THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP
_I.--Marriage_
"The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the
incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement; it is a
statement of fact. In so far as we are individuals, in so far as
we seek to follow merely individual ends, we are accidental,
disconnected, without significance, the sport of chance. In so
far as we realise ourselves as experiments of the species for
the species, just in so far do we escape from the accidental and
the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience greater than
ourselves."--H.G. WELLS.
"There is no subject," says Bernard Shaw in his delightful preface to
_Getting Married_, "on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and
thought than marriage." And, in truth, it is not easy to avoid such
foolishness if we understand at all the complexity of the relationship
of the sexes. Sentiment rules our actions in this connection, whereas
our talk on the subject is directed by intellect. And the demands of
the emotions are at once more imperious and tyrannical, and more
fastidious and more critical, than are the demands of the mind. Thus
the more firmly reason checks the riot of imagination the greater the
danger of error. Of all of which what is the moral? This: It is
useless to talk or to think unless it is also possible and expedient
to act.
Be it noted, then, first that our marriage customs and laws are
founded and have been framed not for, or by, the personal needs--that
is, the likes and dislikes of men and women, but by the exigencies of
social and economic necessities. Now, from this it will be readily
seen that individual inclinations are very likely, even if not bound,
to clash with, as they seek to conform to, the usages of society.
Always there will tend to be prevalent everywhere a hostility--at
times latent, at others active--between these two forces; against the
special desires of women and men on the one hand, and the laws
enforced by a social and economic community on the other. Always there
will tend to arise some who will desire to change the accepted
marriage form, those who, considering first the personal needs, will
advocate the loosening or the breaking of the marriage-bond; while
others, looking only to the stability which they believe to be founded
in law and custom, will seek to keep and to make the tie indissoluble.
This perpetual conflict is, it seems to me, the greatest difficulty
that has to be faced in any effort to readjust the conditions of
marriage. In our contemporary society there is a deep-lying
dissatisfaction with the existing relations of the sexes, a yearning
and restless need for change. In no other direction are the confusions
and uncertainty of the contemporary mind more manifest. The change
that has taken place so rapidly in the attitudes of women and men has
brought with it a very strong and, what seems to be a new, revolt
against the ignominious conditions of our amatory life as bound by
coercive monogamy. We are questioning where before we have accepted,
and are seeking out new ways in which mankind will go--will go because
it must.
Yet just because of this imperative urging the greater caution is
called for in introducing any changes in the laws or customs affecting
marriage. Present social and economic conditions are to a great extent
chaotic. It would be a sorry thing if in haste we were to establish
practices that must come to an end, when we have freed ourselves from
the present transition; changes that would not be for the welfare of
generations still unborn. It will, however, hardly be denied by any
one that reform is needed. All will admit that a change must be made
in some direction, and an attempt to say where it should be tried must
therefore be faced.
Does Nature give us any help in solving the problem? None whatever. It
would seem, indeed, that Nature has in some ways arranged the love
relation in regard to the needs of the two sexes very badly. But
putting this aside for the present, it is clear that in regard to the
form of marriage Nature has no preference; all ways are equal to her,
provided that the race profits by them, or at least does not suffer
too much from them. We found abundant proof of this in our examination
of marriage and the family as established already in the animal
kingdom; the modes of sexual association offer great variety, no
species being of necessity restricted to any one form of union.
Polygamy, polyandry, and monogamy all are practised. The family is
sometimes patriarchal, though more often it is matriarchal, with the
female the centre of it, and her love for the young infinitely
stronger and more devoted than the male, though even in this direction
there are many and notable exceptions. When we came to study the
history of mankind we found similar conditions persisting. Separate
groups living as they best could without caring about theories; their
sexual conduct ordered by a compromise between the procreative needs
on the one hand, and the necessities of the social conditions on the
other. Marriage forms, as we understand them, were for long unknown,
the relations of the sexes slowly evolving from a more or less
restricted promiscuity to a family union at first merely temporary,
and only later becoming fixed and permanent. Thus very gradually the
primitive instinctive sex impulses underwent expansion, and always in
the direction of the control of the individual desires in the interest
of the family.
The unit of the group or state is the family, therefore sex-customs
arise and laws are made not to suit the convenience of the woman or
the man, but for the preservation and good of the family. In a word,
the children--they are the pivot about which all regulations of
marriage should turn.
It is certain, however, that such control and such laws have never in
the past, and never in the future can be fixed to one unchanging form.
In proof of this I must refer the reader back to the historical
section of this book, where nothing stands out clearer than that the
most diverse morality and customs prevail in matters of sex. Wherever
for any reason there arises a tendency towards any form of sexual
association, such form is likely to be established as a habit, and,
persisting, it comes to be regarded as right, and is enforced by
custom and later by law, and also sometimes sanctified by religion. It
comes to be regarded as moral, and other forms become immoral.
Now, all this may seem to be rather far away from the matter we are
discussing--the present dissatisfaction with our marriage system. But
the point I want to make clear is this: there is no rigid and
unchangeable code of right or wrong in the sexual relationship. Our
opinions here are based for the most part on traditional morality,
which accepts what is as right because it is established. A small but
growing minority, looking in an exact opposite direction, turn to an
ideal morality, considering the facts of sex not as they are, but as
they think they ought to be. Both these attitudes are alike harmful.
The one refuses to go forward, the other rushes on blindly, goaded by
sentiment or by personal desires. And to-day the greater danger seems
to me to rest with the hasty reformers. It is an essentially feminine
crusade. By this I do not mean that it is advocated alone by women,
but that in itself it must be regarded as _feminine_; a view which
elevates a subjective ideal relationship of sex above all objective
facts. The desires and feelings and sentiments are set up in
opposition to historical experience and communal tradition. We hear
much, and especially in the writings and talk of women, of such vapid
phrases as "Self-realisation in love," "The enhancement of the
individual life," and "The spiritualising of sex." Such personal
views, which exalt the passing needs of the individual above the
enduring interests of the race, are in direct opposition to progress.
What is rather needed is an examination of marriage and other forms of
our sexual relationships by practical morality, by which I mean the
estimating of their merits and defects in relation to the vital needs
of the community under the circumstances of the present.
To do this we must first clear our minds from the belief that regards
our present form of monogamic marriage as ordained by Nature and
sanctified by God. He who accepts the development of the love of one
man for one woman from other and earlier forms of association may well
look forward in faith to a future progress from our existing marriage:
yet, though eager for reform, he will, remembering the slowness of
this steady upward progress in love's refinement in the past, refrain
from acting in haste, understanding the impossibility of forcing any
Utopia of the sexes. No change can be made in a matter so intimate as
marriage by a mere altering of the law. Only such reforms as are the
natural outgrowth of an enlightened public feeling can be of benefit,
and thus permanent in their result. I must go further than this and
say that what may very possibly be right for the few cannot be
regarded as practically moral and good until it can be accepted and
acted upon by the people at large. In sex more than in any other
department of life we are all linked together; we are our brother's
keeper, and the blood of the race will be required at our hands. Many
women, and some men, do not realise at all the immense complications
of sex and the claims passion makes on many natures. I am sure that
this is the explanation of much of the foolish talk that one hears. I
tried to make clear in the first chapters of this book the
irresistible elemental power of the uncurbed sexual instincts. And
this force is at least as strong now as it was in the beginning of
life. For in sex we have, as yet, learnt very little. We who are
living among the sophistication of aeroplanes, the inheritors of the
knowledge of all the ages, have still to pass in wonder along the
paths of love, entering into it blindly and making all the old
mistakes.
