THE LOVE-RIGHTS OF WOMEN
What is the part of woman, one is sometimes asked, in the sex act? Must it
be the wife's concern in the marital embrace to sacrifice her own wishes
from a sense of love and duty towards her husband? Or is the wife entitled
to an equal mutual interest and joy in this act with her husband? It seems
a simple problem. In so fundamental a relationship, which goes back to the
beginning of sex in the dawn of life, it might appear that we could leave
Nature to decide. Yet it is not so. Throughout the history of
civilisation, wherever we can trace the feelings and ideas which have
prevailed on this matter and the resultant conduct, the problem has
existed, often to produce discord, conflict, and misery. The problem still
exists to-day and with as important results as in the past.
In Nature, before the arrival of Man, it can scarcely be said indeed that
any difficulty existed. It was taken for granted at that time that the
female had both the right to her own body, and the right to a certain
amount of enjoyment in the use of it. It often cost the male a serious
amount of trouble--though he never failed to find it worth while--to
explain to her the point where he may be allowed to come in, and to
persuade her that he can contribute to her enjoyment. So it generally is
throughout Nature, before we reach Man, and, though it is not invariably
obvious, we often find it even among the unlikeliest animals. As is well
known, it is most pronounced among the birds, who have in some species
carried the erotic art,--and the faithful devotion which properly
accompanied the erotic art as being an essential part of it,--to the
highest point. We have here the great natural fact of courtship.
Throughout Nature, wherever we meet with animals of a high type, often
indeed when they are of a lowly type--provided they have not been rendered
unnatural by domestication--every act of sexual union is preceded by a
process of courtship. There is a sound physiological reason for this
courtship, for in the act of wooing and being wooed the psychic excitement
gradually generated in the brains of the two partners acts as a stimulant
to arouse into full activity the mechanism which ensures sexual union and
aids ultimate impregnation. Such courtship is thus a fundamental natural
fact.
It is as a natural fact that we still find it in full development among a
large number of peoples of the lower races whom we are accustomed to
regard as more primitive than ourselves. New conditions, it is true, soon
enter to complicate the picture presented by savage courtship. The
economic element of bargaining, destined to prove so important, comes in
at an early stage. And among peoples leading a violent life, and
constantly fighting, it has sometimes happened, though not always, that
courtship also has been violent. This is not so frequent as was once
supposed. With better knowledge it was found that the seeming brutality
once thought to take the place of courtship among various peoples in a low
state of culture was really itself courtship, a rough kind of play
agreeable to both parties and not depriving the feminine partner of her
own freedom of choice. This was notably the case as regards so-called
"marriage by capture." While this is sometimes a real capture, it is more
often a mock capture; the lover perhaps pursues the beloved on horseback,
but she is as fleet and as skilful as he is, cannot be captured unless she
wishes to be captured, and in addition, as among the Kirghiz, she may be
armed with a formidable whip; so that "marriage by capture," far from
being a hardship imposed on women is largely a concession to their modesty
and a gratification of their erotic impulses. Even when the chief part of
the decision rests with masculine force courtship is still not necessarily
or usually excluded, for the exhibition of force by a lover,--and this is
true for civilised as well as for savage women,--is itself a source of
pleasurable stimulation, and when that is so the essence of courtship may
be attained even more successfully by the forceful than by the humble
lover.
The evolution of society, however, tended to overlay and sometimes even to
suppress those fundamental natural tendencies. The position of the man as
the sole and uncontested head of the family, the insistence on paternity
and male descent, the accompanying economic developments, and the tendency
to view a woman less as a self-disposing individual than as an object of
barter belonging to her father, the consequent rigidity of the marriage
bond and the stern insistence on wifely fidelity--all these conditions of
developing civilisation, while still leaving courtship possible,
diminished its significance and even abolished its necessity. Moreover, on
the basis of the social, economic, and legal developments thus
established, new moral, spiritual, and religious forces were slowly
generated, which worked on these rules of merely exterior order, and
interiorised them, thus giving them power over the souls as well as over
the bodies of women.
The result was that, directly and indirectly, the legal, economic, and
erotic rights of women were all diminished. It is with the erotic rights
only that we are here concerned.
No doubt in its erotic aspects, as well as in its legal and economic
aspects, the social order thus established was described, and in good
faith, as beneficial to women, and even as maintained in their interests.
Monogamy and the home, it was claimed, alike existed for the benefit and
protection of women. It was not so often explained that they greatly
benefited and protected men, with, moreover, this additional advantage
that while women were absolutely confined to the home, men were free to
exercise their activities outside the home, even, with tacit general
consent, on the erotic side.
