The assumption that justice to motherhood and childhood will undermine the institution of marriage implies that marriage as an institution is based on injustice; which is to assume that it is fundamentally unsound. That it does, under present economic conditions, involve serious injustice to both sexes I have shown in the preceding chapter. But this notion implies something more: it implies that marriage is acceptable to women only or chiefly because it offers them a position of privilege—the privilege of exemption from the social and economic consequences of illegitimate motherhood. There is some show of reason in this; for the disabilities which marriage puts on women are in most communities humiliating and onerous, more particularly since the unmarried woman has so generally succeeded in establishing her right to be treated as a free agent. The abolition of illegitimacy mayconceivably undermine institutional marriage; yet hardly before women are economically free. For her need of society’s protection against itself in the discharge of her maternal function has certainly had less to do with woman’s long acquiescence in the disabilities which marriage involves than the fact that marriage offered the only career which society approved for her or gave her much opportunity to pursue. She was under enormous economic and social pressure to accept those disabilities, and she yielded, precisely as thousands of men who have been under analogous pressure to get their living under humiliating conditions, have yielded, rather than not get it at all.
Since we have been discussing unmarried motherhood, we may appropriately begin our consideration of these disabilities by examining the status of motherhood in marriage. The married mother, particularly in modern times, is the object of a sickly pawing and adulation and enjoys a certain formal respect—not, however, as a mother, but as a mother of legitimate children. While she continues to live with her husband, she may exercise considerable supervision over the rearing of her offspring; indeed in some communities she is, by force ofcustom, supreme in this province. But in case of separation or the death of her husband, she may find herself without any legal claim to their guardianship or custody, for until recently children born in wedlock have been generally held to belong exclusively to the father. The principle of joint guardianship is coming to be recognized in modern jurisprudence, but there are communities where the old laws still hold. In Virginia, for example, the father’s claim is always preferred to that of the mother. In Maryland and Delaware it is preferred to such an extent that he may even, by his will, deprive her of the guardianship and custody of her children after his death. This provision is a survival from English common law, and is a logical correlative of woman’s status under that law, which was that of a minor. Her position with regard to her children was one of responsibilities with no compensating rights; and although the discriminations against her have been modified here and there, this is still pretty generally her position. In this respect the unmarried mother is better off than the mother of legitimate children, for in most countries, as the only legal parent of her child, she exercises the right of guardianship and control and possesses fullclaim to their services and earnings. The unmarried mother, in a word, bears her own children; the married mother bears the children of her husband.
Usage, as every one knows, is far ahead of the laws governing the rights of the married mother. In France, where her legal position is notoriously bad, her relation to her family is nevertheless one of influence and authority. In this country also her actual position is generally far better than that allowed her by the law. But this is merely to say that most husbands are more humane than the law; and the fact may not be ignored that so long as legal discriminations bar her from an equal share with her husband in the control and guardianship of her children, she exercises parental rights only on sufferance. It is the law which finally fixes her status in this as in other matters; and as long as she may legally be made to suffer injustice on account of her sex, she can hardly be called her husband’s equal, no matter what privileges she may enjoy by virtue of his indulgence.
So much for the disabilities of the married mother. Her compensations are the immunity that marriage affords her from society’s displeasure and consequent persecution; the inestimable advantageof her husband’s co-operation in making a home for her children, and in rearing and educating them; and the fact that they have a legal claim upon him for support and inheritance.
Her own claim for support does not depend, in law, upon her motherhood, but upon her wifehood. She is entitled to support whether she has children or not. On the other hand the law, in most communities, allows her nothing more than mere support, while at the same time it maintains certain restrictions upon her economic independence. Although most States now allow the wife to control her own earnings in industry, her services in the home are still pretty generally her husband’s property, and any savings that result from economy in her domestic management belong to him, and so does any money earned by her in her own house, as from taking in boarders or lodgers. In short, while she works in the home her status is that of her husband’s servant[22]. He may even, as in Michigan, still prevent her from undertaking employment outside thehome, simply by withholding his consent. Nor is this the only way in which the opportunities of a married woman are restricted. She is frequently disqualified by her status for engaging in business on her own account, or for doing so without her husband’s consent. She may also be disqualified by law or prejudice for engaging in certain professions, such as teaching, an occupation in which, strangely enough, a married woman is frequently held to be incapable.
