It is by no means only during recent years that our marriage

system has been arraigned before the bar of morals. Forty years

ago James Hinton exhausted the vocabulary of denunciation in

describing the immorality and selfish licentiousness which our

marriage system covers with the cloak of legality and sanctity.

"There is an unsoundness in our marriage relations," Hinton

wrote. "Not only practically are they dreadful, but they do not

answer to feelings and convictions far too widespread to be

wisely ignored. Take the case of women of marked eminence

consenting to be a married man's mistress; of pure and simple

girls saying they cannot see why they should have a marriage by

law; of a lady saying that if she were in love she would not have

any legal tie; of its being necessary--or thought so by good and

wise men--to keep one sex in bitter and often fatal ignorance.

These things (and how many more) show some deep unsoundness in

the marriage relations. This must be probed and searched to the

bottom."

At an earlier date, in 1847, Gross-Hoffinger, in his _Die

Schicksale der Frauen und die Prostitution_--a remarkable book

which Bloch, with little exaggeration, describes as possessing an

epoch-marking significance--vigorously showed that the problem of

prostitution is in reality the problem of marriage, and that we

can only reform away prostitution by reforming marriage, regarded

as a compulsory institution resting on an antiquated economic

basis. Gross-Hoffinger was a pioneering precursor of Ellen Key.

More than a century and a half earlier a man of very different

type scathingly analyzed the morality of his time, with a brutal

frankness, indeed, that seemed to his contemporaries a

revoltingly cynical attitude towards their sacred institutions,

and they felt that nothing was left to them save to burn his

books. Describing modern marriage in his _Fable of the Bees_

(1714, p. 64), and what that marriage might legally cover,

Mandeville wrote: "The fine gentleman I spoke of need not

practice any greater self-denial than the savage, and the latter

acted more according to the laws of nature and sincerity than the

first. The man that gratifies his appetite after the manner the

custom of the country allows of, has no censure to fear. If he

is hotter than goats or bulls, as soon as the ceremony is over,

let him sate and fatigue himself with joy and ecstasies of

pleasure, raise and indulge his appetite by turns, as

extravagantly as his strength and manhood will give him leave. He

may, with safety, laugh at the wise men that should reprove him:

all the women and above nine in ten of the men are of his side;

nay, he has the liberty of valuing himself upon the fury of his

unbridled passions, and the more he wallows in lust and strains

every faculty to be abandonedly voluptuous, the sooner he shall

have the good-will and gain the affection of the women, not the

young, vain, and lascivious only, but the prudent, grave, and

most sober matrons."

Thus the charge brought against our marriage system from the

point of view of morality is that it subordinates the sexual

relationship to considerations of money and of lust. That is

precisely the essence of prostitution.

The only legitimately moral end of marriage--whether we regard it from the

wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of human

society--is as a sexual selection, effected in accordance with the laws of

sexual selection, and having as its direct object a united life of

complete mutual love and as its indirect object the procreation of the

race. Unless procreation forms part of the object of marriage, society has

nothing whatever to do with it and has no right to make its voice heard.

But if procreation is one of the ends of marriage, then it is imperative

from the biological and social points of view that no influences outside

the proper natural influence of sexual selection should be permitted to

affect the choice of conjugal partners, for in so far as wholesome sexual

selection is interfered with the offspring is likely to be injured and the

interests of the race affected.

It must, of course, be clearly understood that the idea of

marriage as a form of sexual union based not on biological but on

economic considerations, is very ancient, and is sometimes found

in societies that are almost primitive. Whenever, however,

marriage on a purely property basis, and without due regard to

sexual selection, has occurred among comparatively primitive and

vigorous peoples, it has been largely deprived of its evil

results by the recognition of its merely economic character, and

by the absence of any desire to suppress, even nominally, other

sexual relationships on a more natural basis which were outside

this artificial form of marriage. Polygamy especially tended to

conciliate unions on an economic basis with unions on a natural

sexual basis. Our modern marriage system has, however, acquired

an artificial rigidity which excludes the possibility of this

natural safeguard and compensation. Whatever its real moral

content may be, a modern marriage is always "legal" and "sacred."

We are indeed so accustomed to economic forms of marriage that,

as Sidgwick truly observed (_Method of Ethics_, Bk. ii, Ch. XI),

when they are spoken of as "legalized prostitution" it constantly

happens that "the phrase is felt to be extravagant and

paradoxical."

A man who marries for money or for ambition is departing from the

biological and moral ends of marriage. A woman who sells herself for life

is morally on the same level as one who sells herself for a night. The

fact that the payment seems larger, that in return for rendering certain

domestic services and certain personal complacencies--services and

complacencies in which she may be quite inexpert--she will secure an

almshouse in which she will be fed and clothed and sheltered for life

makes no difference in the moral aspect of her case. The moral

responsibility is, it need scarcely be said, at least as much the man's as

the woman's. It is largely due to the ignorance and even the indifference

of men, who often know little or nothing of the nature of women and the

art of love. The unintelligence with which even men who might, one thinks,

be not without experience, select as a mate, a woman who, however fine and

charming she may be, possesses none of the qualities which her wooer

really craves, is a perpetual marvel. To refrain from testing and proving

the temper and quality of the woman he desires for a mate is no doubt an

amiable trait of humility on a man's part. But it is certain that a man

should never be content with less than the best of what a woman's soul and

body have to give, however unworthy he may feel himself of such a

possession. This demand, it must be remarked, is in the highest interests

of the woman herself. A woman can offer to a man what is a part at all

events of the secret of the universe. The woman degrades herself who sinks

to the level of a candidate for an asylum for the destitute.

Our discussion of the psychic facts of sex has thus, it will be seen,

brought us up to the question of morality. Over and over again, in

setting forth the phenomena of prostitution, it has been necessary to use

the word "moral." That word, however, is vague and even, it may be,

misleading because it has several senses. So far, it has been left to the

intelligent reader, as he will not fail to perceive, to decide from the

context in what sense the word was used. But at the present point, before

we proceed to discuss sexual psychology in relation to marriage, it is

necessary, in order to avoid ambiguity, to remind the reader what

precisely are the chief main senses in which the word "morality" is

commonly used.

The morality with which ethical treatises are concerned is _theoretical

morality_. It is concerned with what people "ought"--or what is "right"

for them--to do. Socrates in the Platonic dialogues was concerned with

such theoretical morality: what "ought" people to seek in their actions?

The great bulk of ethical literature, until recent times one may say the

whole of it, is concerned with that question. Such theoretical morality

is, as Sidgwick said, a study rather than a science, for science can only

be based on what is, not on what ought to be.

Even within the sphere of theoretical morality there are two very

different kinds of morality, so different indeed that sometimes each

regards the other as even inimical or at best only by courtesy, with yet a

shade of contempt, "moral." These two kinds of theoretical morality are

_traditional morality_ and _ideal morality_. Traditional morality is

founded on the long established practices of a community and possesses the

stability of all theoretical ideas based in the past social life and

surrounding every individual born into the community from his earliest

years. It becomes the voice of conscience which speaks automatically in

favor of all the rules that are thus firmly fixed, even when the

individual himself no longer accepts them. Many persons, for example, who

were brought up in childhood to the Puritanical observance of Sunday, will

recall how, long after they had ceased to believe that such observances

were "right," they yet in the violation of them heard the protest of the

automatically aroused voice of "conscience," that is to say the expression

within the individual of customary rules which have indeed now ceased to

be his own but were those of the community in which he was brought up.

Ideal morality, on the other hand, refers not to the past of the community

but to its future. It is based not on the old social actions that are

becoming antiquated, and perhaps even anti-social in their tendency, but

on new social actions that are as yet only practiced by a small though

growing minority of the community. Nietzsche in modern times has been a

conspicuous champion of ideal morality, the heroic morality of the

pioneer, of the individual of the coming community, against traditional

morality, or, as he called it, herd-morality, the morality of the crowd.

These two moralities are necessarily opposed to each other, but, we have

to remember, they are both equally sound and equally indispensable, not

only to those who accept them but to the community which they both

contribute to hold in vital theoretical balance. We have seen them both,

for instance, applied to the question of prostitution; traditional

morality defends prostitution, not for its own sake, but for the sake of

the marriage system which it regards as sufficiently precious to be worth

a sacrifice, while ideal morality refuses to accept the necessity of

prostitution, and looks forward to progressive changes in the marriage

system which will modify and diminish prostitution.

But altogether outside theoretical morality, or the question of what

people "ought" to do, there remains _practical morality_, or the question

of what, as a matter of fact, people actually do. This is the really

fundamental and essential morality. Latin _mores_ and Greek aethos both

refer to _custom_, to the things that are, and not to the things that

"ought" to be, except in the indirect and secondary sense that whatever

the members of the community, in the mass, actually do, is the thing that

they feel they ought to do. In the first place, however, a moral act was

not done because it was felt that it ought to be done, but for reasons of

a much deeper and more instinctive character.[258] It was not first done

because it was felt it ought to be done, but it was felt it "ought" to be

done because it had actually become the custom to do it.

The actions of a community are determined by the vital needs of a

community under the special circumstances of its culture, time, and land.

When it is the general custom for children to kill their aged parents that

custom is always found to be the best not only for the community but even

for the old people themselves, who desire it; the action is both

practically moral and theoretically moral.[259] And when, as among

ourselves, the aged are kept alive, that action is also both practically

and theoretically moral; it is in no wise dependent on any law or rule

opposed to the taking of life, for we glory in the taking of life under

the patriotic name of "war," and are fairly indifferent to it when

involved by the demands of our industrial system; but the killing of the

aged no longer subserves any social need and their preservation ministers

to our civilized emotional needs. The killing of a man is indeed

notoriously an act which differs widely in its moral value at different

periods and in different countries. It was quite moral in England two

centuries ago and less, to kill a man for trifling offences against

property, for such punishment commended itself as desirable to the general

sense of the educated community. To-day it would be regarded as highly

immoral. We are even yet only beginning to doubt the morality of

condemning to death and imprisoning for life an unmarried girl who

destroyed her infant at birth, solely actuated, against all her natural

impulses, by the primitive instinct of self-defense. It cannot be said

that we have yet begun to doubt the morality of killing men in war, though

we no longer approve of killing women and children, or even non-combatants

generally. Every age or land has its own morality.

"Custom, in the strict sense of the word," well says Westermarck,

"involves a moral rule.... Society is the school in which men learn to

distinguish between right and wrong. The headmaster is custom."[260]

Custom is not only the basis of morality but also of law. "Custom is

law."[261] The field of theoretical morality has been found so fascinating

a playground for clever philosophers that there has sometimes been a

danger of forgetting that, after all, it is not theoretical morality but

practical morality, the question of what men in the mass of a community

actually do, which constitutes the real stuff of morals.[262] If we define

more precisely what we mean by morals, on the practical side, we may say

that it is constituted by those customs which the great majority of the

members of a community regard as conducive to the welfare of the community

at some particular time and place. It is for this reason--i.e., because it

is a question of what is and not of merely what some think ought to

be--that practical morals form the proper subject of science. "If the word

'ethics' is to be used as the name for a science," Westermarck says, "the

object of that science can only be to study the moral consciousness as a

fact."[263]

Lecky's _History of European Morals_ is a study in practical

rather than in theoretical morals. Dr. Westermarck's great work,

_The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, is a more modern

example of the objectively scientific discussion of morals,

although this is not perhaps clearly brought out by the title. It

is essentially a description of the actual historical facts of

what has been, and not of what "ought" to be. Mr. L.T. Hobhouse's

_Morals in Evolution_, published almost at the same time, is

similarly a work which, while professedly dealing with ideas,

i.e., with rules and regulations, and indeed disclaiming the task

of being "the history of conduct," yet limits itself to those

rules which are "in fact, the normal conduct of the average man"

(vol. i, p. 26). In other words, it is essentially a history of

practical morality, and not of theoretical morality. One of the

most subtle and suggestive of living thinkers, M. Jules de

Gaultier, in several of his books, and notably in _La Dépendance

de la Morale et l'Indépendance des Moeurs_ (1907), has analyzed

the conception of morals in a somewhat similar sense. "Phenomena

relative to conduct," as he puts it (op. cit., p. 58), "are given

in experience like other phenomena, so that morality, or the

totality of the laws which at any given moment of historic

evolution are applied to human practice, is dependent on

customs." I may also refer to the masterly exposition of this

aspect of morality in Lévy-Bruhl's _La Morale et la Science des

Moeurs_ (there is an English translation).

