Amongthe claims of reconstruction which the insurgent literature of our time puts forward, none, perhaps, so startles and inflames the Conservative as the demand for a reform of the family. Criticism of this institution is, in fact, so severely punished or so slanderously misrepresented that it is usually exercised in the more or less impersonal form of the drama or novel. It happens, however, that the drama or the novel is now quite the most effective means of inoculating millions with critical ideas, and at least half the more brilliant novelists and dramatists of Europe employ their art for this purpose, or reflect some such sentiments in their work. Hence the outcry about the “unclean novel”: which is usually far cleaner than the Old Testament, but more critical. Positivism had assured us that this institution would be transferred intact to a human foundation, and Murillo’s “Holy Family” hung reverently over the hearths of the new pagans. Now, half in fear and half in exultation, the clergy cry that humanism has betrayed its moral poison and its social menace.
Our favourite phrase here is the saying that the family is the foundation of the State. If one patiently considered the matter, one would discover that the divine right of kings was once regarded with equal confidence as the indispensable foundation of the State. It may very well be that the divine duty of the family is no less open to reconsideration. It might be noticed that the change from aristocracy to democracy was at one time hailed with lurid prophecy even by distinguished moralists and sociologists, yet this change has led to greater efficiency and prosperity. We might perceive that the Christian dogmas were once thought vital to our welfare, and it may be that the Christian ethic is in some points as disputable as the Christian dogmas. Few reflect on these matters, and the writer who criticises the family is denounced with peculiar bitterness. Quite certainly that tomb of dead civilisations yawns ominously before us if we lend ear to this kind of rebel. The family is so plainly indispensable an institution that it must be protected from criticism: lest we be tempted to dispense with it.
I propose, however, to make a critical study of the family. Indeed, I venture to say at once that our ideal of the family is so encrusted with ancient superstitions that it pressingly invites the critical attention of our age: that the family is the foundation of the State only in an historical sense, not in the sense that a State cannot be based on any other procreative arrangement: and that the cloak of superstition and rhetoric that we have put about it has covered for ages, and still covers, an appalling amount of vice, hypocrisy, and misery. My point of view has been stated. The affairs of this planet must be run by men for men. The supreme aim must be to lighten the burden of suffering which we inherit from a less intelligent and less humane past. Any creed, code, or institution which forbids progress on these lines must be assailed.
The first and most damnable superstition in regard to the family is the claim that marriage ought to be indissoluble. In its strict form this belief is held only by Roman Catholics, and by a section of the Church of England which was only partially reformed in the sixteenth century and has a strange ambition to disavow even that limited reform. But the most insidious mischief of this old ideal is that it has embedded deep in our minds the feeling that, although indissoluble marriage is an intolerable yoke, we must be very chary and niggardly in granting relief. This feeling we ascribe to a wise concern for our social welfare, whereas it is due to the subconscious tyranny of the old superstition. Recently we have seen the strange spectacle of a non-Christian moralist standing amongst our bishops to bar the way of reform: seeking to prolong, in the name of humanity, a superstition that darkens the homes of a large part of humanity. The bishops may have smiled.
A distinguished sociological writer, Mr. L. Hobhouse, in classifying forms of marriage, says, with unconscious humour: “Marriage is indissoluble among the Andamanese, some Papuans of New Guinea, at Watubela, at Lampong in Sumatra, among the Igorrotes and Italones of the Philippines, the Veddahs of Ceylon, and in the Romish Church.” One trusts that the Roman (and Anglican) Catholics like the company they keep; the peoples enumerated by Mr. Hobhouse are the very lowest and least intelligent savages known to science. The Church of Rome has long boasted that its ideal of indissoluble union is the final and culminating point of human wisdom in regard to the family. It now appears that indissoluble marriage was the most primitive human tradition, and was discarded by the Roman and all other civilisations when they passed from childhood to manhood.
Sociologists have been accustomed to say that monogamy was gradually developed out of promiscuity. This was mere speculation, and Professor Westermarck and other recent authorities rightly dissent. The institution is older than humanity. We find monogamic family life among the anthropoid apes and amongst the lowest peoples, which represent early man; and many writers on prehistoric man now contend that we find him passing from family to social life, not in the reverse way. When the last Ice Age forced men to live in caves, and the scattered families clung together and formed large social groups, the family life was modified, and few of the higher tribes maintained the primitive form. Réclus tells of a Khond who, on hearing of the monogamous life of the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, exclaimed in disgust: “They live like the apes.”
We may assume that little hardship arises from incompatibility of temperament among the Igorrotes or the Veddahs, and there is no need to describe the eccentric forms of marriage which arose among higher savages. None of the great civilisations of the past entertained the idea of indissoluble marriage. The clergy, of course, know nothing of the real line of evolution, and (as Bishop Diggle has done) they represent the Roman system as a comparative refinement of early promiscuity, on which Christianity was to make the final advance. The precious testimony of Juvenal is invoked (against the warning of all modern historians): and we are expected to shudder because St. Jerome tells us of a Roman lady who had been married a score of times. It is not stated what harm was done to the lady, or to anybody else, or whether she was a freak in her generation. It is enough, as Mrs. Humphry Ward knows, to say that divorce is frequent anywhere, and thousands of hands will rise to heaven: what the precise social consequences are the thousand of heads seem to regard as irrelevant.
I have read most of the literature of the Roman Imperial period, and have found that the greater part of the statements made about it by clerical moralists are rubbish. Every serious student knows that it was precisely the more rigid and intolerable earlier form of Roman marriage (theconfarreatio) which led to laxity in the early Empire; that the Roman Lawyers of the first and second centuries, who relaxed marriage, were among the most conscientious that the legal world has ever produced; and that in the time of St. Jerome—an embittered and intensely puritanical priest, who says worse things about his sacerdotal colleagues than he does about the pagans—we have the solid testimony of such documents as theLettersof Symmachus and the instructiveSaturnaliaof Macrobius to show that the family life of the pagans was generally healthy, sober, and harmonious. There is not a particle of proof that Roman society suffered because of the facility of divorce, or generally abused this facility.
But the misrepresentation of Roman morals is light in comparison with the misrepresentation of later Christian morals. Christianity took its ideal from the Jews. Amongst this partially civilised people marriage had been made easy for the male by the retention of polygamy, and it was not customary to consult the feelings of the woman. In the course of time Greek influence entered Judæa, and the Rabbis held learned debates on marriage and divorce. Both the stricter and the laxer view found expression in the New Testament and in early Christian literature, but a celibate priesthood obtained supreme power in Europe and the stricter view was enforced. The moral consequences were disastrous. While the RomanCuria, which could always find a flaw in the marriage of a wealthy man, was enriched, Europe was degraded, and sexual immorality became general. It is enough to recall that a tradition of looseness, in strict correspondence with the law of indissoluble marriage, survives from the ages of faith to our own time in the Latin countries. Some have spoken of “the hot southern blood” and cast the blame on the climate. I would invite the informed moralist to run his eye over the map of the earth, and ask himself whether chastity increases, or the sex-organs lose vitality, in proportion as nations are removed from the Equator. It is a ludicrous effort of Catholics to conceal the evils of indissoluble marriage. Until the Reformation sexual laxity was the same all over Europe.
