TOWARD MONOGAMY
TOWARD MONOGAMY
BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
Physiologists tell us that in all our long ages of animal evolution we have not yet completed the physical changes incident to assuming an erect posture. Psychologists may as plainly see that in the short centuries of social evolution we have naturally failed to complete the changes incident to our growth from tribal to national and international relationships.
Since we remained savages for some 90 per cent of the period of human life on earth, it is to be expected that the long-practiced tribal morals should have modified our characters more deeply than those evolved in the recent, varied, and fluctuating relationship of larger range. Yet we see, during the short period of progressive civilization, such swift and amazing development in some lines, such achievement in knowledge, in wealth, in ability, in breadth of thought, and nobility of feeling that our coincidentstupidity and senseless misbehavior call for explanation.
The main reason for this peculiar delay and irregularity in social evolution is that it has been limited to half the race, the other half being restricted to domestic industry and to the still lower level of misused sex. Our specialized knowledge, power, and skill are developed through the organic relationships of the social group; as are also those characteristics of mutual loyalty and love, of truth, honor, and courage which are as natural to a human society as the distinctive virtues of ants or beavers to their groups.
Humanity’s major error, the exploitation of the female by the male, has not only kept her at the lowest step in social progress—solitary hand-labor in and for the family—but has resulted in excessive sex-development through prolonged misuse. This has made her ultra-feminine, to a degree often injurious to motherhood; and him ultra-masculine, his social advance confused, impeded, and repeatedly destroyed by his excessive emotions. In social morals he has of course outdistanced her, as he alone has entered into therelationships which develop them; but he has carefully exempted his essentially male activities from this elevating influence, maintaining that “all’s fair in love and war.” Of her, domestic morality demanded but one virtue, sex-loyalty; her mate or master taking it upon himself to be both judge and executioner in case of failure. She might be a liar and a coward, lazy, selfish, extravagant, or cruel, but if chaste these traits were overlooked. If unchaste, no array of other virtues was enough to save her. In her household labors she developed minor virtues natural to the position; a tireless industry, an instinct for cleanliness and order, with great capacity for self-denial and petty economy. Speaking broadly, of a race where the young, though necessarily inheriting from both parents, yet are divided almost from birth in training and experience, it may be said that the social virtues have belonged to men, the domestic virtues to women.
Our present age, counting the incredible advance of the last century and the swift fruition of these immediate years, shows among its newly distinguishing social movements one of supremeimportance. Within a hundred years women, in most civilized countries, have moved from domestic into social relationship. Such a sudden and enormous change, while inherently for the improvement of society, is naturally accompanied by much local and immediate dislocation in previously accepted conditions. Many are alarmed at what is considered “the danger to the home” resultant from the refusal of an increasing number of women to spend their lives as house-servants; they fear “the menace to the family” due to similarly increasing numbers of women who refuse compulsory motherhood; they are shocked at a looseness, even grossness, of behavior between the sexes which seems to threaten marriage itself. Few seem able to look beyond the present inconveniences to a specialized efficiency in household management which will raise the standard of public health and private comfort, with large reduction in the cost of living; to such general improvement in child-culture as will lift the average of citizenship and lower the death-rate appreciably; and to a rational and permanent basis for our monogamous marriage.
To understand rightly this trying period, to be patient with its unavoidable reactions and excesses, to know what tendencies to approve and promote and what to condemn and oppose, requires some practical knowledge of biology and sociology. Men, though as yet beyond women in social morality, are unreliable judges in this time of change because their ox is gored—they are the ones who are losing a cherished possession. The overdeveloped sex instinct of men, requiring more than women were willing to give, has previously backed its demands by an imposing array of civil and religious laws requiring feminine submission, has not scrupled to use force or falsehood, and held final power through the economic dependence of women. It is easy to see that if women had been equally willing no such tremendous machinery of compulsion need have been evolved.
But now that the woman no longer admits that “he shall rule over her,” and is able to modify the laws; now that she has become braver, and above all is attaining financial freedom, her previous master has no hold upon her beyond natural attraction and—persuasion. Towardthis end he manifests an instant and vigorous activity. Whereas in the past women were taught that they had no such “imperative instincts” as men, and the wooer, even the husband, sought to preserve this impression, now it is quite otherwise. All that elaborate theory of feminine chastity, that worship of virginity, goes by the board, and women are given a reversed theory—that they are just the same as men, if not more so; our “double standard” is undoubled and ironed flat—to the level of masculine desire.
Clothed in the solemn, newly invented terms of psychoanalysis, a theory of sex is urged upon us which bases all our activities upon this one function. It is exalted as not only an imperative instinct, but astheimperative instinct, no others being recognized save the demands of the stomach. Surely never was a more physical theory disguised in the technical verbiage of “psychology.” We should not too harshly blame the ingenious mind of man for thinking up a new theory to retain what the old ones no longer assured him; nor too severely criticize the subject class, so newly freed, for committing the same excesses, the same eager imitations of the previousmaster, which history shows in any recently enfranchised people. Just as women have imitated the drug-habits of men, without the faintest excuse or reason, merely to show that they can, so are they imitating men’s sex habits, in large measure. Those who go too far in such excesses will presumably die without issue, doing no permanent harm to the stock. This wild excitement over sex, as if it were a new discovery peculiar to our time, will be allayed by further knowledge. Even a little study of the common facts of nature has a cooling and heartening influence.
