dreams, unless they too seek and find love and sympathy with some
woman, who, without the binding security of marriage, is more careful
to understand them and to love them for themselves.
Most wives have yet to learn the deeper responsibilities of love; and
this not at all in regard to their duties to their husbands, which most
often are too perfectly fulfilled, but in the more intimate and far
more exacting task of giving them spiritual freedom as well as sympathy
and understanding.
I believe that this failure on the part of so many wives, in holding
back just what the man most craves and seeks for, is the real cause,
to which all other causes are subsidiary, of that failure in the
continuance of the husband’s love, which brings so many marriages,
which started in happiness, to the disaster of the divorce courts.
In my opinion, the greatest cause of error is in women’s limited
experience which makes their judgments hard. While another cause arises
from the tendency, and already I have emphasised more than once (a
tendency due to a deep inner cause of sex difference) to throw the
whole blame for sexual sins upon men. Some women carry sex antagonism
like a flag, which they flourish in every wind. These are, of course,
a small minority, but the majority of women fail to take a wide, sane
view both on this question of the unfaithfulness of husbands and that
of the whole physical relationship of marriage.
And the remedy? Yes, that is the difficult matter. We cannot alter
these inharmonies of love by any cut-and-dried reforms. The expression
of sex is a question largely of understanding. Its regeneration must
begin with a movement, in particular, on the part of women, towards a
truer acknowledgment of their own natures and an acceptance of men’s
needs.
I dare to think of such a regeneration of Love, but it must come
through education in consciousness and a fuller understanding of life.
And by education must be understood all that influences the unconscious
as well as the conscious self, so that our full life may be lived in
harmony, and not with one half of ourself in enmity with the other
half.
WHY WIVES ARE UNFAITHFUL
It may, and I expect will, be said that I am looking at this question
of faithfulness in marriage from the man’s side only. This is not
because I do not see and sympathise with the woman’s position. I am
thinking really just as much of one partner as of the other. What I
wish to do is to focus attention. For this reason, I am insisting upon
the fact, of the wife’s coldness as being most often the first cause
which drives the husband from his affection and his duty. I do this
because it is just the real cause that is almost always neglected,
unrealised, in particular, by women themselves.
Women have been taught to believe, and do really feel, that by sexual
unfaithfulness a husband does them the cruellest possible wrong that a
man can do to a woman.
It is rare to find a woman who is not sexually jealous. To possess
and to hold, even when she has ceased to desire the possession, is a
quality that is exceedingly common in wives. And our iniquitous divorce
laws, with their obsession with sexual offences, help to maintain this
view of marriage.
But is the man ever wholly to blame? It is so easy to talk
self-righteously of the unfaithfulness of men—of their polygamous
nature and their attraction to wild love.
I never heard such nonsense. Men are the most faithful creatures alive.
After all, almost in every case, the man has given away only what
his wife has shown him she does not want for herself. As long as she
desires him, indeed, often, _as long as she will put up with him_, her
man will stick to her—yes, _stick with the closeness of the proverbial
burr_.
Most English wives always are acquiescent, rather than passionate
in the sexual embrace. Even when in love, they are shy and often
unresponsive. Hiding what they feel, rarely showing their husbands
that they want them with any real desire. Then, after a few years of
marriage, his embraces are either evaded or repulsed, if not, they are
_suffered as a duty_.
Everyone who does not blink facts, knows that the vast majority of
marriages are unhappy owing to the coldness of the wife. Very often
this starts from the beginning of marriage. The wife is disappointed:
she finds the husband different from the lover of her dreams.
In the story of _Beauty and the Beast_ we have material out of which
part of the great sex difficulty can be explained. In the fairy story,
the husband, who before marriage looks like a beast, after marriage,
becomes a prince. In real life the story is inverted. There is a
deluding force in the mere skin and limbs of those of the opposite sex
at the time when maturity is reached which may give princely attributes
to those who would be seen as beasts at other times. The prince seen as
a beast after marriage is a tragedy into which the romantic, ignorant
girl must beware of drifting. The man who most boldly plays up to the
romantic part expected of him, reciprocating to the perhaps unconscious
encouragement of the girl—is not the man who will be most agreeable
to live with. I believe there is real danger in the sentimental view
of love that is common to most girls. They do not know the poverty of
feeling that loudly expressed sentiment may hide. The defect of many
unfaithful lovers is not sensuality, but sentimentality. The lower
types of lovers are strangely, almost incredibly sentimental.
It cannot, I think, be denied that sexual anaesthesia is present in
many women and there would seem to be evidence that even where it is
not present before experience of love, it arises _after marriage_. Any
number of wives are unable to give themselves up to the sexual act in
such a way as to derive from it real satisfaction and the gladness
and health that it should give. This is a very grave matter. The evil
would be less if these frigid women did not marry, but as a rule they
do marry. It is a curious fact that women who sexually are cold, are
sought as wives with greater frequency than are more passionate women,
probably because their easily maintained reserve acts as a stimulus to
the man’s desire. Men are persistently blind in these matters. They
want response to their own love in their wives, but most of them are
very much afraid of any woman who possesses the strong passion to
enable her to give such response.
In short, as we found in the previous essay on unfaithful husbands,
woman gains her fulfilment from the man when he gives her his child.
But when she turns from him, she leaves him unsatisfied. The drama
and the novel are burdened with this problem, which, indeed, intrudes
itself on every hand.
We have, by our wrong ideals, for long been inducing an entirely
perverted view, which regards physical desire as something of which
women should be ashamed, and the sex act as a thing in itself degrading
and even disgusting—the nasty side of love and of marriage, something
to be submitted to, indeed, in order to bear children or for the sake
of the loved man whose passions must be allowed, but not a thing for
health and desire—for the delight and perfection of the woman herself.
This false view, I affirm again, is the blight that has been, and still
is, the destroyer of sexual happiness and health. And this fear and
denial of love; this separation between the passion allowed to the man
and not allowed to the woman, is the serious side of this problem of
marriage. For the hideous disguises and constant lying, too often made
necessary to both the partners, owing to the wife’s entire failure
to realise the physical necessities of love, makes domestic life an
organised hypocrisy.
We fight and fight to be free. Yet ever the concealed antagonism lays
fresh hold, upon both the husband and the wife. It crops up in many
and curious ways, imposing its poison and destroying life—the deep,
deep-hidden rage of unsatisfied love.
The need for love will not often allow itself to be inhibited without
claiming payment. And if desire so frequently manifests itself in
abnormal forms of the coarsest and commonest dissipation, this is
almost always to be explained by some hindrance opposed to its normal
expression. When women face facts and realise this truth, many things
in the conduct of husbands will be clear that hitherto have been hidden
from them.
There is, however, another aspect of this question which now must
be considered. For to leave the matter here would be the greatest
injustice. A further question must first be asked. Why is this coldness
in women so prevalent? Why does the desire of even the loving wife so
often cease towards her husband? It is a difficult question to answer.
One reason has been given already. We have noted women’s false attitude
to love; an attitude which, in so many cases, makes her ashamed of
expressing openly the passions she feels. Yet there is, I think another
and much deeper part of the truth that is fairly clear. Love is a more
difficult thing for women than it is for men. Each man is able to
enforce his sexual desire upon his wife _at a time when she feels no
desire, whereas she cannot gain her desire unless he gain his_. We may,
perhaps, trace back to this cause, many of the feelings of disharmony
and waning of desire which injures the woman’s power to love.
I must follow this a little further. In marriage the husband, usually
exercises his marital privileges _when he wishes_. He does not think
sufficiently of, or understand sufficiently as he should, the wishes of
his wife. For what _she says_ must never be accepted as representing
really what she wishes. It is very hard for any man to understand how
almost impossible it is for a woman, if she is good, to be frank about
sexual desire. Both our laws, and opinion and custom have strengthened
the view—not usually openly acknowledged but usually felt—that the
husband has the right to approach his wife when he desires. Her right
is not equally considered, too often it is taken for granted that
she has no desires or real sex-needs to be considered. The result
is inescapable. The man’s passion finds relief while she remains
unsatisfied. She is in just the same position as someone who is forced
to eat a meal without appetite.
And inevitably this leaves her unresponsive, makes her irritable,
capricious, and quite incomprehensible to her husband.