In England the old priest-made law was retained after the Reformation, and laxity of morals was general. Except for a very few wealthy people, divorce was impossible until 1857, when a slender measure of reform was wrested from the clergy. This, the present law of England, a miserable compromise with religious prejudice and a permanent source of vice and misery, puts English legislation on an important aspect of “the foundation of the State” below that of any other civilised community. Instead of ridding themselves entirely of clerical influence, and directing civic life on civic grounds, our legislators looked still to ancient Judæa, and substituted the less stringent view of the Rabbis for the more stringent. The legendary leader of a rude Arab tribe had granted divorce for adultery, and the English nation of the nineteenth century followed his example. The result was the most stupid and mischievous law of marriage outside the sphere of the Holy Catholic Church.
English people are proud of their national concern for purity, yet they tolerate, and their priests defend as something sacred, a state of law which is medieval in its crudeness and barbarity. When two people have obeyed our counsel to marry early, and they discover that they have misjudged each other, we tell them that there is no relief for them unless they commit adultery: which, when it is committed, we brand as the darkest sin. To the husband we give the further injunction that he must be cruel to his wife before we will release him. We then, although we take especial pride in the “cleanness” of our press and literature, print whole columns about their conduct in suspicious situations,—sometimes entitling the account, in large type, to attract attention, “A Horrible Case,”—and we ask each other whether England is not in a state of decay and contracting the continental spirit. If there are any who do not choose to commit adultery, or do not choose to have their servants bribed to describe their conduct for the entertainment of the public, we grant them a legal permit to be happy and vicious, or miserable and virtuous, for the remainder of their lives: the thing we call a judicial separation.
This extraordinary situation is certainly a slight improvement on indissoluble marriage, but the pride of our bishops and puritans in it is peculiar. One may not expect them to take into account the suffering which hundreds of thousands endure under the law, but the adultery to which it leads would seem to be a proper subject for their consideration. As a rule, they entreat us to maintain religion, whether it be true or no, in the name of morality: here they ask us to maintain immorality in the name of religion,—in the name of a supposed Christian precept,—and we obey even more readily. When a Royal Commission recommends that our law be brought into line with the law of other civilised nations, they burn with indignation and inspire a Minority Report: a remarkable mixture of contradictions, worthless quotations, and irrelevant rhetoric. The question of immorality they shirk; and to the unhappiness which large numbers of our people endure under the present law they are so insensitive that they hardly mention it.
Such consequences are to be expected as long as we borrow our social legislation from an ancient polygamous nation with a great disdain for women. It is said, however, as usual, that our social interest coincides with the supposed command of Christ. We have here one of the most singular confusions of the whole controversy. Marriage is held to be the foundation of the State, because it is believed to be the surest way to supply it with citizens. This duty of procreation is, in fact, the only feature which disposes priests to give their blessing to so distasteful a thing as sexual union. Yet when a majority of the Commissioners recommend that people should be free to remarry if the desertion, cruelty, insanity, or imprisonment of one spouse defrauds the State of its supply of little citizens, the bishops raise their crosiers. Even so ascetic and anti-feminist a divine as St. Augustine could not deny that a man had a right to take a concubine when his wife proved sterile. Our divines speak much more fervently than St. Augustine did of our social interest, yet they forbid us to consult it.
In sum, we have generally rejected the view that marriage ought to be indissoluble, and we pride ourselves on curbing the influence of priests; but our whole attitude toward divorce is shaped by the old superstition and the clergy. In the name of that superstition we condemn large numbers of our fellow-citizens to live in deep and acute misery. Which of our social interests would be prejudiced by granting relief to the man or woman whose life is embittered by the desertion, incurable insanity, cruelty, or criminal conduct of his or her partner? The suggestion is preposterous; and, if we do not grant this relief, adultery is in their case a venial offence, if not a right.
Some explain that they fear “the thin edge of the wedge.” As if wedges had a way of pressing deeper by their own weight, once we have admitted them! If England chooses to grant these reforms, and no others, she need not be deterred by empty phrases. But I believe that the alert and resolute race which is coming will go much further than this. Before many generations, if not in ours, there will be divorce for incompatibility of temperament in every civilised country. Men and women will be divorced, after due delay, because they wish, or when one of them can show grave cause to separate from the other. Ill-informed people express a concern about the children or the social consequences. They do not take the trouble to inquire what happens in some of the American States, or in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, where there is long and ample experience of divorce by mutual consent. The social consequences are just what any unprejudiced person would expect: happier homes, and more healthily engendered and reared children. But the puritan does not want to inquire: he is not sincere. Would he agree to divorce by mutual consent where there are no children or where either or both parents make adequate provision for them? He would not. I will, however, return later to the question of children.
Europe will be far happier when some such humane law as the Danish is generally adopted, and, after a few years’ separation, the discontented are free to remarry. But no one who is acquainted with the tendency and influence of modern literature can fancy that this will be the last state of the old ideal of the family. From the first years when men were free to declare their opinions without fear of the stake, writers of great power have claimed the right of what has come to be called “free love.” Some would abolish marriage, but the normal shape of the demand is that men and women shall be free to love and beget children whether or no they ask the blessing of Church or State. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Goethe took a concubine on the pagan model, many of the first literary men in Europe pressed this demand, and it is sustained by some of the most brilliant writers in every country to-day. The movement exhibits the slow and steady growth characteristic of reforms which eventually triumph. It is no mere bubble on the surface of our effervescent life; it is the new intelligence of the race examining the old traditions.
Moralists, lay and clerical, have a preposterous way of representing this as a surging of selfish passion against the barriers which human experience or superhuman wisdom has erected. There is, it is true, much in our rebellious literature itself which misrepresents the movement. You get the impression that, as the eighteenth century questioned the divine right of kings and the nineteenth century that of priests, the twentieth century is challenging the divine right of moralists. But this is due to the common practice of giving a narrow meaning to the word “immorality.” Goethe and Swinburne became zealous for “morality,” but they never altered their opinions on “free love.” Sudermann and Anatole France and Pérez Galdós and d’Annunzio, G. B. Shaw and T. Hardy and E. Carpenter and H. G. Wells, are sincere moralists: they inculcate honour, truthfulness, kindliness, and justice as firmly as our bishops, and more effectively than most of our clergy. It is not morality that stands at the bar. The real question is whether any sound moral principle implies that marriage alone sanctions sex-union: whether social good or social evil would result from an alteration of our standards.
This is a quite natural and legitimate question, and any healthy-minded person ought to be able to discuss it without hysteria or vituperation. Christian moralists have made some very grave mistakes during the last thousand years. Humility and disdain of the flesh were for centuries extolled by them as the supreme virtues: cruelty was classified as a venial offence. Already the bulk of our divines reject the virtue of asceticism, and they forbear to press on the modern world the kind of humility which turns the other cheek, or the other pocket, to the hooligan. They discover that social justice has been singularly neglected by their predecessors, and they begin to suspect that war or sweating may be worse than unbelief or Sabbath-breaking. It is not at all unnatural to inquire whether there may not also be some element of error in their sex-ethic.