Am I, then, afraid that I plead thus for caution? No, I am not. I rest
my faith in the development of the racial element in love side by side
with its personal ends of physical and spiritual joy. For the sex
impulses, which have ruled women and men, will assuredly come to be
ruled by them. Just as in the past life has been moulded and carried
on by love's selection, acting unconsciously and ignorant of the ends
it followed, so in the future the race will be developed and carried
onwards by deliberate selection, and the creative energy of love will
become the servant of women and men. The mighty dynamic force will
then be capable of further and, as yet, unrealised development. This
is no vain hope. It has its proof in the past history of the selective
power of love. The problems of our individual loves are linked on to
the racial life. The hope for improvement rests thus in a growing
understanding of the individual's relation to the race, and in an
expansion of our knowledge and practice of the high duties love
enforces.
Let us look now at the practical direction of the present. We have
reached these conclusions as a starting-point--
(1) We have inherited marriage as a social, nay more, a racial
institution.
(2) The practical moral end of marriage, whether we regard it from
the wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of
society, is a selection of the sexes by means of love, having as its
social object the carrying on of the race, and as its personal object
a mutual life of complete physical, mental, and psychical union.
(3) The first of these, the racial object, is the concern of the
State; the second, the personal need of love, is the concern of the
individual woman and man.
(4) It is the business of the State to make such laws that the
interests of the race, _i.e._ the children, are protected.
From this it would seem to follow that beyond such care the State has
nothing to do with the sexual relationship. Here I am placed in a
difficulty. I cannot accept this view. I do not believe that the loves
of women and men, even apart from children being born from such union,
can ever be merely a personal matter between the two individuals
concerned. For this reason any woman and man is a potential mother or
father, and may become so in a later union. We cannot break the links
which bind the individual to the race. I am very clear in my mind,
however, of the need of recognising this perpetual duality in the
objects of love. It is not necessary to bring forward any proof of the
profound significance of the individual side of the sexual passion in
the progress of civilisation. We may accept what is really proved by
all of us in our acts, that love and love's embrace are not exercised
only, or indeed chiefly, for the purpose of procreation, but are of
quite equal importance to the parents, necessary for the complete
life--the physical and mental development and the joy of the woman and
the man.
It may seem, then, that we are thus faced by two opposing forces. That
is not the case. There is real harmony underlying the apparent
opposition of these two interests, and each is, indeed, the
indispensable complement of the other. Both the personal and the
further-reaching racial objects of love alike belong to the great
synthesis of life. I do not, of course, deny, what every one knows,
that there is at present an opposition and even conflict in certain
individual cases. This is but one sign of chaos and the wastage of
love. But this does not change the truth; there can be no gain for the
individual in the personal ends of love unless there is also a
corresponding gain to the wider racial end. The element of
self-assertion in our loves must be brought into correlation with the
universal and immortal development of life. This is so evident that I
will not wait to elaborate it further. I will only point out that all
the good, as also all the evil, that the individual is able to gain
from love must ultimately react also for the benefit, or the wastage,
of the race. Thus we have to get every good that we can out of our
sexual experiences for ourselves for this very reason that we do not
stand alone. It is because the race flows through us that we have to
make the utmost of our individual opportunities and powers, so that,
understanding our position as guardians to the generations yet unborn,
we may use to the very full, but refrain from any misuse of love's
possibilities of joy. We know that all we gain for ourselves we gain
in trust for the race, and what we lose for ourselves we waste for
the life to come. This has, of course, been said before by numberless
people, but it seems to me it has been realised by very few, and until
it is realised to the fullest extent it will never begin to be
practised. We shall continue at a crossed purpose between our own
interests and desires and the interests of the race, and shall go on
wasting the forces of love needlessly and riotously.
Armed with these conclusions I shall now attempt to examine our
existing marriage in its relation (1) to the needs of the children,
(2) to the individual needs apart from parentage. The extent of the
problems involved is almost illimitable, thus all that I can do is to
touch very briefly and insufficiently on a few facts.
As we question in turn the various systems of marriage it becomes
clear that monogamy is the form which has most widely prevailed, and
will be likely to be maintained, because of its superior survival
value. In other words, because it best serves the interests of the
race by assuring to the woman and her children the individual interest
and providence of the father. I believe further that monogamy of all
the sexual associations serves best the personal needs of the parents;
and, moreover, that it represents the form of union which is in
harmony with the instincts and desires of the majority of people. The
ideal of permanent marriage between one woman and one man to last for
the life of both must persist as an ideal never to be lost. I wish to
state this as my belief quite clearly. The higher love in true
marriage is the veritable law of the life to be; and beside it all
experiments in sensation will rot in their emptiness and their
self-love.
But this faith of mine in an ideal and lasting union does not lessen
at all my scepticism in the moral inefficacy of our present marriage
system. It is not the particular form of marriage practised that,
after all, is the main thing, but the kind of lives people live under
that form. The mere acceptance of a legally enforced monogamy does not
carry us very far in practical morality; we must claim something much
deeper than this.
And this brings us to the base counterfeit of monogamy that is
accepted and practised by many among us to-day; base because it is a
monogamy largely mitigated by clandestine transitory loves--tipplings
with sensation and snackings at lust which betray passion. Facts of
daily observation may not be shuffled out of consideration by any
hypocrisy. They must be faced and dealt with. Our marriage system is
buttressed with prostitution, which thus makes our moral attitude one
of intolerable deception, and our efforts at reform not only
ineffective, but absurd. Without the assistance of the prostitution of
one class of women and the enforced celibacy of another class our
marriage in its present form could not stand. It is no use shirking
it; if marriage cannot be made more moral--and by this I mean more
able to meet the sex needs of all men and all women--then we must
accept prostitution. No sentimentalism can save us; we must give our
consent to this sacrifice of women as necessary to the welfare and
stability of society. But with this question I shall deal in a later
section of this chapter. There is, however, more than this to be
said. Marriage is itself in many cases a legalised form of
prostitution. From the standpoint of morals, the woman who sells
herself in marriage is on the same level as the one who sells herself
for a night, the only difference is in the price paid and the duration
of the contract. Nay, it is probably fair to say that at the lowest
such sale-marriage results in the greater evil, for the prostitute
does not bear children. If she has a child it has, as a rule, been
born first; such is our morality that motherhood often drives her on
to the streets!
Any woman who marries for money or position is departing from the
biological and moral ends of marriage. A child can be born gladly only
as the fruit of love. It is in this direction, rather than in
maintaining a barren virginity, that woman's chastity should be
guarded. We may excuse women on the grounds of possible ignorance,
but, none the less, have the conditions of marriage been unfavourable
to the development of a fine moral feeling in women or in men. No one
can have failed to feel surprised at the men many girls are content to
marry; it is one thing that must be set against the claim women make
as the morally superior sex. Mr. Wells, whom I have already quoted in
this matter, places in the mouth of one of his characters, in his
recent book, _Marriage_, a true and terrible indictment of women.