Of course, this disharmony, is not always conscious even to the woman
herself, who usually fails quite to understand what is the matter or to
connect her restless unhappiness with the stirrings of her unsatisfied
love. The dyspeptic does not know that he wants food: he turns away
from it. In the same way the woman turns away from love. She gives in
to the inhibiting influences and accepts the abysmal misconception into
which one sex has fallen in regard to the other.
This difference in the power for sexual sacrifice between the two sexes
is, I have frequently thought, one of the gravest causes of misery in
marriage. It will take very long to over come it. Only as we advance
in refinement and knowledge of love can this antagonism in the sex act
lessen, as the woman gains in frankness and the man comes to know how
to arouse and keep aflame her desire.
For woman is passionate. There is no greater lie than the so often
reiterated assumption that she “_is naturally and organically
frigid._”[4] We must remember that this view of woman’s coldness in
love is of comparatively modern growth. Yet it is a lie that will
take a real revolution in our moral ideas to uproot. It is, in large
measure, at least, the result of our pretences—the horrible, grasping,
destroying, back-wash of shams. It is the result of the way in which
women have lived, with blinds drawn down on most of the unruly
disturbance and elemental forces in love.
The wife whose love is turned away from her husband finds substitute
satisfaction in her home and her children, if she has them, or, failing
these, in dress and amusement and other outside interests; or in a
lover, who gives her new hope of finding satisfaction in love. And the
poor bewildered husband is quite unaware of the cause of this coldness.
He cannot understand his wife’s unfaithfulness. He does not know that
his unthinking acceptance of her subordination to his desire, however
gladly given, is what has, and indeed must, exhaust the passion in her.
For I do not deny, as already I have stated, that sexual coldness is
exceedingly common on the part of the wife to-day. What I do deny
is that this is a natural condition; rather is it a symptom of the
mistakes of our civilisation that have cheated women and men alike of
health and happiness in love.
I affirm again, that this idea of coldness in love being natural
to women is entirely false. Complete absence of satisfaction in
love cannot be borne, especially when living in the close intimacy
of married life, by any woman, through a period of years, without
producing serious results on the body and the mind. It is in the
blighting effects of this pseudo-celibacy that we must seek the cause
of the sterility of so many married women’s lives.
Do I put this other side of the problem of marital-celibacy—the woman’s
side—in a strong light. Yes I do, but I put it faithfully as I have
come to know it from the facts I see daily around me.
It is hard to say how often, and how many wives have put from them
the temptation to seek happiness in love _at any price_; no less hard
is it to compute to what extent the transformation of this suppressed
sexual passion is expended in passion in other channels. We see it in
a hundred cases to-day. In every instance where passion is called for
woman tends by her nature to be carried further than man.
There is, of course, no exact measuring in these matters, but who among
us can dare to say that the harm done by the deprivation of love is
greater in the lives of men than of women? I doubt not it is the other
way. We hear so much of the sex-needs of husbands that we have become a
little wearied. We accept so much for them as being right and natural,
but who shall calculate the number of equally right and natural
impulses that women have resisted?—resisted until the very instinct to
love tends in time to become dulled and blighted.
I am willing to grant, indeed, that few women experience that obsessing
longing of the man to grasp the woman of his desire, nor do they, as a
rule, I think suffer the same terrible physical depression that causes
incapacity for control. I am not certain here: women are less open
about these matters than men are, and one hesitates to judge other
women by oneself. We are dealing with a question very difficult to
solve. We may find some explanation in the fact that many passionate
women have had to learn how the energy of the sexual impulse may be
diverted into other activities. It is a lesson that possibly men will
have to learn. Yet I do not know, the price women have had to pay has
been heavy and the results gained very poor. And does not this denial
of love entail a waste of life?—that is what really matters. It is very
hard to know the truth.
Here, then, is the question I would put to men who are suffering to-day
from the unfaithfulness of women. I would ask them. Have they taken
sufficient trouble to understand, both on the physical and psychical
side, the sexual nature of woman, which is much more complex than
their own? The art of love is not understood by men. If they paid more
attention to this subject marriage would be freed from the strongest
and most frequently operating cause that brings it to disaster.
But this will never be done until we have ruled out from our moral
conscience the idea of “the body as the prison of the soul.”
I have often asked myself if this misconception is not the real cause
of all sex trouble?
SHOULD DOCTORS TELL?
Of the many differing opinions concerning the question whether doctors
should reveal medical secrets, none that I know have been more
interesting, in particular to women, than that of a local practitioner
(whose name I have forgotten) who spoke at a Conference of doctors
met to consider this question. In opposing with admirable frankness a
resolution for the continuance of the practice of professional secrecy,
he asked the straight question, whether “a bounder” should be allowed
to live and his wife and child to die?
For here we touch at once the grave difficulty of the position. The
discussion, as is evident, was concerned more particularly with the
position in regard to venereal diseases.
The whole question has, indeed, been brought before public attention
in connection with the recommendation of the Royal Commission on
Venereal Diseases that a communication made by a medical practitioner
with regard to these diseases and to guard the innocent from infection
should be regarded as a privileged communication, and the law of libel
be so modified as to give this safeguard.
Now, on the face of it, this would seem a simple matter. And the
question I want to ask is, why the professional medical voice of this
country has pronounced so emphatically against it? I know, of course,
the reason that is given, that the divulging of a patient’s secret,
without his or her consent, and even if for a good reason, must weaken
confidence—not only the patient’s confidence in the particular doctor
who “told,” but the confidence of the public in the whole medical
profession.
I do not think this reason bears any close investigation. Confidence
is destroyed quite as surely, though probably not so quickly, by
suppression of truth as by revealing it.
No, I believe we have to look deeper for the reason to explain this
attitude of medical hiding.
These diseases are set apart from all other sicknesses of our bodies.
For this reason, in considering them, moral considerations become
confused with practical values. And I do not see quite how this is to
be avoided. There is however, the gravest danger from such an attitude
which rests upon hidden personal prejudices, and is not dependent on
the facts of the case. Such an attitude leads inevitably to concealment
of truth, which is specially disastrous here, because it is absolutely
essential that these diseases, if they are to be cured, should be met
in the open and grappled with methodically and thoroughly.
For greater clearness, I may state the matter thus: There are three
attitudes that may be adopted towards sexual disease. First, that of
the pure moralist, who says only “This is a sin to be punished.” On
the opposite side is the purely utilitarian, who says, “This is only a
disease to be cured.” But both attitudes may be alike wrong or, more
correctly, the truth lies midway between the two. The disease, as a
disease, needs to be cured. This is the first step with which nothing
should interfere. But far different and much more complex is the
treatment required to alter the actions that lead to the disease.
As a first step, public opinion ought to condemn too late marriage,
instead of recommending it on economic grounds. The mania for making
economics the deciding factor in conduct should surely cease: the
falsity of this view has been exposed by many great writers, but much
stronger is the condemnation that must be given here by all who can
understand the evils that it has wrought in our sexual lives. Late
marriages must be one of the causes contributing to men’s use of
prostitutes before marriage.
We have to find a way out, to silence our shrieks of blame, and to give
up many of our old pretences. You can never get things right until you
honestly face them.
Women are the worst sinners. And I say, without hesitation, that it is
men’s fear of women, especially the husband’s fear of his wife, that is
the greatest hindrance to openness in this connection. It is women’s
attitude which holds us back in progress towards health.
Let me give an illustration. I attended recently a meeting where a
paper was read on the morals of men, in connection with the alarming
increase of venereal diseases since the war. The reader of the paper,
being a woman doctor as well as a feminist, took the wise view that the
most urgent question was not the reform of the men, but staying the
spread of the diseases. In the discussion that followed it was plainly
evident that few of the audience—all women—agreed with her. These were
women workers, who had read about, and to some limited extent, at any
rate, thought and studied, these questions. Yet the general view was
that men ought to be punished. One speaker, who stated that she was
married, said that no true woman could or ought to forgive a husband
who had become infected with a contagious disease.
Now, it is this view, here so crudely expressed, that has done so much
harm in the past. It explains also the continuance of the medical
secrecy that has acted so strongly against the stamping out of this
scourge of civilisation. Such an attitude of blame and unforgiveness on
the part of women has to be changed before the truth can be told safely.
Women are mainly responsible for the secrecy of these diseases. And
what is the result? Because these infectious diseases are secret they
are largely uncured.
