As we learn to see how close is the connection of that which we call the
soul with our external conditions, how the moral sense and the behavior
of man are modified by the environment, we must of course look for
marked results in psychic development arising from so important a
condition as our sexuo-economic relation.
The relation of the sexes, in whatever form, has always been observed to
affect strongly the moral nature of mankind; and this is one reason why
we have placed such disproportionate stress upon the special virtues of
that relation. The word “moral” in common use means “chaste”; and, in
the case of women, the word “virtue” itself simply implies the one
virtue of chastity. Large, popular conceptions are never baseless. They
are rooted in deep truths, felt rather than seen, and, however false and
silly in external interpretation, may be trusted in their general trend.
It is not that the virtue of chastity is so much more important to the
race than the virtue of honesty, the virtue of courage, the virtues of
cheerfulness, of courtesy, of kindness, but that upon the sex-relation
in which we live depends so much of the further development and
arrangement of our whole moral nature.
What we call the moral sense is an intellectual recognition of the
relative importance of certain acts and their consequences. This appears
vaguely and weakly among early savages, and was for long mainly applied
to a few clearly defined and arbitrary rites and ceremonies, set rules
in a game of priest-and-people. But the habit of associating a sense of
worthiness with certain acts by which came praise and profit grew in the
childish soul, and the range of moral deeds widened. It has been
widening ever since, growing deeper and higher and far more subtle,
developing with the other social qualities.
No human distinction is more absolutely and exclusively social than the
moral sense. Ethics is a social science. There is no ethics for the
individual. Taken by himself, man is but an animal; and his conduct
bears relation only to the needs of the animal,—self-preservation and
race-preservation. Every virtue, and the power to see and strive for it,
is a social quality. The highest virtues are those wherein we best serve
the most people, and their development in us keeps pace with the
development of society. It is the social relation which calls for our
virtues, and which maintains them.
A simple instance of this is in the prompt lapse to barbarism of a man
cut off from his kind, and forced to live in conditions of savagery.
Even a brief and partial change in condition changes conduct at once, as
is shown by the behavior of the most pious New Englanders when in mining
camps. It is shown, also, by the different scale of virtue in the
different classes and industries.
Every social relation has its ethics; and the general needs of society,
as a whole, are the basis of ethics. In every age and race this may be
studied, and a clear connection established always between the virtues
and vices of a given people and their local conditions. The principal
governing condition in the development of ethics is the economic
environment. This may seem strange to one accustomed to consider moral
laws as not of this world, and to see how often virtue costs its
possessor dear. The relative behavior of a given number of people
depends, first, upon the existence of those people. Such conduct as
should tend to exterminate them would exterminate their ethics. Such
conduct as should tend to preserve and increase them is the only conduct
of which ethical value can be predicated. Ethics is, therefore,
absolutely conditioned upon life and the maintenance thereof. From the
lowest and narrowest view which calls an act right or wrong, according
to its immediate effects upon one’s present life, to the clear vision of
ultimate results which calls a course of conduct right or wrong,
according to its final effects upon one’s eternal life, our ethics,
small and great, is the science of human conduct measured by its
results.
It is inevitable, then, that in all races we should find those acts
whereby men live considered right, and should see a high degree of
approval awarded to him who best performs them. In the hunting and
fighting period the best hunter and fighter was the best man, praised
and honored by his tribe. The virtues cultivated were such as enabled
the possessor to hunt and kill most successfully, to maintain himself
and be a credit and a help to his friends. Savage virtues are the simple
reflection of savage conditions. To be patient and self-controlled was
an economic necessity to the hunter: to bear pain and arduous exertion
easily was a necessity to the fighter. Therefore, the savage, by precept
and example, cultivated these virtues.
In the long agricultural and military periods we see the same thing. In
the peasant the virtues of industry and patience were extolled: it takes
industry and patience to raise corn. In the soldier the virtues of
courage and obedience were extolled, and in every one the virtue of
faith was the prime requisite of the existing religion. It took a great
deal of faith to accept the religions of those times. The importance of
faith as a virtue declines as religion grows more intelligible and
applicable to life. It requires no effort to believe what you can
understand and do. Slowly the industrial era dawned and grew, from the
weak, sporadic efforts of the cringing packman and craftsman, the common
prey of the dominant fighting class, to our colossal industrial
organization, in which the soldier is ruthlessly exploited to some
financial interests. With this change in economic conditions has changed
the scale of virtues.