Practical morality is thus the solid natural fact which forms the

biological basis of theoretical morality, whether traditional or ideal.

The excessive fear, so widespread among us, lest we should injure morality

is misplaced. We cannot hurt morals though we can hurt ourselves. Morals

is based on nature and can at the most only be modified. As Crawley

rightly insists,[264] even the categorical imperatives of our moral

traditions, so far from being, as is often popularly supposed, attempts to

suppress Nature, arise in the desire to assist Nature; they are simply an

attempt at the rigid formulation of natural impulses. The evil of them

only lies in the fact that, like all things that become rigid and dead,

they tend to persist beyond the period when they were a beneficial vital

reaction to the environment. They thus provoke new forms of ideal

morality; and practical morals develops new structures, in accordance with

new vital relationships, to replace older and desiccated traditions.

There is clearly an intimate relationship between theoretical morals and

practical morals or morality proper. For not only is theoretical morality

the outcome in consciousness of realized practices embodied in the

general life of the community, but, having thus become conscious, it

reacts on those practices and tends to support them or, by its own

spontaneous growth, to modify them. This action is diverse, according as

we are dealing with one or the other of the strongly marked divisions of

theoretical morality: traditional and posterior morality, retarding the

vital growth of moral practice, or ideal and anterior morality,

stimulating the vital growth of moral practice. Practical morality, or

morals proper, may be said to stand between these two divisions of

theoretical morality. Practice is perpetually following after anterior

theoretical morality, in so far of course as ideal morality really is

anterior and not, as so often happens, astray up a blind alley. Posterior

or traditional morality always follows after practice. The result is that

while the actual morality, in practice at any time or place, is always

closely related to theoretical morality, it can never exactly correspond

to either of its forms. It always fails to catch up with ideal morality;

it is always outgrowing traditional morality.

It has been necessary at this point to formulate definitely the three

chief forms in which the word "moral" is used, although under one shape or

another they cannot but be familiar to the reader. In the discussion of

prostitution it has indeed been easily possible to follow the usual custom

of allowing the special sense in which the word was used to be determined

by the context. But now, when we are, for the moment, directly concerned

with the specific question of the evolution of sexual morality, it is

necessary to be more precise in formulating the terms we use. In this

chapter, except when it is otherwise stated, we are concerned primarily

with morals proper, with actual conduct as it develops among the masses of

a community, and only secondarily with anterior morality or with posterior

morality.

Sexual morality, like all other kinds of morality, is necessarily

constituted by inherited traditions modified by new adaptations to the

changing social environment. If the influence of tradition becomes unduly

pronounced the moral life tends to decay and lose its vital adaptability.

If adaptability becomes too facile the moral life tends to become unstable

and to lose authority. It is only by a reasonable synthesis of structure

and function--of what is called the traditional with what is called the

ideal--that the moral life can retain its authority without losing its

reality. Many, even among those who call themselves moralists, have found

this hard to understand. In a vain desire for an impossible logicality

they have over-emphasized either the ideal influence on practical morals

or, still more frequently, the traditional influence, which has appealed

to them because of the impressive authority its _dicta_ seem to convey.

The results in the sphere we are here concerned with have often been

unfortunate, for no social impulse is so rebellious to decayed traditions,

so volcanically eruptive, as that of sex.

We are accustomed to identify our present marriage system with "morality"

in the abstract, and for many people, perhaps for most, it is difficult to

realize that the slow and insensible movement which is always affecting

social life at the present time, as at every other time, is profoundly

affecting our sexual morality. A transference of values is constantly

taking place; what was once the very standard of morality becomes immoral,

what was once without question immoral becomes a new standard. Such a

process is almost as bewildering as for the European world two thousand

years ago was the great struggle between the Roman city and the Christian

Church, when it became necessary to realize that what Marcus Aurelius, the

great pattern of morality, had sought to crush as without question

immoral,[265] was becoming regarded as the supreme standard of morality.

The classic world considered love and pity and self-sacrifice as little

better than weakness and sometimes worse; the Christian world not only

regarded them as moralities but incarnated them in a god. Our sexual

morality has likewise disregarded natural human emotions, and is incapable

of understanding those who declare that to retain unduly traditional laws

that are opposed to the vital needs of human societies is not a morality

but an immorality.

The reason why the gradual evolution of moral ideals, which is always

taking place, tends in the sexual sphere, at all events among ourselves,

to reach a stage in which there seems to be an opposition between

different standards lies in the fact that as yet we really have no

specific sexual morality at all.[266] That may seem surprising at first to

one who reflects on the immense weight which is usually attached to

"sexual morality." And it is undoubtedly true that we have a morality

which we apply to the sphere of sex. But that morality is one which

belongs mainly to the sphere of property and was very largely developed on

a property basis. All the historians of morals in general, and of marriage

in particular, have set forth this fact, and illustrated it with a wealth

of historical material. We have as yet no generally recognized sexual

morality which has been based on the specific sexual facts of life. That

becomes clear at once when we realize the central fact that the sexual

relationship is based on love, at the very least on sexual desire, and

that that basis is so deep as to be even physiological, for in the absence

of such sexual desire it is physiologically impossible for a man to effect

intercourse with a woman. Any specific sexual morality must be based on

that fact. But our so-called "sexual morality," so far from being based on

that fact, attempts to ignore it altogether. It makes contracts, it

arranges sexual relationships beforehand, it offers to guarantee

permanency of sexual inclinations. It introduces, that is, considerations

of a kind that is perfectly sound in the economic sphere to which such

considerations rightly belong, but ridiculously incongruous in the sphere

of sex to which they have solemnly been applied. The economic

relationships of life, in the large sense, are, as we shall see, extremely

important in the evolution of any sound sexual morality, but they belong

to the conditions of its development and do not constitute its basis.[267]

The fact that, from the legal point of view, marriage is

primarily an arrangement for securing the rights of property and

inheritance is well illustrated by the English divorce law

to-day. According to this law, if a woman has sexual intercourse

with any man beside her husband, he is entitled to divorce her;

if, however, the husband has intercourse with another woman

beside his wife, she is not entitled to a divorce; that is only

accorded if, in addition, he has also been cruel to her, or

deserted her, and from any standpoint of ideal morality such a

law is obviously unjust, and it has now been discarded in nearly

all civilized lands except England.

But from the standpoint of property and inheritance it is quite

intelligible, and on that ground it is still supported by the

majority of Englishmen. If the wife has intercourse with other

men there is a risk that the husband's property will be inherited

by a child who is not his own. But the sexual intercourse of the

husband with other women is followed by no such risk. The

infidelity of the wife is a serious offence against property; the

infidelity of the husband is no offence against property, and

cannot possibly, therefore, be regarded as a ground for divorce

from our legal point of view. The fact that his adultery

complicated by cruelty is such a ground, is simply a concession

to modern feeling. Yet, as Helena Stöcker truly points out

("Verschiedenheit im Liebesleben des Weibes und des Mannes,"

_Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, Dec., 1908), a married man

who has an unacknowledged child with a woman outside of marriage,

has committed an act as seriously anti-social as a married woman

who has a child without acknowledging that the father is not her

husband. In the first case, the husband, and in the second case,

the wife, have placed an undue amount of responsibility on

another person. (The same point is brought forward by the author

of _The Question of English Divorce_, p. 56.)

I insist here on the economic element in our sexual morality,

because that is the element which has given it a kind of

stability and become established in law. But if we take a wider

view of our sexual morality, we cannot ignore the ancient element

of asceticism, which has given religious passion and sanction to

it. Our sexual morality is thus, in reality, a bastard born of

the union of property-morality with primitive ascetic morality,

neither in true relationship to the vital facts of the sexual

life. It is, indeed, the property element which, with a few

inconsistencies, has become finally the main concern of our law,

but the ascetic element (with, in the past, a wavering

relationship to law) has had an important part in moulding

popular sentiment and in creating an attitude of reprobation

towards sexual intercourse _per se_, although such intercourse is

regarded as an essential part of the property-based and

religiously sanctified institution of legal marriage.

The glorification of virginity led by imperceptible stages to the

formulation of "fornication" as a deadly sin, and finally as an

actual secular "crime." It is sometimes stated that it was not

until the Council of Trent that the Church formally anathematized

those who held that the state of marriage was higher than that of

virginity, but the opinion had been more or less formally held

from almost the earliest ages of Christianity, and is clear in

the epistles of Paul. All the theologians agree that fornication

is a mortal sin. Caramuel, indeed, the distinguished Spanish

theologian, who made unusual concessions to the demands of reason

and nature, held that fornication is only evil because it is

forbidden, but Innocent XI formally condemned that proposition.

Fornication as a mortal sin became gradually secularized into

fornication as a crime. Fornication was a crime in France even as

late as the eighteenth century, as Tarde found in his historical

investigations of criminal procedure in Périgord; adultery was

also a crime and severely punished quite independently of any

complaint from either of the parties (Tarde, "Archéologie

Criminelle en Périgord," _Archives de l'Anthropologie

Criminelle_, Nov. 15, 1898).

The Puritans of the Commonwealth days in England (like the

Puritans of Geneva) followed the Catholic example and adopted

ecclesiastical offences against chastity into the secular law. By

an Act passed in 1653 fornication became punishable by three

months' imprisonment inflicted on both parties. By the same Act

the adultery of a wife (nothing is said of a husband) was made

felony, both for her and her partner in guilt, and therefore

punishable by death (Scobell, _Acts and Ordinances_, p. 121).

The action of a pseudo-morality, such as our sexual morality has been, is

double-edged. On the one side it induces a secret and shamefaced laxity,

on the other it upholds a rigid and uninspiring theoretical code which so

few can consistently follow that theoretical morality is thereby degraded

into a more or less empty form. "The human race would gain much," said the

wise Sénancour, "if virtue were made less laborious. The merit would not

be so great, but what is the use of an elevation which can rarely be

sustained?"[268] At present, as a more recent moralist, Ellen Key, puts

it, we only have an immorality which favors vice and makes virtue

irrealizable, and, as she exclaims with pardonable extravagance, to preach

a sounder morality to the young, without at the same time condemning the

society which encourages the prevailing immorality, is "worse than folly,

it is crime."

It is on the lines along which Sénancour a century ago and Ellen Key

to-day are great pioneers that the new forms of anterior or ideal

theoretical morality are now moving, in advance, according to the general

tendency in morals, of traditional morality and even of practice.

There is one great modern movement of a definite kind which will serve to

show how clearly sexual morality is to-day moving towards a new

standpoint. This is the changing attitude of the bulk of the community

towards both State marriage and religious marriage, and the growing

tendency to disallow State interference with sexual relationships, apart

from the production of children.