We do not go far in such an inquiry before our suspicion is confirmed. The evolution of the virtue of chastity may some day be traced by a cold scientific investigator, and in its earlier stages it will prove extremely interesting. It is primarily connected with an ancient superstition or “tabu” in regard to sex-life: the kind of primitive and unreasoning feeling which once drove women to the temples of Ishtar in parts of the East, and still survives, baldly and ludicrously, in the “purification” process to which a recent mother must submit in the Roman and Anglican Churches. This old idea that there was something “unclean” or mysterious about sex-life, was more or less discarded when men passed out of the barbaric stage, but it quite evidently survived in part in the virtue of purity. A man or woman, it was thought, had a certain mystic superiority if he or she did not use the organs of sex. Hence the widespread veneration of Vestal Virgins, Pythagorean and Serapean recluses, priestesses of Isis, Aztec and Christian nuns. I call attention particularly to the notion that these celibates were in some sense superior to their fellows, because it shows clearly the connection with the older idea of a mystic uncleanness about sex. There is, of course, no rational ground for this superstition, though even philosophers have entertained it. There is a large and elegant literature about it, from theEnneadsof Plotinus to Bulwer Lytton’sZanonior the works of Miss Corelli.
Most of us see quite clearly the barbaric strain lingering in this admiration of virginity, but we do not perceive how far our virtue of purity is a compromise with this ancient superstition. I mean that, together with sound elements which I will discuss presently, the sentiment of purity or chastity retained a good deal of the old irrational view of sex. Luther boldly attacked the theoretical asceticism of the medieval Church, but in the end Protestantism compromised with the old tradition. This again is quite plainly seen when we reflect on the way in which Church people, and many of our modern mystics and feminists, breathe the word “lust.” It means merely pleasure in sexual intercourse, but it has to be mentioned as rarely as possible, and with downcast eyes and an air of very distinct disapproval. The impression is conveyed that it is a thing invented by the devil, but reluctantly permitted by the Almighty because the race had to be maintained. The blessing of the Church made it a barely permissible luxury. We have only to reflect that “lust” does not mean unwedded love, but sexual pleasure or desire under any conditions, to recognise the trail of the old tabu over the whole range of these sentiments.
In the nineteenth century the evolution of morals took a strange turn. Neither clergy nor laity had before that time, speaking generally, observed chastity in practice, but the rise of non-Christian critics in the eighteenth century had compelled the clergy to be more faithful to their own precepts. This (and the growth of such movements as Wesleyanism) led to more concern about virtue, and when the English Agnostic school arose its leaders were taunted by the clergy with a wish to rationalise or alter morality. By a natural reaction they cultivated a particular zeal for virtue, and accepted the old code in its entirety. Those moralists who appealed to a “categorical imperative” or an “intuition” had no difficulty in doing this. Indeed, any man who to-day accepts the Stoic idea of morality, or the æsthetic idea (that virtue is so beautiful that we must cultivate it), has as much right as the Christian to profess a regard for chastity. There ensued a kind of rivalry of virtue between the clergy and the new pagans. It has ended in the curious spectacle of our modern clergy, whose historical knowledge is both slender and peculiar, claiming that their Churches are the most faithful preachers of purity the world has ever known, while Agnostic moralists indignantly dispute their supposed monopoly.
The extreme complexity of this evolution, and the fact that few of us reflect critically at all on our moral sentiments, must excuse me for making this lengthy analysis. It shows that our conception of chastity still contains a large amount of the old non-rational tradition, and that any man or woman who declines (as so many do to-day) to bow to mystic and obscure commands has a right to examine it closely. In one of my works (Life of G. J. Holyoake, ii. 65) I have shown that so sensitive a moralist as J. S. Mill admitted this. Obviously, the precept of purity or chastity has a totally different basis from all the other recognised moral precepts. These others are invariably social laws, and the transgression of them is invariably a social hurt. Life itself furnishes the reply if a man asks why heoughtto be just, kind, and truthful: the answer is not so obvious when he asks why heoughtto be chaste.
This will become very much clearer if we examine our resentment of “immoral” actions. In the majority of cases we condemn them on moral principles quite apart from chastity. Europe has in this respect been lamentably misled by its professional moralists, and we can hardly be surprised that in practice it so largely ignored them. It is quite plain that a man or woman who has married on the usual terms—mutual fidelity—and they remain unaltered, is bound by honour and justice to observe the contract. Adultery is in such a case (the usual case) condemned by moral principles which have a very much clearer basis than chastity. Again, justice sternly forbids a man to inflict, or run the risk of inflicting, grave injury on a woman by causing her to have a child in a social order which will heavily punish her for doing so. Here also there is a firm reason, apart from chastity, for moral resentment. When we eliminate these other moral sentiments from our condemnation of immoral acts, there is certainly nosocialground of resentment left; and, as I said, I am not arguing against a Stoic or æsthetic or theological view. Socially, it would be an enormous improvement if we kept this analysis in mind. If moralists talked less about “vice,” which has an academic sound, and more about “crime” and honour, there would be less suffering in the world. The experience of two thousand years has not commended the Church’s practice of denouncing vice when it ought to have appealed to a man’s sense of honour or justice. It put the accent on the wrong syllable. Many a man will shrink from an act which is unjust, or may involve cruelty, if he is accustomed to regard it as such. He is not so effectively intimidated by terms like virtue and vice, which require a whole moral philosophy or theology to invalidate them.
But I am not for a moment contending that this removal of the accent from one syllable to another leaves the law as it was. It is, on the contrary, the very essence of my contention that the law must, in the real interest of men and women, be altered and that a large amount of ethical tyranny, which has no justification, must be abandoned. Let me first put, with entire candour, what seems to me to be the only rational reconstruction of sex-morality on a social basis, and then we may regard the reasons for advocating it.
It is, as I said, clear that if a man or woman marries on a strict monogamous contract, and holds his or her partner to that contract, there is a plain obligation of justice to adhere to it. If, on the other hand, a man and woman choose to marry on any other understanding, or choose to grant each other (as is now frequently done) a greater liberty than the contract implies, their behaviour is entirely their own concern, and no moralist who takes his stand on purely social grounds has anything to say to it. In regard to unmarried intercourse, it is further plain that a man commits an immoral or anti-social act who entails on an unmarried woman the grave injury which child-bearing does entail in our social order generally. It must, however, be recognised that guilt is in this case entirely relative to circumstances. Where public opinion does not make a pariah of such a woman, where no risk of suffering is involved, such an act of “free love” is no concern of the social moralist. Hence, if two people of mature intelligence, making a just provision for possible children, choose to live together without marriage, it is entirely their own concern; and if any woman, strong and judicious enough to take the responsibility of her acts, chooses love without marriage, it is her own concern.
If there seems to be an unfamiliar coldness and deliberation about this defence of “licence,” it is enough to recall the familiar circumstances. One cannot, as a rule, inquire dispassionately into this subject without raising an hysterical storm. The clergy and other puritans accuse a man of the basest and most selfish motives; they seem, indeed, so incapable of understanding that a man may plead for this moral reconstruction on motives at least as unselfish and elevated as their own that their obtuseness does little credit to their own moral physiognomy. They make fanatical appeals to undiscriminating prejudice, repeat silly phrases about “passion” and “farmyard morals,” and rely on intimidation. The consequence is, that ordinary folk openly bow to their rhetoric and secretly ignore it. Any properly observant person can find out in a week to what extent London observes the virtue of purity. It is then left to rebellious poets and novelists and other artists to make fiery onslaughts on the tyranny: to speak of virtue as “the ash of a burnt-out fire,” to chant “the roses and raptures of vice,” or to say scornfully with Blake:
“And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,And binding with briars my joys and desires.”
“And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,And binding with briars my joys and desires.”