The claim for alimony which at present constitutes such a fecund source of injustice to men and corruption among women, implies the assumption that a woman is economically helpless, that she is a natural dependent whose support, having been undertaken by her husband, must be continued even after divorce, until she dies or finds another husband to support her. It does not take into account the woman’s rightful claim to any property that she may have helped her husband to accumulate, for the question whether or not she shall receive alimony is within the discretion of the court. On the other hand, the awarding of alimony may give a woman a claim to income from property possessed by her husband before marriage and therefore notrightfully to be enjoyed by her; it may, furthermore, give her an equally unjustifiable lien on his future earnings. Thus it allows women at once too little and too much. If the community is to continue to fix the economic obligations which marriage shall entail, it might be fairer to both sexes if those obligations were fixed as they have been in certain of our Western States. In those States, property acquired during marriage is regarded as common property, and in case of separation must be divided equally. Neither party may, during the marriage, dispose of such property without consent of the other; nor may either party dispose of more than half of it by will. On the other hand, either party has free disposal of property acquired before marriage, or inherited during marriage. In case one party dies intestate, the other shares equally with children in his or her half of the common property, and in other property. Thus the law raises woman above the status of a dependent and recognizes marriage as an equal partnership. Such laws, of course, do not fit all cases, for all marriages are by no means equal partnerships; but so long as the State insists upon maintaining a blanket-regulation of the marital relation, some such arrangement would seem to be morenearly just, both to men and women, than the laws now in force in most communities.
I have given only a partial list of the economic disabilities enforced upon a good many millions of married women. Their status in the various countries of the civilized world ranges all the way from complete subjection to their husbands to complete equality with them[23]. The subjection of women, like all slavery, has been enforced by legally established economic disadvantages; and upon the married woman these disadvantages, or some of them, are still binding in most communities. The law deprived her of the right to her own property and her own labour, and in return gave her a claim upon her husband for bare subsistence, which is the claim of a serf. Since woman’s partial emergence from her subjection, and the consequent modification of the discriminations against her, laws which were logical and effective when her status was that of a chattel have been allowed to survive other laws which made them necessary. The result is a grotesque hodge-podge of illogical and contradictory provisions which involve injustice to both sexes, andshould be abolished by the simple expedient of making men and women equal in all respects before the law, and sweeping away all legal claims which they now exercise against one another by virtue of the marriage-bond.
This would mean, of course, that a woman might no longer legally claim support from her husband by virtue of her wifehood; nor should she in fairness be able to do so when all his claims to her property and services had been abolished. There is no reason why the disabilities which marriage imposes on women should be done away with and those which it imposes on men retained. To take such a course would be to turn the tables and place women in a position of privilege. The fact that women are still at considerable disadvantage in the industrial world might appear to justify such a position; but there is a better way of dealing with their economic handicaps than the way of penalizing husbands and demoralizing a large number of women by degrading marriage, for them, to the level of a means of livelihood, gained sometimes through virtual blackmail. Given complete equality of the sexes, so that prejudice may no longer avail itself of legal sanction for excluding women from theoccupations in which they may elect to engage, the economic handicaps from which they may still suffer will be those resulting from the overcrowded condition of the general labour-market. The ultimate emancipation of woman, then, will depend not upon the abolition of the restrictions which have subjected her to man—that is but a step, though a necessary one—but uponthe abolition of all those restrictions of natural human rights that subject the mass of humanity to a privileged class.
This phase of woman’s problem is the main thesis of my book; and since it will come in for detailed consideration in subsequent chapters, I leave it for the present and proceed to discuss some probable results of sex-equality and the removal of legal claims which marriage now gives husband and wife against one another.
The wife would no longer be humiliated by the assumption that as a married woman she is the natural inferior of her husband, and entitled to society’s protection against the extreme results of the disabilities that her status involves. If she became his housekeeper, she would do so by free choice, and not because her services were his legal property; and her resultant claim on his purse would be fixedby mutual arrangement rather than by laws allowing her the claims of a serf. The marriage, if it became an economic partnership, would be so by mutual consent and arrangement, and would thus no longer be a one-sided contract, legally defined, in which all the rights were on the side of the husband, but compensated in too many cases by unjust privileges on that of the wife. At the same time, the temptation to marry for economic security or ease would be lessened. This temptation besets both men and women, though not in the same degree, because men, through the economic advantage enjoyed by their sex, are oftener in a position of ease than women are. It is the temptation, arising out of man’s natural desire to gratify his needs with the least possible exertion, to live by the means of others rather than by one’s own labour. Its gratification through marriage would not be rendered impossible by the mere abolition of coercive laws governing the marriage relation; but at least its cruder manifestations, such as the frequent attempts of unscrupulous or demoralized women to use marriage for purposes of extortion, would no longer assail the nostrils of the public. Its reduction to a minimum must awaitthe establishment of an economic order under which self-support will be easy and certain.
More general and binding, even, than the economic obligations that marriage entails are the personal claims that it creates. In so far as these claims are psychological—those of affection and habit, or attachment to children—their regulation and abrogation will always afford a problem which must be solved by the two persons concerned. There is at present a strong tendency to equalize the incidence of the laws whereby the State defines these relations and imposes them on married people. The old assumption of feminine inferiority in sexual rights is gradually yielding to a single standard for both sexes. So, also, the requirement that the wife shall in all matters subordinate her will and judgment to the will and judgment of her husband, tends to be modified by the new view of woman as a free agent rather than a mere adjunct to man. Qualifications for marriage and grounds for divorce tend to become the same for both sexes as the State is forced to relinquish its right to regard as offences in one sex actions which it does not recognize as offences in the other. It would appear, indeed, thatthe time is not far distant when the marriage-law, however humiliating its provisions may be, will bear equally on men and women.