It is, of course, easy to understand the attitude taken up by women.
Blame of men is not easily avoided; yet is there not confusion in
women’s minds?
The sin that a husband commits against his wife, a man against the girl
he is to marry—yes, and a son against the trust of his mother—is in
being unfaithful. Having caught the disease is a misfortune. The effect
must not be blamed by itself.
Let me illustrate this point of view by considering a different case.
Your child gets scarlet fever by an act of direct disobedience—the sin
of his age. He stays from school, without leave of absence, and goes to
play at a house he has been forbidden to enter. Would you, because of
his disobedience, refuse to pity and nurse him? Rather, would you not
forget his sin and desire only to help and heal him?
Do you see what I mean now? It is not that I would condone immoral
conduct in the husband or the lover that I plead for pity and
understanding on the part of women who love them.
Few men are intentionally evil. They do not even always act foolishly
in this question of infectious diseases because they are wantonly
careless. Often they are fully alive to the danger that may result to
their wives, or the girl they wish to make their wife, from their own
infection.
I repeat, they are not necessarily bad men, and they love their wives
and children; but they are cowards. All men are cowards when it comes
to facing the blame and misunderstanding of the woman they love.
If they cannot rely on the woman’s pity and help, few men will dare to
tell the truth; nor will they be willing to let the doctor tell the
facts for them. And if the truth cannot be told, it is very unlikely
that the infection will not be spread to others. This may lead to the
birth of diseased children, and who may say that in this case the crime
is the man’s alone?
Why can’t we face the situation now, when we are trying to tidy up our
social life? Concealments that may have been necessary in the old time
of ignorance are surely impossible now.
Is the evil to remain hidden, uncorrected, from one generation to
another? Hidden evil multiplies itself, and the sum is national
deterioration.
The mistake has been the muddleheaded thinking that has obscured the
plain and comparatively simple question of cure with the entirely
opposed problem of moral appraisement and punishment: a confusion and
losing of the way that has led us all inevitably into a forest-tangle
of difficulty, of lies and silences, and unanswerable questions.
And this heritage of wrong thinking is still compassing our feet,
binding them and throwing us down, as soon as we try to move a step
onwards: and until that entanglement is broken through, by bringing the
whole complicated position into the light of understanding and honest
thinking, the evil will go on, unchecked by our futile tearings here
and there at withered branches. The supporting stem of concealments and
dishonesty will flourish, and the devastating evil will continue to
spread.
THE MODERN WIFE AND THE OLD-FASHIONED HUSBAND
The old-fashioned husband is always older than his wife. If he is not
old in years, he is old in character. His desires and instincts are
aged. She is young because she is alive.
He wants to give her advice, but she will not listen. He desires to
guide her, or he must think that he does so. He protects her. Thinks
of her as young and precious and tender. He does not speak of certain
things before her. He caresses her, he pays her bills, gives her
presents, and treats her in the way, in which she has learnt not to
treat her children.
For the old-fashioned husband is conservative and hopelessly romantic.
The fact is he ever seeks in his wife the image of his mother, the
first woman whom he worshipped, and whose virtues remain as an
unforgettable pattern, ever to be repeated. He sees her darning
socks (horrible and useful occupation), making beds, dusting the
china, arranging flowers, brushing her husband’s overcoat and
smoothing his hat, fussing needlessly over everything. These
pictures are always interfering with the image of his wife—the new
woman of to-day, with her restless and noisy movements, her slang
and violence, her knowledge, capable management and clearness of
vision-that-look-you-straight-in-the-eyes air that belongs now to wives.
Why have women altered so greatly? Why have women gone on and left
their husbands behind?
It is common to refer everything back to the war. Certainly the war did
this—it sent both women and men into difficult schools but the men’s
school was harder and quite different from that of the women.
If the war had a devastating effect, the peace has likewise had for
women its revolutionary consequences. We all know what the war did. It
took women out of their homes. The feminists rejoiced to see women in
munition factories, on the platforms of trams, squeezed into government
offices, hoeing and driving the plough. Then the peace threw them
back; closed the open doors, cut off the day of financial prosperity,
re-introduced them to their children, if they had any, and to their
husbands.
And now what happened? What effect had this on the desires of women and
men?
Why, the husbands yearned for the old order of home and wife and
children. For the men had fought, they had experienced the uttermost
bitterness of life. Their petrified imagination had had no new ideals.
They wanted nothing changed. For them a terrible interlude was over, a
nightmare passed, that must be forgotten. But the non-combatant women
had not experienced war; they had only looked on. For many of them a
glamour of patriotic achievement in various kinds of work, which they
much preferred to the old domestic duties, added to the lure of high
wages, had thrown a cloak of romance over the war-period. They had
nothing to forget. The last thing they wanted was to go back, all their
desire was set on going forward.
Here then, is the reason why to-day there are so many modern wives with
old-fashioned husbands.
These war-trained women are very efficient; they impose their will on
everyone; they are attractive and very honest, but sometimes rather
aggressive with their assurance and massed information. They go to and
fro from their homes, when they like and how they like. The husband
knows almost nothing of his wife’s friends. He supposes it is all
right. But he understands that he cannot stop her, cannot control
her interests. She makes his house her home, is his friend and dear
companion, but she does not stay in his charge. Often he feels like a
stranger, helpless, not knowing what to do.
Wives are now almost more independent than husbands used to be. “I want
to do it, therefore, I must do it,” is their acknowledged cry. They
are on such good terms with life and with themselves that they cannot
imagine another view—the old view of the woman sacrificing herself.
There are quite a lot of things they won’t do; they are very simple
and straightforward about them.
Nowadays it is not fashionable for even young unmarried girls to
remain in the guarded shelter of the home. Old-fashioned fathers
and brothers, are sometimes alarmed at the freedom of friendship
allowed—the light-hearted pairing off. Life is a game, a dance, like
the figure in the lancers where you “visit” and waltz away, but then
come back to do the same thing with another partner. Yet these girls
are not without hearts; but they realise that they must know men before
they can choose the one man to whom they may give themselves. They
have almost nothing in common with the boneless emotional heroines
of the past. They are very practical and know that love will not pay
the baker’s bills, and after realising all this, they have schooled
themselves not to fall in love carelessly.
They look all life squarely in the face, understand their duties,
what they will do and will not do, in a way that may be hard, but is
admirably sane and admirably honest.
Here is an incident. An exceedingly modern girl was engaged by some
ill-chance to an old-fashioned man. She came once to talk with him of
her future and his. She was not fond of children and therefore, thought
she ought not to have any. Gently he placed his hand over hers, “That
will be as God wills, my darling.” She sprang from him, “It won’t,
Ronald, that’s not true, it will be as I arrange.”
It used to be so different. The old-fashioned girl could never have
spoken with such frankness. Wife or maid she was always younger than
the man she loved. She studied him, listened to him, quoted him. She
lived only in and through him. _At least that is what he thought._
He did not know that she did not really listen, was tired of his
stories, not interested in his business or his friends. All her seeming
submission and acceptance were used to hold him.
The opinions of the old-fashioned woman were quotations from authority;
her motto was obedience, but her practice was sweet rebellion. Very
rarely was she honest. Her eyes were so blinkered that she saw nothing
that she did not wish to see.
No, I am not sorry for old-fashioned men. They remain so childishly
blind. Let them grow up, or at least, conceal their paleolithic ideas.
The new types of modern women face the future with laughter and the
present with quickly responsive feeling. They give still to the
world the essential gift of the eternal feminine, though they are
cutting away the worn-out unreasonable exaggerations of perverted
femininity—the coldness of the vicious woman, the unkindness of the
grabbing woman, the ignorance and submission of the old-fashioned good
woman. They are able to see everything and to help in everything,
without being deceitful, without being dulled.
THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN AND HIS YOUNG WIFE
Everyone is busily trying to explain why there are so many unhappy
marriages at the present time, but few people seem to realise that one
of the most prolific causes has been the comparatively recent tendency
of women to marry out of their class. We all know that all social
distinctions were in abeyance during the war, and even afterwards.
Normal class separations, conventional standards, old careful habits of
conduct have been largely broken through at a time of great uncertainty
and many changes.