Physical courage has sunk: obedience, patience, faith, and the rest do
not stand as they did. We praise and value to-day, as always, the
virtues whereby we live. Every animal developes the virtues of his
conditions: our human distinction is that we add the power of conscious
perception and personal volition to the action of natural force. Not
only in our own race, but in others, do we call “good” and “bad” those
qualities which profit us; and the beasts that we train and use
develope, of necessity, the qualities that profit them,—as, for
instance, in our well-known friend, the dog.
The dog is an animal long since cut off from his natural means of
support, and depending absolutely on man for food. As a free, wild dog,
he was profited by a daring initiative, courage, ferocity. As a tame,
slave dog, he is profited by abject submission, by a crawling
will-lessness that grovels at a blow, and licks the foot that kicks it.
We have quite made over the original dog; and his moral nature, his
spirit, shows the change even more than his body. The force which has
accomplished this is economic,—a change of base in the source of
supplies and the processes of obtaining them.
Let us briefly examine the distinctive virtues of humanity, their order
of introduction and development, and see how this one peculiar relation
has affected them.
The main distinction of human virtue is in what we roughly describe as
altruism,—“otherness.” To love and serve one another, to care for one
another, to feel for and with one another,—our racial adjective,
“humane,” implies these qualities. The very existence of humanity
implies these qualities in some degree, and the development of humanity
is commensurate with their development.
Our one great blunder in studying these things lies in our failure to
appreciate the organic necessity of such moral qualities in human life.
We have assumed that the practice of these social virtues involved a
personal effort and sacrifice, and that there is an irreconcilable
contest between the cosmic process of development and the ethical
process, as Huxley puts it. Social evolution brings with it the
essential qualities of social relation, and these are our much boasted
virtues. The natural processes of human intercourse and interrelation
develope the qualities without which such intercourse would be
impossible; and this development is as orderly, as natural, as “cosmic,”
as the processes of organic activity within the individual body. It is
as natural for an industrial society to live in peace as for a hunting
society to live in war; and this peace is not the result of heroic and
self-sacrificing effort on the part of the industrial society; it is the
necessity of their condition.
The course of evolution in human ethics is marked by a gradual extension
of our perception of common good and evil as distinct from our initial
perception of individual good and evil. This becomes very keen in the
more socialized natures among us, as in the far-seeing devotion of
statesmanship, patriotism, and philanthropy. Each of these words shows
in its construction that the quality described is social,—the statesman,
one who thinks and works for the State; the patriot, one who loves and
labors for his country; the philanthropist, one who loves mankind. All
these qualities, in their extreme and in their first beginnings, are a
mere recognition of the equal right of the next man, common “fair play”
and courtesy; they are but the natural product of social conditions
acting on the individual through primal laws of economic necessity. The
individual, in the absolute economic isolation of the beast, is profited
by pure egoism, and he developes it. The individual, in the increasing
economic interdependence of social relation, is profited by altruism;
and he developes it.
All our virtues can be so traced and accounted for. The great main stem
of them all, what we call “love,” is merely the first condition of
social existence. It is cohesion, working among us as the constituent
particles of society. Without some attraction to hold us together, we
should not be able to hold together; and this attraction, as perceived
by our consciousness, we call love. The virtue of obedience consists in
the surrender of the individual will, so often necessary to the common
good; and it stands highest in military organization, wherein great
numbers of men must act together against their personal interests, even
to the sacrifice of life, in the service of the community.
As we have grown into fuller social life, we have slowly and
experimentally, painfully and expensively, discovered what kind of man
was the best social factor. The type of a satisfactory member of society
to-day is a man self-controlled, kind, gentle, strong, wise, brave,
courteous, cheerful, true. In the Middle Ages, strong, brave, and true
would have satisfied the demands of the time. We now require for our
common good a larger range of qualities, a more elaborate moral
organization. All this is a simple, evolutionary process of social life,
and should have involved no more confusion, effort, and pain than any
other natural process.
But the moral development of humanity is a most tempestuous and
contradictory field of study. Some virtues we have developed in orderly
fashion, hardly recognizing that they were virtues, because they came so
easily into use. Accuracy and punctuality are qualities which were
unknown to the savage, because they were not needed in his business.
