INTRODUCTION
BY FREDA KIRCHWEY
The subject of sex has been treated in this generation with a strange, rather panic-stricken lack of balance. Obscenity hawks its old wares at one end of the road and dogmatic piety shouts warnings at the other—while between is chaos. And the chaos extends beyond ideas and talk, beyond novels and scenarios and Sunday feature stories, into the realm of actual conduct. Religion has indeed found substantial matter for its words of caution and disapproval: never in recent generations have human beings so floundered about outside the ropes of social and religious sanctions.
But while John Roach Straton and Billy Sunday point a pleasant way toward hell, while sensationalism finds in new manners of life subject for five-inch headlines, and while modern novelists make their modern characters stumble through pages of inner conflict to ends of darknessand desperation, a few people are at work quietly sorting out the elements of chaos and holding fragments of conduct up in the sun and air to find what they really are made of.
No one seeks to argue chaos away. CertainlyMr.Straton andMr.Sunday are right: Men and women are ignoring old laws. In their relations with each other they are living according to tangled, conflicting codes. Remnants of early admonitions and relationships, the dictates of custom, the behavior of their friends, their own tastes and desires, elusive dreams of a loveliness not provided for by rules—all these are scrambling to fill the gap that was left when Right and Wrong finally followed the other absolute monarchs to an empty, nominal existence somewhere in exile. But the traditional, ministerial method with chaos was not Jehovah’s method. He brought order and light into the world; but the way of our current moralists has been to clamp down the hatches even though “sin” bubbled beneath. A few courageous, matter-of-fact glances into the depths have been embodied in the articles in this volume. The men and women who have written them have approached the subjectvariously; the fragments they have brought up to examine do not necessarily fit together. But none of these writers is afraid to saunter up to the edge and see what moral disorder looks like.
Some of them find it thoroughly disagreeable. They believe that old laws were born of old desires and find their sanctions in the emotions of men. They seek for new and rational ways back to the sort of stability provided by the traditional relationships of men and women. Others find in contemporary manners merely the disorder incident to reconstruction; they find there tentative beginnings rather than ruinous endings. They see chaos as an interesting laboratory, filled with strange ferments and the pungent odors of new compounds. None of these writers offers dogmatic conclusions—and in this they differ delightfully from our most popular novelists and preachers. They present facts, they analyze and interpret; they suggest directions, they even prophesy. But they never announce or warn or reprove. When these chapters first appeared as articles inThe Nationit became evident that this exercise of thought was itself commonly held to be a simple blasphemy. Lettersfrom readers came in scores charging the articles with the sin of intelligence where only faith and conformity were tolerable. Dogma is so deep in the bone of even the more enlightened and adult members of our modern world that the most modest doubt regarding the success of monogamy or the virtue of chastity becomes in some way an insult to Moses or Saint Paul.
It is interesting to see how many of the authors of this group of articles find a connection between the changing standards of sex behavior and the increasing freedom of women. Are women forcing this change? Or does freedom itself make change inevitable? Possibly only the woman in the isolation of the home is able to sustain the double load of her own virtue and her husband’s ideals. Out in the world, in contact and competition with men, she is forced to discriminate; questions are thrust upon her. The old rules fail to work; bewildering inconsistencies confront her. Things that were sure become unsure. And slowly, clumsily, she is trying to construct a way out to a new sort of certainty in life; she is seeking something to take the place of the burden of solemn ideals and reverentialattitudes that rolled off her shoulders when she emerged. That some such process may be going on is hinted at in more than one of these articles. Certainly, of the factors involved in modern sex relations, women and economic conditions are the two that have suffered the most revolutionary change; and men’s morals must largely shape themselves to the patterns laid down by these two masters of life.
Much has been said about sex—and everything remains to be said. Largely, new conclusions will be reached through new processes of living. People will act—and then a new code will grow up. But along the way guidance and interpretation are deeply needed, if only to take the place of the pious imprecations of those who fear life and hate the dangers and uncertainties of thought and emotion.