"If there was one thing in which you might think woman would
show a sense of some divine purpose in life it is in the matter
of children, and they show about as much care in the matter--oh,
as rabbits! Yes, rabbits. I stick to it. Look at the things a
nice girl will marry; look at the men's children she'll submit
to bring into the world. Cheerfully! Proudly! For the sake of
the home and the clothes!"
The fact is our marriage in its present legal form is primarily an
arrangement for securing the rights of property. This in itself is not
necessarily evil. Economic necessities cannot be ignored in any form
of the sexual relationship; it is rather a readjustment that is called
for here. We have seen how admirably a marriage system based upon
property in the form of free contracts worked in Egypt, and how happy
were the family relationships under this system of equal partnership
between the wife and husband. I would again recommend the careful
study of these marriage contracts to all those interested in marriage
reform. The contracts were never fixed in one form; all that was
required being that the interests of the woman and the children were
in all cases protected. Take again the Roman marriage which, in its
latest fine developments, has special interest, as the history of
modern marriage systems may be traced back to it. The Romans came,
like the Egyptians, to regard marriage as a contract rather than a
legal form. In the custom of _usus_, which supplanted the earlier and
sacred _confarreatio_, there was no ceremony at all. I would recall to
the memory of my readers the significant fact that in both these great
countries this freedom in marriage was associated with the freedom of
woman. It must be recognised that these two forces act together.
Traditional customs in marriage, as in all other departments of life,
tend to become worn out, and whenever any form presses too heavily on
a sufficient number of individuals acting against, instead of for, the
interests of those concerned, there arises a movement towards reform.
This happened in Rome, and led to the establishment of marriage by
_usus_, which was further modified by the practice known as _conventio
in manus_, whereby the wife by passing three nights in the year from
her husband was able to break through the terrible right of the
husband's _manus_. It is possible that by some such simple way of
escape we may come to change the pressure of our coercive marriage.
The briefest glance at our marriage system proves it to be founded on
the patriarchal idea of woman as the property of man, which is
sufficiently illustrated by the fact that a husband can claim sums of
money as compensation from any man who sexually approaches his wife,
while a woman, on her side, is granted compensation in the case of a
breach of promise of marriage. If we seek to find how this condition
has arisen we must look backwards into the past. To the fine legacy
left by the Roman law (which, regarding marriage as a contract, placed
the two sexes in a position of equal freedom) was added the customs of
the barbarians and the base Jewish system, giving to the husband
rights in marriage and divorce denied to the wife. Later, in the
twelfth century, came the capture of marriage by the Church and the
establishment of Canon law, whereby the property-value of marriage
became inextricably mingled with the sanctification of marriage as a
sacrament, which, strengthened by Christian asceticism and the
glorification of virginity, involved a corresponding contempt cast on
all love outside of legal marriage.[326] The action of this double
standard of sexual morality has led on the one side to the setting-up
of a theoretical ideal, which, as few are able to follow it, tends to
become an empty form, and this, on the other side, leads to a hidden
laxity that rushes to waste love out to a swift finish. The puritan
view has left us an inheritance of denials. It is small wonder, under
such circumstances, that marriage is often immoral, so often ending in
repulsion and weariness. "Our sexual morality," it has been said with
fine truth by Havelock Ellis, "is in reality a bastard born of the
union of property-morality with primitive ascetic morality, neither in
true relationship to the vital facts of life."
It may, indeed, be doubted if apart from property considerations we
have left any sexual morality at all. How else were it possible for
marriage (which, if it is to fulfil its moral biological ends, must be
based on physical and mental affinity and fitness) to be contracted,
as it often is, without knowledge or any true care of these essential
factors, and, moreover, to guarantee a permanence of a relationship
thus entered into blindly. At least it should be considered necessary
that a certificate of the health of the partners be obtained before
marriage. What is required to ensure our individual life ought to be
demanded before we create new life. Here, as I believe, is one
direction in which the State should take action. Parentage on the part
of degenerate human beings is a crime, and as such it ought to be
prevented. It may be, and is, argued that any action of the State in
this direction entails an interference with the rights of the
individual. Just the same may be said of all laws. The man who wishes
to steal or to kill either another or himself may, with equal reason,
hold that it is an interference of the law that he is not permitted to
follow his inclinations in these matters. The sins that he may wish to
commit are assuredly less evil in their results than the sin of
irresponsible parentage. You see what I mean. For if this unceasing
crime against the unborn could somehow be stopped there would be so
great a reduction of all other sins that we might well be freed from
many laws. As an example I would refer the reader back to the wise
Spartans, to consider how great was the gain to them as individuals by
their strict and unceasing care for the welfare of the race.
There are many who attribute to mammon-marriages all the terrible
evils of our disordered love-life of to-day. It is, therefore, well to
remember that such conditions are not really a new thing, and cannot
be regarded as the result of our commercialised civilisation. The
intrusion of economics into marriage is of very ancient origin, and
may be found among peoples who are almost primitive. But there is this
important difference. In earlier and more vigorous societies such
property-based marriages occur side by side with other forms of sexual
associations, on a more natural basis, which are openly accepted and
honoured. Our marriage system by its rigorous exclusions closes this
way of escape. Morality may be outraged to any extent provided that
law and religion have been invoked in legal marriage.
Let me give my readers two cases from my own experience; facts speak
more forcibly than any mere statements of opinion. In a village that I
know well a woman, legally married, bore five idiot children one after
the other; her husband was a confirmed drinker and a mental
degenerate. One of the children fortunately died. The text that was
chosen as fitting for his funeral card was, "Of such is the kingdom of
heaven." About the same time in the same village a girl gave birth to
an illegitimate child. She was a beautiful girl; the father, who did
not live in the village, was strong and young; probably the child
would have been healthy. But the girl was sent from her situation and,
later, was driven from her home by her father. At the last she sought
refuge in a disused quarry, and she was there for two days without
food. When we found her her child had been born and was dead.
Afterwards the girl went mad. I will add no comment, except to record
my belief that under a saner social organisation such crimes against
love would be impossible.
As was said years ago by the wise Senancour, "The human race would
gain much if virtue were made less laborious." Let us view these large
questions in the light of their results to the individual and the
race. This practical morality will serve us better than any
traditional code. So only shall we learn to see if we cannot rid love
of stress and pain that is unendurable. We force women and men into
rebellion, into fearing concealments, and the dark and furtive ways of
vice. For this reason we must, I believe, make the regulations of law
as wide as possible, taking care only that mothers and all children
must be safeguarded, whether in legal marriage or outside. All of
which forces the conclusion: the same act of love cannot be good or
bad just because it is performed in or out of marriage. To hold such
an opinion is really as absurd as saying that food is more or less
digestible according to whether grace is, or is not, said before the
meal. All marriage forms are only matters of custom and expediency.