Whatever the real benefits, and there is no occasion for questioning them,
of the sexual order thus established, it becomes clear that in certain
important respects it had an unnatural and repressive influence on the
erotic aspect of woman's sexual life. It fostered the reproductive side of
woman's sexual life, but it rendered difficult for her the satisfaction of
the instinct for that courtship which is the natural preliminary of
reproductive activity, an instinct even more highly developed in the
female than in the male, and the more insistent because in the order of
Nature the burden of maternity is preceded by the reward of pleasure. But
the marriage order which had become established led to the indirect
result of banning pleasure in women, or at all events in wives. It was
regarded as too dangerous, and even as degrading. The women who wanted
pleasure were not considered fit for the home, but more suited to be
devoted to an exclusive "life of pleasure," which soon turned out to be
not their own pleasure but men's. A "life of pleasure," in that sense or
in any other sense, was not what more than a small minority of women ever
desired. The desire of women for courtship is not a thing by itself, and
was not implanted for gratification by itself. It is naturally
intertwined--and to a much greater degree than the corresponding desire in
men--with her deepest personal, family, and social instincts, so that if
these are desecrated and lost its charm soon fades.
The practices and the ideals of this established morality were both due to
men, and both were so thoroughly fashioned that they subjugated alike the
actions and the feelings of women. There is no sphere which we regard as
so peculiarly women's sphere as that of love. Yet there is no sphere which
in civilisation women have so far had so small a part in regulating. Their
deepest impulses--their modesty, their maternity, their devotion, their
emotional receptivity--were used, with no conscious and deliberate
Machiavellism, against themselves, to mould a moral world for their
habitation which they would not themselves have moulded. It is not of
modern creation, nor by any means due, as some have supposed, to the
asceticism of Christianity, however much Christianity may have reinforced
it. Indeed one may say that in course of time Christianity had an
influence in weakening it, for Christianity discovered a new reservoir of
tender emotion, and such emotion may be transferred, and, as a matter of
fact, was transferred, from its first religious channel into erotic
channels which were thereby deepened and extended, and without reference
to any design of Christianity. For the ends we achieve are often by no
means those which we set out to accomplish. In ancient classic days this
moral order was even more severely established than in the Middle Ages.
Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, declared that "marriage is a devout
and religious relationship, the pleasures derived from it should be
restrained and serious, mixed with some severity." But in this matter he
was not merely expressing the Christian standpoint but even more that of
paganism, and he thoroughly agreed with the old Greek moralist that a man
should approach his wife "prudently and severely" for fear of inciting her
to lasciviousness; he thought that marriage was best arranged by a third
party, and was inclined to think, with the ancients, that women are not
fitted to make friends of. Montaigne has elsewhere spoken with insight of
women's instinctive knowledge of the art and discipline of love and has
pointed out how men have imposed their own ideals and rules of action on
women from whom they have demanded opposite and contradictory virtues;
yet, we see, he approves of this state of things and never suggests that
women have any right to opinions of their own or feelings of their own
when the sacred institution of marriage is in question.
Montaigne represents the more exalted aspects of the Pagan-Christian
conception of morality in marriage which still largely prevails. But that
conception lent itself to deductions, frankly accepted even by Montaigne
himself, which were by no means exalted. "I find," said Montaigne, "that
Venus, after all, is nothing more than the pleasure of discharging our
vessels, just as nature renders pleasurable the discharges from other
parts." Sir Thomas More among Catholics, and Luther among Protestants,
said exactly the same thing in other and even clearer words, while untold
millions of husbands in Christendom down to to-day, whether or not they
have had the wit to put their theory into a phrase, have regularly put it
into practice, at all events within the consecrated pale of marriage, and
treated their wives, "severely and prudently," as convenient utensils for
the reception of a natural excretion.
Obviously, in this view of marriage, sexual activity was regarded as an
exclusively masculine function, in the exercise of which women had merely
a passive part to play. Any active participation on her side thus seemed
unnecessary, and even unbefitting, finally, though only in comparatively
modern times, disgusting and actually degrading. Thus Acton, who was
regarded half a century ago as the chief English authority on sexual
matters, declared that, "happily for society," the supposition that women
possess sexual feelings could be put aside as "a vile aspersion," while
another medical authority of the same period stated in regard to the most
simple physical sign of healthy sexual emotion that it "only happens in
lascivious women." This final triumph of the masculine ideals and rule of
life was, however, only achieved slowly. It was the culmination of an
elaborate process of training. At the outset men had found it impossible
to speak too strongly of the "wantonness" of women. This attitude was
pronounced among the ancient Greeks and prominent in their dramatists.
Christianity again, which ended by making women into the chief pillars of
the Church, began by regarding them as the "Gate of Hell." Again, later,
when in the Middle Ages this masculine moral order approached the task of
subjugating the barbarians of Northern Europe, men were horrified at the
licentiousness of those northern women at whose coldness they are now
shocked.