Some of us hoped that this new co-operation which seemed to be
springing up between men and women of different social classes would
lead to permanent changes. We forgot that excitement is the most potent
intoxicant, and that after excitement there is usually a falling back
into dullness and apathy. But certainly for a time there was quite
a new loosening of the guiding-rein of reason, that has allowed the
horses of impulse and instinct freer than ever before to pull the car
of ourselves and our fates in this direction and in that, just as they
chose.
The many misfit marriages bear witness to the excited condition of
women.
And it ought not to be difficult to realise, with the least gift of
imagination, the conflict and the unhappiness, almost necessarily
resulting, from such unions, entered into during that period of
topsy-turvy conditions, between the man who had “risen” and the
more complicated type of modern girl—the girl of brains and nerves,
passionate, intellectually emancipated and delighting in her new-gained
freedom; yet, at the same time, fastidious, ruled by traditions and
inherited habits, which crop up unexpectedly, with a conservatism that
is neither acknowledged nor reckoned with.
The men who in commerce or in war had a meteoric success have, in many
cases, fallen back; they are but clerks, shop-assistants, artisans.
They themselves, and everything belonging to them seem different. While
they were accepted as gentlemen, because of what they had done or the
money they had made, they married “above them” as the phrase is. And
now when the money is spent and what they did no longer remembered,
they cannot find work that will enable them to maintain the outward
show of being a gentleman. The intoxication of excitement is over, and
their wives complain, not only of their position, but of them.
The temporary gentleman and his young wife, in many cases, are finding
that it needs a lot of grit and a lot of duty to keep in love. For
the rose-coloured glasses of courtship have been replaced by the blue
goggles of matrimony. They are already unhappy, though they expected
happiness. You see, their love has been tested by the love-destroying
test of poverty. And these difficult days have cast their homes into
disorder.
We have all felt the world’s wave of trade depression: the world’s
difficulties have dealt a blow, causing a leak to spring in many a
frail boat of domestic happiness, so that its inexperienced navigators
no longer can exercise control over the journey.
Now it is customary to blame the wife. Always it is the woman’s fault.
She is, or ought to be, the home-maker. While no one seems to consider
how much depends on the character, or conditions, of the home she is
asked to make.
The boarding-school-educated and college girl has never been trained
to perform or to endure the difficult, necessary duties of the poor
man’s home. In their girlhood’s homes and luxurious schools, everything
was done for them. That was in the old, almost-forgotten days of cheap
domestic service.
In no other direction, perhaps, has there been so great and so
far reaching changes as in the homes of the so-called upper classes.
In a sense, to-day we have no homes, only places in which we sleep,
and sometimes eat. For the domestic work of preparing the food and
keeping the home as a place to live in and not to escape from has, in
great measure, ended; duties which once it was every woman’s pride
to do well, have been allowed to slip, as far as possible, into the
hands of hired experts. In the old days cooking and housekeeping, and
even house-cleaning, were known to all women. Every wife was expected
to enter into competition with other wives in the important matters of
making bread and cakes, and in making jams and jellies and puddings.
But the home, with its old full activities, has passed out of the hands
of the mistress. So to-day a girl often finds herself forced to learn
the very elements of the routine day of the wage-earner’s wife. And the
duties that have to be learnt are many of them disagreeable as well as
immensely tiring and monotonous to unaccustomed hands.
I do not, however, believe that the knife-and-fork aspect of these
marriages is the fundamental aspect. It is love itself that is at
fault. The strain and the jar of daily living under these difficult
restless conditions have been too great, especially for the women.
The passing from one way of living, from one station of society to
another, is always a hard and unpleasant process. We do not always know
it or admit it, even if we _do know_, but the small, almost unnoticed
differences in habits and manners are harder to tolerate than many a
more fundamental cleavage.
I want to labour this point. The most frequent causes of trouble in
those marriages where there is poverty and a restricted life, are born,
I am certain, out of the daily fret of uncomfortable and cheap living
together, out of small ugly minor habits of omissions, and stupidities.
Romantics may deny this, but what most wears and frays the love of
wives are just trifles so small that very rarely is their adverse
action directly noticed. But they give an escape for the concealed
hostility, and set up an almost indecent and fearfully intolerant
irritation. Dirty finger nails, the murdering of words, or making
a noise when you eat soup, may be much harder to bear than real
unkindness and anger. The failure to rise and give up a chair or to
open a closed door may seem greater neglect to a wife than the absence
of money to buy presents. The roughness of the “rough diamond” becomes
unbearable. Things that once did not seem to matter, now matter
tremendously.
Of course this is illogical, but then love is illogical.
And month by month as it passes makes the marriage more broken. The
disappointment goes deeper though the irritation may, perhaps, be
less frankly expressed. This is the time of the real danger. It is
the wife’s own love that is failing her, much more than anything her
husband may do or not do.
The difficulty of finding suitable work, the differences in friends and
in the accustomed spheres of life, could be overcome were it not for
the _unconscious want of will to overcome them_. The man may feel that
he would do better farming in Canada than here. It is a very certain
indication that the woman has ceased to love him wholeheartedly if
she objects to accompany him on the ground that all her friends are in
England.
Love does not hesitate: it delights to give up and to sacrifice.
You will see what this means: It is rather the _hidden feelings that
make conscious social difference_, that act and are far stronger than
the difference itself.
The unacknowledged failure in Love, not anything that happens
outwardly, is the real trouble that gnaws at the root of content in
their marriages, and rots and breaks the bond.
Yet there is a bright side to these marriages even when they fail. The
socially adventurous, the breakers of conventions, must expect trouble;
but they may console themselves by reflecting that they are pioneers in
opposing dead traditions. Only the tall trees sway in the breeze, the
dwarf plants are ingloriously safe.
IS MARRIAGE TOO EASY?
On the subject of marriage I have written again and again, not alone
in these essays, but in many of my other books. I would, however, wish
to say now, and with all the power I have, that in England, marriage
is made too easy. If some of the restrictions which are placed against
the breaking of the marriage bond were transferred to the time when the
bond is made it would be well.
We prevent too late. Always we run to shut the stable door after the
horse is stolen.
Many amazing marriages are made, in particular, by the very young who
to-day refuse, more fiercely than even before, any guidance from the
old; reckless marriages, entered into by those who have known each
other for a few days only before marrying for life.
An ever-increasing freedom and independence for the young has certainly
had rather a startling moral result. It has been shewn that for all
ordinary young men and women intimate association with each other in
college, in business, in workshops, and factories, and in play, turns
them with extreme readiness to love making. Now I am very far indeed
from wishing to apportion blame, but I do hold that new conditions
demand—not only changes in our thoughts and judgment, but revision of
the laws formulated to restrict conduct.
A minister of religion stated publicly, not very long ago, “I have had
to marry many couples who admitted to me they knew little about each
other. I could do nothing. I was not allowed to refuse marriage.”
The many marriages made in haste and under the pressure of sudden
emotional urgencies, are a sign of the nervous condition of the
times. The customary criticisms of reason are not heard, or not until
the emotional storm has subsided. This is, of course, a condition
not infrequent in love, but in these rushing and exciting days of
dancing-partners and jazz courtships, it is greatly exaggerated, such
marriages may not unfortunately bear the scrutiny of minds restored to
reason. Living together is found to be a different and far harder thing
than dancing together. And this has led to the unprecedented demand for
divorce which should cause no surprise or lamentation, but should urge
us forward to face the situation, like spurs in the flesh of a tired
horse. For the disgrace is, not that these marriages should end, but
that they should ever have begun.
We English are too afraid of preventative interference: we wait until
something is very wrong indeed and then we punish.
It would be salutary for us to consider the more careful regulations of
other lands. In France, for instance, and in Belgium no encouragement
is given for hurried marriages such as we permit. Official enquiries
and the consent of parents and guardians are considered necessary. From
the start the greatest care is exercised. _Fiançailles_ (engagements)
are regarded as serious family events, more binding and more sacred
than anything to which we are accustomed. Both the engagement
and the marriage are affairs of the utmost importance to the two
families concerned as well as to the young people themselves. There
are discussions and careful arrangements, and months of testing of
suitability for life-partnership, during which the future husband and
wife get to know one another before being tied by marriage. Perhaps,
this is why the crime of bigamy is very rare in France, and there is no
such thing known as cases for breach of promise of marriage.
