There never was an age when so many diverse types of young women
flourished, sometimes they are rather puzzling to the middle-aged
observer.[200:1] With so many of them there is a kind of forced levity,
a self-consciousness that prevents them from being either simple or
serious. All the clever ones seem to think that by talking in
generalizations, you can avert the plain issues of life. Their
conversation is full of meaningless remarks, such as "the bondage of
sex," "the superstition of chastity," "freedom in the marriage bond,"
"the sacrifice of women," "stifling convention," and so on, which they
go on repeating because that is the terminology of their set. They have
no conception of realities at all, only of abstract situations.
Impossible to tell what are their pseudo-emotions; a sort of sterile
intellectualism, shown in their shirking of sex responsibility. They
wish to ignore the real difficulty of marriage; they accept love, but
only with conditions. The one thing they face practically is work, and
the two activities don't conflict in their estimates, because their
minds are too choked with conceptions to admit facts. They are faithful
to their training by G. Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, in thinking that
by stating a situation and arguing about it, you can shirk the need of
dealing with it.
Some women want to wipe the sex-side of life out. They cannot. They
preach that work and human experience (whatever that may mean) will
weaken sex-desire. It does not. Desires may be inhibited, not destroyed,
corrupting in quietness they wait opportunity to revive, insistent,
clamoring.
Other young women try deliberately to keep love light. Shrewd enough to
understand the heavy claims of serious passion, they prefer affairs of
the senses only; episodes that are a secret detachable part of their
lives. They want love as an experience, and to provide the always
desired excitement, but they want as well to remain free to take up
other aspects of life. And while condescending to fascinate men while
deliberately seeking attention, they still hold themselves in hand;
intending to exploit life to the uttermost, they find sex amusing, but
they fight always against its being a vocation.
There is, of course, a reason for this. The young are more reckless and
lawless, they do more and go further than the last generation, and this
is but an outward expression of disorder within, in my opinion, to be
traced back to the passionate need felt by the young for love. So that
whenever this love-desire is unsatisfied, or falsely satisfied, the
dynamic need causes a kind of ferment, which sours love so that it
becomes _desire to be considered_. If a woman is not important to
others, she becomes important to herself, and this unconscious
self-glorification is so devouring, so little based on anything that can
possibly satisfy the need that is its cause, that it creates a hunger
that can never be appeased, so constant are its demands for
nourishment. It is difficult to say how far this insatiable egomania
will take our young women. Some men are also empoisoned with it.
Both these types are modern; opposed to them is another type of young
woman, more feminine, easier to explain, but also thwarted, restlessly
demanding an outlet. These women do not want to furl their sex, they
seek lovers to whom they may surrender themselves, but they suffer from
a formless discontent that rots into every love and prevents them
finding satisfaction. Eternally they are unsatisfied, without knowing
why.
It is another modern disease and has little connection with flirting and
lightness of character, though often the two are confused. Too restless
to be faithful, born spiritual adventurers, these worshipers of
emotionalism set up elaborate pretenses of pure friendships, ignoring
the hot glow within: they love romantically, but rarely are strong
enough to obey their inclinations. Such women are out on an eternal
quest, and every now and again, they believe they have found what they
are seeking. Then they discover they have not found it, so their search
is taken up anew; while often the social scheme drives them into
dangerous corners, forces them to turn from their quest or to use mean
weapons of deceit, does not give them a chance.
These romantic seekers of love, suffering continual frustration from the
evaporation of emotional interest that defies their own needs; the many
types of efficient workers, alert, hard, self-satisfied, not wholly
cynical, yet with a touch of something that borders on cynicism,
submitting almost with a secret repugnance to the mysterious but supreme
bond which holds the sexes miserably together; and the prostitute woman
of all kinds, out to seize every advantage from men, ruthless, living
upon sex--these are, it seems to me, the three main types of women
resulting in our so-called civilization of to-day, from our repressions
and falsehoods, our indefinite wills, from our confused ideals and
failure in living; and it is hard to say which is the most harmful,
which is the most wronged, which is the most unhappy, the furthest
removed from the type that is eternal--the ideal woman, satisfied and
glad, whom a happier future may again permit to live.