But mere equalization of the law’s incidence leaves untouched the previous question whether any third person—and the State assumes the rôle of a third person—has a legitimate right to define and regulate the personal relations of adult and presumably mature people. So long as the basic assumption goes unchallenged that the State may grant to man and woman lifelong monopoly-rights in one another, or monopoly-rights which shall endure, despite the inclination of the persons concerned, during the State’s pleasure, so long will complaints of harsh or unjust marriage or divorce laws prove the truth of Mill’s dictum that “no enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once ... those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise.” Marriage under conditions arbitrarily fixed by an external agency is slavery; and if we allow the right of an external agency—be it State, family, or community—to place marriage in so degrading a position, we necessarily deny the freedom of the individual in this most intimate ofrelationships, and put ourselves in the position of petitioners for privilege when we sue for an improvement in the rules to which we have subjected ourselves.
When this fundamental fact is borne in mind, it becomes at once apparent that marriage will gain in dignity through the abolition of all legal sanction upon the personal claims that it involves. In a community which had renounced all claim to prescribe legally the nature of the marriage-bond, its duration, and the manner of its observance, there would be no washing of soiled domestic linen in the squalid publicity of courtrooms and newspaper-columns; no arbitration of noisy domestic differences by judges whose only qualification for the office is that they have had enough political influence to get themselves elected; none of the demoralizing consequences that the sense of proprietorship in one another has on the dispositions of married people. Marriage might still be publicly registered; it would no longer be publicly regulated. Its regulation would be left to the people whom it concerned, as it properly should be and safely could be; for as Mill remarked, “the modern conviction, the fruit of a thousand years experience, is that things in whichthe individual is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are left to his own discretion, and that any regulation of them by authority, save to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous.” The only way to protect married people against the bad faith which one may show toward the other, is to leave the door wide open for either of them to be quit of the union the minute it ceases to be satisfactory. If society for any reason sees fit to close the door to freedom, it sets union by law above the union by affection on which alone true marriage is based; and in so doing it is responsible for an amount of injustice, spiritual conflict, and suffering which no attempt at equitable regulation can ever compensate. Such attempts are in reality mere efforts to adjust the marriage-relation to the fundamental injustice of the marriage-law.
Perhaps the most serious objection to the union by law is that it is so often an effective barrier against the union by affection; for the union by law complicates marriage with a great many uses that are not properly germane to it; such as the custom of taking on one another’s family and friends, and the setting up of a common menage where this most intimate and delicate of relationships is maintained ina trying semi-publicity under the critical and unwavering scrutiny of relatives and friends. The influence of the expected extends to the regulation of the menage and the division of labour. A lover would hardly, perhaps, require his mistress to darn his socks; but if she became his wife he would probably yield to the immemorial expectation that a married woman shall do her husband’s mending. So, likewise, a woman may refuse to accept support from her lover so long as he is only her lover, and accept it as a matter of course when the union has been legalized. All conventional uses have a purely fortuitous and incidental connexion with marriage; yet they often fret it into failure. As Jane Littell remarked not long ago in theAtlantic Monthly, “being friends with someone to whom the law binds one is not so easy as it sounds.” This is especially true where the law assumes a natural inferiority in one party to the contract, as it almost universally does.
I have not forgotten the children. One could hardly do so in an age when sentimentalism offers them as the final and unanswerable reason for continuing to tolerate the injustice involved in institutionalized marriage. But the very fact that it is thesentimentalist who thus defends established abuses is in itself enough to warrant considerable wariness in dealing with his arguments; for when the defenders of any cause have recourse to sentimentality, it is likely to be for want of solid ground under their feet, or in order to obscure a doubtful ulterior motive. Sentimentalism is a sugar coating on the pill of things as they are, which makes it easier for many people to swallow it than to contemplate a dose which is at once more salutary and more formidable, namely: things as they ought to be. When one hears the sentimentalist proclaiming the sacredness of marriage, one may agree with him; but at the same time one must wonder what kind of marriage he means; whether it is the ceremony performed by a minister or a magistrate, or the union which two people have made sacred through mutual respect, confidence and love. Such marriages as this last have sometimes been without benefit of clergy—Would these be as sacred to the sentimentalist as the marriage which has been sanctified only in law? Again, when one listens to the good old saws about the glory of motherhood, one may be interested to know the conditions under which it is proposed to call it glorious; and when domesticity is held up toadmiration as woman’s natural vocation, one wonders whether the sponsor of domesticity is willing to put his argument to the test by leaving her free to choose that vocation or not, as she will, or whether his praise is a mere preface to the demand that she be forced into this natural vocation by the method of denying her an alternative. So, likewise, when one hears the argument that marriage should be indissoluble for the sake of children, one cannot help wondering whether the protagonist is really such a firm friend of childhood, or whether his concern for the welfare of children is merely so much protective coloration for a constitutional and superstitious fear of change.
