“But since our women must walk gay,
And money buys their gear,
The sealing vessels filch this way
At hazard, year by year.”
The contest in every good man’s heart to-day between the “ought to” and
the “must,” between his best work and the “potboiler,” is his personal
share of this incessant struggle between social interest and
self-interest. For himself and by himself he would be glad to do his
best work, to be true to his ideals, to be brave in meeting loss for
that truth’s sake. But as the compromising capitalist says in “Put
Yourself in His Place,” when his sturdy young friend—a bachelor—wonders
at his giving in to unjust demands, “Marriage makes a mouse of a man.”
To the young business man who falls into evil courses in the
sex-relation the open greed of his fair dependant is a menace to his
honesty, to his business prospects. On the same man married the needs of
his wife often operate in the same way. The sense of the dependence of
the helpless creature whose food must come through him does not
stimulate courage, but compels submission.
The foregoing distinction should be clearly held in mind. Legitimate
sex-competition brings out all that is best in man. To please her, to
win her, he strives to do his best. But the economic dependence of the
female upon the male, with its ensuing purchasability, does not so
affect a man: it puts upon him the necessity for getting things, not for
doing them. In the lowest grades of labor, where there is no getting
without doing and where the laborer always does more than he gets, this
works less palpable evil than in the higher grades, the professions and
arts, where the most valuable work is always ahead of the market, and
where to work for the market involves a lowering of standards. The young
artist or poet or scientific student works for his work’s sake, for art,
for science, and so for the best good of society. But the artist or
student married must get gain, must work for those who will pay; and
those who will pay are not those who lift and bear forward the standard
of progress. Community of interest is quite possible with those who are
working most disinterestedly for the social good; but bring in the
sex-relation, and all such solidarity disintegrates,—resolves itself
into the tiny groups of individuals united on a basis of sex-union, and
briskly acting in their own immediate interests at anybody’s or
everybody’s expense.
The social perception of the evil resultant from the intrusion of
sex-influence upon racial action has found voice in the heartless
proverb, “There is no evil without a woman at the bottom of it.” When a
man’s work goes wrong, his hopes fail, his ambitions sink, cynical
friends inquire, “Who is she?” It is not for nothing that a man’s best
friends sigh when he marries, especially if he is a man of genius. This
judgment of the world has obtained side by side with its equal faith in
the ennobling influence of woman. The world is quite right. It does not
have to be consistent. Both judgments are correct. Woman affecting
society through the sex-relation or through her individual economic
relation is an ennobling influence. Woman affecting society through our
perverse combination of the two becomes a strange influence, indeed.
One of the amusing minor results of these conditions is that, while we
have observed the effect of marriage upon social economic relation and
the effect of social economic relation upon marriage,—seeing that the
devoted servant of the family was a poor servant of society and that the
devoted servant of society was a poor servant of the family, seeing the
successful collectivity of celibate institutions,—we have jumped to the
conclusion that collective prosperity was conditioned upon celibacy, and
that we did not want it. That is why the popular mind is so ready to
associate socialistic theories with injury to marriage. Having seen that
marriage makes us less collective, we infer conversely that collectivity
will make us less married,—that it will “break up the home,” “strike at
the roots of the family.”
When we make plain to ourselves that a pure, lasting, monogamous
sex-union can exist without bribe or purchase, without the manacles of
economic dependence, and that men and women so united in sex-relation
will still be free to combine with others in economic relation, we shall
not regard devotion to humanity as an unnatural sacrifice, nor
collective prosperity as a thing to fear.
Besides this maintenance of primeval individualism in the growing
collectivity of social economic process and the introduction of the
element of sex-combat into the narrowing field of industrial
competition, there is another side to the evil influence of the
sexuo-economic relation upon social development. This is in the attitude
of woman as a non-productive consumer.