They have been developed in us, because they were required, and so have
been gradually assumed under pressure of economic necessity. Obedience,
even in its extreme form of self-sacrifice, has been produced in the
soldier; and no quality is more altruistic, more unnatural, or more
difficult of adoption by the sturdy individual will. The common,
law-abiding citizen does not consider himself a hero; yet he is
manifesting a high degree of social virtue, often at great personal
sacrifice.
But in other virtues we have not progressed so smoothly. In the ordinary
economic relations of life, and in our sex-relations, we are
distinguished by peculiar and injurious qualities. Our condition may be
described as consisting of a tenacious survival of qualities which we
ought, on every ground of social good, to have long since outgrown; and
an incessant struggle between these rudimentary survivals and the normal
growth. This it is which has so forcibly assailed our consciousness
since its awakening, and which we call the contest between good and
evil. We have felt within ourselves the pull of diverse tendencies,—the
impulse to do what was immediately good for ourselves, but which our
growing social sense knew was bad for the community, and therefore
wrong; and the impulse to do what might be immediately bad for
ourselves, but which the same social sense knew was good for the
community, and therefore right. This we felt, and cast about in our
minds for an explanation of the way we behaved: we knew it was peculiar.
The human brain is an organ that must have an explanation, if it has to
make one. We made one.
The belated impulses of the individual beast—good in him because he
needed them, bad in us because we were becoming human and had other
needs—we lumped together, and, with our facile, dramatic, personifying
tendency, called them “the devil.” And, as these evil promptings were
usually along the lines of physical impulse, we considered our own
bodies, and nature in general, as part and parcel of the wrong,—“the
world, the flesh, and the devil.” We felt, also, within us the mighty
stirrings of new powers and strange tendencies, that led us out of
ourselves and toward each other, new loves and hopes and wishes, new
desires to give instead of to take, to serve instead of to fight; and,
realizing, with true social instinct, that this impulse tended to help
us most, was really good for us, we called it the will of God, the voice
of God, the way to God. The tearing contest between these ill-adjusted
impulses and tendencies, with our growing power of self-conscious
decision and voluntary adoption of one or another course of action,—this
process in psychic evolution has given us the greatest world-drama ever
conceived, the struggle between good and evil.
And, fumbling vaguely at the sources of our pain so far as we could
trace them, judging always by persons, and not by conditions,—as a child
strikes the chair he bumps his head upon,—race after race has located
the cause of the trouble in woman. Not that she primarily invented all
the evil, and brought it upon us,—our vague devil was the remoter
cause,—but that woman let the trouble in. Pandora did not make the
mischief-box; but she perversely opened it, even against the wise man’s
advice. Eve did not plant that apple-tree; but she ate of it, and
tempted the superior man. It seems a childish and clumsy guess, but
there is something in it. Nothing of the unspeakable blame and shame
with which man has blackened the face of his mother through all these
centuries, but a sociological truth for all that.
Not woman, but the condition of woman, has always been a doorway of
evil. The sexuo-economic relation has debarred her from the social
activities in which, and in which alone, are developed the social
virtues. She was not allowed to acquire the qualities needed in our
racial advance; and, in her position of arrested development, she has
maintained the virtues and the vices of the period of human evolution at
which she was imprisoned. At a period of isolated economic
activity,—mere animal individualism,—at a period when social ties ceased
with the ties of blood, woman was cut off from personal activity in
social economics, and confined to the functional activities of her sex.
In keeping her on this primitive basis of economic life, we have kept
half humanity tied to the starting-post, while the other half ran. We
have trained and bred one kind of qualities into one-half the species,
and another kind into the other half. And then we wonder at the
contradictions of human nature! For instance, we have done all we could,
in addition to natural forces, to make men brave. We have done all we
could, in addition to natural forces, to make women cowards. And, since
every human creature is born of two parents, it is not surprising that
we are a little mixed.
We have trained in men the large qualities of social usefulness which
the pressure of their economic conditions was also developing; and we
have done this by means of conscious praise and blame, reward and
punishment, and with the aid of law and custom. We have trained in
women, by the same means, the small qualities of personal usefulness
which the pressure of their economic conditions was also developing. We
have made a creature who is not homogeneous, whose life is fed by two
currents of inheritance as dissimilar and opposed as could be well
imagined. We have bred a race of psychic hybrids, and the moral
qualities of hybrids are well known.