Children are really as helpless as women have always been held to be; and in their case the reason is not merely supposition. Woman was supposed to be undeveloped man. The childisundeveloped man or woman; and because of its lack of development it needs protection. To place it in the absolute power of its parents as its natural protectors and assume that its interests will invariably be well guarded, would be as cruel as was the assumption that a woman rendered legally and economically helpless and delivered over to a husband or othermale guardian, was sure of humane treatment. No human being, man, woman, or child, may safely be entrusted to the power of another; for no human being may safely be trusted with absolute power. It is fair, therefore, that in the case of those whose physical or mental immaturity renders them comparatively helpless, there should be a watchful third person who from the vantage-point of a disinterested neutrality may detect and stop any infringement of their rights by their guardians, be they parents or other people. Here then, is a legitimate office for the community: to arbitrate, in the interest of justice, between children and their guardians.
But the community has a more direct and less disinterested concern in the welfare of children: every child is a potential power for good or ill; what its children become, that will the community become. It is knowledge of this that prompts the establishment of public schools and colleges, and all the manifold associational activities intended to promote the physical and spiritual welfare of children. It is back of the mothers’ pension system, which is properly, as the Children’s Bureau insists, a system of assistance for children. From all this activity it is only a step to the assumption by the communityof entire responsibility for the upbringing and education of every child. This idea has some advocates; it is a perfectly logical corollary of the modern conception of the child’s relation to the community. Yet it invites a wary and conditional acceptance. It is fair that the community should assume the burden of the child’s support and education, particularly so long as the community sanctions an economic system which makes this burden too heavy for the great majority of parents, and a political system which may force male children to sacrifice their lives in war as soon as parents have completed the task of bringing them up. But the advisibility of accomplishing this purpose through the substitution of institutionalized care for parental care is more than a little doubtful; for to institutionalize means in great degree to mechanize. To establish such a system and make it obligatory, would be to remove many children from the custody of parents entirely unfitted to bring them up; but it would likewise involve the removal of many children from the custody of parents eminently well fitted for such a responsibility. It would imply an assumption that the people who might be engaged to substitute for parents would be better qualifiedfor their task than the parents themselves; and such an assumption would be dangerous so long as the work of educators continues to be as little respected and as poorly paid as it now is. Moreover, so long as society remains organized in the exploiting State, the opportunity to corrupt young minds and turn out rubber-stamp patriots would be much greater than that which is now afforded by the public school system, whose influence intelligent parents are sometimes able to neutralize.
Perhaps the best argument against such a system is that it would not work. If experience teaches anything, it is that what the community undertakes to do is usually done badly. This is due in part to the temptation to corruption that such enterprises involve, but even more, perhaps, to the lack of personal interest on the part of those engaged in them. Those people who advocate bringing up children in institutions do not take into account the value of parental interest in the child; nor do they respect the parental affection which would cause many parents to suffer keenly if they were forced to part with their children. The family is by no means always the best milieu for young people; but before we seek to substitute a dubious institutionalism, it would bewise to ascertain whether the change is imperative. In a matter which touches, as this one does, the most profound human instincts, there is need to observe Lord Falkland’s dictum that “where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” As I have shown in the preceding chapter, parents are at present under heavy economic handicaps in discharging their parental duties, handicaps which not only render those duties a heavy burden, but lengthen inordinately the period for which they must be undertaken. Until those handicaps are removed, it will not be fair to say that the family is a failure; and until they are removed, we may be certain that any other institution charged with the care of the young will be a failure, for it will be filled with people who are there less because of their understanding of children and their peculiar fitness to rear them, than because such work offers an avenue of escape from starvation.
These same considerations apply to the argument that the rearing of children should be institutionalized in order to emancipate women from the immemorial burden of “woman’s work.” There is a simpler way of dealing with this problem, a way which eliminates an element that dooms to failureany scheme of human affairs in which it is involved, namely: the element of coercion. To contend that all mothers should be forced to devote themselves exclusively to the rearing of children, or that they should be forcibly relieved of this responsibility, is to ignore the right of the individual to free choice in personal matters. There is no relation more intimately personal than that of parents to the child they have brought into the world; and there is therefore no relationship in which the community should be slower to interfere. This is a principle universally recognized: the community at present interferes only when the interest of the child, or that of the community in the child, is obviously suffering. The emancipation of women by no means necessitates the abandonment of this principle. It necessitates nothing more than a guarantee to women of free choice either to undertake themselves the actual work of caring for their children, or to delegate that work to others. There is nothing revolutionary about this: well-to-do parents have always exercised this choice. In mediaeval Europe people of the upper classes regularly sent their children to be brought up by other people, and took the children of other people into their own houses. In RenaissanceItaly the wealthy urban dwellers, almost as soon as their children were born, sent them out of the plague-infested cities to nurse with peasants. In modern times people who can afford it often place their children in boarding schools at an early age, and keep them at home only during vacations—when they do not place them in camps. Under a system of free economic opportunity all people, instead of a few, would have this alternative to rearing their children at home, for they would all be able to afford it. Even under the present economic order it would be possible if the system of children’s assistance were extended to include every child, whether the parents were living or not. But under a system of free opportunity there would be greater certainty that the child would not suffer through separation from its parents; for the paid educator would be in his position because it interested him. If it did not, he would take advantage of the opportunity, freely open to him, to do something that did.