I know, of course, the many and great evils that are attendant on the
French system, but to me it seems that these could easily be avoided
as they arise entirely out of property considerations and the wife’s
dowry—considerations which so inevitably act disastrously on moral
conduct.
It would, I am certain, lessen the chance of endless unhappiness in
marriage and prevent many divorces if some more fixed inquiries,
with—in the case of any one (shall I say, under twenty-five?) the
consent of one parent of either party, if living, if not, that of a
guardian, were obligatory before the marriage could be entered into. Or
if the young will not accept this parental authority, marriage could be
made conditional, except under very special reasons, on the betrothal
months having lasted for a fixed and sufficiently long period: at least
inquiry should be made as to the amount of knowledge the partners have
gained of each other. I would recommend these reforms to all who are
concerned for the future of marriage.
Nor need the change be difficult or would it entail any great
alterations in the machinery of the law. We appoint a King’s Proctor
to inquire into domestic details to prevent unsuitable marriages being
broken, why not change his duties to prevent unsuitable marriages being
made?
I would urge also that Commandments of Marriage are formulated to be
read to every couple at their betrothal and again before the wedding
ceremony takes place, as is done to some limited extent in France and
Belgium and in one or two other countries. This is another duty which
might be undertaken by the department of the King’s Proctor.
Here, then, is a practical way in which we might wisely copy other
civilisations whose customs are more carefully planned to safeguard
marriage and help the young in right living.
I must press home this question of the dangers of too easy marriage,
though I risk wearying my readers by repetition. The facilities we
give the young for marrying in haste, is, I affirm again, the cause
mainly responsible in the greater number of marriages that come to
the disaster of the Divorce Courts. This I have proved already. It is
responsible also for many cases of bigamy, a crime which has increased
alarmingly in the last years. Our law of breaches of marriage promises,
with its frequent misuse and extortion of hushmoney, is another cause
dependent on our stupid neglect to regulate marriage. It leads to many
unsuitable marriages being made, which very often have their fatal
sequel of separation or divorce.
Nor does the disaster end here. Our present careless laws are certainly
acting to bring marriage itself to discredit. We hurry young people
within its bonds, freeing them from all obligations to their families
or to society in this matter of choosing their life’s partner, and then
later, if disaster overtakes them, with callous irony we say, “you have
made your bed, you must lie on it.”
If we desire really to preserve marriage, let us treat marriage with
seriousness. As I have said in another of these essays—Marriage is not
considered a vocation: it has become a game. I would urge practical
and prompt action. We are, I think, bound to realise that if we are
to succeed in freeing our society from the evils which all of us are
deploring, our attention must shift from attempts to _punish after
wrong has been done_, to removing the causes that _lead certainly to
wrong being done_.
In other words we have to formulate more practical and helpful laws.
Even more important is to change public thought, cleansing men and
women from their desire to punish and replacing instead the desire to
help and to understand. Nothing else, in my opinion, can avert even
greater disasters of license in the future than those we are facing.
PASSIONATE FRIENDSHIPS
I had wished to write these essays without too frequent mention of the
war. I find, however, that such avoidance is almost impossible. For the
war has, in the most effective way, made prominent all the problems of
sexual conduct with which I am dealing, has done this so effectively
that some way out must be found. New and even startling changes have
come and are coming, and have to be faced. Certainly our judgments
can never be the same. Many who never before thought about these
things have been made to think. All of us have seen more plainly the
ineffectiveness of much that always before we had accepted. No longer
can we cover our eyes with the comfortable mid-Victorian bandages.
There has ended for every one of us our blind-man’s-buff game with life.
We are caught: and it is well. The unwritten commandment of sexual
conduct, that anything may be done as long as the doing of it may be
hidden, can never, I think, again be accepted, unless, indeed, by
the very good, whose entire lack of humour makes them able to accept
anything.
Whether we like it or not most of us have got now to muck-rake into the
dark bye-paths of conduct.
Now, it is easy to say that this urgent concern with sexual questions
arises from decadence. I do not believe it. To me it has always seemed
that this growing demand for inquiry affords the surest hope for the
future. Much is being thrown on to the scrap-heap of life. This is
done only when there is need for it. We, who have come to see and in
some measure to understand, have got to be concerned with sex and its
problems, until some of its wrongs are righted.
Here I must digress to make a necessary explanation. The special
problem of sexual conduct which now I wish to consider—the very
difficult problem of passionate friendships between men and women who,
for one reason or another, are unable or do not wish to marry, is a
question to which my interest has for very long been directed. I was
first asked to write about it in 1913 (how remote that time now seems)
in answer to two articles that had appeared in the _English Review_, in
July and August of that year, _Women and Morals_ and _Men and Morals_,
supposed to have been written, the one by “A Mother,” and the other
by “A Father;” but which, as later transpired, were thought out and
transcribed in the office, by the Editor and sub-Editor of that then
courageous journal.
But to whatever journalistic trickery they owed their origin, the
interest of those articles remained unchanged. I need not wait to
describe them; their importance rested in the courage and truth with
which they faced the difficult problem, at that time almost always
hidden or sentimentalised over, of the sex-needs of men and women apart
from marriage.
I was asked to answer—I had, as it were, to sum up, sift out, weigh and
judge, what was said in both articles. I did not then know anything of
their bastard authorship, and I accepted. My answer appeared in the
September number of the Review. At the time it gained some attention.
In America the three articles were republished together. The little
book, called “Women and Morals” had an exceedingly attractive cover and
an excellent preface: I believe it sold widely. More amusing and also,
I think, more witness to the power of my work, was a very different
kind of notoriety which, in one quarter at least, it achieved in this
country. It aroused anger. The number of the _English Review_ in which
it appeared was, I believe, burnt publicly in an Advanced Club for
women by order of the ladies who then formed the committee. For their
intense virtue considered my views too horrible to remain uncleansed
by fire. (Excuse my laughing, but the fact is I always do laugh when I
picture this incident—those splendidly blinkered women holding solemnly
in extended fire-tongs that burning review!)
My work was immoral!
Immoral! What is it that people mean? I do not know. I am for morality
and always shall be. That is, indeed, why I offend. I am always wanting
to turn out dirty places and to spring-clean life. And I have to show
things as I find them, not as I would like them to be. It is so easy if
you drug your soul and place blinkers over your intelligence. But you
cannot be moral if you are over-occupied with being nice.
It is the young, not the old, who are thinking and writing to-day.
Let me give you an example that exactly fits this question we are
considering.
By a somewhat suggestive coincidence there appeared an article on
“Youth and Marriage” in the _English Review_ for May, 1923—the last
number issued under the editorship of Mr. Austin Harrison—which very
strikingly repeats, but more openly and with cruder emphasis, almost
everything that was said in the three articles published in 1913.
It treats the same difficult and still unsettled question of sexual
relationships outside of marriage. The article gives the answer of
youth to the old, who are criticising and condemning the friendships
and new freedom of sex intimacy between young women and young men: they
are told frankly that they fail to realise the changed conditions of
present-day life. The name of the writer of this interesting article,
Vera M. Garrell, is unknown to me, but I take this opportunity of
thanking her. Her article has given me the greatest pleasure. All the
facts are considered in a refreshingly candid, if not always entirely
adequate way. (1) The increased enormous disparity between the numbers
of the sexes, which the writer comments upon as “an outstanding tragedy
of the war;” leading as it must do, to “an unhealthy competition to
attract men,” under the urge of which girls are drawn “to use coarser
measures and act on bolder lines,” if they are to escape “the dark
dread that haunts the average girl of being ‘left on the shelf.’” (2)
The economic factors, which cause marriage to become increasingly
difficult, and thus act in lowering the marriage ideal by making a
permanent union so remote that it comes to be regarded as “practically
impossible.” “The young people of to-day are very much realists. They
intensely dislike poverty.” A great deal is said about this “economic
blockade against marriage,” and the writer maintains that “much of the
laxity in sexual morals is the direct outcome of this position.” (3)
Yet, even deeper in their action are the inner reasons. War has left
the youth of to-day “with a kind of sexual neurosis.” For years it kept
life “entirely physical;” “morality was at a discount,” the inescapable
result has been that “youth has been lured into sexual compromise.” The
old code of morality has failed: it does not meet the new demands.