There has no doubt always been a tendency among the masses of the

population in Europe to dispense with the official sanction of sexual

relationships until such relationships have been well established and the

hope of offspring has become justifiable. This tendency has been

crystallized into recognized customs among numberless rural communities

little touched either by the disturbing influences of the outside world or

the controlling influences of theological Christian conceptions. But at

the present day this tendency is not confined to the more primitive and

isolated communities of Europe among whom, on the contrary, it has tended

to die out. It is an unquestionable fact, says Professor Bruno Meyer, that

far more than the half of sexual intercourse now takes place outside legal

marriage.[269] It is among the intelligent classes and in prosperous and

progressive communities that this movement is chiefly marked. We see

throughout the world the practical common sense of the people shaping

itself in the direction which has been pioneered by the ideal moralists

who invariably precede the new growth of practical morality.

The voluntary childless marriages of to-day have served to show the

possibility of such unions outside legal marriage, and such free unions

are becoming, as Mrs. Parsons points out, "a progressive substitute for

marriage."[270] The gradual but steady rise in the age for entering on

legal marriage also points in the same direction, though it indicates not

merely an increase of free unions but an increase of all forms of normal

and abnormal sexuality outside marriage. Thus in England and Wales, in

1906, only 43 per 1,000 husbands and 146 per 1,000 wives were under age,

while the average age for husbands was 28.6 years and for wives 26.4

years. For men the age has gone up some eight months during the past forty

years, for women more than this. In the large cities, like London, where

the possibilities of extra-matrimonial relationships are greater, the age

for legal marriage is higher than in the country.

If we are to regard the age of legal marriage as, on the whole,

the age at which the population enters into sexual unions, it is

undoubtedly too late. Beyer, a leading German neurologist, finds

that there are evils alike in early and in late marriage, and

comes to the conclusion that in temperate zones the best age for

women to marry is the twenty-first year, and for men the

twenty-fifth year.

Yet, under bad economic conditions and with a rigid marriage law,

early marriages are in every respect disastrous. They are among

the poor a sign of destitution. The very poorest marry first, and

they do so through the feeling that their condition cannot be

worse. (Dr. Michael Ryan brought together much interesting

evidence concerning the causes of early marriage in Ireland in

his _Philosophy of Marriage_, 1837, pp. 58-72). Among the poor,

therefore, early marriage is always a misfortune. "Many good

people," says Mr. Thomas Holmes, Secretary of the Howard

Association and missionary at police courts (in an interview,

_Daily Chronicle_, Sept. 8, 1906), "advise boys and girls to get

married in order to prevent what they call a 'disgrace.' This I

consider to be absolutely wicked, and it leads to far greater

evils than it can possibly avert."

Early marriages are one of the commonest causes both of

prostitution and divorce. They lead to prostitution in

innumerable cases, even when no outward separation takes place.

The fact that they lead to divorce is shown by the significant

circumstance that in England, although only 146 per 1,000 women

are under twenty-one at marriage, of the wives concerned in

divorce cases, 280 per 1,000 were under twenty-one at marriage,

and this discrepancy is even greater than it appears, for in the

well-to-do class, which can alone afford the luxury of divorce,

the normal age at marriage is much higher than for the population

generally. Inexperience, as was long ago pointed out by Milton

(who had learnt this lesson to his cost), leads to shipwreck in

marriage. "They who have lived most loosely," he wrote, "prove

most successful in their matches, because their wild affections,

unsettling at will, have been so many divorces to teach them

experience."

Miss Clapperton, referring to the educated classes, advocates

very early marriage, even during student life, which might then

be to some extent carried on side by side (_Scientific

Meliorism_, Ch. XVII). Ellen Key, also, advocates early marriage.

But she wisely adds that it involves the necessity for easy

divorce. That, indeed, is the only condition which can render

early marriage generally desirable. Young people--unless they

possess very simple and inert natures--can neither foretell the

course of their own development and their own strongest needs,

nor estimate accurately the nature and quality of another

personality. A marriage formed at an early age very speedily

ceases to be a marriage in anything but name. Sometimes a young

girl applies for a separation from her husband even on the very

day after marriage.

The more or less permanent free unions formed among us in Europe are

usually to be regarded merely as trial-marriages. That is to say they are

a precaution rendered desirable both by uncertainty as to either the

harmony or the fruitfulness of union until actual experiment has been

made, and by the practical impossibility of otherwise rectifying any

mistake in consequence of the antiquated rigidity of most European divorce

laws. Such trial marriages are therefore demanded by prudence and caution,

and as foresight increases with the development of civilization, and

constantly grows among us, we may expect that there will be a parallel

development in the frequency of trial marriage and in the social attitude

towards such unions. The only alternative--that a radical reform in

European marriage laws should render the divorce of a legal marriage as

economical and as convenient as the divorce of a free marriage--cannot yet

be expected, for law always lags behind public opinion and public

practice.

If, however, we take a wider historical view, we find that we are in

presence of a phenomenon which, though favored by modern conditions, is

very ancient and widespread, dating, so far as Europe is concerned, from

the time when the Church first sought to impose ecclesiastical marriage,

so that it is practically a continuation of the ancient European custom of

private marriage.

Trial-marriages pass by imperceptible gradations into the group

of courtship customs which, while allowing the young couple to

spend the night together, in a position of more or less intimacy,

exclude, as a rule, actual sexual intercourse. Night-courtship

flourishes in stable and well-knit European communities not

liable to disorganization by contact with strangers. It seems to

be specially common in Teutonic and Celtic lands, and is known by

various names, as _Probenächte, fensterln, Kiltgang,

hand-fasting, bundling, sitting-up, courting on the bed, etc_. It

is well known in Wales; it is found in various English counties

as in Cheshire; it existed in eighteenth century Ireland

(according to Richard Twiss's _Travels_); in New England it was

known as _tarrying_; in Holland it is called _questing_. In

Norway, where it is called _night-running_, on account of the

long distance between the homesteads, I am told that it is

generally practiced, though the clergy preach against it; the

young girl puts on several extra skirts and goes to bed, and the

young man enters by door or window and goes to bed with her; they

talk all night, and are not bound to marry unless it should

happen that the girl becomes pregnant.

Rhys and Brynmor-Jones (_Welsh People_, pp. 582-4) have an

interesting passage on this night-courtship with numerous

references. As regards Germany see, e.g., Rudeck, _Geschichte der

öffentlichen Sittlichkeit_, pp. 146-154. With reference to

trial-marriage generally many facts and references are given by

M.A. Potter (_Sohrab and Rustem_, pp. 129-137).

The custom of free marriage unions, usually rendered legal before

or after the birth of children, seems to be fairly common in

many, or perhaps all, rural parts of England. The union is made

legal, if found satisfactory, even when there is no prospect of

children. In some counties it is said to be almost a universal

practice for the women to have sexual relationships before legal

marriage; sometimes she marries the first man whom she tries;

sometimes she tries several before finding the man who suits her.

Such marriages necessarily, on the whole, turn out better than

marriages in which the woman, knowing nothing of what awaits her

and having no other experiences for comparison, is liable to be

disillusioned or to feel that she "might have done better." Even

when legal recognition is not sought until after the birth of

children, it by no means follows that any moral deterioration is

involved. Thus in some parts of Staffordshire where it is the

custom of the women to have a child before marriage,

notwithstanding this "corruption," we are told (Burton, _City of

the Saints_, Appendix IV), the women are "very good neighbors,

excellent, hard-working, and affectionate wives and mothers."

"The lower social classes, especially peasants," remarks Dr.

Ehrhard ("Auch Ein Wort zur Ehereform," _Geschlecht und

Gesellschaft_, Jahrgang I, Heft 10), "know better than we that

the marriage bed is the foundation of marriage. On that account

they have retained the primitive custom of trial-marriage which,

in the Middle Ages, was still practiced even in the best circles.

It has the further advantage that the marriage is not concluded

until it has shown itself to be fruitful. Trial-marriage assumes,

of course, that virginity is not valued beyond its true worth."

With regard to this point it may be mentioned that in many parts

of the world a woman is more highly esteemed if she has had

intercourse before marriage (see, e.g., Potter, op. cit., pp. 163

et seq.). While virginity is one of the sexual attractions a

woman may possess, an attraction that is based on a natural

instinct (see "The Evolution of Modesty," in vol. i of these

_Studies_), yet an exaggerated attention to virginity can only be

regarded as a sexual perversion, allied to _paidophilia_, the

sexual attraction to children.

In very small coördinated communities the primitive custom of

trial-marriage tends to decay when there is a great invasion of

strangers who have not been brought up to the custom (which seems

to them indistinguishable from the license of prostitution), and

who fail to undertake the obligations which trial-marriage

involves. This is what happened in the case of the so-called

"island custom" of Portland, which lasted well on into the

nineteenth century; according to this custom a woman before

marriage lived with her lover until pregnant and then married

him; she was always strictly faithful to him while living with

him, but if no pregnancy occurred the couple might decide that

they were not meant for each other, and break off relations. The

result was that for a long period of years no illegitimate

children were born, and few marriages were childless. But when

the Portland stone trade was developed, the workmen imported from

London took advantage of the "island custom," but refused to

fulfil the obligation of marriage when pregnancy occurred. The

custom consequently fell into disuse (see, e.g., translator's

note to Bloch's _Sexual Life of Our Time_, p. 237, and the

quotation there given from Hutchins, _History and Antiquities of

Dorset_, vol. ii, p. 820).

It is, however, by no means only in rural districts, but in great

cities also that marriages are at the outset free unions. Thus in

Paris Després stated more than thirty years ago (_La Prostitution

à Paris_, p. 137) that in an average arrondissement nine out of

ten legal marriages are the consolidation of a free union;

though, while that was an average, in a few arrondissements it

was only three out of ten. Much the same conditions prevail in

Paris to-day; at least half the marriages, it is stated, are of

this kind.

In Teutonic lands the custom of free unions is very ancient and

well-established. Thus in Sweden, Ellen Key states (_Liebe und

Ehe_, p. 123), the majority of the population begin married life

in this way. The arrangement is found to be beneficial, and

"marital fidelity is as great as pre-marital freedom is

unbounded." In Denmark, also, a large number of children are

conceived before the unions of the parents are legalized (Rubin

and Westergaard, quoted by Gaedeken, _Archives d'Anthropologie

Criminelle_, Feb. 15, 1909).

In Germany not only is the proportion of illegitimate births very

high, since in Berlin it is 17 per cent., and in some towns very

much higher, but ante-nuptial conceptions take place in nearly

half the marriages, and sometimes in the majority. Thus in Berlin

more than 40 per cent, of all legitimate firstborn children are

conceived before marriage, while in some rural provinces (where

the proportion of illegitimate births is lower) the percentage of

marriages following ante-nuptial conceptions is much higher than

in Berlin. The conditions in rural Germany have been especially

investigated by a committee of Lutheran pastors, and were set

forth a few years ago in two volumes, _Die Geschlecht-sittlich

Verhältnisse im Deutschen Reiche_, which are full of instruction

concerning German sexual morality. In Hanover, it is said in this

work, the majority of authorities state that intercourse before

marriage is the rule. At the very least, a _probe_, or trial, is

regarded as a matter-of-course preliminary to a marriage, since

no one wishes "to buy a pig in a poke." In Saxony, likewise, we

are told, it is seldom that a girl fails to have intercourse

before marriage, or that her first child is not born, or at all

events conceived, outside marriage. This is justified as a proper

proving of a bride before taking her for good. "One does not buy

even a penny pipe without trying it," a German pastor was

informed. Around Stettin, in twelve districts (nearly half the

whole), sexual intercourse before marriage is a recognized

custom, and in the remainder, if not exactly a custom, it is very

common, and is not severely or even at all condemned by public

opinion. In some districts marriage immediately follows

pregnancy. In the Dantzig neighborhood, again, according to the

Lutheran Committee, intercourse before marriage occurs in more

than half the cases, but marriage by no means always follows

pregnancy. Nearly all the girls who go as servants have lovers,

and country people in engaging servants sometimes tell them that

at evening and night they may do as they like. This state of

things is found to be favorable to conjugal fidelity. The German

peasant girl, as another authority remarks (E.H. Meyer, _Deutsche

Volkskunde_, 1898, pp. 154, 164), has her own room; she may

receive her lover; it is no great shame if she gives herself to

him. The number of women who enter legal marriage still virgins

is not large (this refers more especially to Baden), but public

opinion protects them, and such opinion is unfavorable to the

disregard of the responsibilities involved by sexual

relationships. The German woman is less chaste before marriage

than her French or Italian sister. But, Meyer adds, she is

probably more faithful after marriage than they are.