Therefore I have chosen to apply to the issue the cold deductive processes with which experience as a professor of moral philosophy has made me familiar. As I said, the Christian is free to observe his supposed divine command, the Stoic may bow to a mystic and inscrutable law, the moral æsthete may enthuse over the charm of virtue; but I maintain that the sociological or utilitarian view of morals, which is now generally accepted by the vast number of people who have ceased to be Christian, cannot control sex-relations in any other sense than this. A man must avoid injustice and hardship: a woman must use her discretion. Indeed, as the clergy and the puritans now take their stand commonly on social grounds, these social considerations are effective against them.
But the question is not merely academic. These cold and severe deductions are very properly opposed to the heated phraseology and sentimentality of Conservatives, who profess to be concerned about our social welfare, but I am really pleading for the greater happiness of the race, the lessening of hypocrisy, the curtailment of a system of prostitution which makes the lives of so many women end in horror. With all their talk about our “social welfare,” the clergy and their puritan supporters are in this respect the gravest disturbers and restricters of our social welfare; and the insolence with which they assail every attempt at reform is ludicrous in view of their own record and gravely prejudicial to the advance of human happiness. It is not a question of abolishing marriage, or of interfering with the liberty of any. At one moment the clergy represent marriage as so beneficent, so solidly established in the hearts of our people, that only a morbid sensualist ever assails it; and the next moment they suggest, in effect, that if we relax our coercion, people will abandon marriage in such numbers that the social order will be overwhelmed. Let us have sincerity and liberty.
But neither is it a question of spreading a gospel of “free love,” in the perverse sense in which the clergy conceive such a gospel. The considerations I have given above should make this plain enough. It is a question of securing freedom and love for the hundreds of thousands of mature women who cannot marry, or who do not choose to enter upon the very precarious experiment of surrendering their privacy and independence: a question of breaking the tyranny of an old superstition which, by means of public opinion, forbids so many women to have the child they desire to have, or the share of happiness from which they are excluded: a question of putting an end to a vast amount of needless suffering and privation and hypocrisy. The State would gain rather than lose by this freedom: it is the Church only that would suffer. Thousands of women already hold these views, as the open circulation of theFreewoman(a few years ago) and of our bolder novelists shows. The feeling gains ground yearly, and the time is approaching when that seal of ignominy which our priest-made law puts on the “illegitimate” child will be removed, and men and women will cease to speak of “lust.” Sex-pleasure has no more taint than any other, and the notion that it is justified only as an accompaniment to the begetting of children, or to lessen the risk of adultery, is childishly irrational and generally insincere. Laws there must be: but the laws must be made for men, not men for the laws. It is time that Europe shook off the conceptions of conduct which were imposed on it by impotent monks like Gregory VII., and framed its own rules in accordance with the new and healthier attitude toward life. Asceticism is a commercial speculation—the sacrifice of earth for a double share of heaven—which we have no longer reason to appreciate.
The progress of this view will be assisted by two contemporary reforms of received opinion. One regards the economic dependence of woman on man, which I will discuss later. I need only recall here that some of the worst evils of our marriage-system—the scheming and bartering and linking for life—are due to this dependence. The other reform is the widespread and increasing rejection of the old idea that a woman must bear as many children as nature will permit her to have.
There is amongst us a disgusting amount of hypocrisy in regard to this question. The majority of educated people of all classes, even many of the clergy, now practise artificial limitation of the family, yet we proceed on the fiction that this is a disreputable practice. We turn into pornographic dépôts the shops which sell contraceptives, and we allow an antiquated law to be drastically enforced against men who would be decent purveyors of the things we use in secret. We have talked, and read journalistic articles, about “the dwindling population of France” for twenty years, though it is only within the last year or so that it has even slightly decreased; and the birth-rate alone shows that London and Berlin and every other great city are rapidly approaching the condition of Paris. We listen without protest to the lamentations of half-informed faddists on the limitation of the birth-rate in ancient Rome (where the practice was confined to a few, and proved an excellent means of saving the State by ridding it of a worn-out nobility) or the medieval republics of Italy. And while we perpetrate these and a hundred other follies, we know that the majority of us who are educated and unprejudiced find the practice humane and commendable. We would, it seems, rather leave frail girls to the mercy of quacks and dangerous operators than tell them openly what better-educated ladies do to avoid conception.
Yet we have not here even the excuse of an antique religious command. The Catholic Church, it is true, severely condemns the use of contraceptives, but one finds that its prohibition is based merely on the reasoning of medieval celibates. With those who argue that the practice is “against nature” one hardly needs to discuss. Half the distinctive things of civilisation are “against nature,” nor is there any reason why we should not depart from the ways of that ancient and unintelligent dame. Hardly less foolish is the alarm about our dwindling birth-rate. With every industry and profession already much overcrowded, we do not act very intelligently in censuring the modern restriction of production. But these are, to a great extent, either wholly insincere expressions or confused repetitions of ancient prejudices. In France, where a society arose for the checking of the practice, it was found that the members had an average of one child and a half in each family. A similar census among the writers and associations which attack Malthusianism in England might yield an instructive result.
One can understand the hostility to Malthusianism—or, rather, Neo-Malthusianism, since Malthus’s idea of restricting population by avoiding intercourse is unnecessarily heroic—in a country like Australia, which urgently requires population; though even in Australia the opposition is futile. One can understand such hostility in a land which has universal conscription, and neighbours with a superior army; though I have elsewhere pointed out the sensible and natural way to settle this difficulty. But it is quite irrational in such a city as London. Five-sixths of us, it has been demonstrated, do not attend church or take our code of life meekly from the clergy, as our fathers did; our labour-market is, in every division, enormously overcrowded; and our army is not affected by the dwindling birth-rate. Why, in these circumstances, should the women of England be asked to undergo the pain and sickness and weariness of a yearly birth, and wear out their lives in the rearing of a large family? Men have, as a rule, too little appreciation of the terrible burden they lay on their wives, but their own interest at least ought to weigh with them. Why be constrained to find the resources for rearing and educating a large family when a smaller family will give better chances to the children and conduce to the happiness of the home?
To these questions the only answer is an irrational outpouring of antique rhetoric. It is mere “lust” to have commerce without children: it is “selfish” to wish to live in greater comfort by restricting the family: it is “unnatural.” The man who would lessen the suffering of his companion in life, and obtain greater advantages and more loving care for his children by restricting their number, may smile at the futility of this kind of rhetoric. But it is surely time, in the second decade of the twentieth century, to meet it with a frank and curt declaration that we have, and will use, a right to any pleasure which this life affords, provided it hurt no one. The last trace of asceticism should be trodden underfoot. The medieval clergy were a body of a few fanatics leading an army of hypocrites. Their ideas have no place in our life. Love and joy and comradeship are in themselves as much ours as the scent of the rose or the flavour of wine. It is time that we echoed defiantly the sneering words of the apostle, and said: Yes,letus eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. We are not likely to forget that life has other pleasures, of culture and art, besides those of the palate or of love. The supreme commandment is, as old Egypt said: “Thou shalt make no man weep.” The supreme virtue is to quicken the hearts of men with joy and fill their minds with truth. And the time will come when the clergy, reading aright for the first time the life of the ages of faith, will say: “We never insisted on our theoretical asceticism until those dour sceptics of the nineteenth century compelled us: the Middle Ages were the ages of liberty.”