In face of the iniquity of our bastardy laws we may well pause to
doubt the traditional ideas of our sexual code and conventional
morality. It seems to me that in these questions of sex we have
receded further and further from the reality of things, and become
blinded and baffled by the very idols to love that men have set up.
One thing renders love altogether and incurably wrong, and that is
waste. The terribly high death-rate among illegitimate children alone
suffices to illustrate the actual conditions, to say nothing of the
greater waste often carried on in those children who live. The
question of the maintenance of such unfathered children is a scandal
of our time. We may surely claim that the birth of any child, without
exception, must be preceded by some form of contract which, though not
necessarily binding the mother and the father to each other, will
place on both alike the obligation of adequate fulfilment of the
duties to their child. This, I believe, the State must enforce. If
inability on the part of the parents to make such provision is proved,
the State must step in with some wide and fitting scheme of insurance
of childhood. The carrying out of even these simple demands will lead
us a great step forward in practical morality. It will open up the way
to a saner and more beautiful future.
But here, in case I am mistaken and thought to be desiring the
loosening of the bonds between the sexes, I must repeat again how
firmly I accept marriage as the best, the happiest, and the most
practical form of the sexual association. The ideal union is, I am
certain, an indestructible bond, trebly woven of inclination, duty,
and convenience. Marriage is an institution older than any existing
society, older than mankind, and reaches back, as Fabre's study of
insects has so beautifully shown us, to an infinitely remote past. Its
forms are, therefore, too fundamentally blended with human and,
further back, with animal society for them to be shaken with theories,
or even the practices of individuals or groups of individuals. Thus I
accept marriage: I believe that its form must be regulated and cannot
be left to the development of individual desires against the needs of
the race.
There are some who, in seeking liberation from the ignominious
conditions of our present amatory life, are wishing to rid marriage
from all legal bonds, and are pointing to Free-love as the way of
escape. To me this seems a very great mistake. I admit the splendid
imaginative appeal in the idea of Love's freedom as it is put forward,
for instance, by the great Swedish feminist, Ellen Key; I am unable to
accept it as practical morality. This, I believe, should be the only
sound basis for reform. The real question is not what people _ought
to do_, but what they _actually do_ and are likely _to go on doing_.
It is these facts that the idealist fails to face. Love is a very
mixed game indeed. And all that the wisest reformer has ever been able
to do is to make bad guesses at the solution of its problems.
The fundamental principle of the new ideal morality is that love and
marriage must always coincide, and, therefore, when love ceases the
bond should be broken. This in theory is, of course, right. I doubt if
it is, or ever will be, possible in practice. Experience has forced
the knowledge that the most passionate love is often the most likely
to end in disaster. Nor do I think that the evil is much lessened when
no legal bond is entered into. Those few people who have made a
success of Free-love would probably have made an equal success of
marriage. I know personally several cases in which the same woman, and
many in which the same man, has tried in succession legal marriage and
free unions and has been equally unhappy in both.
All the facts seem to me to point in another direction for reform. I
do not think that life's great central purpose of carrying on the race
(not alone giving birth to fit children, but the equally necessary
work of both parents uniting in caring for and bringing them up) can
be left safely to be confused and wasted by its dependence on the
gratification of personal desires. I wish that I thought otherwise. It
would make it all so much easier. It is useless to point back here to
the action of love's selection in the past history of life. As
civilisation progresses, and as individual needs become elaborated and
wealth increases, we tend to get further and further away from the
realities of love. We choose our partners without understanding, and
think very little of the needs of the future. What I want is to free
marriage from those bonds that can be proved to act against practical
morality. I do not wish at all to lessen its binding, only to defend
it against the conventions of a false and narrow traditional morality.
In love, as in every human relationship, it is character that avails
and prevails--nothing else. Marriage is, or ought to be, the most
practically moral institution that any civilisation is able to
produce. Women and men are likely to get out of any form of the sexual
association results in proportion to that which they put into it. A
great many people put nothing into marriage, and they are disappointed
when they get out of it--nothing. We shall put more into marriage, and
not less, in proportion as we come to understand it and to value its
enduring importance.
After all it is the people of any race who make marriage, not marriage
the people. The form of union is but a symbol of the people's
character, their desires, and capacities. If we have evolved the wrong
women and men, then any reform of marriage is vain. Have we in our
weakened civilisation drifted so far from life that the inherent
attributes of loyalty and discipline to the future are no longer with
us in sufficient measure adequately to respond to the enduring
realities of love? The answer is with women. We must demand from the
fathers of our children, as we demand from ourselves, loyalty to the
well-being of the race; the discipline of our personal desires and
loves that we may maintain ourselves fit as the bearers and protectors
of those wider interests, which belong not to ourselves, not to this
generation alone, but to the life and the future history of our race.
Woman must again assert, as she did in the past, that she is the maker
of men. She must reclaim her right, held by the female from the
beginning of life, as the director of love's selective power. And more
even than this. Woman with man must be the framer of the law, and the
guide and director of all the relations of the sexes. But it is not
sufficient to do this by mere proclamation. Virile nations are not
made by theories or by the blast of the trumpet. They are reared in
the bonds of marriage, and what we incorporate in that bond will be
manifest in our children.
II.--_Divorce_
"The result of dissolving the formal stringency of the marriage
relationship, it is sometimes said, would be a tendency to an
immoral laxity. Those who make this statement overlook the fact
that laxity tends to reach a maximum as the result of
stringency, and that where the merely external authority of a
rigid marriage law prevails then the extreme excesses of licence
must flourish. It is also undoubtedly true, and for the same
reason, that any sudden removal of restraints necessarily
involves a reaction to the opposite extreme of licence. A slave
is not changed in a stroke into an autonomous free
man."--HAVELOCK ELLIS.
In putting forward a practical morality for marriage we have to
remember that we are not really uprooting traditional morality. There
is no necessity. Of its own decay the old morality has fallen in a
confusion of ruin. The ideal marriage is the union of one woman with
one man for life. This we have established. We have now to look at the
question from another side and ask, How far is this ideal monogamy
possible in practice? I think the answer must be that, as we stand at
present, it is possible to very few. For marriage is essentially a
state of bondage--there is no getting away from this--a state which
calls upon the individual to surrender his personal freedom in the
interests of the race and the stability of social structure. I have
proved that this bondage acts really for the benefit and happiness of
the individual, but this deep truth I must now leave. Marriage is,
thus, a concession of the individual to the general welfare of the
future and of the State. Now, with human nature as it is in its
present development, it is clearly claiming the impossible to demand
indissoluble marriage. Divorce is really implicit in the conditions of
marriage itself, and the firmest believers in monogamy must be the
supporters of practical and moral conditions of divorce.
The moral code of any society represents the experience of its
members. But experience is continually changing and enlarging, and
moral codes must also change and enlarge, or they become worn-out and
useless. Those people who are unable to modify their moral code to fit
new conditions and growth are doomed to extinction, while the people
who adjust their customs and laws to meet new requirements open up the
way to move on, and still onwards, in continual progress.