It is assumed by many that this state of German morality as it

exists to-day is a new phenomenon, and the sign of a rapid

national degeneration. That is by no means the case. In this

connection we may accept the evidence of Catholic priests, who,

by the experience of the confessional, are enabled to speak with

authority. An old Bavarian priest thus writes (_Geschlecht und

Gesellschaft_, 1907, Bd. ii, Heft I): "At Moral Congresses we

hear laudation of 'the good old times' when, faith and morality

prevailed among the people. Whether that is correct is another

question. As a young priest I heard of as many and as serious

sins as I now hear of as an old man. The morality of the people

is not greater nor is it less. The error is the belief that

immorality goes out of the towns and poisons the country. People

talk as though the country were a pure Paradise of innocence. I

will by no means call our country people immoral, but from an

experience of many years I can say that in sexual respects there

is no difference between town and country. I have learnt to know

more than a hundred different parishes, and in the most various

localities, in the mountain and in the plain, on poor land and on

rich land. But everywhere I find the same morals and lack of

morals. There are everywhere the same men, though in the country

there are often better Christians than in the towns."

If, however, we go much farther back than the memories of a

living man it seems highly probable that the sexual customs of

the German people of the present day are not substantially

different--though it may well be that at different periods

different circumstances have accentuated them--from what they

were in the dawn of Teutonic history. This is the opinion of one

of the profoundest students of Indo-Germanic origins. In his

_Reallexicon_ (art. "Keuschheit") O. Schrader points out that the

oft-quoted Tacitus, strictly considered, can only be taken to

prove that women were chaste after marriage, and that no

prostitution existed. There can be no doubt, he adds, and the

earliest historical evidence shows, that women in ancient Germany

were not chaste before marriage. This fact has been disguised by

the tendency of the old classic writers to idealize the Northern

peoples.

Thus we have to realize that the conception of "German virtue,"

which has been rendered so familiar to the world by a long

succession of German writers, by no means involves any special

devotion to the virtue of chastity. Tacitus, indeed, in the

passage more often quoted in Germany than any other passage in

classic literature, while correctly emphasizing the late puberty

of the Germans and their brutal punishment of conjugal infidelity

on the part of the wife, seemed to imply that they were also

chaste. But we have always to remark that Tacitus wrote as a

satirizing moralist as well as a historian, and that, as he

declaimed concerning the virtues of the German barbarians, he had

one eye on the Roman gallery whose vices he desired to lash. Much

the same perplexing confusion has been created by Gildas, who, in

describing the results of the Saxon Conquest of Britain, wrote as

a preacher as well as a historian, and the same moral purpose (as

Dill has pointed out) distorts Salvian's picture of the vices of

fifth century Gaul. (I may add that some of the evidence in favor

of the sexual freedom involved by early Teutonic faiths and

customs is brought together in the study of "Sexual Periodicity"

in the first volume of these _Studies_; cf. also, Rudeck,

_Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland_, 1897,

pp. 146 et seq.).

The freedom and tolerance of Russian sexual customs is fairly

well-known. As a Russian correspondent writes to me, "the

liberalism of Russian manners enables youths and girls to enjoy

complete independence. They visit each other alone, they walk out

alone, and they return home at any hour they please. They have a

liberty of movement as complete as that of grown-up persons; some

avail themselves of it to discuss politics and others to make

love. They are able also to procure any books they please; thus

on the table of a college girl I knew I saw the _Elements of

Social Science_, then prohibited in Russia; this girl lived with

her aunt, but she had her own room, which only her friends were

allowed to enter: her aunt or other relations never entered it.

Naturally, she went out and came back at what hours she pleased.

Many other college girls enjoy the same freedom in their

families. It is very different in Italy, where girls have no

freedom of movement, and can neither go out alone nor receive

gentlemen alone, and where, unlike Russia, a girl who has sexual

intercourse outside marriage is really 'lost' and 'dishonored'"

(cf. _Sexual-Probleme_, Aug., 1908, p. 506).

It would appear that freedom of sexual relationships in

Russia--apart from the influence of ancient custom--has largely

been rendered necessary by the difficulty of divorce. Married

couples, who were unable to secure divorce, separated and found

new partners without legal marriage. In 1907, however, an attempt

was made to remedy this defect in the law; a liberal divorce law

has been introduced, mutual consent with separation for a period

of over a year being recognized as adequate ground for divorce

(Beiblatt to _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. ii, Heft 5, p.

145).

During recent years there has developed among educated young men

and women in Russia a movement of sexual license, which, though

it is doubtless supported by the old traditions of sexual

freedom, must by no means be confused with that freedom, since it

is directly due to causes of an entirely different order. The

strenuous revolutionary efforts made during the last years of the

past century to attain political freedom absorbed the younger and

more energetic section of the educated classes, involved a high

degree of mental tension, and were accompanied by a tendency to

asceticism. The prospect of death was constantly before their

eyes, and any pre-occupation with sexual matters would have been

felt as out of harmony with the spirit of revolution. But during

the present century revolutionary activity has largely ceased. It

has been, to a considerable extent, replaced by a movement of

interest in sexual problems and of indulgence in sexual

unrestraint, often taking on a somewhat licentious and sensual

character. "Free love" unions have been formed by the students of

both sexes for the cultivation of these tendencies. A novel,

Artzibascheff's _Ssanin_, has had great influence in promoting

these tendencies. It is not likely that this movement, in its

more extravagant forms, will be of long duration. (For some

account of this movement, see, e.g., Werner Daya, "Die Sexuelle

Bewegung in Russland," _Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_,

Aug., 1908; also, "Les Associations Erotiques en Russe," _Journal

du Droit International Privé_, Jan., 1909, fully summarized in

_Revue des Idées_, Feb., 1909.)

The movement of sexual freedom in Russia lies much deeper,

however, than this fashion of sensual license; it is found in

remote and uncontaminated parts of the country, and is connected

with very ancient customs.

There is considerable interest in realizing the existence of

long-continued sexual freedom--by some incorrectly termed

"immorality," for what is in accordance with the customs or

_mores_ of a people cannot be immoral--among peoples so virile

and robust, so eminently capable of splendid achievements, as the

Germans and the Russians. There is, however, a perhaps even

greater interest in tracing the development of the same tendency

among new prosperous and highly progressive communities who have

either not inherited the custom of sexual freedom or are now only

reviving it. We may, for instance, take the case of Australia and

New Zealand. This development may not, indeed, be altogether

recent. The frankness of sexual freedom in Australia and the

tolerance in regard to it were conspicuous thirty years ago to

those who came from England to live in the Southern continent,

and were doubtless equally visible at an earlier date. It seems,

however, to have developed with the increase of self-conscious

civilization. "After careful inquiry," says the Rev. H.

Northcote, who has lived for many years in the Southern

hemisphere (_Christianity and Sex Problems_, Ch. VIII), "the

writer finds sufficient evidence that of recent years intercourse

out of wedlock has tended towards an actual increase in parts of

Australia." Coghlan, the chief authority on Australian

statistics, states more precisely in his _Childbirth in New South

Wales_, published a few years ago: "The prevalence of births of

ante-nuptial conception--a matter hitherto little understood--has

now been completely investigated. In New South Wales, during six

years, there were 13,366 marriages, in respect of which there was

ante-nuptial conception, and, as the total number of marriages

was 49,641, at least twenty-seven marriages in a hundred followed

conception. During the same period the illegitimate births

numbered 14,779; there were, therefore, 28,145 cases of

conception amongst unmarried women; in 13,366 instances marriage

preceded the birth of the child, so that the children were

legitimatized in rather more than forty-seven cases out of one

hundred. A study of the figures of births of ante-nuptial

conception makes it obvious that in a very large number of

instances pre-marital intercourse is not an anticipation of

marriage already arranged, but that the marriages are forced upon

the parties, and would not be entered into were it not for the

condition of the woman" (cf. Powys, _Biometrika_, vol. i, 1901-2,

p. 30). That marriage should be, as Coghlan puts it, "forced upon

the parties," is not, of course, desirable in the general moral

interests, and it is also a sign of imperfect moral

responsibility in the parties themselves.

The existence of such a state of things, in a young country

belonging to a part of the world where the general level of

prosperity, intelligence, morality and social responsibility may

perhaps be said to be higher than in any other region inhabited

by people of white race, is a fact of the very first significance

when we are attempting to forecast the direction in which

civilized morality is moving.

It is sometimes said, or at least implied, that in this movement women are

taking only a passive part, and that the initiative lies with men who are

probably animated by a desire to escape the responsibilities of marriage.

This is very far from being the case.

The active part taken by German girls in sexual matters is

referred to again and again by the Lutheran pastors in their

elaborate and detailed report. Of the Dantzig district it is said

"the young girls give themselves to the youths, or even seduce

them." The military manoeuvres are frequently a source of

unchastity in rural districts. "The fault is not merely with the

soldiers, but chiefly with the girls, who become half mad as soon

as they see a soldier," it is reported from the Dresden district.

And in summarizing conditions in East Germany the report states:

"In sexual wantonness girls are not behind the young men; they

allow themselves to be seduced only too willingly; even grown-up

girls often go with half-grown youths, and girls frequently give

themselves to several men, one after the other. It is by no means

always the youth who effects the seduction, it is very frequently

the girls who entice the youth to sexual intercourse; they do not

always wait till the men come to their rooms, but will go to the

men's rooms and await them in their beds. With this inclination

to sexual intercourse, it is not surprising that many believe

that after sixteen no girl is a virgin. Unchastity among the

rural laboring classes is universal, and equally pronounced in

both sexes" (op. cit., vol. i, 218).

Among women of the educated classes the conditions are somewhat

different. Restraints, both internal and external, are very much

greater. Virginity, at all events in its physical fact, is

retained, for the most part, till long past girlhood, and when it

is lost that loss is concealed with a scrupulous care and

prudence unknown to the working-classes. Yet the fundamental

tendencies remain the same. So far as England is concerned,

Geoffrey Mortimer quite truly writes (_Chapters on Human Love_,

1898, p. 117) that the two groups of (1) women who live in

constant secret association with a single lover, and (2) women

who give themselves to men, without fear, from the force of their

passions, are "much larger than is generally supposed. In all

classes of society there are women who are only virgins by

repute. Many have borne children without being even suspected of

cohabitation; but the majority adopt methods of preventing

conception. A doctor in a small provincial town declared to me

that such irregular intimacies were the rule, and not by any

means the exception in his district." As regards Germany, a lady

doctor, Frau Adams-Lehmann, states in a volume of the

Transactions of the German Society for Combating Venereal Disease

(_Sexualpädagogik_, p. 271): "I can say that during consultation

hours I see very few virgins over thirty. These women," she adds,

"are sensible, courageous and natural, often the best of their

sex; and we ought to give them our moral support. They are

working towards a new age."