The clergy are, in fact, in a dilemma. The cry of the hour is “social consequences.” There is a vast amount of doleful recalling of dead civilisations and prediction of coming woe; though England was never before so prosperous, solid, and free from crime. But dogmas have worn so thin that we must be pressed to maintain them, even if they are false, on social grounds. The answer is quite simple. If any social quality or rule of conduct is necessary for our welfare and happiness in this world, we need no dogmatic foundation for it. Men will see that virtue is its own reward. And if any rule of conduct in the Christian code isnotbased upon the actual exigencies of life, there will be no social consequences if we disregard it. The superstitions I have assailed belong to this latter category.
But a campaign against the artificial restriction of the birth-rate has recently been inaugurated on what are thought to be serious social grounds, and this leads me to a third and last reform which the family will undergo. I refer to the Eugenic movement. Let me first explain why this hostility of Eugenists to the restriction of the birth-rate seems a needless and illogical complication of their aims.
This hostility is usually expressed in the form of a fear that the restriction of births among the “better class” and unrestricted increase of the “lower class” must lead to deterioration. One would think that the proper remedy of this would be to recommend prudential restriction to the mass of the workers, as the Malthusian League endeavours to do. It is a strange social idealism which would urge over-production all round, with its train of domestic and industrial evils, instead of urging restriction all round. It would also be interesting to learn the average number of children to a family among these zealous Eugenists, and whether they do not find middle-class professions as overcrowded as the manual industries are. At all events, since it is now impossible to induce educated mothers to return to the virtuous and exacting industry of their Victorian predecessors, the best thing would be to educate the masses in a common-sense view of maternity and of their own interest.
It will suffice here, however, to deal with the saner side of the Eugenic movement. It proposes to eliminate bad human stock and promote the mating of good stocks. These are those who find it a degradation to introduce “the methods of the breeder” into human affairs, but the objection is merely silly. The methods of the modern breeder are an expression of intelligence, improving on nature; these old-fashioned folk would have us disregard the persuasion of intelligence and retain the crude methods of unintelligent nature. The serious question is: Is the Eugenic proposal sound and practicable?
As far as positive Eugenics, or the selection of good human stocks for breeding, is concerned, the recent evolution of the movement seems to show that no firm and practicable proposal can yet be formulated. The truth is that the movement is greatly enfeebled by a general reliance on disputed theories of heredity. Some Eugenists rely on Weismann’s theory: some on the Mendelist theory. They do not realise that scientific men are by no means agreed upon these theories, and it is a serious mistake to build on either. In England most of our biologists are Weismannists (in a broad sense), but there is more hostility to the theory in Germany and the United States, and both theories have lately had to confront grave difficulties. Any Eugenic proposal which is based on a theory of heredity must be regarded with reserve. The dogmatic statements of Professor Karl Pearson, for instance, in regard to the impossibility of altering by education the innate qualities of a child are entirely unwarranted. Heredity is still a mystery: and the relative importance of heredity and environment (or nature and nurture) is not yet determined.
Detaching the element of theory, we have a plain proposal to eradicate tainted stocks from the human garden and promote the growth of the sounder. As I have said, the positive proposal to breed has not yet been put before us in a practicable or discussable form. This is largely because Eugenists fear to alarm the public by pointing out how it affects the position of marriage. There are, however, many other difficulties. The extraordinary diversity among children of the same parents warns us that we cannot count on the result of mating human beings, with their infinitely more complex nervous systems, as we can count on the issue of mating sheep or dogs. The mediocrity of the living children of our ablest men of the last generation, even when the mother was an excellent mate, is another circumstance to be considered. We do not yet know the points to breed for, and there is no constancy of result. Eugenists sometimes refer to the physical or mental superiority of one class of children over another, but in this they do not attempt to distinguish between the effect of environment and the natural endowment. Positive Eugenics is not yet beyond the stage of research. Such research, if conducted without academic prejudice (which is too apparent in many Eugenic papers), is of very great service; and, if ever a firm proposal lies before us, we may trust that rhetorical phrases and clerical prejudices will not be allowed to bar the way.
In the case of negative Eugenics we are nearer agreement. Here again, however, research is not always candid. Inquiries have been made into the lineage of American criminals, and the large percentage of criminals in one family is held to indicate a tainted stock: it is not sufficiently noticed that they all lived in the same crime-breeding environment. Other Eugenists try to intimidate us with the cry that lunacy and crime are increasing rapidly: whereas (as I showed in theHibbert Journal, April 1912) there is no proved increase of lunacy and no increase of crime, in proportion to the growth of population. These methods bring discredit on the Eugenic proposals. It is, however, now agreed that certain diseases, including certain forms of mental disease, are transmissible, and common-sense suggests that we should prevent their transmission. It is well to bear in mind, however, that these things affect only a fraction of the community. As is the case with every new social proposal, Eugenics is being pressed as a panacea; and it appeals to many as a fascinating method of healing our social maladies without touching the present distribution of wealth. It is one subsidiary remedy among the hundred which modern civilisation needs to apply. By all means let us discover what “tainted stocks,” if any, there are amongst us; and let us have the elementary courage and intelligence to extinguish them, by the isolation, painless destruction, or sterilisation of their representatives.
The future of the family seems not obscure. Malthusian and Eugenic proposals will alter much of the crudeness and stupidity of the old family ideal, and ease of divorce will remove the blight it has put on many a home. Hundreds of thousands bless marriage with gratitude and sincerity: tens of thousands curse it with equal sincerity. Let there be liberty and life for all. For a modern legislature to ignore a vast amount of vice and misery, and be guided by the ancient formula of a celibate priesthood, is one of the most lamentable features of our civilisation. And the unbiased social student may look without concern on the growth of extra-matrimonial love. There is no interest of the State which forbids it, nor any sound principle of morals. The woman of the future will be her own mistress, responsible neither to priest nor moralist in this respect. If she chooses, she will marry; but she will not sacrifice half the joy of life because she cannot, or does not choose to, venture upon the experiment of domestic intimacy.
Theold tradition of the family is intimately connected with the old ideal of womanhood, and this in turn is summoned to the bar of modern criticism. A substantial change in the position of woman seems so revolutionary a disturbance, since it directly affects half the race and must very seriously affect the home and the State, that our Conservatives employ against the proposal the whole arsenal of controversial rhetoric. We hear of the wisdom of the race—as if the race did not grow wiser as it grows older—and the thin end of the wedge. We are reminded that the ancient civilisations always came to an end when their women rebelled against their natural position. We have private appeals to our sensuous feelings and our instincts of proprietorship, and open appeals to the ascetic doctrine of the Pauline Epistles. We have history put before us, as usual, in chosen fragments, and on the strength of these detached bits of learning we hear impressive sermons on the “laws” of history and of nature.
The appeal to history, which men like Dr. Emil Reich have so gravely abused, is in this case singularly unfortunate. In most cases the candid student of history finds some ancient abuse or irrational tradition making its way from one civilisation to another, and finds it natural that our more critical and independent generation should at length seek to dethrone it. But in the case of woman the Conservative has not even “the wisdom of the race” to appeal to. Her position in the past has varied greatly, but it is very far from true that she had always occupied that state of subjection in which our Victorian reformers found her. I have elsewhere (Woman in Political Evolution) surveyed the full story of woman’s development, and will here be content with a summary view which makes the Feminist movement of our time intelligible.