It were well to remember this as we come to question the conditions of
our law of divorce. There can be no possible doubt that if marriage is
to remain and become moral there must be an easier dissolution of its
bonds. The enforced continuance of an unreal marriage is really the
grossest form of immorality, harmful not only to the individuals
concerned, but to the children. The prejudices handed down to us by
past tradition have twisted morals into an assertion that a husband
or wife who have ceased to love must continue to share the rites of
marriage in mutual repugnance, or live in an unnatural celibacy.
The question as to how this condition arose may be answered very
briefly. The Church ordained that marriage is indissoluble, but, this
being found impossible to maintain in practice, the State stepped in
with a way of escape--a kind of emergency exit. But what a makeshift
it is! how flagrantly indecent! how inconsistent! Adultery must be
committed. To escape the degradation of an unworthy partner another
partner must first be sought, and love degraded in an act of
infidelity. Adultery is, in fact, a State-endowed offence against
morality, just as the indissolubility of marriage is a theological
perversion of the plainest moral law, that the true relationship
between the sexes is founded on love. This bastard-born morality of
Church and State is as immoral in theory as it is evil in practice.
For if we look deeper it becomes clear that the test to be applied
here is the same as in every relation between the sexes: the
conditions of divorce, like the conditions of marriage, must be such
as best serve the interests of the race. This means, in the first
place, that both partners in a marriage must have the assurance that
when the moral conditions of the contract are broken, or through any
reason become inefficient, they can be liberated, without any shame or
idea of delinquency being attached to the dissolution. "Divorce is
relief from misfortune and not a crime," to quote from the admirable
statute-book of Norway, a saying which should be one of universal
application in divorce. This must be done not merely as an act of
justice to the individual; it is called for equally in the interests
of the race. The woman or man from whom a divorce ought to be obtained
is in almost all cases the woman or man who ought not to be a parent.
We may go further than this. Divorce cannot be considered on the
physical side alone, there is a psychological divorce which is far
deeper, and also far more frequent. The woman or man who for any
reason is unhappy in marriage is unfitted to be a parent in that
marriage, and the way should be opened to them, if they desire, to
have other children born in love in a new marriage with a more fitting
mate. Our eyes are shut to the damning facts which confront us on
every side. Take, for instance, the case of the drunkard, the insane,
the syphilitic, the consumptive, parent bound in marriage. On
biological and economic grounds it is folly to leave in such hands the
protection of the race. It is the business of the State, as I believe,
to regulate the law to prevent, as far as possible, the birth of unfit
children; at least we may demand that Church and State cease to grant
their sanction to this flagrant sin.
It is of the utmost importance to realise that Divorce Law Reform is
needed to bring our jurisprudence up to the level of the modern
civilised State. Our law in this respect lags far behind that of other
countries, and is only one example out of many of our hide-bound
attachment to ancient abuses. The opposition shown against the
splendid and fearless recommendations for the extension of the grounds
of divorce, voiced by the Majority Report in the recent Divorce Law
Commission, prove how far we are still from understanding the higher
morality of marriage. The recent Commission and the strong movement in
favour of reform will, without doubt, lead to a change in the glaring
injustice and inconsistencies of our law. It is, however, certain that
an enlightened divorce law must go much further than providing ways of
escape from marriage. Such exits tend to destroy the true sanctity of
marriage; also they are unable to meet the needs of all classes, no
matter how wide and numerous they are. They can never form the
ultimate solution. They tend to make marriage ridiculous, and there
are real grounds in the objections raised against them. There must be
no special exits; the door of marriage itself must be left open to go
out of as it is open to enter. This will come. When personal
responsibility in marriage is developed, when all the relationships of
sexes are founded on the recognition of the equality of the mother
with the father--the woman with the man, then will come divorce by
mutual consent.
Whenever divorce is difficult, there woman's lot is hard and her
position low. It is a part of the patriarchal custom which regards
women as property. It would be easy to prove this by the history of
marriage in the civilisations of the past, as also by an examination
of the present divorce laws in civilised countries. I cannot do this,
but I make the assertion without the least shadow of doubt. I would
point back in proof to the Egyptian and Babylonian divorce law, and to
the splendid development of Roman Law in this direction. Consent is
accepted as necessary to marriage; it should be the condition of
divorce. This, I believe, is the only solution which women will be
content to accept, when once they are awakened to their
responsibilities in marriage. And here I would quote the wise dictum
of Mr. Cunninghame Graham: "Divorce is the charter of Woman's
Freedom".
The condemnation of divorce and the pillorying of divorced persons are
not really the outcome of any concern for true morality, though most
people deceive themselves that they are. They are predominantly the
outcome of ignorance, of prejudices and false values, based, on the
one hand, on the primitive patriarchal view of the wife (hence the
insistence on woman's chastity and the inequality of the law), and, on
the other, on the ecclesiastical doctrine of the indissolubility of
marriage and the sin of all relationships outside its bonds. It is
only when we realise how deeply and terribly these worn-out views have
saturated and falsified our judgments that we come to understand the
barbarism of our present laws of divorce.
It is significant that those who talk most of the sanctity of marriage
are the very people who fear most the extension of divorce, seeming to
believe that any loosening of its chains would lead to a dissolution
of the institution of marriage. One marvels at the weakness of faith
shown in such a view. It is not possible to hold the argument both
ways. If the partners in marriage are happy, why lock them in? if not,
why pretend that they are? The best argument I ever heard for divorce
was a remark made to me in a conversation with a working man. He said,
"When two people are fighting it is not very safe to lock the door".
After all, what you do is this: you give occasion for the locks to be
broken.
I have already spoken of loyalty and duty in relation to marriage,
and nothing that I say now must be thought to lessen at all my deep
belief in the personal responsibility of the individual in every
relationship of the sexes. Living together even after the death of
love may, indeed, be right if this is done in the interests of the
children. But it can never be right to compel such action by law. For
then in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred what is regarded as
duty is really a question of expediency. It is very easy to deceive
ourselves. And it requires more courage than most people possess to
face the fact that what has perhaps been a happy and fruitful marriage
has died a slow and bitter death. But the higher morality claims that
a child must be born in love and reared in love, or, at the lowest, in
an atmosphere from which all enmity is absent. Only the parent who is
strong enough to subordinate the individual right to the rights of the
child can safely remain in a marriage without love.
One great advantage of free divorce is that the wife and husband would
not part, as is almost inevitable under present conditions, in hatred,
but in friendship. This would enable them to meet one another from
time to time and unite together in care of any children of the
marriage. If such reasonable conduct was for any reason impossible on
the part of either or both parents, then the State must appoint a
guardian to fill the place of one parent or both. No child should be
brought up without a mother and a father. The adoption of children
under the State might in this way open up fruitful opportunities
whereby childless women and men might gain the joys of parenthood.
This condition of safety by free-divorce once established, would do
much to mitigate the hostility against marriage which is so
unfortunately prevalent among us to-day. Practical morality is
teaching us the immorality of indissoluble marriage. In Spain, a
country that I know well, where marriage is indissoluble, an
increasing number of men--and these the best and most thoughtful--are
refraining from marriage for this very reason. It follows, as a
result, that in Spain the illegitimate birth-rate is very high. The
difficulty of divorce is also a strong factor that upholds
prostitution.