It is frequently stated that the pronounced tendency witnessed at the

present time to dispense as long as possible with the formal ceremony of

binding marriage is unfortunate because it places women in a

disadvantageous position. In so far as the social environment in which she

lives views with disapproval sexual relationship without formal marriage,

the statement is obviously to that extent true, though it must be

remarked, on the other hand, that when social opinion strongly favors

legal marriage it acts as a compelling force in the direction of

legitimating free unions. But if the absence of the formal marriage bond

constituted a real and intrinsic disadvantage to women in sexual relations

they would not show themselves so increasingly ready to dispense with it.

And, as a matter of fact, those who are intimately acquainted with the

facts declare that the absence of formal marriage tends to give increased

consideration to women and is even favorable to fidelity and to the

prolongation of the union. This seems to be true as regards people of the

most different social classes and even of different races. It is probably

based on fundamental psychological facts, for the sense of compulsion

always tends to produce a movement of exasperation and revolt. We are not

here concerned with the question as to how far formal marriage also is

based on natural facts; that is a question which will come up for

discussion at a later stage.

The advantage for women of free sexual unions over compulsory

marriage is well recognized in the case of the working classes of

London, among whom sexual relationships before marriage are not

unusual, and are indulgently regarded. It is, for instance,

clearly asserted in the monumental work of C. Booth, _Life and

Labour of the People_. "It is even said of rough laborers," we

read, for instance, in the final volume of this work (p. 41),

"that they behave best if not married to the woman with whom they

live." The evidence on this point is often the more impressive

because brought forward by people who are very far indeed from

being anxious to base any general conclusions on it. Thus in the

same volume a clergyman is quoted as saying: "These people manage

to live together fairly peaceably so long as they are not

married, but if they marry it always seems to lead to blows and

rows."

It may be said that in such a case we witness not so much the

operation of a natural law as the influences of a great centre of

civilization exerting its moralizing effects even on those who

stand outside the legally recognized institution of marriage.

That contention may, however, be thrust aside. We find exactly

the same tendency in Jamaica where the population is largely

colored, and the stress of a high civilization can scarcely be

said to exist. Legal marriage is here discarded to an even

greater extent than in London, for little care is taken to

legitimate children by marriage. It was found by a committee

appointed to inquire into the marriage laws of Jamaica, that

three out of every five births are illegitimate, that is to say

that legal illegitimacy has ceased to be immoral, having become

the recognized custom of the majority of the inhabitants. There

is no social feeling against illegitimacy. The men approve of the

decay of legal marriage, because they say the women work better

in the house when they are not married; the women approve of it,

because they say that men are more faithful when not bound by

legal marriage. This has been well brought out by W.P.

Livingstone in his interesting book, _Black Jamaica_ (1899). The

people recognize, he tells us (p. 210), that "faithful living

together constitutes marriage;" they say that they are "married

but not parsoned." One reason against legal marriage is that they

are disinclined to incur the expense of the official sanction.

(In Venezuela, it may be added, where also the majority of births

take place outside official marriage, the chief reason is stated

to be, not moral laxity, but the same disinclination to pay the

expenses of legal weddings.) Frequently in later life, sometimes

when they have grown up sons and daughters, couples go through

the official ceremony. (In Abyssinia, also, it is stated by

Hugues Le Roux, where the people are Christian and marriage is

indissoluble and the ceremony expensive, it is not usual for

married couples to make their unions legal until old age is

coming on, _Sexual-Probleme_, April, 1908, p. 217.) It is

significant that this condition of things in Jamaica, as

elsewhere, is associated with the superiority of women. "The

women of the peasant class," remarks Livingstone (p. 212), "are

still practically independent of the men, and are frequently

their superiors, both in physical and mental capacity." They

refuse to bind themselves to a man who may turn out to be good

for nothing, a burden instead of a help and protection. So long

as the unions are free they are likely to be permanent. If made

legal, the risk is that they will become intolerable, and cease

by one of the parties leaving the other. "The necessity for

mutual kindness and forbearance establishes a condition that is

the best guarantee of permanency" (p. 214). It is said, however,

that under the influence of religious and social pressure the

people are becoming more anxious to adopt "respectable" ideas of

sexual relationships, though it seems evident, in view of

Livingstone's statement, that such respectability is likely to

involve a decrease of real morality. Livingstone points out,

however, one serious defect in the present conditions which makes

it easy for immoral men to escape paternal responsibilities, and

this is the absence of legal provision for the registration of

the father's name on birth certificates (p. 256). In every

country where the majority of births are illegitimate it is an

obvious social necessity that the names of both parents should be

duly registered on all birth certificates. It has been an

unpardonable failure on the part of the Jamaican Government to

neglect the simple measure needed to give "each child born in the

country a legal father" (p. 258).

We thus see that we have to-day reached a position in which--partly owing

to economic causes and partly to causes which are more deeply rooted in

the tendencies involved by civilization--women are more often detached

than of old from legal sexual relationship with men and both sexes are

less inclined than in earlier stages of civilization to sacrifice their

own independence even when they form such relationships. "I never heard of

a woman over sixteen years of age who, prior to the breakdown of

aboriginal customs after the coming of the whites, had not a husband,"

wrote Curr of the Australian Blacks.[271] Even as regards some parts of

Europe, it is still possible to-day to make almost the same statement. But

in all the richer, more energetic, and progressive countries very

different conditions prevail. Marriage is late and a certain proportion of

men, and a still larger proportion of women (who exceed the men in the

general population) never marry at all.[272]

Before we consider the fateful significance of this fact of the growing

proportion of adult unmarried women whose sexual relationships are

unrecognized by the state and largely unrecognized altogether, it may be

well to glance summarily at the two historical streams of tendency, both

still in action among us, which affect the status of women, the one

favoring the social equality of the sexes, the other favoring the social

subjection of women. It is not difficult to trace these two streams both

in conduct and opinion, in practical morality and in theoretical morality.

At one time it was widely held that in early states of society, before the

establishment of the patriarchal stage which places women under the

protection of men, a matriarchal stage prevailed in which women possessed

supreme power.[273] Bachofen, half a century ago, was the great champion

of this view. He found a typical example of a matriarchal state among the

ancient Lycians of Asia Minor with whom, Herodotus stated, the child takes

the name of the mother, and follows her status, not that of the

father.[274] Such peoples, Bachofen believed, were gynæcocratic; power was

in the hands of women. It can no longer be said that this opinion, in the

form held by Bachofen, meets with any considerable support. As to the

widespread prevalence of descent through the mother, there is no doubt

whatever that it has prevailed very widely. But such descent through the

mother, it has become recognized, by no means necessarily involves the

power of the mother, and mother-descent may even be combined with a

patriarchal system.[275] There has even been a tendency to run to the

opposite extreme from Bachofen and to deny that mother-descent conferred

any special claim for consideration on women. That, however, seems

scarcely in accordance with the evidence and even in the absence of

evidence could scarcely be regarded as probable. It would seem that we may

fairly take as a type of the matriarchal family that based on the _ambil

anak_ marriage of Sumatra, in which the husband lives in the wife's

family, paying nothing and occupying a subordinate position. The example

of the Lycians is here in point, for although, as reported by Herodotus,

there is nothing to show that there was anything of the nature of a

gynæcocracy in Lycia, we know that women in all these regions of Asia

Minor enjoyed high consideration and influence, traces of which may be

detected in the early literature and history of Christianity. A decisive

and better known example of the favorable influence of mother-descent on

the status of woman is afforded by the _beena_ marriage of early Arabia.

Under such a system the wife is not only preserved from the subjection

involved by purchase, which always casts upon her some shadow of the

inferiority belonging to property, but she herself is the owner of the

tent and the household property, and enjoys the dignity always involved by

the possession of property and the ability to free herself from her

husband.[276]

It is also impossible to avoid connecting the primitive tendency to

mother-descent, and the emphasis it involved on maternal rather than

paternal generative energy, with the tendency to place the goddess rather

than the god in the forefront of primitive pantheons, a tendency which

cannot possibly fail to reflect honor on the sex to which the supreme

deity belongs, and which may be connected with the large part which

primitive women often play in the functions of religion. Thus, according

to traditions common to all the central tribes of Australia, the woman

formerly took a much greater share in the performance of sacred ceremonies

which are now regarded as coming almost exclusively within the masculine

province, and in at least one tribe which seems to retain ancient

practices the women still actually take part in these ceremonies.[277] It

seems to have been much the same in Europe. We observe, too, both in the

Celtic pantheon and among Mediterranean peoples, that while all the

ancient divinities have receded into the dim background yet the goddesses

loom larger than the gods.[278] In Ireland, where ancient custom and

tradition have always been very tenaciously preserved, women retained a

very high position, and much freedom both before and after marriage.

"Every woman," it was said, "is to go the way she willeth freely," and

after marriage she enjoyed a better position and greater freedom of

divorce than was afforded either by the Christian Church or the English

common law.[279] There is less difficulty in recognizing that

mother-descent was peculiarly favorable to the high status of women when

we realize that even under very unfavorable conditions women have been

able to exert great pressure on the men and to resist successfully the

attempts to tyrannize over them.[280]

If we consider the status of woman in the great empires of antiquity we

find on the whole that in their early stage, the stage of growth, as well

as in their final stage, the stage of fruition, women tend to occupy a

favorable position, while in their middle stage, usually the stage of

predominating military organization on a patriarchal basis, women occupy a

less favorable position. This cyclic movement seems to be almost a natural

law of the development of great social groups. It was apparently well

marked in the very stable and orderly growth of Babylonia. In the earliest

times a Babylonian woman had complete independence and equal rights with

her brothers and her husband; later (as shown by the code of Hamurabi) a

woman's rights, though not her duties, were more circumscribed; in the

still later Neo-Babylonian periods, she again acquired equal rights with

her husband.[281]

In Egypt the position of women stood highest at the end, but it seems to

have been high throughout the whole of the long course of Egyptian

history, and continuously improving, while the fact that little regard was

paid to prenuptial chastity and that marriage contracts placed no stress

on virginity indicate the absence of the conception of women as property.

More than three thousand five hundred years ago men and women were

recognized as equal in Egypt. The high position of the Egyptian woman is

significantly indicated by the fact that her child was never illegitimate;

illegitimacy was not recognized even in the case of a slave woman's

child.[282] "It is the glory of Egyptian morality," says Amélineau, "to

have been the first to express the Dignity of Woman."[283] The idea of

marital authority was altogether unknown in Egypt. There can be no doubt

that the high status of woman in two civilizations so stable, so vital, so

long-lived, and so influential on human culture as Babylonia and Egypt, is

a fact of much significance.

Among the Jews there seems to have been no intermediate stage of

subordination of women, but instead a gradual progress throughout

from complete subjection of the woman as wife to ever greater

freedom. At first the husband could repudiate his wife at will

without cause. (This was not an extension of patriarchal

authority, but a purely marital authority.) The restrictions on

this authority gradually increased, and begin to be observable

already in the Book of Deuteronomy. The Mishnah went further and

forbade divorce whenever the wife's condition inspired pity (as

in insanity, captivity, etc.). By A.D. 1025, divorce was no

longer possible except for legitimate reasons or by the wife's

consent. At the same time, the wife also began to acquire the

right of divorce in the form of compelling the husband to

repudiate her on penalty of punishment in case of refusal. On

divorce the wife became an independent woman in her own right,

and was permitted to carry off the dowry which her husband gave

her on marriage. Thus, notwithstanding Jewish respect for the

letter of the law, the flexible jurisprudence of the Rabbis, in

harmony with the growth of culture, accorded an ever-growing

measure of sexual justice and equality to women (D.W. Amram, _The

Jewish Law of Divorce_).

Among the Arabs the tendency of progress has also been favorable

to women in many respects, especially as regards inheritance.