So long as responsibility for the care and support of children continues to be vested in the parents, so long, for the sake of the child, will it be the duty of society to insist that parents shall not neglect this responsibility. But when society had renouncedall claim to regulate the affairs of married people, it would content itself with holding all parents, married or unmarried, jointly liable for the support and care of their children. If the parents were married, then the apportioning of this burden between them would be arranged by mutual agreement, and the community’s only interest in the contract would be that of arbiter in case of a dispute between the parties, precisely as in case of other contracts. To assume that the community’s interest in children justifies its claim to “preserve the home” by making marriage indissoluble or dissoluble only under humiliating conditions, is to confuse issues. The practice of perpetuating marriage merely for the sake of children defeats its own end; for it is, far from being good for children, likely to be injurious to them. It condemns them to be brought up in what Mr. Shaw has well called a little private hell. For the home, as other critics than Mr. Shaw have pointed out, is a proper place for children only when it provides harmonious conditions for their development; and harmony is not characteristic of homes where mutual love and confidence no longer exist between the parents. The demand that the freedom and happiness of parentsshall be sacrificed to the so-called interest of the child is in reality a demand that injustice shall be done one person for the sake of another; and where this demand is effective it serves no end but that of frustration and discord, as might be expected. It is far better, as modern society is coming to realize, for the community to content itself with insisting upon the discharge of parental responsibility, without prescribing too minutely the conditions under which it shall be done.
It is not, perhaps, so much a concern for the preservation of the home that makes people afraid of divorce, as it is for other time-honoured concepts; such, for instance, as the idea that marriage is a sacrament, that it is made in heaven and is therefore indissoluble in this world. Curiously enough, this idea of the essential holiness and consequent indissolubility of the marriage-bond has coexisted in Christian society with the most cold-blooded practice of marrying for convenience, for money, for social prestige, for place and power, for everything that ignores or negates the spiritual element in sexual union. The marriage arranged for social or mercenary reasons by the families of the contracting parties, who might not even meet before the wedding-day,was as sacred as if it had been founded upon an intimate acquaintance and tender passion between them. Thus was utilitarianism invested with a spurious holiness. Small wonder that a mediaeval court of love denied the possibility of romantic attachment between husband and wife. The Church, to be sure, introduced the principle of free consent of the contracting parties; but so long as the subjection of women endured, there could be little more than a perfunctory regard for this principle. There can be no real freedom of consent when the alternative to an unwelcome marriage is the cloister or lifelong celibacy at the mercy of relatives whose wishes and interests one has defied, in a society where to be unmarried is, for a woman, to be nobody. A son, because of the greater independence that his sex gave him, might safely exercise some degree of choice in marrying. A daughter might safely exercise none. As women have become more independent, and their economic opportunities have increased, consent has become more closely related to inclination, and in many places, notably the United States, it is actually dependent upon inclination;[24]butwhile women remain at an economic disadvantage it is hardly to be expected that the motives behind inclination and consent will always be entirely free from an ignoble self-interest.
So long as woman’s economic and social welfare was bound up with marriage, indissoluble marriage undeniably offered her a certain kind of protection. It did not, as I have remarked, protect her from cruelty and infidelity on the part of her husband; but it generally assured her of a living and a respected position in society—that is, so long as she violated none of the conventional taboos against her sex. Even now the chivalrous man often feels that he must endure an unhappy marriage rather than cause his wife to incur the economic and social consequences of divorce. He generally feels that her chance of finding another husband to support her would be considerably worse than his of getting another wife to support; a feeling which, considering the relative desirability of supporting and being supported, will be justified so long as it is consideredtolerable for women to be an economic dead weight on the shoulders of men.