Many women and men of exceptional gifts and character, conscious of an
increasing intolerance against the makeshift morality imposed upon our
sexual life, are standing outside of marriage and evading parentage.
For this waste we are responsible to the future. Thus, finally, we
find this truth: the principle of divorce reform forms the most
practical foundation--and one waiting ready to our hands--for the
reformation of marriage and the re-establishment of its sanctity. It
also has direct and urgent bearing on many of the problems of
womanhood.
III.--_Prostitution_
"Nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor nought so good but strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice being misapplied,
And vice sometimes by action dignified."--_Romeo and Juliet._
"In nature there's no blemish but the mind,
None can be called deformed but the unkind."--_Twelfth Night._
A brief and final section of this chapter on the sexual relationships
must be devoted to the question of the conditions of prostitution,
which are really part of the conditions of marriage, being correlated
with that institution in its present coercive form, in fact, part of
it and growing out of it.
The extent of the problems involved here are so immense, the
difficulties so great and the issues so involved that I hesitate at
making any attempt to treat so wide a subject briefly and necessarily
inadequately in the short space at my disposal. Yet it seems to me
impossible to take the easy way and pass it over in silence, and I may
be able to contribute a word or two of worth to this very complex
social phenomenon. I shall limit myself to the aspects of the question
that seem to me important, choosing in preference the facts about
which I have some little personal knowledge.
Essentially this is a woman's question. What do women know about it?
Almost nothing. We are really as ignorant of the character, moral,
mental and physical of "the fallen woman," as if she belonged to an
extinct species. We know her only to pity her or to despise her, which
is, in result, to know nothing that is true about her. To deal with
the problem needs women and men of the finest character and the widest
sympathy. There are some of them at work now, but these, for the most
part, are engaged in the almost impossible task of rescue work, which
does not bring, I think, a real understanding of the facts in their
wider social aspect.
Women are, however, realising that they cannot continue to shirk this
part of their civic duties. These "painted tragedies" of our streets
have got to be recognised and dealt with; and this not so much for the
sake of the prostitute, but for all women's safety and the health of
the race. The time is not far distant when the mothers of the
community, the sheltered wives of respectable homes, must come to
understand that their own position of moral safety is maintained at
the expense of a traffic whose very name they will not mention. For
the prostitute, though unable to avenge herself, has had a mighty ally
in Nature, who has taken her case in hand and has avenged it on the
women and their children, who have received the benefits of our legal
marriage system. M. Brieux deals with this question in _Les Avaries_:
it is a tragedy that should be read by all women.
For this reason, if for no other, the existence of prostitution has to
be faced by women. Apathy and ignorance will no longer be accepted as
excuse, in the light of the sins against the race slowly piled up
through the centuries by vice and disease. But what will be the result
of women's action in this matter? What will they do? What changes in
the law will they demand? The importance of these questions forces
itself upon all those who realise at all the difficulties of the
problem. What we see and hear does not, I think, give great hopes.
Every woman who dares to speak on this great burked subject seems to
have "a remedy" ready to her hand. What one hears most frequently are
unconsidered denunciations of "the men who are responsible." For
example, I heard one woman of education state publicly that _there was
no problem of prostitution!_ I mention this because it seems to me a
very grave danger, an instance of the feminine over-haste in reform,
which, while casting out one devil, but prepares the way for seven
other devils worse than the first. Women seem to expect to solve
problems that have vexed civilisation since the beginnings of society.
This attitude is a little irritating. Every attempt hitherto to
grapple with prostitution has been a failure. Women have to remember
that it has existed as an institution in nearly all historic times and
among nearly all races of men. It is as old as monogamic marriage, and
maybe the result of that form of the sexual relationship, and not, as
some have held, a survival of primitive sexual licence. The action of
women in this question must be based on an educated opinion, which is
cognisant with the past history of prostitution, recognises the facts
of its action to-day in all civilised countries, and understands the
complexity of the problem from the man's side as well as the woman's.
Nothing less than this is necessary if any fruitful change is to be
effected, when women shall come to have a voice to direct the action
the State should assume towards this matter. The one measure which has
recently been brought forward and passed, largely aided by women,
especially the militant Suffragists--I refer to the White Slave
Traffic Bill--is just the most useless, ill-devised and really
preposterous law with which this tremendous problem could be mocked.
As Bernard Shaw has recently said--
"The act is the final triumph of the vice it pretends to
repress. There is one remedy and one alone, for the White Slave
Traffic. Make it impossible, by the enactment of a Minimum Wage
law and by the proper provision of the unemployed, for any woman
to be forced to choose between prostitution and penury, and the
White Slaver will have no more power over the daughters of
labourers, artisans and clerks than he (or under the New Act
she) will have over the wives of Bishops."
Now all this is true, but is not all the truth. Remove the economic
pressure and no woman will be driven, or be likely to be trapped, into
entering the oldest profession in the world; but this does not say
that she _will not enter it_. The establishment of a minimum wage will
assuredly lighten the evil, but it will not end prostitution. The
economic factor is by no means the only factor. It is quite true that
poverty drives many women into the profession--that this should be so
is one of the social crimes that must, and will, be remedied.
The real problem lies deeper than this. Want is not the incentive to
the traffic of sex in the case of the dancer or chorus girl in regular
employment, of the forewoman in a factory or shop who earns steady
wages, or among numerous women belonging to much higher social
positions. These women choose prostitution, they are not driven into
it. It is necessary to insist upon this. The belief in the efficacy of
economic reform amounts almost to a disease--a kind of unquestioning
fanatical faith. Again and again I have been met by the assurance,
made by men who should know better, as well as by women, that no woman
would sell herself if economic causes were removed. Such opinion
proves a very plain ignorance of the history and facts of
prostitution. It is only a little more scientific than the view of the
woman moral crusader, who believes that the "social evil" can easily
be remedied by self-control on the part of men. One of the worst vices
common to women at present is spiritual pride. One wonders if these
short-cut reformers have ever been acquainted with a single member of
this class they hope to repress by legal enactments or other
measures, such as early marriage, better wages for women, moral
education, the censorship of amusements, and so forth. It is not so
simple. You see, what is needed is an understanding of the conditions,
not from the reformer's standard of thought, but from that of the
prostitute, which is a very different matter. How can any one hope to
reform a class whose real lives, thoughts, and desires are unknown to
them?
My effort to reach bed-rock facts had led me to seek first-hand
information from these women, many of whom I have come to know
intimately, and to like. I have learnt a great deal, much more than
from all my close study of the problem as it is presented in books.
Problems are never so simple in the working out as they appear in
theories. Moral doctrines fall to pieces; even statistics and the
estimates of expert investigators are apt to become curiously unreal
in the light of a very little practical knowledge. I have learnt that
there is no one type of prostitute, no one cause of the evil, no one
remedy that will cure it.
And here, before I go further, I must in fairness state that I have
been compelled to give up the view held by me, in common with most
women, that men and their uncontrolled passions are chiefly
responsible for this hideous traffic. It is so comfortable to place
the sins of society on men's passions. But as an unbiassed inquirer I
have learnt that seduction as a cause of prostitution requires very
careful examination. We women have got to remember that if many of our
fallen sisters have been seduced by men, at least an equal number of
men have received their sexual initiation at the hands of our sex.