That, indeed, was, as Montaigne had seen, the central core of conflict in
the rule of life imposed by men on woman. Men were perpetually striving,
by ways the most methodical, the most subtle, the most far-reaching, to
achieve a result in women, which, when achieved, men themselves viewed
with dismay. They may be said to be moved in this sphere by two passions,
the passion for virtue and the passion for vice. But it so happens that
both these streams of passion have to be directed at the same fascinating
object: Woman. No doubt nothing is more admirable than the skill with
which women have acquired the duplicity necessary to play the two
contradictory parts thus imposed upon them. But in that requirement the
play of their natural reactions tended to become paralysed, and the
delicate mechanism of their instincts often disturbed. They were
forbidden, except in a few carefully etiquetted forms, the free play of
courtship, without which they could not perform their part in the erotic
life with full satisfaction either to themselves or their partners. They
were reduced to an artificial simulation of coldness or of warmth,
according to the particular stage of the dominating masculine ideal of
woman which their partner chanced to have reached. But that is an attitude
equally unsatisfactory to themselves and to their lovers, even when the
latter have not sufficient insight to see through its unreality. It is an
attitude so unnatural and artificial that it inevitably tends to produce a
real coldness which nothing can disguise. It is true that women whose
instincts are not perverted at the roots do not desire to be cold. Far
from it. But to dispel that coldness the right atmosphere is needed, and
the insight and skill of the right man. In the erotic sphere a woman asks
nothing better of a man than to be lifted above her coldness, to the
higher plane where there is reciprocal interest and mutual joy in the act
of love. Therein her silent demand is one with Nature's. For the
biological order of the world involves those claims which, in the human
range, are the erotic rights of women.
The social claims of women, their economic claims, their political claims,
have long been before the world. Women themselves have actively asserted
them, and they are all in process of realisation. The erotic claims of
women, which are at least as fundamental, are not publicly voiced, and
women themselves would be the last to assert them. It is easy to
understand why that should be so. The natural and acquired qualities of
women, even the qualities developed in the art of courtship, have all been
utilised in building up the masculine ideal of sexual morality; it is on
feminine characteristics that this masculine ideal has been based, so
that women have been helpless to protest against it. Moreover, even if
that were not so, to formulate such rights is to raise the question
whether there so much as exists anything that can be called "erotic
rights." The right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way as one claims
the right to put a voting paper in a ballot box. A human being's erotic
aptitudes can only be developed where the right atmosphere for them
exists, and where the attitudes of both persons concerned are in
harmonious sympathy. That is why the erotic rights of women have been the
last of all to be attained.
Yet to-day we see a change here. The change required is, it has been said,
a change of attitude and a resultant change in the atmosphere in which the
sexual impulses are manifested. It involves no necessary change in the
external order of our marriage system, for, as has already been pointed
out, it was a coincident and not designed part of that order. Various
recent lines of tendency have converged to produce this change of attitude
and of atmosphere. In part the men of to-day are far more ready than the
men of former days to look upon women as their comrades in the every day
work of the world, instead of as beings who were ideally on a level above
themselves and practically on a level considerably below themselves. In
part there is the growing recognition that women have conquered many
elementary human rights of which before they were deprived, and are more
and more taking the position of citizens, with the same kinds of duties,
privileges, and responsibilities as men. In part, also, it may be added,
there is a growing diffusion among educated people of a knowledge of the
primary facts of life in the two sexes, slowly dissipating and dissolving
many foolish and often mischievous superstitions. The result is that, as
many competent observers have noted, the young men of to-day show a new
attitude towards women and towards marriage, an attitude of simplicity and
frankness, a desire for mutual confidence, a readiness to discuss
difficulties, an appeal to understand and to be understood. Such an
attitude, which had hitherto been hard to attain, at once creates the
atmosphere in which alone the free spontaneous erotic activities of women
can breathe and live.
This consummation, we have seen, may be regarded as the attainment of
certain rights, the corollary of other rights in the social field which
women are slowly achieving as human beings on the same human level as men.
It opens to women, on whom is always laid the chief burden of sex, the
right to the joy and exaltation of sex, to the uplifting of the soul
which, when the right conditions are fulfilled, is the outcome of the
intimate approach and union of two human beings. Yet while we may find
convenient so to formulate it, we need to remember that that is only a
fashion of speech, for there are no rights in Nature. If we take a broader
sweep, what we may choose to call an erotic right is simply the perfect
poise of the conflicting forces of life, the rhythmic harmony in which
generation is achieved with the highest degree of perfection compatible
with the make of the world. It is our part to transform Nature's large
conception into our own smaller organic mould, not otherwise than the
plants, to whom we are far back akin, who dig their flexible roots deep
into the moist and fruitful earth, and so are able to lift up glorious
heads toward the sky.