During the greater part of the history of civilisation, in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian empires, woman had a considerable measure of freedom and respect. When the Greeks and Romans entered the stage, they brought with them a different tradition in regard to woman, but as soon as they reached the height of their cultural development, their women (and many of their men) rebelled against this tradition. The civilisation of Greece was extinguished so speedily that the women of Athens, aided by so eminent a thinker as Plato, had not time to win their emancipation; but the Roman women did succeed in lifting themselves from their position of subjection. In the meantime, however, the political and religious development of Europe led to the reappearance of the barbaric tradition in a new form. The Christian leaders had in their sacred documents the social code of a rude Semitic tribe, the Jews, which was sternly emphasised by St. Paul, and they brooded darkly over the position of woman. Tertullian fiercely reminded Christians that, but for woman, the race would never have been damned. Ambrose ingeniously reflected that Eve was made out of a mere rib, not out of the brain, of Adam. Augustine regarded woman as an unpleasant institution created by Providence for the relief of weak-willed males and for the maintenance of the race. Jerome frowned heavily on the Roman woman’s claim of emancipation. This quaint mixture of Jewish contempt and ascetic dread was imposed on Europe by the triumphant priesthood, educated mainly in the opinions of “the Fathers,” and woman sank again to a position of inferiority and subjection.
Women writers of many countries have written this story of the degradation of their sex in Christian Europe, and one can only admire the splendid audacity with which Bishop Welldon assures women that Jesus Christ (who never uttered a protest against the Jewish conception or a warning against the coming abuse of it) was “the first to respect them,” or the Bishop of London describes Christianity as “woman’s best friend,” or Bishop Diggle represents the Christian as an advance on the Roman attitude. Our clergy are distinguished for the facility with which they make historical statements without giving us any serious evidence of a command of history; they have the advantage of being able to assure their followers that it is a “sin” to read more accurate and less orthodox experts.
The historical truth is that the nineteenth century found woman in a position far lower than that she had occupied at Rome seventeen centuries before—far lower, indeed, than she had occupied during (except for two brief periods) the many thousands of years of the history of civilisation. It was quite inevitable that a movement for her emancipation and uplifting should find a place among the great reforms initiated in the last century. To conceive this movement as a semi-hysterical rebellion against the settled usage of the race is merely to betray a gross ignorance of history. Recent experience has taught us that there is a great deal in the settled usage of the race to rebel against; but it is false that in this case we are doing so. The undisputed historical truth is that woman had been comparatively free and respected during the greater part of the civilised period: that, when the early civilisations of Greece and Rome had placed her in subjection for a few centuries, she, at the beginning of the Christian era, rebelled and won her emancipation: and that the later period of subjection was merely due to the incorporation in the Christian religion of the primitive and crude ideal of a polygamous Arab tribe. Against this intolerable superstition modern civilisation has rebelled, and we are in the midst of a far deeper discussion of woman’s nature and position than ever occurred before.
The discussion is passing through the three phases which are customary in these controversies. At first the clergy and the Conservative quoted the Bible and the Fathers. Then, when women began to show that they were disposed to examine a little more closely the authority of documents which taught so obvious an injustice, it was pleaded that in this case the religious view coincided with “sound” science and sociology. In that phase we are to-day, discussing claims that “nature” and our social interest are on the side of the old ideal. In a few more decades, when the battle is won, the Bishop of London of the time will be demonstrating that the reform was anticipated by the Fathers sixteen hundred years ago and was contained, in germ, in the New Testament.
At present the controversy about woman’s position turns largely on the question of her “nature,” and the literature of the subject is prodigious. Woman has different organs and functions than those of man, and it is natural to suppose that they will give her a different character. Here is the opportunity of the male: he has a solid scientific fact to build upon.
He sagely examines the intellectual life of woman and pronounces it inferior to that of man: he measures her brain and finds it smaller than that of man, and thus discovers the scientific basis of her inferiority; and he never reflects that, since he, on the whole, forbade her to develop her brain and intelligence during the fifteen centuries of Christian domination, it may be that her brain is not working with all the energy of which it is capable. He lays down for this dependent creature a certain code of deportment and behaviour, and, when it has enfeebled her, he discourses on her inferior muscular development: if any girls or women defiantly exercise their muscles and become strong, he calls them “unwomanly” and happily exceptional. He observes that woman is more emotional than man; and, of course, he does not ask physiologists whether this may be merely, or mainly, the effect (as it is) of the muscular and intellectual restrictions he has placed on her. He bids her develop pretty curves on her body for his entertainment, and never thinks about the physiological and psychological effect of the dead mass of fat and the flabby muscles. He kindly undertakes (for a consideration) the care of this weaker companion, and, when she begins to prove that she can fend for herself, he severely censures her for intruding on his labour-market. He learns from novelists that she has a peculiar power of “intuition” (in fiction), and a greater fineness of perception than man (which exact experiment in America has shown to be untrue), and is altogether a deep and unfathomable being. And he then, in virtue of his superior understanding of her “mysterious” nature, proceeds to dictate to her about her sphere and her capacities.
The absurdities and contradictions of male writers on women, supported by some women writers, during the last two hundred years, would fill a volume. They were more or less intelligible, and certainly entertaining, in the earlier part of the modern period, but at a time when we have scientific and historical information to guide us they are neither intelligent nor amusing. We now know that there is no such thing as an unchangeable nature of a living organism. Structure and function vary with use and environment, whatever theory of heredity one follows. Forbid the brain and muscles to function for some centuries, and they will become feebler: restore their activity and they will return to strength. Shut a woman out of politics or business or war, and she will lose her capacity for it: reintroduce her to it, and her faculties are sharpened. When the kings of Dahomi formed a regiment of women in their army, the women were found to be more deadly fighters than the men, and they drank as heavily.
As far as the political phase of the modern Feminist struggle is concerned, the application of these principles is clear enough. When statesmen can find no better argument against the enfranchisement of women than the fact that (like the politicians themselves) they do no military service, and when scientific men plead only their periodical perturbations and their “change of life,” it is time to cease arguing. Even in countries which have a system of conscription it has never been proposed that those who are exempt from service should not have a vote. In a country like England the objection is supremely foolish: it reminds one of Plato’s ironical argument, in this connection, that men who are bald should not be allowed to make shoes. As to the comparative disturbance of judgment which a certain proportion of women suffer at certain periods, it is preposterous to suppose that this does not unfit them for more important work, butdoesunfit them for casting a vote once in seven years. Is it suggested that the Conservative matron will, if an election fall in her period of nervous instability, march in a frenzy to the poll and vote for Keir Hardie? Even the more or less intoxicated male voter does not overrule a settled conviction so easily. But it is waste of time to discuss such matters. A simple investigation of years of experience in America and Australasia is more valuable than the pedantic declarations of one or two scientific men. Even Conservative Australians smiled when I asked them if the consequences of female enfranchisement, as they are darkly foreboded by serious people in England, had been observed in their Commonwealth.
The anti-suffrage campaign has been the death-blow of the prejudice against the enfranchisement of women. It has shown the complete futility of the Conservative position. Women would probably have the vote in England to-day if a section of those who demand it had not taken a false path. The end, however sacred, does not justify criminal means; nor can any serious statesman yield to violence and intimidation. Yet there is nothing in this temporary aberration to strengthen the anti-Feminist position. It was an error of judgment and a misreading of history. I am well acquainted with many of the ladies who did these regrettable things, and I know that the suggestion of “hysteria” is an insult. It is, however, useless to discuss this question further. Women will be enfranchised in England within a few years, and in all civilised nations within a quarter of a century.