This seduction of men by women is often the starting-point of a young
man's association with courtesans. It is time to assert that, if women
suffer through men's passion, men suffer no less from women's greed. I
am inclined to accept the estimate of Lippert (_Prostitution in
Hamburg_) that the principal motives to prostitution are "idleness,
frivolity, and, above all, the love of finery." This last is, as I
believe, a far more frequent and stronger factor in determining
towards prostitution than actual want, and one, moreover, that is very
deeply rooted in the feminine character. I do not wish to be cynical,
but facts have forced on me the belief that the majority of
prostitutes are simply doing for money what they originally did _of
their own will_ for excitement and the gain of some small personal
gift.
There are, of course, many types among these unclassed women, as many
as there are in any other class, probably even more. Yet, in one
respect, I have found them curiously alike. Just as the members of any
other trade have a special attitude towards their work, so prostitutes
have, I think, a particular way of viewing their trade in sex. It is a
mistake of sentiment to believe they have any real dislike to this
traffic. Such distaste is felt by the unsuccessful and by others in
periods of unprofitable business, but not, I think, otherwise. To me
it has seemed in talking with them--as I have done very freely--that
they regard the sexual embraces of their partners exactly in the light
that I regard the process of the actual writing down of my books--as
something, in itself unimportant and tiresome, but necessary to the
end to be gained. This was first made clear to me in a conversation
with a member of the higher _demi-monde_, a woman of education and
considerable character. "After all," she said, "it is really a very
small thing to do, and gives one very little trouble, and men are
almost always generous."
This remarkable statement seems to me representative of the attitude
of most prostitutes. They are much better paid, if at all successful,
than they ever could be as workers. The sale of their sex opens up to
them the same opportunities of gain that gambling on the
stock-exchange or betting on the racecourse, for instance, opens up to
men. It also offers the same joy of excitement, undoubtedly a very
important factor. There are a considerable number of women who are
drawn to and kept in the profession, not through necessity, but
through neurosis.
There is no doubt that prostitution is very profitable to the clever
trader. I was informed by one woman, for instance, that a certain
country, whose name I had perhaps better withhold, "Is a Paradise for
women." Quite a considerable fortune, either in money or jewels, may
be reaped in a few months and sometimes in a few weeks. But the woman
must keep her head; cleverness is more important even than beauty. I
learnt that it was considered foolish to remain with the same partner
for more than two nights, the oftener a change was made the greater
the chance of gain. The richest presents are given as a rule by young
boys or old men: some of these boys are as young as fifteen years.
Now the really extraordinary thing to me was that my informant had
plainly no idea of my moral sensibility being shocked at these
statements. Of course, if I had shown the least surprise or
condemnation, she would at once have agreed with me--but I didn't. I
was trying to see things as she saw them, and my interest caused her
really to speak to me as she felt. I am certain of this, as was proved
to me in a subsequent conversation, in which I was told the history of
a girl friend, who had got into difficulties and been helped by my
informant. (These women are almost always kind and generous to one
another. I know of one case in which a woman who had been trapped into
a bogus marriage and then deserted, afterwards helped with money the
girl and bastard child, also left by the man who had deceived her.)
The story was ended with this extraordinary remark, "_It was all my
friend's own fault, she was not particular who she went with; she
would go with any man just because she took a fancy to him. I often
told her how foolish she was, but she always said she could not help
it._"
It was then that I realised the immensity of the gulf which separated
my outlook from that of this successful courtesan. To her _to be not
particular_ was to give oneself without a due return in money: to
me----! Well, I needed all my control at that moment not to let her
see what I felt. I have never been conscious of so deep a pity for any
woman before, or felt so fierce an anger against social conditions
that made this degradation of love possible. For, mark you, I know
this woman well, have known her for years, and I can, and do, testify
that in many directions apart from her trade, her virtue, her
refinement and her character are equal, even if not superior, to my
own. This is the greatest lesson I have learnt. The degradation of
prostitution rests not with these women, but on us, the sheltered,
happy women who have been content to ignore or despise them. Do you
come to know these women (and this is very difficult) you are just as
able to like them and in many ways to respect them, as you are to like
and to respect any "straight" woman. You may hate their trade, you
cannot justly hate them.
I would like here to bring forward as a chief cause of prostitution a
factor which, though mentioned by many investigators,[327] has not, I
think, been sufficiently recognised. To me it has been brought very
forcibly home by my personal investigations. I mean sexual frigidity.
This is surely the clearest explanation of the moral insensibility of
the prostitute. I have not enough knowledge to say whether this is a
natural condition, or whether it is acquired. I am certain, however,
that it is present in those courtesans whom I have known. These women
have never experienced passion. I believe that the traffic of love's
supreme rite means less to them than it would do to me to shake hands
with a man I disliked.
Now, if I am right, this fact will explain a great deal. I believe,
moreover, that here a way opens out whereby in the future prostitution
may be remedied. This is no fanciful statement, but a practical belief
in passion as a power containing all forces. To any one who shares
the faith I have been developing in this book, what I mean will be
evident. If we consider how large a factor physical sex is in the life
of woman, it becomes clear that any atrophy of these instincts must be
in the highest degree hurtful. Moral insensibility is almost always
combined with economic dependence. If all mating was founded, as it
ought to be, on love, and all children born from lovers, there would
follow as an inevitable result a truer insistence on reality in the
relationships of the sexes. With a strengthening of passion in the
mothers of the race, sex will return to its right and powerful
purpose; love of all types, from the merest physical to the highest
soul attraction, will be brought back to its true biological end--the
service of the future.
I know, of course, as I have said already, that, just as there are
many different forms of prostitution, there are many and varied types
of prostitutes, and that, therefore, it is foolishness to hold fast in
a one-sided manner to a single theory. There are undoubtedly
voluptuous women among prostitutes. These I have not considered. For
one thing I have not met them. I have preferred to speak of the women
I have known personally. In the light of what I have learnt from them,
I have come to believe that only in comparatively few cases does
sexual desire lead any woman to adopt a career of prostitution, and in
still fewer cases does passion persist. The insistence so often made
on this factor as a cause of prostitution is due, in part, to
ignorance as to the real feelings of these women, and also, in part,
to its moral plausibility. We are so afraid of normal passion that we
readily assume abnormal passion to be the cause of the evil. But far
truer causes on the women's side are love of luxury and dislike of
work. I think the estimates given by men on this subject have to be
accepted with great caution. It must be remembered that it is the
business of these women to excite passion, and, to do this, they must
have learnt to simulate passion; and men, as every woman who is not
ignorant or a fool knows, are easy to deceive. It may also be added
that to the woman of strong sexuality the career of prostitution is
suited. It is possible that in the future and under wiser conditions
such women only will choose this profession.