Before Mahommed, in accordance with the system prevailing at

Medina, women had little or no right of inheritance. The

legislation of the Koran modified this rule, without entirely

abolishing it, and placed women in a much better position. This

is attributed largely to the fact that Mahommed belonged not to

Medina, but to Mecca, where traces of matriarchal custom still

survived (W. Marçais, _Des Parents et des Alliés Successibles en

Droit Musulman_).

It may be pointed out--for it is not always realized--that even

that stage of civilization--when it occurs--which involves the

subordination and subjection of woman and her rights really has

its origin in the need for the protection of women, and is

sometimes even a sign of the acquirement of new privileges by

women. They are, as it were, locked up, not in order to deprive

them of their rights, but in order to guard those rights. In the

later more stable phase of civilization, when women are no longer

exposed to the same dangers, this motive is forgotten and the

guardianship of woman and her rights seems, and indeed has really

become, a hardship rather than an advantage.

Of the status of women at Rome in the earliest periods we know little or

nothing; the patriarchal system was already firmly established when Roman

history begins to become clear and it involved unusually strict

subordination of the woman to her father first and then to her husband.

But nothing is more certain than that the status of women in Rome rose

with the rise of civilization, exactly in the same way as in Babylonia and

in Egypt. In the case of Rome, however, the growing refinement of

civilization, and the expansion of the Empire, were associated with the

magnificent development of the system of Roman law, which in its final

forms consecrated the position of women. In the last days of the Republic

women already began to attain the same legal level as men, and later the

great Antonine jurisconsults, guided by their theory of natural law,

reached the conception of the equality of the sexes as a principle of the

code of equity. The patriarchal subordination of women fell into complete

discredit, and this continued until, in the days of Justinian, under the

influence of Christianity, the position of women began to suffer.[284] In

the best days the older forms of Roman marriage gave place to a form

(apparently old but not hitherto considered reputable) which amounted in

law to a temporary deposit of the woman by her family. She was independent

of her husband (more especially as she came to him with her own dowry) and

only nominally dependent on her family. Marriage was a private contract,

accompanied by a religious ceremony if desired, and being a contract it

could be dissolved, for any reason, in the presence of competent

witnesses and with due legal forms, after the advice of the family council

had been taken. Consent was the essence of this marriage and no shame,

therefore, attached to its dissolution. Nor had it any evil effect either

on the happiness or the morals of Roman women.[285] Such a system is

obviously more in harmony with modern civilized feeling than any system

that has ever been set up in Christendom.

In Rome, also, it is clear that this system was not a mere legal invention

but the natural outgrowth of an enlightened public feeling in favor of the

equality of men and women, often even in the field of sexual morality.

Plautus, who makes the old slave Syra ask why there is not the same law in

this respect for the husband as for the wife,[286] had preceded the legist

Ulpian who wrote: "It seems to be very unjust that a man demands chastity

of his wife while he himself shows no example of it."[287] Such demands

lie deeper than social legislation, but the fact that these questions

presented themselves to typical Roman men indicates the general attitude

towards women. In the final stage of Roman society the bond of the

patriarchal system so far as women were concerned dwindled to a mere

thread binding them to their fathers and leaving them quite free face to

face with their husbands. "The Roman matron of the Empire," says Hobhouse,

"was more fully her own mistress than the married woman of any earlier

civilization, with the possible exception of a certain period of Egyptian

history, and, it must be added, than the wife of any later civilization

down to our own generation."[288]

On the strength of the statements of two satirical writers,

Juvenal and Tacitus, it has been supposed by many that Roman

women of the late period were given up to license. It is,

however, idle to seek in satirists any balanced picture of a

great civilization. Hobhouse (loc. cit., p. 216) concludes that

on the whole, Roman women worthily retained the position of their

husbands' companions, counsellors and friends which they had

held when an austere system placed them legally in his power.

Most authorities seem now to be of this opinion, though at an

earlier period Friedländer expressed himself more dubiously. Thus

Dill, in his judicious _Roman Society_ (p. 163), states that the

Roman woman's position, both in law and in fact, rose during the

Empire; without being less virtuous or respected, she became far

more accomplished and attractive; with fewer restraints she had

greater charm and influence, even in public affairs, and was more

and more the equal of her husband. "In the last age of the

Western Empire there is no deterioration in the position and

influence of women." Principal Donaldson, also, in his valuable

historical sketch, _Woman_, considers (p. 113) that there was no

degradation of morals in the Roman Empire; "the licentiousness of

Pagan Rome is nothing to the licentiousness of Christian Africa,

Rome, and Gaul, if we can put any reliance on the description of

Salvian." Salvian's description of Christendom is probably

exaggerated and one-sided, but exactly the same may be said in an

even greater degree of the descriptions of ancient Rome left by

clever Pagan satirists and ascetic Christian preachers.

It thus becomes necessary to leap over considerably more than a thousand

years before we reach a stage of civilization in any degree approaching in

height the final stage of Roman society. In the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries, at first in France, then in England, we find once more the

moral and legal movement tending towards the equalization of women with

men. We find also a long series of pioneers of that movement foreshadowing

its developments: Mary Astor, "Sophia, a Lady of Quality," Ségur, Mrs.

Wheeler, and very notably Mary Wollstonecraft in _A Vindication of the

Rights of Woman_, and John Stuart Mill in _The Subjection of Women_.[289]

The main European stream of influences in this matter within historical

times has involved, we can scarcely doubt when we take into consideration

its complex phenomena as a whole, the maintenance of an inequality to the

disadvantage of women. The fine legacy of Roman law to Europe was indeed

favorable to women, but that legacy was dispersed and for the most part

lost in the more predominating influence of tenacious Teutonic custom

associated with the vigorously organized Christian Church. Notwithstanding

that the facts do not all point in the same direction, and that there is

consequently some difference of opinion, it seems evident that on the

whole both Teutonic custom and Christian religion were unfavorable to the

equality of women with men. Teutonic custom in this matter was determined

by two decisive factors: (1) the existence of marriage by purchase which

although, as Crawley has pointed out, it by no means necessarily involves

the degradation of women, certainly tends to place them in an inferior

position, and (2) pre-occupation with war which is always accompanied by a

depreciation of peaceful and feminine occupations and an indifference to

love. Christianity was at its origin favorable to women because it

liberated and glorified the most essentially feminine emotions, but when

it became an established and organized religion with definitely ascetic

ideals, its whole emotional tone grew unfavorable to women. It had from

the first excluded them from any priestly function. It now regarded them

as the special representatives of the despised element of sex in

life.[290] The eccentric Tertullian had once declared that woman was

_janua Diaboli_; nearly seven hundred years later, even the gentle and

philosophic Anselm wrote: _Femina fax est Satanæ_.[291]

Thus among the Franks, with whom the practice of monogamy

prevailed, a woman was never free; she could not buy or sell or

inherit without the permission of those to whom she belonged. She

passed into the possession of her husband by acquisition, and

when he fixed the wedding day he gave her parents coins of small

money as _arrha_, and the day after the wedding she received from

him a present, the _morgengabe_. A widow belonged to her parents

again (Bedollière, _Histoire de Moeurs des Français_,

vol. i, p. 180). It is true that the Salic law ordained a

pecuniary fine for touching a woman, even for squeezing her

finger, but it is clear that the offence thus committed was an

offence against property, and by no means against the sanctity of

a woman's personality. The primitive German husband could sell

his children, and sometimes his wife, even into slavery. In the

eleventh century cases of wife-selling are still heard of, though

no longer recognized by law.

The traditions of Christianity were more favorable to sexual

equality than were Teutonic customs, but in becoming amalgamated

with those customs they added their own special contribution as

to woman's impurity. This spiritual inferiority of woman was

significantly shown by the restrictions sometimes placed on women

in church, and even in the right to enter a church; in some

places they were compelled to remain in the narthex, even in

non-monastic churches (see for these rules, Smith and Cheetham,

_Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_, art. "Sexes, Separation

of").

By attempting to desexualize the idea of man and to oversexualize

the idea of woman, Christianity necessarily degraded the position

of woman and the conception of womanhood. As Donaldson well

remarks, in pointing this out (op. cit., p. 182), "I may define

man as a male human being and woman as a female human being....

What the early Christians did was to strike the 'male' out of the

definition of man, and 'human being' out of the definition of

woman." Religion generally appears to be a powerfully depressing

influence on the position of woman notwithstanding the appeal

which it makes to woman. Westermarck considers, indeed (_Origin

and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. i, p. 669), that

religion "has probably been the most persistent cause of the

wife's subjection to her husband's rule."

It is sometimes said that the Christian tendency to place women

in an inferior spiritual position went so far that a church

council formally denied that women have souls. This foolish story

has indeed been repeated in a parrot-like fashion by a number of

writers. The source of the story is probably to be found in the

fact, recorded by Gregory of Tours, in his history (lib. viii,

cap. XX), that at the Council of Mâcon, in 585, a bishop was in

doubt as to whether the term "man" included woman, but was

convinced by the other members of the Council that it did. The

same difficulty has presented itself to lawyers in more modern

times, and has not always been resolved so favorably to woman as

by the Christian Council of Mâcon.

The low estimate of women that prevailed even in the early Church

is admitted by Christian scholars. "We cannot but notice," writes

Meyrick (art. "Marriage," Smith and Cheetham, _Dictionary of

Christian Antiquities_), "even in the greatest of the Christian

fathers a lamentably low estimate of woman, and consequently of

the marriage relationship. Even St. Augustine can see no

justification for marriage, except in a grave desire deliberately

adopted of having children; and in accordance with this view, all

married intercourse, except for this single purpose, is harshly

condemned. If marriage is sought after for the sake of children,

it is justifiable; if entered into as a _remedium_ to avoid worse

evils, it is pardonable; the idea of the mutual society, help,

and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in

prosperity and adversity, hardly existed, and could hardly yet

exist."

From the woman's point of view, Lily Braun, in her important work

on the woman question (_Die Frauenfrage_, 1901, pp. 28 et seq.)

concludes that, in so far as Christianity was favorable to women,

we must see that favorable influence in the placing of women on

the same moral level as men, as illustrated in the saying of

Jesus, "Let him who is without sin amongst you cast the first

stone," implying that each sex owes the same fidelity. It

reached, she adds, no further than this. "Christianity, which

women accepted as a deliverance with so much enthusiasm, and died

for as martyrs, has not fulfilled their hopes."

Even as regards the moral equality of the sexes in marriage, the

position of Christian authorities was sometimes equivocal. One of

the greatest of the Fathers, St. Basil, in the latter half of the

fourth century, distinguished between adultery and fornication as

committed by a married man; if with a married woman, it was

adultery; if with an unmarried woman, it was merely fornication.

In the former case, a wife should not receive her husband back;

in the latter case, she should (art. "Adultery," Smith and

Cheetham, _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_). Such a

decision, by attaching supreme importance to a distinction which

could make no difference to the wife, involved a failure to

recognize her moral personality. Many of the Fathers in the

Western Church, however, like Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose,

could see no reason why the moral law should not be the same for

the husband as for the wife, but as late Roman feeling both on

the legal and popular side was already approximating to that

view, the influence of Christianity was scarcely required to

attain it. It ultimately received formal sanction in the Roman

Canon Law, which decreed that adultery is equally committed by

either conjugal party in two degrees: (1) _simplex_, of the

married with the unmarried, and (2) _duplex_, of the married with

the married.

It can scarcely be said, however, that Christianity succeeded in

attaining the inclusion of this view of the moral equality of the

sexes into actual practical morality. It was accepted in theory;

it was not followed in practice. W.G. Sumner, discussing this

question (_Folkways_, pp. 359-361), concludes: "Why are these

views not in the _mores?_ Undoubtedly it is because they are

dogmatic in form, invented or imposed by theological authority or

philosophical speculation. They do not grow out of the experience

of life, and cannot be verified by it. The reasons are in

ultimate physiological facts, by virtue of which one is a woman

and the other is a man." There is, however, more to be said on

this point later.