In the industrial evolution of the human race, that marvellous and
subtle drawing out and interlocking of special functions which
constitute the organic life of society, we find that production and
consumption go hand in hand; and production comes first. One cannot
consume what has not been produced. Economic production is the natural
expression of human energy,—not sex-energy at all, but race-energy,—the
unconscious functioning of the social organism. Socially organized human
beings tend to produce, as a gland to secrete: it is the essential
nature of the relation. The creative impulse, the desire to make, to
express the inner thought in outer form, “just for the work’s sake, no
use at all i’ the work!” this is the distinguishing character of
humanity. “I want to mark!” cries the child, demanding the pencil. He
does not want to eat. He wants to mark. He is not seeking to get
something into himself, but to put something out of himself. He
generally wants to do whatever he sees done,—to make pie-crust or to
make shavings, as it happens. The pie he may eat, the shavings not; but
he likes to make both. This is the natural process of production, and is
followed by the natural process of consumption, where practicable. But
consumption is not the main end, the governing force. Under this organic
social law, working naturally, we have the evolution of those arts and
crafts in the exercise of which consists our human living, and on the
product of which we live. So does society evolve within itself—secrete
as it were—the social structure with all its complex machinery; and we
function therein as naturally as so many glands, other things being
equal.
But other things are not equal. Half the human race is denied free
productive expression, is forced to confine its productive human
energies to the same channels as its reproductive sex-energies. Its
creative skill is confined to the level of immediate personal bodily
service, to the making of clothes and preparing of food for individuals.
No social service is possible. While its power of production is checked,
its power of consumption is inordinately increased by the showering upon
it of the “unearned increment” of masculine gifts. For the woman there
is, first, no free production allowed; and, second, no relation
maintained between what she does produce and what she consumes. She is
forbidden to make, but encouraged to take. Her industry is not the
natural output of creative energy, not the work she does because she has
the inner power and strength to do it; nor is her industry even the
measure of her gain. She has, of course, the natural desire to consume;
and to that is set no bar save the capacity or the will of her husband.
Thus we have painfully and laboriously evolved and carefully maintain
among us an enormous class of non-productive consumers,—a class which is
half the world, and mother of the other half. We have built into the
constitution of the human race the habit and desire of taking, as
divorced from its natural precursor and concomitant of making. We have
made for ourselves this endless array of “horse-leech’s daughters,
crying, Give! give!” To consume food, to consume clothes, to consume
houses and furniture and decorations and ornaments and amusements, to
take and take and take forever,—from one man if they are virtuous, from
many if they are vicious, but always to take and never to think of
giving anything in return except their womanhood,—this is the enforced
condition of the mothers of the race. What wonder that their sons go
into business “for what there is in it”! What wonder that the world is
full of the desire to get as much as possible and to give as little as
possible! What wonder, either, that the glory and sweetness of love are
but a name among us, with here and there a strange and beautiful
exception, of which our admiration proves the rarity!
Between the brutal ferocity of excessive male energy struggling in the
market-place as in a battlefield and the unnatural greed generated by
the perverted condition of female energy, it is not remarkable that the
industrial evolution of humanity has shown peculiar symptoms. One of the
minor effects of this last condition—this limiting of female industry to
close personal necessities, and this tendency of her over-developed
sex-nature to overestimate the so-called “duties of her position”—has
been to produce an elaborate devotion to individuals and their personal
needs,—not to the understanding and developing of their higher natures,
but to the intensification of their bodily tastes and pleasure. The wife
and mother, pouring the rising tide of racial power into the same old
channels that were allowed her primitive ancestors, constantly ministers
to the physical needs of her family with a ceaseless and concentrated
intensity. They like it, of course. But it maintains in the individuals
of the race an exaggerated sense of the importance of food and clothes
and ornaments to themselves, without at all including a knowledge of
their right use and value to us all. It developes personal selfishness.
Again, the consuming female, debarred from any free production, unable
to estimate the labor involved in the making of what she so lightly
destroys, and her consumption limited mainly to those things which
minister to physical pleasure, creates a market for sensuous decoration
and personal ornament, for all that is luxurious and enervating, and for
a false and capricious variety in such supplies, which operates as a
most deadly check to true industry and true art. As the priestess of the
temple of consumption, as the limitless demander of things to use up,
her economic influence is reactionary and injurious. Much, very much, of
the current of useless production in which our economic energies run
waste—man’s strength poured out like water on the sand—depends on the
creation and careful maintenance of this false market, this sink into
which human labor vanishes with no return. Woman, in her false economic
position, reacts injuriously upon industry, upon art, upon science,
discovery, and progress. The sexuo-economic relation in its effect on
the constitution of the individual keeps alive in us the instincts of
savage individualism which we should otherwise have well outgrown. It
sexualizes our industrial relation and commercializes our sex-relation.
And, in the external effect upon the market, the over-sexed woman, in
her unintelligent and ceaseless demands, hinders and perverts the
economic development of the world.