For the same reason I have passed very lightly over the economic
factor as a cause of prostitution. I believe that this will be
changed. I do not under-estimate the undoubted importance of the
driving pressure of want. But, as I have tried to make clear, it does
not take us to the root of the problem. Poverty can only be regarded
as probably the strongest out of many accessory causes. The socialists
and economic apostles have to face this: no possible raising of
women's wages can abolish prostitution.[328]
We must hold firmly to the fact that characterlessness, which is
incapable of overcoming opposition and takes the path that is easiest,
is the result of the individual's inherited disposition, with the
addition of his, or her, own experience; and of these it is the former
that, as a rule, determines to prostitution. Every kind of moral and
intellectual looseness and dullness can, for the most part, be traced
to this cause. At all events it is the strongest among many. Not alone
for the prostitute's sake must this subject be seriously approached,
but for society's sake as well. As things stand with us at present,
moral sensitiveness has a poor chance of being cultivated, and those
who realise that this is the case are still very few. Women have yet
to learn the responsibilities of love, not only in regard to their
duties of child-bearing and child-rearing, but in its personal bearing
on their own sexual needs and the needs of men. I believe that the
degradation of our legitimate love-relationships is the ultimate cause
of prostitution, to which all other causes are subsidiary.
If we look now at the position for a moment from the other side--the
man's side--a very difficult question awaits us. It is a question that
women must answer. What is the real need of the prostitute on the part
of men? This demand is present everywhere under civilisation; what are
its causes? and how far are these likely to be changed? Now it is easy
to bring forward answers, such as the lateness of marriage, difficulty
of divorce, and all those social and economic causes which may be
grouped together and classed as "lack of opportunity of legitimate
love." Without question these causes are important, but, like the
economic factor which drives women into prostitution, they are not
fundamental; they are also remediable. They do not, however, explain
the fact, which all know, that the prostitute is sought out by
numberless men who have ample opportunity of unpriced love with other
women. Here we have a preference for the prostitute, not the
acceptance of her as a substitute taken of necessity. It is, of
course, easy to say that such preference is due to the lustful nature
of the male. There was a time when I accepted this view--it is,
without doubt, a pleasant and a flattering one for women. I have
learnt the folly of such shallow condemnations of needs I had not
troubled to understand. Possibly no woman can quite get to the truth
here; but at least I have tried to see facts straight and without
feminine prejudice.
This is what seems to me to be the explanation.
We have got to recognise that there are primitive instincts of
tremendous power, which, held in check by our dull and laborious, yet
sexually-exciting, civilisation, break out at times in many
individuals like a veritable monomania. In earlier civilisations this
fact was frankly recognised, and such instincts were prevented from
working mischief by the provision of means wherein they might expend
themselves. Hence the widespread custom of festivals with the
accompanying orgy; but these channels have been closed to us with a
result that is often disastrous. No woman can have failed to feel
astonishment at the attractive force the prostitute may, and often
does, exercise on cultured men of really fine character. There is some
deeper cause here than mere sexual necessity. But if we accept, as we
must, the existence of these imperatively driving, though usually
restrained impulses, it will be readily seen that prostitution
provides a channel in which this surplus of wild energy may be
expended. It lightens the burden of the customary restraints. There
are many men, I believe, who find it a relief just to talk with a
prostitute--a woman with whom they have no need to be on guard. The
prostitute fulfils that need that may arise in even the most
civilised man for something primitive and strong: a need, as has been
said by a male writer, better than I can express it, "for woman in
herself, not woman with the thousand and one tricks and whimsies of
wives, mothers and daughters."
This is a truth that it seems to me it is very necessary for all women
to realise. It is in our foolishness and want of knowledge that we
cast our contempt upon men. Women flinch from the facts of life. These
women who, regarded by us as "the supreme types of vice," are yet,
from this point of view, "the most efficient guardians of our virtue."
Must we not then rather see if there is no cause in ourselves for
blame?
It has been held for generations that woman must practise principles
of virtue to counteract man's example. This has led to an entirely
false standard. A solving compromise has been found in the ideal of
purity in one set of women and passion in another. And this state of
things has continued indefinitely until it has become to some extent
true. Numberless women have withered in this unprofitable service to
chastity. The sexual coldness of the modern woman, which sociologists
continually refer to, exists mainly in consequence of this constant
system of repression. Female virtue has been over-cultivated, the
flower has grown to an enormous size, but it has lost its scent. A
hypocritical and a lying system has been set up professing disbelief
in that which it knows is necessary to the needs of the individual
woman and to the larger needs of the race. Physical love is only
inglorious when it is regarded ingloriously. Why this horror of
passion? The tragedy of woman it seems is this, that with such power
of love as she has in her there should be so little opportunity for
its use--so much for its waste. Those of us who believe in passion as
the supreme factor in race-building, must know that this view of its
shamefulness is weakening the race.
I, therefore, hold firmly as my belief that the hateful traffic in
love will flourish just as long, and in proportion, as we regard
passion outside of prostitution with shame. Each one of us women is
responsible. Do we not know that there is not this difference between
our sexual needs and those of men? Let us tear down the old pretence.
Do not instincts arise in us, too, that demand expression, free from
all coercion of convention? And if we stifle them are we really the
better--the more moral sex? I doubt this, as I have come to doubt so
many of the lies that have been accepted as the truth about women.
The true hope of the future lies in the undivided recognition of
responsibility in love, which alone can make freedom possible. Freedom
for all women--the women of the home and the women of the streets. The
prostitute woman must be freed from all oppression. We, her sisters,
can demand no less than this. If we are to remain sheltered, she must
be sheltered too. She must be freed from the oppression of absurd
laws, from the terrible oppression of the police and from all economic
and social oppression. But to make this possible, these women, who for
centuries have been blasted for our sins against love, must be
re-admitted by women and men into the social life of our homes and the
State. Then, and then alone, can we have any hope that the prostitute
will cease to be and the natural woman will take her place.
FOOTNOTES:
[326] I would refer my readers to the Chapters on "Sexual Morality"
and "Marriage" in Havelock Ellis's _Psychology of Sex_, Vol. VI. The
only way to estimate aright the value of our present marriage system
is to examine the history of that system in the past. I had hoped to
have space in which to do this, and it is with real regret I am
compelled to omit the section I had written on this subject.
[327] Lombroso mentions the prevalence of sexual frigidity among
prostitutes (_La Donna Delinquente_, p. 401). See also Havelock Ellis,
_Psychology of Sex_, Vol. VI. pp. 268-272. This writer does not
support the view of the sexual frigidity of prostitutes, but in this,
I believe, he is influenced by statistics and outward facts, rather
than personal knowledge gained from the women themselves.
[328] Women in marriage have been for so long protected by men from
the necessity of doing work, that why should we expect the prostitute
to prefer uncongenial work?
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XI
THE END OF THE INQUIRY
The future of Woman--Indications of progress--The re-birth of
woman--Woman learning to believe in herself--The sin of
sterility--The waste of womanhood--The change in woman's
outlook--The quickening of the social conscience--A criticism
of militancy--It does not correspond with the ideal for
women--The new free relationship of the sexes--The conditions
which make this possible--The recognition of love as the
spiritual force in life--The importance of woman's freedom to
the vital advance of humanity--The end brings us back to the
beginning--The supreme importance of Motherhood--Woman the
guardian of the Race-life and the Race-soul--This the ground
of her claim for freedom.