The sanctions of monogamic marriage have been enforced on women only. The Christian Church, after some indecision, finally decided that indissoluble monogamy was the only allowable form of marriage; and in theory it exacted from man and woman the same faithfulness to the marriage-vows. Practically, of course, it did no such thing. Being dominated by men, it eventually came to condone the sexual irregularities of men, if it did not sanction them; but sexual irregularity in the subject sex continued to be both theoretically and practically intolerable. Woman became the repository of morality in a society which regarded morality as chiefly a matter of sex. But since she was at the same time the means of satisfying those sexual needs which Christianity disparaged, she also bore the brunt of social displeasure at violation of the ascetic creed. Womankind, as I have already remarked, was divided into two classes: the virtuous wives and cloistered virgins who embodied Christian morals;and those unfortunate social outcasts who sold their bodies to gratify un-Christian desires. The prostitute, the “companion” of the Greeks, who had been in the Greek world the only educated woman, the only woman who enjoyed comparative freedom, became in the Christian world a social outcast, reviled and persecuted, a convenient scapegoat for man’s sins of the flesh, who atoned vicariously by her misery for his failure to live up to the Christian ideal of sexual purity. Nothing reflects more discredit upon the dominance of the male under Christianity than the fact that he took advantage of the economic helplessness which forced millions of women to sell their sex for a living, and then persecuted them outrageously because he had outrageously mistreated them. For prostitution, however much it may reflect upon the morality and, more especially, upon the taste, of men, has nothing whatever to do with the morality of women. It is, with women, a question of economics, purely and simply. The man who buys gratification of his sexual desire has at least an option in the matter; he will not starve if he abstains; but the woman who sells her body indiscriminately to any man who will buy, does so because her need to earn a living forherself or her family forces her to do violence to her natural selective sexual disposition.
This economic pressure has been strikingly illustrated in Central Europe since the war, where thousands of women of gentle breeding have been literally driven to the streets by the compelling scourge of want. The men upon whom these women in normal times would have depended for a living had been either killed or incapacitated in the war, or their power to earn had disappeared in the economic collapse which followed. When men, in a society so organized as to give them an economic advantage over women, can no longer earn enough to maintain their dependents even at the subsistence-level, the chance of women, for the most part untrained to breadwinning, to do so will be poor indeed. Under such circumstances the woman thrown on her own resources may, through some extraordinary stroke of luck, find a way to self-sufficiency through labour; but more often she is obliged, after her possessions have been disposed of, to take refuge from starvation by selling the only marketable commodity that is left her—her sex. Of course there is the alternative of starvation, which for herself she may choose; but if this choice would involve starvationfor her children or other dependents she is likelier to choose prostitution, precisely as so many German and Austrian mothers and daughters have done. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy’s little story of Vienna after the war, “Viennese Medley,” depicts a situation which is not untypical. A middle-class Viennese family which had enjoyed a mediocre prosperity before the war, is suffering, with all that suffering city, from the nightmare of want that followed a savage peace. In the background, unspoken of, the only ray of hope across the bleakness of their extremity, moves the sister who sells her beauty to foreign officials and native, war-made millionaires. It is she who, when the young half-brother is struck by the dreaded plague of tuberculosis, sends him to the mountains and health. It is she who helps the sister-in-law to establish herself in trade, after the brilliant young surgeon, her brother, has come back a nervous ruin from the war. It is she who buries, with decent ceremony, the child of a sister whose husband, once a distinguished professor, is now able to do little more than starve with his numerous family. She even saves from want the young nobleman whom she loves, and his family as well. Not every woman who has sold herself in strickenEurope could command so high a price, but there is no doubt that many of them stood between their suffering families and death.
War releases all that is brutal in man, and places woman in a peculiarly helpless position; therefore it is a prolific immediate source of prostitution. But the ultimate and permanent source is the source of war itself, the economic exploitation of man by man. So long as society is organized to protect the exploiter, so long will peace be an incessant struggle—for more wealth with the privileged classes; for existence with the exploited masses—and war will be, as it has always been, merely a final explosion of the struggling forces. So long as human beings may starve in the midst of plenty, so long will woman be under temptation to sell the use of her body. She may prostitute herself because she has literally no other way to get a living; she may do so in order to eke out an insufficient wage; she may do so because prostitution seems to offer a relief from hopeless drudgery; she may do so because she has made what the world calls a misstep and is cut off thereby from respectability and the chance to earn a decent living; or she may prostitute herself legally, in marriage, as women have beenforced to do from time immemorial. In every case there is one motive force, and that motive force is economic pressure, which bears hardest upon women because of the social, educational, and economic disadvantages from which they are forced to suffer in a world dominated by men. No amount of masculine chivalry has ever mitigated this evil, and no amount ever will; for chivalry is not compulsory, while prostitution is. No amount of exhortation, no amount of devoted labour on the part of reformers will touch it; for it is not a question of morality. No amount of persecution—of arrests, of manhandling, of night-courts, public insult, fine and imprisonment—will check it, for the necessity which prompts it is too imperious to be balked by the uncomprehending guardians of public decency. The peril of this necessity threatens all womankind; one turn of fortune’s wheel may bring its stark aspect before the eyes of the most sheltered of women. It is the sheltered women, indeed, who are peculiarly in danger; those women whose preparation for the struggle to wrest a living from economic injustice has consisted in waiting for men to marry and support them. The parent who, in a world where celibacy and prostitution are on theincrease, fails to give a girl child education or training which will enable her to get her living by her own efforts, forces her to take a dangerous risk; for the woman who is brought up in the expectation of getting her living by her sex may ultimately be driven to accept prostitution if she fails to find a husband, or, having found one, loses him.