Away back in that early beginning, by dividing the economic conditions
of women and men, we have divided their psychic development, and built
into the constitution of the race the irreconcilable elements of these
diverse characters. The incongruous behavior of this cross-bred product
is the riddle of human life. We ourselves, by maintaining this
artificial diversity between the sexes, have constantly kept before us
the enigma which we found so hard to solve, and have preserved in our
own characters the confusion and contradiction which is our greatest
difficulty in life.
The largest and most radical effect of restoring women to economic
independence will be in its result in clarifying and harmonizing the
human soul. With a homogeneous nature bred of two parents in the same
degree of social development, we shall be able to feel simply, to see
clearly, to agree with ourselves, to be one person and master of our own
lives, instead of wrestling in such hopeless perplexity with what we
have called “man’s dual nature.” Marry a civilized man to a primitive
savage, and their child will naturally have a dual nature. Marry an
Anglo-Saxon to an African or Oriental, and their child has a dual
nature. Marry any man of a highly developed nation, full of the
specialized activities of his race and their accompanying moral
qualities, to the carefully preserved, rudimentary female creature he
has so religiously maintained by his side, and you have as result what
we all know so well,—the human soul in its pitiful, well-meaning
efforts, its cross-eyed, purblind errors, its baby fits of passion, and
its beautiful and ceaseless upward impulse through all this wavering.
We are quite familiar with this result, but we have not so far
accurately located the cause. We have had our glimmering perception that
woman had something to do with it; and she has been treated accordingly,
by many simple races, to her further injury, and to that of the whole
people. What we need to see is that it is not woman as a sex who is
responsible for this mis-mothered world, but the economic position of
woman which makes her what she is. If men were so placed, it would have
the same effect. Not the sex-relation, but the economic relation of the
sexes, has so tangled the skein of human life.
Besides the essential evils of an unbalanced nature, many harmful
qualities have been developed in human characters by these conditions.
For countless centuries we have sought to develope, by selection and
education, a timid submission in woman. When there did appear “a curst
shrew,” she was left unmarried; and her temper perished with her, or she
was “tamed” by some Petruchio. The dependence of women on the personal
favor of men has produced an exceeding cleverness in the adaptation of
the dependent one to the source of her supplies. Under the necessity of
pleasing, whether she wished or no, of interceding for a child’s pardon
or of suing for new pleasures for herself, “the vices of the slave” have
been forever maintained in this housemaid of the world.
Another discord introduced by the condition of servitude is that between
will and action. A servant places his time and strength at the disposal
of another will. He must hold himself in readiness to do what he is
told; and the mere physical law of conservation of energy, to say
nothing of his own conscious judgment, forbids wasting nerve-force in
planning and undertaking what he may not be able to accomplish. This
produces a condition of inactivity, save under compulsion, and, on the
other side, a perverse, capricious wilfulness in little things,—the
reaction from a forced submission.
A more insidious, disintegrating force to offset the evolution of human
character could hardly be imagined than this steady training of the
habits of servitude into half the human race,—the mother of all of it.
These results have been modified, of course, by the different education
and environment of men, developing in them opposite qualities, and
transmitting the contradictory traits to the children indiscriminately.
Heredity has no Salic law. The boy inherits from his mother, as well as
from his father; the girl from her father, as well as from her mother.
This has prevented the full evil of the results that plight have ensued,
but has also added to the personal difficulties of each of us, and
retarded the general progress of the race.
Worse than the check set upon the physical activities of women has been
the restriction of their power to think and judge for themselves. The
extended use of the human will and its decisions is conditioned upon
free, voluntary action. In her rudimentary position, woman was denied
the physical freedom which underlies all knowledge, she was denied the
mental freedom which is the path to further wisdom, she was denied the
moral freedom of being mistress of her own action and of learning by the
merciful law of consequences what was right and what was wrong; and she
has remained, perforce, undeveloped in the larger judgment of ethics.
Her moral sense is large enough, morbidly large, because in this
tutelage she is always being praised or blamed for her conduct. She
lives in a forcing-bed of sensitiveness to moral distinctions, but the
broad judgment that alone can guide and govern this sensitiveness she
has not. Her contribution to moral progress has added to the anguish of
the world the fierce sense of sin and shame, the desperate desire to do
right, the fear of wrong; without giving it the essential help of a
practical wisdom and a regulated will. Inheriting with each generation
the accumulating forces of our social nature, set back in each
generation by the conditions of the primitive human female, women have
become vividly self-conscious centres of moral impulse, but poor guides
as to the conduct which alone can make that impulse useful and build the
habit of morality into the constitution of the race.