V
It was Mr. Wells who said in one of his novels, "suppose the liberation
of women simply means the liberation of mischief." "Suppose she _is_
wicked as a sex, suppose she _will_ trade on her power of exciting
imaginative men."
Something very like this has been happening in the world to-day.
We are all to pieces morally. The consciences of many people are their
neighbor's opinions, and the removal of so many young girls and men from
their home surroundings, their relations and old friends, has greatly
slackened the watchful safe-guarding of morals, so that any slightest
infringement has not been at once observed and quickly punished. The
important barriers of difference in class, in social positions, and in
race have also broken through. Conditions in the five war-years and most
of the arrangements of society have discouraged morality very heavily,
and the wise thing for us to do in the matter is not to grow eloquent
about sin, but at once to do intelligent things to make right conduct
easier.
An organized freedom and independence for women has certainly had
startling moral results. The reasons are obvious enough. It is a
necessary consequence of our modern insistence on individual values; the
harping of one generation on freedom, which has caused our young women,
in many directions, to carry their ideas of freedom far beyond the
accepted conventions of our ordinary civilized human association. It has
been shown as manifestly true that for all ordinary young women that
intimate association with men, fellowship in the workshops and factories
and in play, turns them with extreme readiness to love-making. Now, I am
very far from wishing to blame women; rather am I glad that what I have
asserted, for so long and against so much opposition, about the
elementary power of sex in women, has been vindicated by themselves.
Life for women so often has been wrong and discordant, and the
wretchedness has been greatly increased by the way we have left, in the
immediate past, the force of sex unregulated and unrecognized, thereby
causing much of the modern companionship of women with men, of girls
with boys, to be really a monstrous sham, maintained and made exciting
by false situations that often have closed around the two like a trap.
There are, and always have been, far more women and girls than we like
to acknowledge who are by their inclinations sexually promiscuous. It is
just conventional rot to talk of sex impulse being weaker and quite
different in women from men; of constancy as the special virtue of
women. Sometimes it is, but oftener it is not. It depends on the type of
woman. A great and possibly increasing number of girls to-day regard
love affairs in very much the same way as they are regarded by the
average sensual man, as enjoyable and exciting incidents of which they
are ashamed only when they are talked about and blamed. Such girls very
rarely give trouble to men or make scenes, they don't care enough; that,
I think, is why they always find lovers. It is also why it is easy for
them to have secret relations. With no sex-conscience, such girls, even
when quite young, exhibit a logic and a frankness that sometimes is
rather startling. They seem to have no modesty, though many of them are
prudes; they have no consciousness of responsibility; they feel no kind
of shame. Such libidinous temperaments have been common at all times
and in all societies, if in stricter periods so many women did not
follow their inclinations with the openness now so frequent, it was
simply out of fear; possibly they took more careful precautions against
discovery.
There are as well as these wantons, girls of a different type, who are
more contradictory and difficult because of a less simple sexuality, but
who are equally, even if not more, harmfully destructive in the utter
misery they often create. This is the type of girl who ripens to a
premature and too emotional sexuality, and who, though still keeping
herself physically intact, is spiritually corrupt. The spiritual
masochism of a woman may lead to depths of cruelty rarely
understood.[208:1]
Many other nobler types of women have been playing with vice. Many wild
impulses have found strange expressions. Women have been very like
children playing at desperate rebels, who take up weapons to use far
more deadly than they knew. All this playing with love is detestable,
all of it. It shows a shameful shirking of responsibility. Women are the
custodians of manners in love, and very many, who have not dreamt of
the results of their slackenings, have been urging on the young to a
riotous festival, extravagant and disquieting.
It must, I think, be acknowledged that a vast impatience on the part of
women has made conduct less decent and less responsible. Lovers are more
reckless, even sometimes more consciously and vulgarly vicious. Women of
profound and steadfast emotional nature are rare. The great majority
now, perhaps, are not entirely light-minded, but they are less serious,
more noisily determined to do what they want, and get what they can both
out of men and out of life.
And the great fact that stands out from all this--the great need for our
private personal good as well as the public good--is the need of the
young for guidance and regulation, the necessity for refixing of moral
standards in sexual conduct, of formulating a code of good manners, to
meet the present needs. Nothing else, in my opinion, can avert even
greater disasters of license in the future, than those conditions we are
now facing.