There is only one remedy for prostitution, and that remedy is economic freedom—freedom to labour and to enjoy what one produces. When women have this freedom there will be no more prostitution; for no woman will get a living by doing violence to her deep-rooted selective instinct when opportunities are plentiful and a little labour will yield an ample living. There may still be women who are sexually promiscuous; but there is a vast gulf between promiscuity and prostitution: the sexually promiscuous woman may choose her men; the prostitute may not. It is the abysmal gulf between choice and necessity.
Marriage, illegitimacy and prostitution are so closely related, as social problems, that it is impossible to draw firm lines of demarcation betweenthem. The unlegalized union—which is betrayed by illegitimate birth—may be a marriage in all but law; the legalized marriage may be merely a respectable form of prostitution; prostitution may take the form of a more or less permanent union which may even assume the dignity of a true marriage. Illegitimacy, marriage, and prostitution do not exist independently; they exist in relation to one another and are often confused in people’s minds—as when it is assumed that all mistresses are essentially harlots. They are the three faces of mankind’s disastrous attempt to impose arbitrary regulation upon the unruly and terrifying force of sex; they form a triptych of which the central panel is institutionalized marriage and the other panels the two chief aspects of its failure. The title might appropriately be “The Martyrdom of Woman.”
Experience has amply proved that as individualism progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to impose upon people more than an appearance of conformity in sexual matters. Society can not really regulate anything so essentially personal and private in its nature as the sexual relation: it can only take revenge upon its natural result—and thereby encourage the prevention of that result by artificialmeans. For every unmarried mother who is persecuted by society, there are ten unmarried women who escape the social consequences of an unauthorized sexual relation. For every faithful husband there is another who deceives his wife with other women; nor are wedded wives by any means always faithful to their marriage vows. There are people who live together in the sexual uncleanness of loveless marriages; and there are those who live purely in extra-legal union. The sexual impulse is too variable and too imperious to be compressed into a formula.
Christian society, as I have remarked, early surrendered its uncompromising asceticism and settled down to an easy acceptance of the mere appearance of conventional sexual virtue—that is, so far as men were concerned. Women, as inferior and evil beings, who, incongruously enough, at the same time embodied Christian morality, must naturally be under the rigid surveillance of their male tutors, and no deviation from established rules might be allowed them. Thus worldly motives in marrying might be united with sacramental monogamy; for the man might avail himself of extra-marital union as a safety-valve for the emotional needs to which marriage gave no scope. The needs of the womanwere not considered, save when savage punishment was visited upon their illicit satisfaction. Thus hypocrisy and deceit were tacitly encouraged, and the monogamic ideal was degraded; and countless generations lived a gigantic social lie which distorted and perverted their spiritual vision as only an accepted lie can distort and pervert it.
I do not mean by this that there have not been millions of really monogamous marriages. To intimate that the greater sexual freedom allowed men by law and custom has led all men into licence would be as stupid as to assume that repression and surveillance have kept all women chaste. But the institution of marriage, in Christian society, has represented compromise, and the fruit of compromise is insincerity—such insincerity, for example, as the Government of South Carolina shows when it forbids divorce, and fixes by law what proportion of his estate a man may leave to his concubine.
Any people which wishes to attain dignity and seriousness in its collective life must resolve to cast aside compromise and insincerity, and to look at all questions—even the vexed one of sex—squarely and honestly. The person who would do this has first some prepossessions to overcome: he must forgettradition long enough to appraise institutionalized marriage by its value to the human spirit; he must resolve for the time to regard men and women as equally human beings, entitled to be judged by the same standards, and not by different sets of traditional criteria; and he must put away fear of sex and fear of autonomy. If he can do these things, he may be able to look clear-eyed down the long vista of the centuries and realize the havoc that has been wrought in the souls of men and women by a sexual code and a system of marriage based on a double standard of spiritual values and of conduct. He may perceive how constant tutelage degrades the human spirit, and how much greater would be the sum of human joy if freedom were substituted for coercion and regulation—if men and women were without legal power to harass and bedevil one another simply because the State, through the marriage-bond, allows them humiliating rights in one another; if virginity and chastity were matters of self-respect and taste, instead of being matters of worldly self-interest to women and unconcern to men; if the relations between the sexes were based on equality and regulated only by affection and the desire to serve and give happiness.
The modification which institutionalized marriage has been undergoing since the partial emergence of woman, its chief victim, have been in the direction of equality and freedom. The relative ease with which divorce may now be had marks a long step towards recognition of marriage as a personal rather than a social concern; and so does the tendency to abolish the legal disabilities resulting from the marriage-bond. Nothing augurs better for the elevation of marriage to a higher plane than the growing economic independence of women and the consequent improvement in the social position of the unmarried woman; for only when marriage is placed above all considerations of economic or social advantage will it be in a way to satisfy the highest demands of the human spirit.