It was probably, however, not so much the Church as Teutonic customs and

the development of the feudal system, with the masculine and military

ideals it fostered, that was chiefly decisive in fixing the inferior

position of women in the mediæval world. Even the ideas of chivalry, which

have often been supposed to be peculiarly favorable to women, so far as

they affected women seem to have been of little practical significance.

In his great work on chivalry Gautier brings forward much

evidence to show that the feudal spirit, like the military spirit

always and everywhere, on the whole involved at bottom a disdain

for women, even though it occasionally idealized them. "Go into

your painted and gilded rooms," we read in _Renaus de Montauban_,

"sit in the shade, make yourselves comfortable, drink, eat, work

tapestry, dye silk, but remember that you must not occupy

yourselves with our affairs. Our business is to strike with the

steel sword. Silence!" And if the woman insists she is struck on

the face till the blood comes. The husband had a legal right to

beat his wife, not only for adultery, but even for contradicting

him. Women were not, however, entirely without power, and in a

thirteenth century collection of _Coutumes_, it is set down that

a husband must only beat his wife reasonably, _resnablement_. (As

regards the husband's right to chastise his wife, see also

Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_, vol. i, p. 234. In England it

was not until the reign of Charles II, from which so many modern

movements date, that the husband was deprived of this legal

right.)

In the eyes of a feudal knight, it may be added, the beauty of a

horse competed, often successfully, with the beauty of a woman.

In _Girbers de Metz_, two knights, Garin and his cousin Girbert,

ride by a window at which sits a beautiful girl with the face of

a rose and the white flesh of a lily. "Look, cousin Girbert,

look! By Saint Mary, a beautiful woman!" "Ah," Girbert replies,

"a beautiful beast is my horse!" "I have never seen anything so

charming as that young girl with her fresh color and her dark

eyes," says Garin. "I know no steed to compare with mine,"

retorts Girbert. When the men were thus absorbed in the things

that pertain to war, it is not surprising that amorous advances

were left to young girls to make. "In all the _chansons de

geste_," Gautier remarks, "it is the young girls who make the

advances, often with effrontery," though, he adds, wives are

represented as more virtuous (L. Gautier, _La Chevalerie_, pp.

236-8, 348-50).

In England Pollock and Maitland (_History of English Law_, vol.

ii, p. 437) do not believe that a life-long tutela of women ever

existed as among other Teutonic peoples. "From the Conquest

onwards," Hobhouse states (op. cit., vol. i, p. 224), "the

unmarried English woman, on attaining her majority, becomes

fully equipped with all legal and civil rights, as much a legal

personality as the Babylonian woman had been three thousand years

before." But the developed English law more than made up for any

privileges thus accorded to the unmarried by the inconsistent

manner in which it swathed up the wife in endless folds of

irresponsibility, except when she committed the supreme offence

of injuring her lord and master. The English wife, as Hobhouse

continues (loc. cit.) was, if not her husband's slave, at any

rate his liege subject; if she killed him it was "petty treason,"

the revolt of a subject against a sovereign in a miniature

kingdom, and a more serious offence than murder. Murder she could

not commit in his presence, for her personality was merged in

him; he was responsible for most of her crimes and offences (it

was that fact which gave him the right to chastise her), and he

could not even enter into a contract with her, for that would be

entering into a contract with himself. "The very being and legal

existence of a woman is suspended during marriage," said

Blackstone, "or at least is incorporated and consolidated into

that of her husband, under whose wing, protection and cover she

performs everything. So great a favorite," he added, "is the

female sex of the laws of England." "The strength of woman," says

Hobhouse, interpreting the sense of the English law, "was her

weakness. She conquered by yielding. Her gentleness had to be

guarded from the turmoil of the world, her fragrance to be kept

sweet and fresh, away from the dust and the smoke of battle.

Hence her need of a champion and guardian."

In France the wife of the mediæval and Renaissance periods

occupied much the same position in her husband's house. He was

her absolute master and lord, the head and soul of "the feminine

and feeble creature" who owed to him "perfect love and

obedience." She was his chief servant, the eldest of his

children, his wife and subject; she signed herself "your humble

obedient daughter and friend," when she wrote to him. The

historian, De Maulde la Clavière, who has brought together

evidence on this point in his _Femmes de la Renaissance_, remarks

that even though the husband enjoyed this lofty and superior

position in marriage, it was still generally he, and not the

wife, who complained of the hardships of marriage.

Law and custom assumed that a woman should be more or less under the

protection of a man, and even the ideals of fine womanhood which arose in

this society, during feudal and later times, were necessarily tinged by

the same conception. It involved the inequality of women as compared with

men, but under the social conditions of a feudal society such inequality

was to woman's advantage. Masculine force was the determining factor in

life and it was necessary that every woman should have a portion of this

force on her side. This sound and reasonable idea naturally tended to

persist even after the growth of civilization rendered force a much less

decisive factor in social life. In England in Queen Elizabeth's time no

woman must be masterless, although the feminine subjects of Queen

Elizabeth had in their sovereign the object lesson of a woman who could

play a very brilliant and effective part in life and yet remain absolutely

masterless. Still later, in the eighteenth century, even so fine a

moralist as Shaftesbury, in his _Characteristics_, refers to lovers of

married women as invaders of property. If such conceptions still ruled

even in the best minds, it is not surprising that in the same century,

even in the following century, they were carried out into practice by less

educated people who frankly bought and sold women.

Schrader, in his _Reallexicon_ (art. "Brautkauf"), points out

that, originally, the purchase of a wife was the purchase of her

person, and not merely of the right of protecting her. The

original conception probably persisted long in Great Britain on

account of its remoteness from the centres of civilization. In

the eleventh century Gregory VII desired Lanfranc to stop the

sale of wives in Scotland and elsewhere in the island of the

English (Pike, _History of Crime in England_, vol. i, p. 99). The

practice never quite died out, however, in remote country

districts.

Such transactions have taken place even in London. Thus in the

_Annual Register_ for 1767 (p. 99) we read: "About three weeks

ago a bricklayer's laborer at Marylebone sold a woman, whom he

had cohabited with for several years, to a fellow-workman for a

quarter guinea and a gallon of beer. The workman went off with

the purchase, and she has since had the good fortune to have a

legacy of £200, and some plate, left her by a deceased uncle in

Devonshire. The parties were married last Friday."

The Rev. J. Edward Vaux (_Church Folk-lore_, second edition, p.

146) narrates two authentic cases in which women had been bought

by their husbands in open market in the nineteenth century. In

one case the wife, with her own full consent, was brought to

market with a halter round her neck, sold for half a crown, and

led to her new home, twelve miles off by the new husband who had

purchased her; in the other case a publican bought another man's

wife for a two-gallon jar of gin.

It is the same conception of woman as property which, even to the

present, has caused the retention in many legal codes of clauses

rendering a man liable to pay pecuniary damages to a woman,

previously a virgin, whom he has intercourse with and

subsequently forsakes (Natalie Fuchs, "Die Jungfernschaft im

Recht und Sitte," _Sexual-Probleme_, Feb., 1908). The woman is

"dishonored" by sexual intercourse, depreciated in her market

value, exactly as a new garment becomes "second-hand," even if it

has but once been worn. A man, on the other hand, would disdain

the idea that his personal value could be diminished by any

number of acts of sexual intercourse.

This fact has even led some to advocate the "abolition of

physical virginity." Thus the German authoress of _Una

Poenitentium_ (1907), considering that the protection of a woman

is by no means so well secured by a little piece of membrane as

by the presence of a true and watchful soul inside, advocates the

operation of removal of the hymen in childhood. It is undoubtedly

true that the undue importance attached to the hymen has led to a

false conception of feminine "honor," and to an unwholesome

conception of feminine purity.

Custom and law are slowly changing in harmony with changed social

conditions which no longer demand the subjection of women either in their

own interests or in the interests of the community. Concomitantly with

these changes a different ideal of womanly personality is developing. It

is true that the ancient ideal of the lordship of the husband over the

wife is still more or less consciously affirmed around us. The husband

frequently dictates to the wife what avocations she may not pursue, what

places she may not visit, what people she may not know, what books she may

not read. He assumes to control her, even in personal matters having no

direct concern with himself, by virtue of the old masculine prerogative of

force which placed a woman under the hand, as the ancient patriarchal

legists termed it, of a man. It is, however, becoming more and more widely

recognized that such a part is not suited to the modern man. The modern

man, as Rosa Mayreder has pointed out in a thoughtful essay,[292] is no

longer equipped to play this domineering part in relation to his wife. The

"noble savage," leading a wild life on mountain and in forest, hunting

dangerous beasts and scalping enemies when necessary, may occasionally

bring his club gently and effectively on to the head of his wife, even, it

may be, with grateful appreciation on her part.[293] But the modern man,

who for the most part spends his days tamely at a desk, who has been

trained to endure silently the insults and humiliations which superior

officials or patronizing clients may inflict upon him, this typical modern

man is no longer able to assume effectually the part of the "noble savage"

when he returns to his home. He is indeed so unfitted for the part that

his wife resents his attempts to play it. He is gradually recognizing

this, even apart from any consciousness of the general trend of

civilization. The modern man of ideas recognizes that, as a matter of

principle, his wife is entitled to equality with himself; the modern man

of the world feels that it would be both ridiculous and inconvenient not

to accord his wife much the same kind of freedom which he himself

possesses. And, moreover, while the modern man has to some extent acquired

feminine qualities, the modern woman has to a corresponding extent

acquired masculine qualities.

Brief and summary as the preceding discussion has necessarily been, it

will have served to bring us face to face with the central fact in the

sexual morality which the growth of civilization has at the present day

rendered inevitable: personal responsibility. "The responsible human

being, man or woman, is the centre of modern ethics as of modern law;"

that is the conclusion reached by Hobhouse in his discussion of the

evolution of human morality.[294] The movement which is taking place among

us to liberate sexual relationships from an excessive bondage to fixed and

arbitrary regulations would have been impossible and mischievous but for

the concomitant growth of a sense of personal responsibility in the

members of the community. It could not indeed have subsisted for a single

year without degenerating into license and disorder. Freedom in sexual

relations involves mutual trust and that can only rest on a basis of

personal responsibility. Where there can be no reliance on personal

responsibility there can be no freedom. In most fields of moral action

this sense of personal responsibility is acquired at a fairly early stage

of social progress. Sexual morality is the last field of morality to be

brought within the sphere of personal responsibility. The community

imposes the most varied, complicated, and artificial codes of sexual

morality on its members, especially its feminine members, and, naturally

enough, it is always very suspicious of their ability to observe these

codes, and is careful to allow them, so far as possible, no personal

responsibility in the matter. But a training in restraint, when carried

through a long series of generations, is the best preparation for freedom.

The law laid on the earlier generations, as old theology stated the

matter, has been the schoolmaster to bring the later generations to

Christ; or, as new science expresses exactly the same idea, the later

generations have become immunized and have finally acquired a certain

degree of protection against the virus which would have destroyed the

earlier generations.

The process by which a people acquires the sense of personal

responsibility is slow, and perhaps it cannot be adequately

acquired at all by races lacking a high grade of nervous

organization. This is especially the case as regards sexual

morality, and has often been illustrated on the contact of a

higher with a lower civilization. It has constantly happened that

missionaries--entirely against their own wishes, it need not be

said--by overthrowing the strict moral system they have found

established, and by substituting the freedom of European customs

among people entirely unprepared for such freedom, have exerted

the most disastrous effects on morality. This has been the case

among the formerly well-organized and highly moral Baganda of

Central Africa, as recorded in an official report by Colonel

Lambkin (_British Medical Journal_, Oct. 3, 1908).

