CHANGES IN SEX RELATIONS
CHANGES IN SEX RELATIONS
BY ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
The other day I listened to a conversation on marriage and divorce between a well-known feminist, her daughter, and an Episcopal clergyman. The celibate cleric and the younger woman were in fair accord: the institution of marriage was invaluable to society and had to be protected. Let there be no divorce, said the cleric, on any ground, at least within the church; children should be cared for by both parents, divorce being sought only as an ultimate recourse, said the girl, who was two years married and had a son.
The feminist was biding her time. Finally she said: “So much for the institution. What of the actual sex life? No divorce and continence or no divorce and intimacy with another?â€
“The first, of course,†said the cleric.
“Not at all; the second,†said the girl. “And you, mother?â€
“Oh, on the whole I’m for the brittle marriage as against the lax, the American way against the European. But most of all I am for tolerance in sex relations and for respecting privacy. Why not all kinds of relations for all kinds of persons? Just as there are now, but with respect or tolerance for the individual and without hypocrisy.â€
“Even if we did not agree,†the cleric said later to the feminist, “we could talk about it as twenty years ago we could not. So much to the good.â€
“So much to the bad,†said the girl’s father, still later; “better for all of us the old reserve.†The speaker was a lawyer with divorce cases in his practice.
Had we not here a mingling of currents from law, the church, feminism, and the younger generation which illustrates what divergency of attitude on sex and sex institutions or practices may exist to-day, even within the same cultural and local circle? Include circles of different education and locality and although the range of difference would be no larger the expressions of opinion would vary. Is the variation in opinion due to variation in experience or is it due to thatcontemporaneous lifting of the taboo on discussion which characterizes not only our talk about sex but about other interests as well? A remarkable and indisputable change of attitude, this release from verbal taboo, which often gives us a sense of change in general greater perhaps than the facts themselves warrant.
In the conversation I quoted the women were on the whole the radicals, the men on the whole the conservatives. This alignment was far from typical, I think, and yet in contemporaneous life, whether or not in opinion, women have been the exponents of cultural change in sex relations. The increase in the divorce rate, it seems probable, has been effected predominantly by women; about two-thirds of the total number of divorces are granted to women. (Of course the tradition that it is decent for the man to let the woman get the divorce must not be ignored in this connection.) This increase in divorce may indicate a changing attitude toward the criteria of marriage on the part of women. Women may be demanding more of marriage than in the day when they had little to expect but marriage. In other words, marriage standards mount as marriagehas other relations to compete with. At any rate in the talk of women it seems to me that desire for integral satisfaction in marriage is more consciously or realistically expressed than ever before. Emotional and sexual appeasements are considered as well as social or economic advantage. What of the part played by women in changes in sex relations outside marriage?
Unfortunately, we have no dependable statistics of prostitution, but whatever decrease there has been in prostitution, and opinion is that with the passing of segregated districts there has been a decrease, may be, on the whole, put down to women, if only indirectly through an increase in illicit relations. Illicit relations are not subject to statistics, but that there has been an increase in them in this country in this century will be generally accepted, likewise that in this, too, the increase is due to women, alike more willing to participate in such relations and more tolerant of them in others. Again those curious suits for alienation of affection appear to be brought against women as much as against men; and theories of seduction by men have long since been sounding archaic to our ears. Even on thescreen, the great present vehicle of traditional manners and morals, although rape is always in order, seduction is infrequent. Seduction with its complement of marital honor has been rendered an anachronism, through women.
The theory of seduction is affiliated with the proprietary theory of woman and, needless to say, this general theory has been undergoing considerable change for several decades. To-day women are not only not property, they are property holders, and property holding has become a significant factor in the social independence of women. Of this social independence, independence in mating is the most recent expression, more recent even than political independence, and less fully realized or accomplished. Indeed it would be rash to predict how this type of independence may be expected to come about; apart from the gesture, sometimes gay, sometimes merely comic, of keeping one’s name in marriage, there is no conscious feministic movement, in this country at least, toward freedom in sex. The political emancipation of women came to us as a reflex from abroad, largely through England. Whatever the political effect of militancyin England, without the advertisement of the British suffragette American women would be voteless to-day. Quite likely the direction of emancipation in mating may be determined likewise from abroad, perhaps from innovating Scandinavia or from Soviet Russia, where the last legal word has been said on sex equality.
In the soviet laws on marriage and domestic relations there is no mention of suit for breach of promise or for alimony whereby woman proclaims herself a chattel, and according to the soviet code husband as well as wife is entitled to support if incapacitated for work. Incapacity for work is the sole condition which entitles either spouse to support. In other words, the Russian state has interested itself not in maintaining the proprietary theory of woman; but in providing for the care of man or woman in distress. Of such clear distinction American law is innocent. In American law the husband is still the provider and in this law lags but little behind current opinion, which holds that a married woman should work only when she has to. Dr. Herskowits tells me that this American attitude is so well represented in the Negro populationof Harlem that in gathering statistics of employment as soon as he learns the occupation of the husband he can predict whether or not the wife is at work. Low-paid employment for the husband means wage-earning by the wife, and highly paid employment means that the woman is not a wage-earner. Surveys in other parts of the country have shown the same condition. These surveys have been made among wage-earners, and concerned primarily with the margin of subsistence; but familiar enough is the record in other economic classes of the persuasion that marriage exempts a woman from industry or professional activity. The standing controversies about married women as school-teachers are fully documented instances. The Harvard prize play acted last year on Broadway hinged on the rigidity of the alternative of a man marrying and sacrificing his career or pursuing his career and sacrificing his love. There was not the faintest suggestion that the woman might contribute to the family income and so render marriage and career economically compatible. The young couple, to be sure, belonged to smart Suburbia, economically a conservative circle; but there wasno indication in the play that the university intelligentsia did not hold to the theory of wifely parasitism, nor that audiences might question the theory. And I incline to think that few in those Broadway audiences, although drawn as they were from fairly composite circles, did question. Wifely parasitism is holding its own.