But the emergence of women has had another significant effect, namely: an increase in frankness concerning extra-legal sexual relations, if not in their number. Of late there has been much public discussion of the wantonness of our modern youth; which, being interpreted, means the disposition of our girls to take the same liberty of indulgence in pre-nuptial sexual affairs that has always been countenanced in boys. This tendency is an entirelynatural result of woman’s increased freedom. The conditions of economic and social life have undergone revolutionary change in the past half-century; and codes of morals always yield before economic and social exigency, for this is imperious. It is for this reason, as Dr. A. Maude Royden has acutely observed, that women of the lower classes have always enjoyed a certain immunity from the taboos that reduced women of the middle and upper classes to virtual slavery. “If among the poor,” says Dr. Royden, “these ‘protections’ have been dispensed with, it has not been because the poor have thought either better or worse of their women, but merely because they are too poor to dispense with their labour, and labour demands some small degree of freedom.” Labour not only demands, it gives freedom. The woman who is economically independent need no longer observe rules based on male dominance; hence the new candour in woman’s attitude towards the awe-inspiring fetich of sex.
If there is about this attitude an element of bravado, akin to that of the youth who thinks it clever and smart to carry a hip-pocket flask, it bears testimony, not to the dangers of freedom, but to the bankruptcy of conventional morality. The worsteffect of tutelage is that it negates self-discipline, and therefore people suddenly released from it are almost bound to make fools of themselves. The women who are emerging from it, if they have not learned to substitute an enlightened self-interest for the morality of repression, are certainly in danger of carrying sexual freedom to dishevelling extremes, simply to demonstrate to themselves their emancipation from unjust conventions. There is no reason to expect that women, emerging from tutelage, will be wiser than men. One should expect the contrary. It is necessary to grow accustomed to freedom before one may walk in it sure-footedly. “Everything,” says Goethe, “which frees our spirit without increasing our self-control, is deteriorating.” This so-called wantonness, this silly bravado, simply shows that the new freedom is a step ahead of the self-discipline that will eventually take the place of surveillance and repression. It would not be so, perhaps, if girls and boys had ever been enlightened concerning the real sins of sex, and their true consequences. Women, in the past, have been taught to keep virgin or chaste for the sake of their reputations, of their families, of their chances in the marriage-market; they have been scared intochastity in the name of religion; but they have not been taught to be chaste for the sake of the spiritual value of chastity to themselves. Men, having been expected to “sow their wild oats”, have been taught to sow them with a certain degree of circumspection. Girls have been intimidated by pictures of the social consequences of a misstep; boys have been warned of the physical danger involved in promiscuous sexual relations. This may not have been the invariable preparation of youth for the experiences of sex; but it has unquestionably been the usual one, and it is one of utter levity and indecency.
The real sins of sex are identical for men and women; and they differ from infractions of the conventional moral code in this respect among others: that they do not have to be found out in order to be punished. They carry their punishment in themselves, and that punishment is their deteriorative effect upon the human spirit. They are infractions of spiritual law; and there is this significant distinction to be observed between spiritual laws and the laws of men: that regulation plays no part in their administration. The law of freedom is the law of God, who does not attempt to regulate the human soul, but sets instinct there as a guide andleaves man free to choose whether he will follow the instinct which prompts obedience to spiritual law, or the desire which urges disregard of it. The extreme sophistication of the conventional attitude towards sex has dulled the voice of instinct for countless generations, with the inevitable result of much unnecessary suffering and irreparable spiritual loss.
A healthy instinct warns against lightness in sexual relationships; and with reason, for the impulse of sex is one of the strongest motive forces in human development and human action. It touches the obscurest depths of the soul; it affects profoundly the functions of the mind and the imagination—can not, indeed, be dissociated from them. The fact that it is also strongly physical leads to misunderstanding and disregard of its relation to the mind and spirit; a misunderstanding and disregard which are immensely aggravated in a society where woman, because of her inferior position, may be used for the gratification of physical desire, with no consideration of her own desires or her spiritual claims. Prostitution, for example, has exerted a most deleterious influence on the attitude of men toward sex and toward women. But degradationof the sex-impulse is inevitably punished. The sheerly physical indulgence to which it leads produces a coarsening of spiritual fibre, an incapacity for appreciation of spiritual values. Moreover, it produces a cleavage between passion and affection which renders impossible the highest and most beautiful form of the sexual relation, the relation in which passion and affection are fused in a love which offers complete understanding and fulfilment. It is to this fusion (and not to monogamy, which, Spencer thought, developed love) that we owe “the many and keen pleasures derived from music, poetry, fiction, the drama, etc., all of them having for their predominant theme the passion of love.” True monogamy, the product of this highest love, is not a regulation to be observed; it is an ideal to be attained, and it will not be attained by the person who fails to recognize and to respect the spiritual aspects of the sexual relation.
Nor will it be attained by the person who mistakes excitement for love, and who flits from one temporary attachment to another, thinking always to find the beautiful in the new. Such promiscuous philandering not only precludes depth of affection and thus renders constancy impossible; it also bluntsperception. Its effect was never better expressed than by Burns, who was one of its unhappy victims.