Then will begin the campaign for the right to sit in Parliament, even in the Ministry. From sheer force of prejudice the great majority of the enfranchised women will resist this further claim, and the long story of education and agitation will be repeated. This is the outcome of our habit of persistently compromising with false traditions instead of frankly discarding them. The immortal jokes about women will be retailed in the House of Commons by our legislators; the same dark warnings will come from scientific Cassandras who have felt social influence; the same tragic whispers about “what every woman knows” will be heard in drawing-rooms. Then, about the year 1930, we will discover that woman is really capable of undertaking the not very exacting duties of the average Member of Parliament,—if we have not in the meantime abolished these aimless long debates on subjects which all approach with a fixed conviction,—and that it may not be impossible to find a woman with the capacity of Mr. Reginald M’Kenna or Lord Gladstone or Mr. Walter Long. Our Mrs. Humphry Wards will be the first to compete for the office.
I turn to the more serious question of the economic enfranchisement of women. On this side of the Feminist movement our views are hardly less hazy than in regard to politics. The middle-class, being the brain as well as the backbone of England, is chiefly responsible for the maxim that woman’s place is the home; but the middle-class is also the great employer of labour, and it has found that female labour is cheaper than male, and has therefore concluded that woman’s proper place is the office or the workshop. More than a fourth of the girls and women of England work outside the home. This material incentive to right views is, however, limited in its action. When the middle-class woman in turn seeks economic independence, she is received with coldness, if not derision. Women may be clerks, teachers, actresses, telegraphists, hosiery-makers, etc., but they ought not to aspire to be doctors, lawyers, or stockbrokers. If they ask the reason, they hear an inconsistent jumble of statements. In the first place, of course, they are not clever enough; in the second place, however, they are likely to be so far successful that they would lessen the available employment of men.
Certainly in such a haphazard industrial world as ours the accession of a fresh army of workers will cause, and is causing, confusion. On thelaissez-faireprinciple this overcrowding of the market is good; it gives a greater play to selection and promotes efficiency. But we have, as I said, forcedlaissez-faireto compromise with decency. We prefer a little overcrowding, but not too much. The opening of the doors of all the professions to woman means a worse overcrowding than ever in the medical and legal worlds, and we naturally hesitate.
Naturally, but not justly or logically. Between logic and justice the modern man pleads that he is distracted, and he asks time for reconstruction; asks, in other words, that we should leave the trouble to another generation. This shrinking from trouble is of no avail. We have sanctioned the principle of female industry outside the home—millions of women are so employed in England to-day—and we have absolutely no ground to limit it except the natural disability of woman or the social need for her to undertake other functions. Of her natural disability little need be said here. We have had, in most countries, decades of experience of the employment of women in many industries—teaching, nursing, journalism, factory-work, art, theatre, post-office, type-writing, shop-work, and so on. What proportion of complaint to the number of workers is there that their periodical functions make them unfit for employment? We do not need learned experts on gynecology to tell us of the acute and exceptional cases which have come under their observation. The scientific and practical procedure is to make a general inquiry into the net result of our employment of millions of girls and women. Most of us would await such a report with confidence. As long as the wages of women are lower than those of men, we hear very little complaint; nor do we find the work of our schools or the play of our theatres very much interrupted by peculiarly feminine weaknesses. Of late years women have shown that they are equally qualified to be dentists, doctors, chartered accountants, etc. Common-sense would persuade us, if we would find the real limits of woman’s capacity, to open to her all the doors of the world of work and learn it by experience.
One must give more serious attention to the claim that this economic enfranchisement of women will tend to lessen maternity, and will therefore endanger our social interests. This question of the birth-rate is, in fact, very important from many points of view, and it is extremely advisable to have a clear and reasoned grasp of it. Many people are at once alarmed if it is shown that a practice will tend to lessen the birth-rate. They rarely examine with critical attention the reasons which would be alleged by those who maintain that a lowering of the birth-rateisa social menace.
But one needs no lengthy reflection to discover that at the root of all this clamour for maintaining or increasing the birth-rate we have only military requirements. Some, indeed, urge that a nation needs as many soldiers as possible for her industrial army as well as for her military forces; but, seeing that each nation already has more than she can employ, we are not impressed by this phrase. It is not volume of production, or gross largeness of revenue, which makes a nation great. It is the proportion of her revenue to her population, and in that respect some of the smallest States are the most happily situated. The need of a large army alone justifies complaints about a falling birth-rate, and it is monstrous that we should lay this strain on parents merely in order to produce “fodder for cannon.” The actual need of each country, as long as the military system lasts, must, of course, be met, but—apart from the hope that we will soon cast off the greater part of this military burden—two circumstances show that we have not here a sound and permanent social need. The birth-rate is falling in all civilised countries, and will eventually reach a common low level; and the war has shown us that a nation with a reduced population may, like any nation with a small population, find compensation for its weakness in alliances.
The truth is that the premature advance of France in restricting its birth-rate has led to a general fallacy. France exposed itself to a particular danger in face of Germany, and this special weakness of France was converted into the general statement that any nation which reduces its birth-rate is in danger. Not only is the general statement untrue, but the particular case of France is very carelessly conceived. After 1871 the German Empire had such an advantage in population over France, and (until 1895) so much less need of maintaining a fleet, that even a full birth-rate would not have equipped France confidently for a combat. In any case, we come back always to military needs, and we may trust that these will not long impose their terrible strain on civilisation. There is, apart from them, no reason why the birth-rate should not sink in every country to the level of the death-rate, and in many countries even lower.
On the other hand, the superficial folk who cry for heavy maternity and full cradles overlook a very important social fact. I am thinking chiefly of the men and women who denounce in principle the practice of restricting births. Not only do they ignore the overcrowding of our trades and professions,—and they are usually amongst the most reluctant to organise them,—but they fail to notice that the increasing application of science and humane sentiment to our modes of living threatens the earth, as a whole, with enormous over-population, unless the birth-rate be checked. The population of England has increased nearly fourfold in the past hundred years, whereas it had little more than doubled in the previous two hundred years. The factors which are responsible for this vast modern increase are becoming more active every decade, and are spreading over the world. How will the population of Europe and Asia stand when they are fully applied in Russia, China, and India? Within twenty years the United States, according to its agricultural experts, will have as large a population as it can support, and we have already seen Germany very largely thrust into war because of its superabundant population. The future is full of peril and misery if we continue to allow this military demand for men to masquerade as a sound and permanent human need. The birth-ratemustbe checked.
We must therefore refuse to allow the path of reform to be obstructed by either the priest or the drill-sergeant. If ever a time comes when some real interest of the race is endangered by too low a birth-rate, we may trust the race to see to it. Conservatives often imagine that those who would reform life on common-sense lines are devoid of sentiment. They confuse sentiment and sentimentality, which is sentiment out of accord with reason. The man of the future will be, in my judgment, not less, but more emotional than the man of to-day; but he will not allow ancient prejudices and mere phrases to have the unchecked support of his feelings. It will not be enough to tell him that divorce is increasing, or the birth-rate falling, or respect for the clergy deteriorating. He will ask the precise value in social terms of your bogy. At present we have, on broad social grounds, much to gain and nothing to lose by a fall of the birth-rate. Indeed, the prospect of a fall is, as far as this economic development alone is concerned, much exaggerated. Millions of employed women have, and will continue to have, children. Under our present system of industry this has undoubtedly certain risks and burdens; under the organised system of employment for which I plead it will be possible to adjust employment to maternal functions.