I have been impressed and sharply hurt at the bitterness and fatalism
underneath what is written. Let me quote one or two sentences. “The
charge against youth is correct. He is in revolt against conventional
morality. _Young men and young women are sex conscious, not on the old
lines of retiring from intimacy, but rather in the opposite direction
of intimacy._” And again, “Every sex companionship is born of _mutual
recognition of social grievances_. Where it is possible for men and
women to come together and form friendships they do so, _without any
regard for the commital convention that marriage must be the object_.”
(The italics in the passages are mine.)
It is insisted upon that every normal person has a right to
self-expression in the sex-function, while further frank
acknowledgement is made that when sex-friendship “_is unregulated it
ends in vice_.” “_We shall not marry so why not enjoy ourselves_,” is
the prevailing philosophy of those who have ceased to regard the sexual
act as immoral. (Again the italics are mine).
Now, all this has set me thinking that it is worth while to restate
certain propositions in connection with these friendships of passion,
which I made first in the article I wrote in 1913. I do this for two
reasons. First I would like to assure the young, who to-day are more
than ever impatient of, and condemnatory of, the old, that the old are
not always ignorant and that some of them, too, have tried honestly
to face this difficult problem of sexual conduct. The second reason
is deeper. A sickness of soul cries out from so much that the young
say to-day. I want to end this. And the only way in which I know to do
this in connection with these unregulated friendships is to _have them
regulated_.
It is ridiculous to say as so many of the young do to-day that sexual
relationships between two people affect no one but themselves, unless a
child is born. It is not true. The partners in even the strongest and
purest union have no right to say to society, “This is our business and
none of yours.” The consequences may be so grave and wide-reaching for
society that the sex-deed can never be confined to the pair concerned.
And I would go further even than this. For the sexual partnership that
is kept secret, almost of necessity, will work anti-socially. Just in
the same way as in any other secret partnership, opportunity will be
given to those who desire to escape from the responsibilities of the
partnership. This inevitably leads to the commital of sin, by those
who are weak and unfixed in character. While other men and women of
higher conscience, who wish to, and would act honourably, often find
the way so difficult that they fail in their endeavours—lose themselves
in the dark and tangled ways of concealment. Many unions that now are
shameful, would not have been shameful, if the partners had not been
drawn into deceitful concealments, that cannot fail to act in a way
disastrous to love.
This problem of Passionate Friendships, like all problems of sexual
conduct, demands something more than emotional treatment; it requires
the most careful consideration of many different sets of facts, that
often rise up in what seem to be direct opposition.
I must follow this a little further. The sex-needs are almost always
dealt with as though they stood apart and lay out of line with any
other need or faculty of our bodies. This is, in part, due to secrecy
which has kept sex as something mysterious. We have most of us been
trained from our childhood into indecent secretiveness. There is as
well deeper trouble, and it will be a long time before we can change
it. Sex is so powerful in most of us, and occupies really so large
a part of our attention, that we are afraid of ourselves, and this
re-acts in fear of any open acknowledgement of our sex-needs.
It is necessary before we can even begin to judge this question of
passionate friendships, to face very frankly this tremendous force
of the sex-impulses, for the most part veiled in discussion. Next to
hunger this is the most imperative of our needs, and, indeed, to-day
sex enters more into conscious thought than hunger. For the hunger
needs of most of us are satisfied, while the sex-needs are thwarted and
restrained in all kinds of ways, and thus insist themselves the more
insistently in our thoughts. Here is some slight explanation why so
many of our judgments about sex are so arbitrary and so unforgiving.
In penalising the sexual misconduct of others we are really passing
judgment, though we do not know it, on our ourselves in blaming them we
gain a curious kind of vicarious salvation, which brings the peace of
self-forgiveness. In devising punishments for others, we are fixing a
compensatory sacrifice for our deeply buried wishes, which never having
found relief, either in direct expression or by sublimation, remain to
torment us with ceaseless conflicts in our unconscious life.
I must not follow this further. Anyone with knowledge of the new
psychology will understand what I mean.
Now, what I want to emphasise is that, to some limited extent at any
rate, this system of self-concealments and lies is being broken,
or if that view is too hopeful, at least the point of view has
shifted. Indeed it is the acceptance of the imperative force of sex
hunger, and the frank recognition of the present position—a fearless
acknowledgment of the natural right of every adult woman as well as man
to sex experience, that renders so noteworthy the change in outlook
between this generation and the last. The youth of to-day have been
fearless enough to cry aloud desires that the men and women of my
generation, either denied or whispered about. Within its limits (and
I am bound to say that, in my opinion, these limits are badly fixed
and very narrow), this is the most truthful generation that yet has
existed. I am glad to have lived to know it.
It is true that the many difficult problems of sexual conduct, of
which we hear so much and so continuously, in almost every case are
approached from one side only—the personal-pleasure side. That is why
there is so much waste and foolishness. It explains too, why there
is no consistent and united movement; no attempt at trying to find
for everyone some possible decent way out—an escape from the terrible
conditions which we are all agreed exist under the difficulties and
strain of our under-controlled and over-civilised life.
A new conception of morality is, indeed, called for, but we have to
be clearer as to what it is to be and where it is taking us. You will
see at once what I mean. Until new safeguards are established, the old
restriction cannot safely be loosened. It is too dangerous. The brief
passionate partnership must entail disaster, in particular for the
woman. She must still pay the heavier price of love. For what do these
partnerships really mean? There can be no glossing with talk about
freedom here. It is the old solution, the giving by the woman _without
security_, what is given by the woman who is married under security and
permanence.
I do not believe this can be accepted as an established and permitted
thing as soon as we come to consider the lasting results.
It is an essential part of sexual morality, as I conceive it, that in
any relation between the two sexes—I care not whether the association
be legal or illegal, recognised or unrecognised—the position of the
woman, _as the potential mother_ must be made secure. This is a social,
not a private matter. As such it has always been accepted by a wise
State: it is the disgrace of our lax civilisation that too often to-day
it is forgotten or ignored.
We come then to this—How can provision be made for honourable
partnerships with _security for the woman_ outside of marriage? For
I am altogether persuaded that this provision must be made in order
to harmonise our sexual life, and meet the desires of a large and
increasing number of young people, whose exceptional needs our existing
institutions and customs ignore or crush.
We must all of us know from our experience of life that many women
as well as men are by their temperaments unsuited for monagonious
marriage—the living permanently with one partner for life. Often,
I would even say as a rule, these individuals are strongly sexual.
They will not, because with the character they have, they cannot,
live for any long period celibate. They will marry to gain permanent
sexual relief or, if they are men, they will buy temporary relief from
prostitutes, unless they are able to seek satisfaction in an irregular
union.
Now, I affirm it as my conviction that the first and second of these
courses are likely to lead to greater misery and sin than the third
course; and of the three, the first, in my opinion, is the worst. I
have, no doubt at all on this matter. No one, who is not blind to the
facts of life, can close their eyes to the evil and suffering that
certainly follows, when permanent marriage is entered into by those
people who are unfitted _and do not desire_ to fulfil the obligations
and duties of living faithfully with one partner. And I would ask all
those who stand in fear of change or reform, and cannot contemplate
any open toleration of wider opportunities for sexual friendships to
consider this fact: the discredit which has fallen upon marriage arises
largely from the demoralising lives lived under its cover by those
unsuited for enduring mating.
It is commonly taken for granted that love and passion in men is quite
different from love and passion in women. I am sure this is not true.
It is very necessary to break down the idea that for the impulses of
sex, with their immense complications and differences, there is one
general rule. Nor is it possible, I am sure, to make any for arbitrary
judgments. To me the man or woman who is able to live in faithful love
with one partner is not necessarily better than the man or woman who
is not so able. I may prefer the one type, and dislike the other, but
that again is a matter of personal judgment. We cannot safely class
those who differ from ourselves as wrong, and set them down as fit only
for suppression and education. We have to put aside the old shrieks of
blame that are possible only to the ignorant.
It is all very well to preach the ideal of complete sexual abstinence
until marriage, but there are the clear, hard conditions of
contemporary circumstances for all but the really rich, who can marry
when they want to do so without other considerations, and the very poor
who marry young because they have nothing at all to consider. We have
to face the presence among us to-day of an amount of suffering through
enforced celibacy, which is acting in many directions in degrading our
sexual lives. Any number of these sufferers, both the unmarried and
the married who are ill-mated, are everywhere amongst us. I need not
wait to prove this: the facts face us all, unless, indeed, we are too
wilfully blind and too prejudiced to see what is happening.