The essential facts are these: That all living forms show the tendency to maintain and to reproduce themselves; that some, in differing degree, show tendencies to vary and to improve; that after an immense period of reproduction without it (showing that as the “life force” it was quite unnecessary) the distinction of sex appeared as a means to freer variation and improvement; that the male characteristics of intense desire for the female, personal display, and intermasculine combat, as well as the female’s instinct of selection, are visible contributions to the major purpose of improvement; thatin the higher and later life-forms further and more rapid improvement has been made through the development in the female of new organs and functions for the benefit of the young; through her alone have come the upward steps of viviparous birth, the marsupial pouch, and that crowning advantage, the mammary glands; the female solely is responsible for the development of nature’s aristocracy, Order Mammalia.
In the human species she adds to her previous contributions to racial progress the invention of our primitive industries, which were evolved by her in service to the young, and later carried out by men into the trades and crafts which support human life. In the developing care and nurture of her children she laid the foundation for those social functions of government, education, and coöperative industry which are so vitally important to social progress that we have called the family “the unit of the state.”
This is an error. The family is the prototype of the state, a tiny primitive state in itself, often quite inimical to the interests of the larger state which has developed through the wider interaction of individuals. The state does not electfamilies, tax families, punish families, nor thrive where physical inheritance is made the basis of authority. Where the family persists too powerfully, as in China, there is a commensurate lack in the vitality and efficiency of the state. By restricting women to the family relationship, with its compulsory woman service and domestic morality, we have checked and perverted social growth by keeping out of it the most effective factor in that growth, the mother.
The world having been for so long dominated by the individualistic and combative male, with that vast increment of masculine thought and emotion embodied in our literature, our religion, our art, modifying all our ideals, it is not to be wondered at that the newly freed women are as yet unable to see their opportunity, their power, and their long-prevented sex duty—race improvement.
The collapse of the arbitrary and unjust domestic morality of the past will presently be followed by recognition of the social morality of the future. Rightly discarding artificial standards of virtue based on the pleasure of men, we shall establish new ones based on natural law.Repudiating their duty to an owner and master, women have yet to accept and fulfill their duty to society, to the human race. This is not generally clear to them. In their legitimate rebellion against domestic service and compulsory sex-service they almost inevitably confuse these things with marriage, with which indeed they have been long synonymous. Some of our most valuable women, as well as many of negligible importance, speak of marriage as if it were an invention of Queen Victoria. Surely no excessive education is needed to learn that monogamy, among many of the higher carnivora and birds, is as natural a form of sex union as the polygamy of the grass eaters or the promiscuity among insects, reptiles, and fish. Monogamy appears when it is to the advantage of the young to have the continued care of both parents. This means that the parents share in the activities of supporting the family; it does not mean that the female becomes the servant of the male. Because of the united activities and mutual services of the pair love is developed, and stays. Such profound affection is found in some of these natural “marriages” that if one of a pair is killed the otherwill not mate again. Mated leopards or ostriches do not remain together because they are “Victorian” or “puritanical,” but because they like to. They could form as many and as variegated “free unions” as Greenwich Villagers if they choose; there is nothing to stop them.
But natural monogamy is as free from sex service as from domestic service. The pairing species adhere to their mating season as do the polygamous ones, or even the promiscuous. Man is the only animal using this function out of season and apart from its essential purpose. These natural monogamists are not “ascetics.” They are not dominated by religious doctrine or civil law. They fulfill their natural desires with the utmost freedom, but these desires do not move them out of season.
The human species, with all its immense advantages, has made many conspicuous missteps. Its eating habits are such as to have induced a wide assortment of wholly unnecessary diseases; its drinking habits are glaringly injurious; and its excessive indulgence in sex-waste has imperiled the life of the race.
Domestic morality vaguely recognized someduty to society and sought through religion to limit masculine desires or at least to restrict their indulgence to marriage. But the desires of a vigorous polygamist are not easily restricted to one wife; and our polygamous period was far longer than that of the recently established monogamy. It is a most reassuring fact in social evolution that monogamy, naturally belonging to our species, has persisted among the common people and in popular ideals: even in “The Arabian Nights” the love story is always about one man and one woman, never of the mad passion for a harem! So with the accelerated progress of recent centuries monogamous union becomes accepted, and is carefully buttressed by the law, while religion, with commandments and ceremonies, does its best to establish “the sanctity of marriage.” But as religion, law, and family authority were all in the hands of men, they naturally interpreted that sanctity to suit themselves, ignored the religious restrictions, and so handled the law as to apply its penalties to but one party in a dual offense.
Social morality requires the promotion of such lines of conduct as are beneficial to the maintenanceand improvement of society. It will demand of both man and woman the full development of personal health and vigor, careful selection of the best mate by both, with recognition on her side of special responsibility as the natural arbiter. It will encourage such sex relations as are proved advantageous both to individual happiness and to the race. We are as yet so hag-ridden by domestic morality, with its arbitrary restrictions, and by the threats and punishments of law and religion, that we shrink from the broader biological judgment as if it involved blame, punishment, compulsory reform. Not at all. Men and women are no more to blame for being oversexed than a prize hog for being over-fat. The portly pig is not sick or wicked, he is merely overdeveloped in adipose tissue. Our condition does not call for condemnation, nor can we expect any sudden and violent change in our behavior resting on foolish ideals of celibacy, of self-denial, or of “sublimated sex.” It will take several generations of progressive selection, with widely different cultural influences, to reëstablish a normal sex development ingenus homo, with its consequences in happier marriage, betterchildren, and wide improvement in the public health.
It is to this end, with all its widening range of racial progress, that social morality tends.