As regards Polynesia, also, R.L. Stevenson, in his interesting

book, _In the South Seas_ (Ch. V), pointed out that, while before

the coming of the whites the Polynesians were, on the whole,

chaste, and the young carefully watched, now it is far otherwise.

Even in Fiji, where, according to Lord Stanmore--who was High

Commissioner of the Pacific, and an independent

critic--missionary effort has been "wonderfully successful,"

where all own at least nominal allegiance to Christianity, which

has much modified life and character, yet chastity has suffered.

This was shown by a Royal Commission on the condition of the

native races in Fiji. Mr. Fitchett, commenting on this report

(Australasian _Review of Reviews_, Oct., 1897) remarks: "Not a

few witnesses examined by the commission declare that the moral

advance in Fiji is of a curiously patchy type. The abolition of

polygamy, for example, they say, has not told at every point in

favor of women. The woman is the toiler in Fiji; and when the

support of the husband was distributed over four wives, the

burden on each wife was less than it is now, when it has to be

carried by one. In heathen times female chastity was guarded by

the club; a faithless wife, an unmarried mother, was summarily

put to death. Christianity has abolished club-law, and purely

moral restraints, or the terror of the penalties of the next

world, do not, to the limited imagination of the Fijian, quite

take its place. So the standard of Fijian chastity is

distressingly low."

It must always be remembered that when the highly organized

primitive system of mixed spiritual and physical restraints is

removed, chastity becomes more delicately and unstably poised.

The controlling power of personal responsibility, valuable and

essential as it is, cannot permanently and unremittingly restrain

the volcanic forces of the passion of love even in high

civilizations. "No perfection of moral constitution in a woman,"

Hinlon has well said, "no power of will, no wish and resolution

to be 'good,' no force of religion or control of custom, can

secure what is called the virtue of woman. The emotion of

absolute devotion with which some man may inspire her will sweep

them all away. Society, in choosing to erect itself on that

basis, chooses inevitable disorder, and so long as it continues

to choose it will continue to have that result."

It is necessary to insist for a while on this personal responsibility in

matters of sexual morality, in the form in which it is making itself felt

among us, and to search out its implications. The most important of these

is undoubtedly economic independence. That is indeed so important that

moral responsibility in any fine sense can scarcely be said to have any

existence in its absence. Moral responsibility and economic independence

are indeed really identical; they are but two sides of the same social

fact. The responsible person is the person who is able to answer for his

actions and, if need be, to pay for them. The economically dependent

person can accept a criminal responsibility; he can, with an empty purse,

go to prison or to death. But in the ordinary sphere of everyday morality

that large penalty is not required of him; if he goes against the wishes

of his family or his friends or his parish, they may turn their backs on

him but they cannot usually demand against him the last penalties of the

law. He can exert his own personal responsibility, he can freely choose to

go his own way and to maintain himself in it before his fellowmen on one

condition, that he is able to pay for it. His personal responsibility has

little or no meaning except in so far as it is also economic independence.

In civilized societies as they attain maturity, the women tend to acquire

a greater and greater degree alike of moral responsibility and economic

independence. Any freedom and seeming equality of women, even when it

actually assumes the air of superiority, which is not so based, is unreal.

It is only on sufferance; it is the freedom accorded to the child, because

it asks for it so prettily or may scream if it is refused. This is merely

parasitism.[295] The basis of economic independence ensures a more real

freedom. Even in societies which by law and custom hold women in strict

subordination, the woman who happens to be placed in possession of

property enjoys a high degree alike of independence and of

responsibility.[296] The growth of a high civilization seems indeed to be

so closely identified with the economic freedom and independence of women

that it is difficult to say which is cause and which effect. Herodotus, in

his fascinating account of Egypt, a land which he regarded as admirable

beyond all other lands, noted with surprise that, totally unlike the

fashion of Greece, women left the men at home to the management of the

loom and went to market to transact the business of commerce.[297] It is

the economic factor in social life which secures the moral responsibility

of women and which chiefly determines the position of the wife in relation

to her husband.[298] In this respect in its late stages civilization

returns to the same point it had occupied at the beginning, when, as has

already been noted, we find greater equality with men and at the same time

greater economic independence.[299]

In all the leading modern civilized countries, for a century past, custom

and law have combined to give an ever greater economic independence to

women. In some respects England took the lead by inaugurating the great

industrial movement which slowly swept women into its ranks,[300] and made

inevitable the legal changes which, by 1882, insured to a married woman

the possession of her own earnings. The same movement, with its same

consequences, is going on elsewhere. In the United States, just as in

England, there is a vast army of five million women, rapidly increasing,

who earn their own living, and their position in relation to men workers

is even better than in England. In France from twenty-five to seventy-five

per cent. of the workers in most of the chief industries--the liberal

professions, commerce, agriculture, factory industries--are women, and in

some of the very largest, such as home industries and textile industries,

more women are employed than men. In Japan, it is said, three-fifths of

the factory workers are women, and all the textile industries are in the

hands of women.[301] This movement is the outward expression of the modern

conception of personal rights, personal moral worth, and personal

responsibility, which, as Hobhouse has remarked, has compelled women to

take their lives into their own hands, and has at the same time rendered

the ancient marriage laws an anachronism, and the ancient ideals of

feminine innocence shrouded from the world a mere piece of false

sentiment.[302]

There can be no doubt that the entrance of women into the field

of industrial work, in rivalry with men and under somewhat the

same conditions as men, raises serious questions of another

order. The general tendency of civilization towards the economic

independence and the moral responsibility of women is

unquestionable. But it is by no means absolutely clear that it is

best for women, and, therefore, for the community, that women

should exercise all the ordinary avocations and professions of

men on the same level as men. Not only have the conditions of the

avocations and professions developed in accordance with the

special aptitudes of men, but the fact that the sexual processes

by which the race is propagated demand an incomparably greater

expenditure of time and energy on the part of women than of men,

precludes women in the mass from devoting themselves so

exclusively as men to industrial work. For some biologists,

indeed, it seems clear that outside the home and the school women

should not work at all. "Any nation that works its women is

damned," says Woods Hutchinson (_The Gospel According to Darwin_,

p. 199). That view is extreme. Yet from the economic side, also,

Hobson, in summing up this question, regards the tendency of

machine-industry to drive women away from the home as "a tendency

antagonistic to civilization." The neglect of the home, he

states, is, "on the whole, the worst injury modern industry has

inflicted on our lives, and it is difficult to see how it can be

compensated by any increase of material products. Factory life

for women, save in extremely rare cases, saps the physical and

moral health of the family. The exigencies of factory life are

inconsistent with the position of a good mother, a good wife, or

the maker of a home. Save in extreme circumstances, no increase

of the family wage can balance these losses, whose values stand

upon a higher qualitative level" (J.A. Hobson, _Evolution of

Modern Capitalism_, Ch. XII; cf. what has been said in Ch. I of

the present volume). It is now beginning to be recognized that

the early pioneers of the "woman's movement" in working to remove

the "subjection of woman" were still dominated by the old ideals

of that subjection, according to which the masculine is in all

main respects the superior sex. Whatever was good for man, they

thought, must be equally good for woman. That has been the source

of all that was unbalanced and unstable, sometimes both a little

pathetic and a little absurd, in the old "woman's movement."

There was a failure to perceive that, first of all, women must

claim their right to their own womanhood as mothers of the race,

and thereby the supreme law-givers in the sphere of sex and the

large part of life dependent on sex. This special position of

woman seems likely to require a readjustment of economic

conditions to their needs, though it is not likely that such

readjustment would be permitted to affect their independence or

their responsibility. We have had, as Madame Juliette Adam has

put it, the rights of men sacrificing women, followed by the

rights of women sacrificing the child; that must be followed by

the rights of the child reconstituting the family. It has already

been necessary to touch on this point in the first chapter of

this volume, and it will again be necessary in the last chapter.

The question as to the method by which the economic independence of women

will be completely insured, and the part which the community may be

expected to take in insuring it, on the ground of woman's special

child-bearing functions, is from the present point of view subsidiary.

There can be no doubt, however, as to the reality of the movement in that

direction, whatever doubt there may be as to the final adjustment of the

details. It is only necessary in this place to touch on some of the

general and more obvious respects in which the growth of woman's

responsibility is affecting sexual morality.

The first and most obvious way in which the sense of moral responsibility

works is in an insistence on reality in the relationships of sex. Moral

irresponsibility has too often combined with economic dependence to induce

a woman to treat the sexual event in her life which is biologically of

most fateful gravity as a merely gay and trivial event, at the most an

event which has given her a triumph over her rivals and over the superior

male, who, on his part, willingly condescends, for the moment, to assume

the part of the vanquished. "Gallantry to the ladies," we are told of the

hero of the greatest and most typical of English novels, "was among his

principles of honor, and he held it as much incumbent on him to accept a

challenge to love as if it had been a challenge to fight;" he heroically

goes home for the night with a lady of title he meets at a masquerade,

though at the time very much in love with the girl whom he eventually

marries.[303] The woman whose power lies only in her charms, and who is

free to allow the burden of responsibility to fall on a man's

shoulder,[304] could lightly play the seducing part, and thereby exert

independence and authority in the only shapes open to her. The man on his

part, introducing the misplaced idea of "honor" into the field from which

the natural idea of responsibility has been banished, is prepared to

descend at the lady's bidding into the arena, according to the old legend,

and rescue the glove, even though he afterwards flings it contemptuously

in her face. The ancient conception of gallantry, which Tom Jones so well

embodies, is the direct outcome of a system involving the moral

irresponsibility and economic dependence of women, and is as opposed to

the conceptions, prevailing in the earlier and later civilized stages, of

approximate sexual equality as it is to the biological traditions of

natural courtship in the world generally.

In controlling her own sexual life, and in realizing that her

responsibility for such control can no longer be shifted on to the

shoulders of the other sex, women will also indirectly affect the sexual

lives of men, much as men already affect the sexual lives of women. In

what ways that influence will in the main be exerted it is still premature

to say. According to some, just as formerly men bought their wives and

demanded prenuptial virginity in the article thus purchased, so nowadays,

among the better classes, women are able to buy their husbands, and in

their turn are disposed to demand continence.[305] That, however, is too

simple-minded a way of viewing the question. It is enough to refer to the

fact that women are not attracted to virginal innocence in men and that

they frequently have good ground for viewing such innocence with

suspicion.[306] Yet it may well be believed that women will more and more

prefer to exert a certain discrimination in the approval of their

husbands' past lives. However instinctively a woman may desire that her

husband shall be initiated in the art of making love to her, she may often

well doubt whether the finest initiation is to be secured from the average

prostitute. Prostitution, as we have seen, is ultimately as incompatible

with complete sexual responsibility as is the patriarchal marriage system

with which it has been so closely associated. It is an arrangement mainly

determined by the demands of men, to whatever extent it may have

incidentally subserved various needs of women. Men arranged that one group

of women should be set apart to minister exclusively to their sexual

necessities, while another group should be brought up in asceticism as

candidates for the privilege of ministering to their household and family

necessities. That this has been in many respects a most excellent

arrangement is sufficiently proved by the fact that it has nourished for

so long a period, notwithstanding the influences that are antagonistic to

it. But it is obviously only possible during a certain stage of

civilization and in association with a certain social organization. It is

not completely congruous with a democratic stage of civilization involving

the economic independence and the sexual responsibility of both sexes

alike in all social classes. It is possible that women may begin to

realize this fact earlier than men.