I would propose as a first step towards honesty and health, that we
ought to claim an open declaration of the existence of any form of
sexual relationship between a woman and a man. We shall, I believe,
have to do it, if not now, then later, because we are finding out the
evils that must ensue, both to the individuals concerned and to the
society of which they are members, by forcing men and women into the
dark, immoral way of concealments.
I believe if there were some open recognition of these partnerships
outside of marriage, not necessarily permanent, with proper provision
for the woman and her children, should there be any, a provision not
dependent on the generosity of the man and made after the love which
sanctioned the union had waned, but decided upon by the man and woman
in the form of a contract before the relationships were entered upon,
there would be many women ready to undertake such unions gladly; there
would even be some women as well as men, who, I believe, would prefer
them to permanent marriage, which binds them to one partner for life
and as a rule entails mutual living together and the giving up by the
woman of her work or profession. In this way many marriages would be
prevented which inevitably come to disaster. It is also possible that
such friendship-contracts might, under present disastrous conditions,
be made by those who are unsuitably mated and yet are unable or do
not wish to entirely sever the bond between them, with some other
partner they could love. Such contracts would open up possibilities of
honourable partnership to many who must suffer from enforced sexual
abstinence or be driven into hateful concealed intimacies.
I do not think we need fear to do this. My own faith in monogamous
marriage, the living together of one man and one woman for the life of
both, as the most practical, the best, and the happiest form of union
for the great majority of people, is so strongly rooted that I do not
wish, because I hold it unnecessary, to force anyone either to enter or
stay within its bonds. I want them to do this because they themselves
want to be bound. We get further and further away from real monogamy
by allowing no other form of honourable partnerships.
Under present conditions and the prejudice of social opinion, the
penalties that have to be paid in particular by women, for any sexual
relationship outside of marriage are too heavy. This is manifest as
I have, to some extent, pointed out already. Indeed when we consider
the difficulties faced in these unions, that so many do take the risks
is another proof, if one were needed of the elemental strength of the
sex-impulse. But mark this: it is only those whose social conscience
is for some reason unawakened who can enter into these irregular
relationships except under special and very exceptional circumstances,
until some steps have been taken to regulate them. They may be willing
to take the risk for themselves, but they know, or perhaps I had better
say _ought to know_, that the payment may fall also on the child of
their love. You may say—there need be no children. This is true. It
makes the conditions of such love much easier. It is not, however, a
solution and can never, I think, be accepted as such by women. The
woman who loves a man wants to be the mother of a child by him. I shall
be told that there are women of whom this is not true. I know this. But
that does not make it less true that the great majority of women can
find the completion of their love only in the child.
It would, of course, be easy to raise any number of objections against
these contract-partnerships, some of which might well prove true.
It may be said, for instance, that the economic difficulties that
now prevent marriage would not be lessened, but increased, by these
extra-conjugal relationships. This is a question on which so much ought
to be said that I feel compelled to say almost nothing, as I cannot now
treat it adequately. I can only say that I have in my mind some scheme
of insurance, which might easily be contributed to by both partners of
the contract, but which would go to the woman for her own provision,
and that of any children of the union in case of separation. If this
once became established as a custom (a kind of marriage settlement,
but without the marriage) necessary between all entering into such
partnerships, the practice would gain the support of public opinion. It
is done frequently now, but secretly. What I want is that it should
be done openly, as a right and not a favour. It would then be possible
to take another step in the form of State endowment for parenthood;
this might be an extension of endowment for legal motherhood and
mother’s pensions, and by doing this would follow another and, perhaps,
even greater gain. The recognition of these contract-partnerships
would prevent the ostracism which even to-day falls on the discarded
mistress. There are many women who dread this much more than poverty.
The whole question of any sexual relationships outside of marriage in
the past has been left in the gutter, so to speak. Everything has been
blotted in darkness and made disgraceful by concealment. This would be
changed.
May not something be done now, when in so many directions we are
being forced to consider these questions, to establish sanction to
meet new needs? Partnerships other than marriage have had a place as
a recognised and guarded institution in many older and more primitive
societies, and it may be that the conditions brought upon us may act in
forcing upon us a similar acceptance.
We have got to recognise that our form of monogamous marriage cannot
meet the sex-needs of all people. To assert that it can do this is
to close our eyes to the known facts. Something has got to be done.
The extending of the opportunities of honourable love must be faced
before we can hope for more moral conditions of life. It is the results
that have almost always followed these irregular unions that have
branded them as anti-social acts. But the desertion of women with the
inevitable resulting evils, which has arisen so frequently from the
conditions of secrecy under which they now exist, would be put an end
to. One reason why extra-conjugal relationships are discredited is
because it is often almost impossible to avoid disaster. Make these
partnerships honourable and there will be much greater chances of
honourable conduct. I spoke just now of the sacrifice of women. But in
love there is no such thing as sacrifice for a woman; there is the joy
of giving. The sacrifice arises out of the conditions of concealment
and blame under which the duties and joys of love so often have had to
be fulfilled.
I do not see how we can forbid or treat with contempt any partnership
that is openly entered into and in which the duties undertaken are
faithfully fulfilled. It is our attitude of blame that has, in
the past, so often made this honourable fulfilment of obligations
impossible.
I have sought to put these matters as plainly as may be in the
conviction that nothing can be gained by concealment. Anyone who writes
on the subject of sexual conduct is very open to misconceptions. It is
not realised that the effort of the reformer is not to lessen at all
the bonds in any sexual partnership, rather the desire is to strengthen
them. But the forms of the partnership will have to be more varied;
unless, indeed, we prefer to accept unregulated and secret vice. We
shall, I do most sincerely believe, have more morality in too much
wideness than in too little.
I can anticipate a further objection that will certainly be raised.
Why, I shall be asked, if sexual relationships are to be acknowledged
and protected outside of marriage, preserve marriage at all? I have
answered this question already. _Monogamous marriage will be maintained
because the great majority of women and men want it to be maintained._
I affirm again my own belief in the monogamic union: the ideal marriage
is that of the man and woman who have dedicated themselves to each
other for the life of both, faithfully together to fulfil the duties
of family life. This is the true monogony: this is the marriage which
I regard as sanctified. But, I, regarding it as a holy state, would
preserve it for those suited for the binding duties of the individual
home so intimately connected with it.
The contract-partnerships I have suggested will do nothing to change
the sanctity of any true marriages. There will always remain a penalty
to those who seek variety in love, in that unrest which is the other
side of variety. And the answer I would give to those who fear an
increase of immorality from any provision for sexual partnerships
outside of permanent marriage is, that no deliberate change in our
sexual conduct can conceivably make moral conditions worse than they
are at present. As a matter of fact every form of irregular union
exists to-day, but shamefully and hidden. The only logical moral
objection that I can think of being advanced against an honourable
recognition of these partnerships is that, by doing away with all
necessity for concealments their number is likely to be larger than if
the old penalties are maintained. This is undoubtedly true: it is also
true that it is the only possible way in which they can cease to be
shamefull. Prohibitions and laws, however stringent, can do nothing.
The past has proved their failure; they will fail still worse in the
future.
Nor is the change really so great or so startling as at first it
may appear to be. Our marriage in its present form is primarily an
arrangement for the protection of the woman and the family. What I want
is that some measure, at least, of the protection now given to the
legal wife, shall be afforded to all women who fulfil the same duties.
I am not seeking to make immorality easier; as I have before insisted,
that is very far from my purpose. These changes for which I am pleading
will make immorality much harder, for it will not be so easy as now it
is to escape from the responsibilities of love.
No one can suppose, of course, that this change can be other than
gradual. There will be no stage at which a large section of society
will give up the accepted custom and stand perplexed as to how they
shall readjust their sexual conduct. Any movement towards openness and
honesty must be gradual. The process of change will be in the future,
what has always happened in the past, the slow abandonment of worn-out
conventions, and a trial of new paths, first by the few, to be followed
by an ever-increasing number. When the need for a change arises then
does a change come.
I assert again there need be no fear.