In less invidious terms, where income permits, the wife continues to be the consumer, the husband the producer. Conjugal partnership in production, familiar in Europe, remains by and large unfamiliar in this country. Outside of marriage, on the other hand, the last years have seen considerable lessening in our American forms of segregating the sexes. Not only has there been an increase of women in gainful occupations together with an increase of occupations open to women, but between men and women in business and in the professions relations are increasingly less restricted, influenced less by sex taboo. There is more coöperation, more goodwill, more companionship.
Possibly this companionship between the sexes at large will have a reflex upon marriage, and marriage will become a more comprehensivepartnership. The question of the married woman in gainful occupations is related, however, to a larger economic issue. Our capitalistic and competitive economy not only suffers parasites and drones, it compels them by reason of its inelasticity in providing for part-time labor. The whole workday or no work at all is the notice given to women who would be part-day home-keepers, either in their child-bearing years or because of other family exigency, as well as to men who are aging or invalid. For this economic waste and loss to personal happiness and welfare there seems to be no promise of relief in prospect. Just the opposite, in fact, for women, since, given the increasing mechanization of housekeeping and the ramifying organization of hospital, nursery, and school, women at home may have a larger and larger part of the day on their hands and their functions become less and less significant. In this connection birth control has been for some time an important factor. As knowledge of contraception becomes surer and more widespread and births more spaced, even during her child-bearing period the home-stayingwoman will have less and less call on her vitality and energy.
Discussion of contraception has been active in the last decade or so; but curiously enough its significance aside from contributing to directly saner ways of life[1]has been little realized. Birth control makes possible such clear-cut distinctions between mating and parenthood that it might be expected to produce radical changes in theories of sex attitude or relationship, forcing the discard of many an argument for personal suppression for the good of children or the honor of the family, and forcing redefinition of concepts of honor and sincerity between the sexes. In such redefinition reciprocity in passion, emotional integrity, and mutual enhancement of life might share in the approval once confined to constancy, fidelity, and duty, virtues that are obviously suggested by the hit or miss system of mating and reproducing our social organization has favored. With little or no self-knowledgeor knowledge of men, a girl often marries in order to find out how much she cares or whether or not she qualifies, and then when her experience has but begun she finds herself an expectant mother, and maternity begins to supersede other interests. She may become a parent without the assurance of being well-mated, if not, more tragically, with the certainty of being mismated. Advocates of the monogamous family would do well to consider how essential to an enduring union, at least in our society, experience in love may be, together with restraint from child-bearing before experience is achieved.
That neither such considerations nor other changes in the theory of sex morality have yet come to the fore in current discussion is perhaps because the technique of contraception is still in the experimental stage, perhaps because in popular consciousness the morality of contraception in itself is not fully established. How is it going to be established? I doubt if through rationalism or rationalistic propaganda. Social changes, we begin to know, are rarely due to deliberation, in any society. In our society they are due mainly to economic causes. Housing congestion in NewYork will in time affect birth-control legislation in Albany; and fear of an overpopulated world will drive church as well as state into a new attitude toward multiplying to the glory of God.
As in birth control so in other matters of sex intimacy the growth of cities and the complexity of our economy may be the more potent factors of change. In very large communities there is an ignorance of the personal relations of others, an inevitable ignoring which contributes unconsciously to tolerance toward experiment and variation in sex relations. Indifference to the private life of others is almost an exigency of our economic organization. Attention is directed to the efficiency of the personality encountered and away from the individual means taken to induce that efficiency. What difference does it make to an employer how clerk or stenographer lives after hours provided he or she is competent, alert, and responsive to the business need? In office or in factory one may be but a cog in the machine and yet left larger personal freedom than in a more independent job in a small place or than in a household. Out of such urban influences—negatively, of indifference, and positively,of attention to personalityper se—come opportunities for personal freedom that will set men and women to ordering their sex life to please themselves rather than to please society. That is, ordinary men and women; certain outstanding figures will have to continue to forego freedom. The President of the United States, presidents of banks or colleges, cinematograph stars, “society ladies,†now and again a clergyman or a prize-fighter—all these will continue to be observed closely in their private life, and, like the gods and goddesses of other cultures or times, will have to conform to popular preconceptions of marriage or celibacy, chastity or libertinism. For them, as for other personages in folk-lore, individual adjustment or variation would be out of the picture.
FOOTNOTES:[1]Dr. Ogburn informs me that his recent and still unpublished analysis of the census of 1920 shows that in localities where birth control is presumedly practiced the marriage rate mounts. He states also that in the country at large there has been a higher marriage rate in the last census decade and that the age at marriage is earlier.
[1]Dr. Ogburn informs me that his recent and still unpublished analysis of the census of 1920 shows that in localities where birth control is presumedly practiced the marriage rate mounts. He states also that in the country at large there has been a higher marriage rate in the last census decade and that the age at marriage is earlier.
[1]Dr. Ogburn informs me that his recent and still unpublished analysis of the census of 1920 shows that in localities where birth control is presumedly practiced the marriage rate mounts. He states also that in the country at large there has been a higher marriage rate in the last census decade and that the age at marriage is earlier.