Recognizing her intense feeling on moral lines, and seeing in her
the rigidly preserved virtues of faith, submission, and
self-sacrifice,—qualities which in the Dark Ages were held to be the
first of virtues,—we have agreed of late years to call woman the
moral superior of man. But the ceaseless growth of human life,
social life, has developed in him new virtues, later, higher, more
needful; and the moral nature of woman, as maintained in this
rudimentary stage by her economic dependence, is a continual check
to the progress of the human soul. The main feature of her life—the
restriction of her range of duty to the love and service of her own
immediate family—acts upon us continually as a retarding influence,
hindering the expansion of the spirit of social love and service on
which our very lives depend. It keeps the moral standard of the
patriarchal era still before us, and blinds our eyes to the full
duty of man.
An intense self-consciousness, born of the ceaseless contact of close
personal relation; an inordinate self-interest, bred by the constant
personal attention and service of this relation; a feverish, torturing,
moral sensitiveness, without the width and clarity of vision of a
full-grown moral sense; a thwarted will, used to meek surrender, cunning
evasion, or futile rebellion; a childish, wavering, short-range
judgment, handicapped by emotion; a measureless devotion to one’s own
sex relatives, and a maternal passion swollen with the full strength of
the great social heart, but denied social expression,—such psychic
qualities as these, born in us all, are the inevitable result of the
sexuo-economic relation.
It is not alone upon woman, and, through her, upon the race, that the
ill-effects may be observed. Man, as master, has suffered from his
position also. The lust for power and conquest, natural to the male of
any species, has been fostered in him to an enormous degree by this
cheap and easy lordship. His dominance is not that of one chosen as best
fitted to rule or of one ruling by successful competition with “foemen
worthy of his steel”; but it is a sovereignty based on the accident of
sex, and holding over such helpless and inferior dependants as could not
question or oppose. The easy superiority that needs no striving to
maintain it; the temptation to cruelty always begotten by irresponsible
power; the pride and self-will which surely accompany it,—these
qualities have been bred into the souls of men by their side of the
relation. When man’s place was maintained by brute force, it made him
more brutal: when his place was maintained by purchase, by the power of
economic necessity, then he grew into the merciless use of such power as
distinguishes him to-day.
Another giant evil engendered by this relation is what we call
selfishness. Social life tends to reduce this feeling, which is but a
belated individualism; but the sexuo-economic relation fosters and
developes it. To have a whole human creature consecrated to his direct
personal service, to pleasing and satisfying him in every way
possible,—this has kept man selfish beyond the degree incidental to our
stage of social growth. Even in our artificial society life men are more
forbearing and considerate, more polite and kind, than they are at home.
Pride, cruelty, and selfishness are the vices of the master; and these
have been kept strong in the bosom of the family through the false
position of woman. And every human soul is born, an impressionable
child, into the close presence of these conditions. Our men must live in
the ethics of a civilized, free, industrial, democratic age; but they
are born and trained in the moral atmosphere of a primitive
patriarchate. No wonder that we are all somewhat slow to rise to the
full powers and privileges of democracy, to feel full social honor and
social duty, while every soul of us is reared in this stronghold of
ancient and outgrown emotions,—the economically related family.
So we may trace from the sexuo-economic relation of our species not only
definite evils in psychic development, bred severally in men and women,
and transmitted indifferently to their offspring, but the innate
perversion of character resultant from the moral miscegenation of two so
diverse souls,—the unfailing shadow and distortion which has darkened
and twisted the spirit of man from its beginnings. We have been injured
in body and in mind by the too dissimilar traits inherited from our
widely separated parents, but nowhere is the injury more apparent than
in its ill effects upon the moral nature of the race.
Yet here, as in the other evil results of the sexuo-economic relation,
we can see the accompanying good that made the condition necessary in
its time; and we can follow the beautiful results of our present changes
with comforting assurance. A healthy, normal moral sense will be ours,
freed from its exaggerations and contradictions; and, with that clear
perception, we shall no longer conceive of the ethical process as
something outside of and against nature, but as the most natural thing
in the world.
Where now we strive and agonize after impossible virtues, we shall then
grow naturally and easily into those very qualities; and we shall not
even think of them as especially commendable. Where our progress
hitherto has been warped and hindered by the retarding influence of
surviving rudimentary forces, it will flow on smoothly and rapidly when
both men and women stand equal in economic relation. When the mother of
the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of
birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of social evolution.