It is one of the deepest and healthiest instincts of men and women that
they have always fought for liberty to love, and have rebelled whenever
the restrictions and conditions of society have borne too hardly
upon them. There is first a period of dull acquiescence, followed
certainly by a reaction towards pleasure and sin—the grabbing to take
what has been withheld by any means and in any form; but afterwards
comes rebellion—the true movement towards purity; the deep desire of a
return to health, necessitating always the breaking through from all
hindering barriers, so that the intolerable burden of sin may be cast;
a glad imperative effort to gain liberty, to live rightly and joyously.
It is the young who to-day have a new consciousness of the right of
freedom. They will never again accept the ancient restrictions. And it
is well. We, who are older, whose steps are faltering and whose eyes
grow dim with waiting for the vision we have seen, look to them to gain
liberty, to re-establish the sanctity of love, which we have tried to
do and failed.
But the young must shake off every symptom of the prevalent and
contagious anaemia of fatalism that limits everything to the personal
issues, before they can formulate and carry through any really
constructive work of reform. They must learn to distinguish more
clearly between cause and effect, the means and the end. At present
they place the horse after the cart and mistake the power for the
product. We are all apt to suppose conduct and feelings are the outcome
of conditions and laws. They are not: they are the origin of them. When
we have all got the desire for right and honourable conduct and honest
conduct and honest feelings both about marriage and every form of
sexual partnership, we shall get living and helpful laws.
What is the use of tinkering with what is moribund? A great teacher has
said, “Let the dead bury their dead; come and preach the good and the
new thing.”
CONCLUSION
REGENERATION
I have dared to think of a regeneration of our sexual lives through
education and a fuller understanding of the meaning of love. But by
education must be understood all that influences the desires and
imagination, so that in every direction we shall be turned to seek
health and clean living.
Our supine acceptance of so many things that are wrong ought to arouse
us to shame. What are we going to do?
Are we content to go on in the muddles that so long we have accepted
without much consideration? Are we satisfied to allow all the evil to
continue because we are too lazy and too dishonest to face them in
truth and demand a clearance? We are all responsible; you, my readers,
and I. If we demand saner and more practical conditions we shall get
them.
But do we care—I mean care sufficiently to seek and to find the way of
escape? Ah, that is the question!
Fear has been the hot-bed wherein have been forced rank plants of
shame, dishonesty and trickery, of uncleanness, of concealments, of
persecution and punishments—plants of persistent but unhealthy growth,
that insistently and riotously spring up to hinder the workers, who
strive ever to clear the soil of the fair Garden of Love, from the rank
and choking growths.
What wonder, indeed, that we have lost our way so that still we are
wandering in the jungle, unable to steer a straight course through the
rough and tortuous paths left to us as a legacy from the past. It is
this confusion that is hindering us to-day. And our real task is to
cut through the jungle, and force clear paths, so that again we may
have good roads in an open country on which we may walk gladly and
fearlessly.
Yet, it were unwise to be too hopeful. We cannot be architects of life.
Each generation will make new mistakes, even do they escape the follies
that are old. We can see a very short way along the path of life, and
often we are confused. The wisest amongst us are only bricklayers, and
the best can but lay two or three bricks in a lifetime. Our work is to
do that if we can. We can guess very feebly at the whole design. Many
mistakes must be made by us, as they have been by those before us, and
often it may be the duty of a new generation to pull down the work that
in sorrow we have toiled to build up.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The English Edition was translated from the French Edition.
[2] See a most instructive pamphlet, “The Conflicts of the Child,” by
Edith and Dr. Eder, reprinted from “Child Study,” 1917.
[3] See the pamphlet to which already reference has been made.
[4] This frequently quoted statement was made by Lombroso and not by
Krafft-Ebing as almost everyone seems to think. It is significant that
the women on the study of whose sexuality this judgment was founded
were of the prostitute class. See _La Donna Delinquente_, etc., p.p.
54-56.
INDEX
A
Adoption of Children 61;
law needed 61 _et seq._;
fears and dangers in 62 _et seq._
B
Birth control 37 _et seq._, 163.
Boys, seduction of 113 _et seq._, 119 _et seq._
C
Cats, 15;
their qualities compared with those of women 16 _et seq._
Child, effect of birth control on 39;
feeling of inferiority in 49;
inferiority and crime in 49;
must rebel 51 _et seq._ 82, 94, 103;
adoption of, law of needed 61;
faults and crimes of 73 _et seq._ 99;
in prison 73 _et seq._;
at modern school 79 _et seq._;
at play 81;
sex education of 87 _et seq._, 107 _et seq._;
early manifestation of sex in 88 _et seq._;
savagery of 97;
marriage founded on 136 _et seq._
Concealment, evils of 178 _et seq._
Curiosity, 101, 109 _et seq._
D
Dangerous Age, the 29 _et seq._
Doctors and Patients’ secrets 157 _et seq._
Dogs, 59, 60.
E
Economics, mania for, 158 _et seq._
Education, sex 87 _et seq._
F
Father, daughter’s feeling for 54;
the intruder 55 _et seq._, 95;
after birth of child 56;
conflict with son 56;
authority of, necessary 57;
effect on child 91 _et seq._ 93;
danger of being too fond of child 104.
Faults of children 43 _et seq._, 73 _et seq._ 99.
Freedom for children 80 _et seq._
G
Gentleman, the temporary 165 _et seq._
Girls, and seduction of boys 113, 118;
playing with love 127 _et seq._
_See also_ Child.
Garrell, Vera M. (on “Youth and Marriage”) 175.
H
Husband, the old-fashioned 161 _et seq._
J
Jealousy, 44, 55, 68, 93, 95, 103, 109, 136.
L
Law, reform in relation to parentage 35 _et seq._;
reform in relation to adoption 61 _et seq._;
of adoption in other countries 67 _et seq._;
in relation to mothers’ pensions 71;
in relation to seduction 113 _et seq._;
in relation to age of consent 117 _et seq._;
White Slave Traffic 118 _et. seq._;
marriage law in other countries 170.
Lyttelton, Dr. (on sex instruction) 107.
M
Marriage, joy in 33; 133 _et seq._
result of children 136 _et seq._;
causes of failure in 139;
altered views on 141 _et seq._;
unfaithfulness of men in 145 _et seq._;
of women 149 _et seq._;
too easy 169 _et seq._;
problem of unions outside 174 _et seq._
_See also_ Birth Control.
Michaelis, Karin 29 _et. seq._
Mother, and child who steals 43 _et seq._;
danger of being too fond of child 52 _et. seq._ 104;
supreme with child 55, 72, 92;
perfect and (childless) 59;
difficulty of adoptions for 61 _et seq._;
love, effect on child 91;
and sex instruction 108 _et seq._;
after birth of child 145 _et seq._;
image of, sought in wife 161.
N
Neil, Judge 71 _et seq._
O
Old-fashioned husband 161 _et seq._
P
Pensions for mothers 71 _et seq._
Play 81;
love in 127 _et seq._
Pleasure, search for 31, 133.
Punishment of children 73 _et seq._, 84 _et seq._
Parent, _See_ Father and Mother.
R
Racial types, best seen in women 20.
Rebellion of children, necessary 51 _et seq._; 82; 94.
Remorse, as temptation 46;
not necessarily good 98.
S
Schools, poor law 72;
for delinquent 77;
modern and their errors 79 _et seq._
Sex, education 87 _et seq._;
early manifestation of 88;
right age for 107 _et seq._
Solitary confinement condemned 77.
Son, who steals 43 _et seq._
_See also_ Child.
Spain 19 _et seq._;
dancing in 21;
workers (women) in 23 _et seq._
W
Wife, the modern 161 _et seq._
Wife, the young 163 _et seq._
Women, their qualities compared with those of cats 16 _et seq._;
in Spain 19 _et seq._;
racial types best seen in 20;
as workers in Spain 23 _et seq._;
approaching age, in terror of 30;
search for pleasure in 31;
false purity in 32;
repression in 33;
legal position of 35;
childless 59;
difficulties in adopting children by _et seq._ 61;
seduction of men by 113 _et seq._, 118, 123;
myth of superior purity 113 _et seq._;
child more than husband to 145 _et seq._;
attitude to sexual disease of 158 _et seq._
Women, _See also_ Birth Control, Marriages, Mother, Wife, the modern,
Gentleman, the temporary.
_Clements Bros., Printers, Meeting House Lane, Chatham_