And this brings me to the cardinal issue of the whole controversy: the economic position of the married woman or the mother. Let us face this graver position quite candidly. The industrial disorganisation will right itself in the course of time. The middle-class father of our time whose daughter does a certain amount of work, not in order to relieve his pocket, but in order to buy additional luxuries for herself, has assuredly a grievance. She takes part of a man’s work and pay, yet leaves on him the old burden of maintenance. She makes matters worse by accepting a low wage, because she is not self-maintaining. I am assuming that women will become independent economic units, and that the rate of payment will be—equal wage for equal service.
But the position of the married woman, or of the independent woman who undertakes maternal functions, forms a special and difficult problem, which is pressing upon us more heavily every decade. There is spreading rapidly through the civilised world a feeling of rebellion against the economic dependence of wife or husband. No Conservative argumentation, no censure of new ideas, no religious preaching of self-sacrifice for a doubtful reward in heaven, will relieve us of this difficulty. Educated women—statistics of college-taught women are available—are increasingly rebelling against the subjection or inferiority which this economic dependence seems to entail. It is the chief motive of the general demand for economic independence (or an independent place in the industrial world) and has much to do with the revolt against marriage itself. Whether or no we adopt new ideals of social life, this revolt will spread.
One very quickly sees that it is not so much marriage as the traditional practice of husbands which is chiefly responsible for the revolt. The practice varies considerably, but, apart from a small class in which the wife brings with her or earns an independent income, it is still generally true to say that the wife receives what the husband chooses to give. Now it is plain that this difficulty may be met in a very large proportion of cases by an equitable voluntary agreement. Various domestic experiments of the kind are being tried, and a comparison of experiences would be useful. Many people are agreed in the just view that, since the wife works at home while the husband works abroad, all income is joint income. A common fund, accessible to both, is assigned for household and saving, and an equal and fixed personal share is taken by each from the income or wage. Such an arrangement is quite easily practised by middle-class people, and it seems to me to remove every legitimate suspicion of ignominy from the wife’s position.
When unmarried women have secured economic independence they will be able to demand some such arrangement before marrying. The kind of “modesty” which would prevent a woman from having an understanding before marriage in regard to income and children is a very costly and foolish luxury. Let them insist that the ritual words, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” must mean something more than that they shall have chocolates and pretty dressesifthey humour the moods of a husband. Our law, which secures for a wife full maintenance when she has ceased to do any work for it (after a separation), but has no interest in her when she is working dutifully for twelve or fourteen hours a day, is infinitely more dangerous to marriage than are the puritan assaults of Mr. G. B. Shaw. In any case, a voluntary agreement that a wife has access to the bank and cash-box, and a right to take for personal use the same sum as her husband, removes all need of asking money from a husband (which is justly odious to many women), and makes a wife economically independent in any important sense of the word.
But it would be futile to hope either that the majority of men will thus surrender their privileged position, or that all women will recognise even such an arrangement as economic independence. A grave conflict undoubtedly lies before us, and there will be an increasing demand for the State-endowment of wifehood, or at least of motherhood. The suffrage movement has naturally inflamed the difficulty by educating women in a sense of grievance. Indeed, it seems to many of us that Feminist writers have at times gone far beyond legitimate grievances and set up fictitious and mischievous standards. This is a very common development of propagandist movements which meet with a prolonged resistance. The first generation of agitators says the obvious and just things in regard to the reform: the next generation must revive the jaded sentiment with stimulating novelties and exaggerations. It seems to me one of these morbid exaggerations to speak of marriage as “legalised prostitution”; to imagine that one is “selling one’s body” to a man, or receiving payment for ministering to his “lust.” One Feminist writer of some influence, and some pretension to knowledge of science, has actually compared the human male very unfavourably with all other male animals in the world, on the ground that the latter are content with a restricted period of “rut”!
This mixture of ancient Puritanism and advanced sociology is as incongruous as it is mischievous. A woman who sincerely regards sex-pleasure in the way generally implied by the use of the word “lust”—a woman who has not the same healthy desire of it as her partner—has no right to marry: except, of course, to marry a man with similarly antique views. A wife of such a kind may very well consider that she is being “paid” to surrender her body. The normal wife is not paid for that at all. She is paid—if there is any paying—to care for the home and her children: which is as well earned a payment as the fee of a lawyer. And from the sentimental point of view it does not make a particle of difference whether she is paid out of her husband’s income or out of the coffers of the State. She would still “sell her body,” if there is any selling of body. But there is not. Maternity and sex-pleasure are entirely different matters.
I am deliberately trying to undermine the plea for the endowment of motherhood, because the proposal seems to me to present very grave difficulties which even so penetrating a sociologist as Mr. H. G. Wells has, apparently, not appreciated. Mr. Wells is, of course, in a very different position from the Feminist writers who advocate the complete endowment or maintenance of wives or mothers by the State. Such a scheme would cost about £300,000,000 a year, and need not be discussed. Mr. Wells suggests rather a modest contribution per child born (leaving out, I assume, wealthier mothers); a practicable scheme, with much in its favour. Yet it seems to me that such endowment would mean that we would encourage the weakest in will, the most sensual, the least intelligent and least provident of our people, to breed. Intelligent women would not abandon the practice of restricting births because the State offered them a few shillings per child. The better class—whether of manual or professional workers—would have to pay for the undesirable fertility of the worst class. We are just beginning to realise that quality of children is more precious than quantity, and the endowment of motherhood would not encourage this saner view. The kind of brute who is at present restrained by the paternity-law would be restrained no longer: the rougher type of husband—a very numerous type—would pay so much less to his wife when he found the State contributing (either in cash or kind) to her: the man who at present practises restriction, not out of consideration for his wife and family, but to have more shillings for himself, would cease to practise it, and lay a greater burden on his wife.
But, while there seem to be such grave objections to the endowment of motherhood that we do better to strengthen women in their individual demand of justice, we must remember that the wife will have the advantage of other changes in the home. Domestic service is becoming more and more repugnant to girls, and some form of co-operative and efficient housekeeping, with common servants and restaurant, will be adopted. Some day a photograph of a twentieth-century suburb will provoke a smile. Perhaps the museum of the future will set up models of our establishments, just as we set up in our ethnographical galleries models of a Kaffir or a Papuan household. Boys and girls will gaze with admiring delight at the naïveté of the model: a thousand brick boxes, separated by a thousand little gardens, with three thousand little chimneys smoking, a thousand amateur cooks perspiring over a thousand fires, and a thousand inefficient servant-girls flirting with the servants of rival butchers and dairymen. The common nursery will especially relieve the mother and lower the death-rate. The State will one day have an interest in seeing that each babe ushered into the world, at such pain and sacrifice, becomes a useful citizen. If any mothers care to entrust the child more fully to it, the State will find it profitable to respond. These things can be arranged without more detriment to parental affection than there is in the case of women—often women who write beautiful things in defence of the old tradition—who have nurses for the child and send it later to a distant school for the greater part of the year.