{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_67662/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_67662","id":"gutenberg_67662","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67662","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches","Category: Gender & Sexuality Studies","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Moral conditions","Sex","Women -- Social conditions"],"text":"OUR\n  CHANGING MORALITY\n  _A SYMPOSIUM_\n\n  EDITED BY\n  FREDA KIRCHWEY\n\n\n  ALBERT & CHARLES BONI\n  NEW YORK      1924\n\n\n\n\n  COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALBERT & CHARLES BONI, INC.\n\n  _Printed in the United States of America by_\n  J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK\n\n\n\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nBY FREDA KIRCHWEY\n\n\nThe subject of sex has been treated in this generation with a strange,\nrather panic-stricken lack of balance. Obscenity hawks its old wares\nat one end of the road and dogmatic piety shouts warnings at the\nother--while between is chaos. And the chaos extends beyond ideas and\ntalk, beyond novels and scenarios and Sunday feature stories, into the\nrealm of actual conduct. Religion has indeed found substantial matter\nfor its words of caution and disapproval: never in recent generations\nhave human beings so floundered about outside the ropes of social and\nreligious sanctions.\n\nBut while John Roach Straton and Billy Sunday point a pleasant way\ntoward hell, while sensationalism finds in new manners of life subject\nfor five-inch headlines, and while modern novelists make their modern\ncharacters stumble through pages of inner conflict to ends of darkness\nand desperation, a few people are at work quietly sorting out the\nelements of chaos and holding fragments of conduct up in the sun and\nair to find what they really are made of.\n\nNo one seeks to argue chaos away. Certainly Mr. Straton and Mr. Sunday\nare right: Men and women are ignoring old laws. In their relations\nwith each other they are living according to tangled, conflicting\ncodes. Remnants of early admonitions and relationships, the dictates of\ncustom, the behavior of their friends, their own tastes and desires,\nelusive dreams of a loveliness not provided for by rules--all these are\nscrambling to fill the gap that was left when Right and Wrong finally\nfollowed the other absolute monarchs to an empty, nominal existence\nsomewhere in exile. But the traditional, ministerial method with chaos\nwas not Jehovah\u2019s method. He brought order and light into the world;\nbut the way of our current moralists has been to clamp down the hatches\neven though \u201csin\u201d bubbled beneath. A few courageous, matter-of-fact\nglances into the depths have been embodied in the articles in this\nvolume. The men and women who have written them have approached the\nsubject variously; the fragments they have brought up to examine do\nnot necessarily fit together. But none of these writers is afraid to\nsaunter up to the edge and see what moral disorder looks like.\n\nSome of them find it thoroughly disagreeable. They believe that old\nlaws were born of old desires and find their sanctions in the emotions\nof men. They seek for new and rational ways back to the sort of\nstability provided by the traditional relationships of men and women.\nOthers find in contemporary manners merely the disorder incident to\nreconstruction; they find there tentative beginnings rather than\nruinous endings. They see chaos as an interesting laboratory, filled\nwith strange ferments and the pungent odors of new compounds. None of\nthese writers offers dogmatic conclusions--and in this they differ\ndelightfully from our most popular novelists and preachers. They\npresent facts, they analyze and interpret; they suggest directions,\nthey even prophesy. But they never announce or warn or reprove. When\nthese chapters first appeared as articles in _The Nation_ it became\nevident that this exercise of thought was itself commonly held to be\na simple blasphemy. Letters from readers came in scores charging the\narticles with the sin of intelligence where only faith and conformity\nwere tolerable. Dogma is so deep in the bone of even the more\nenlightened and adult members of our modern world that the most modest\ndoubt regarding the success of monogamy or the virtue of chastity\nbecomes in some way an insult to Moses or Saint Paul.\n\nIt is interesting to see how many of the authors of this group of\narticles find a connection between the changing standards of sex\nbehavior and the increasing freedom of women. Are women forcing this\nchange? Or does freedom itself make change inevitable? Possibly only\nthe woman in the isolation of the home is able to sustain the double\nload of her own virtue and her husband\u2019s ideals. Out in the world,\nin contact and competition with men, she is forced to discriminate;\nquestions are thrust upon her. The old rules fail to work; bewildering\ninconsistencies confront her. Things that were sure become unsure. And\nslowly, clumsily, she is trying to construct a way out to a new sort of\ncertainty in life; she is seeking something to take the place of the\nburden of solemn ideals and reverential attitudes that rolled off her\nshoulders when she emerged. That some such process may be going on is\nhinted at in more than one of these articles. Certainly, of the factors\ninvolved in modern sex relations, women and economic conditions are the\ntwo that have suffered the most revolutionary change; and men\u2019s morals\nmust largely shape themselves to the patterns laid down by these two\nmasters of life.\n\nMuch has been said about sex--and everything remains to be said.\nLargely, new conclusions will be reached through new processes of\nliving. People will act--and then a new code will grow up. But along\nthe way guidance and interpretation are deeply needed, if only to take\nthe place of the pious imprecations of those who fear life and hate the\ndangers and uncertainties of thought and emotion.\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n                                     PAGE\n\n  INTRODUCTION                          v\n  _By Freda Kirchwey_\n\n  STYLES IN ETHICS                      3\n  _By Bertrand Russell_\n\n  MODERN MARRIAGE                      19\n  _By Arthur Garfield Hays_\n\n  CHANGES IN SEX RELATIONS             37\n  _By Elsie Clews Parsons_\n\n  TOWARD MONOGAMY                      53\n  _By Charlotte Perkins Gilman_\n\n  WOMEN--FREE FOR WHAT?                69\n  _By Edwin Muir_\n\n  VIRTUE AND WOMEN                     85\n  _By Isabel Leavenworth_\n\n  WHERE ARE THE FEMALE GENIUSES?      107\n  _By Sylvia Kopald_\n\n  MAN AND WOMAN AS CREATORS           129\n  _By Alexander Goldenweiser_\n\n  DOMINANT SEXES                      147\n  _By M. Vaerting_\n\n  MODERN LOVE AND MODERN FICTION      167\n  _By J. W. Krutch_\n\n  CAN MEN AND WOMEN BE FRIENDS?       183\n  _By Floyd Dell_\n\n  LOVE AND MARRIAGE                   197\n  _By Ludwig Lewisohn_\n\n  COMMUNIST PURITANS                  207\n  _By Louis Fischer_\n\n  STEREOTYPES                         219\n  _By Florence Guy Seabury_\n\n  WOMEN AND THE NEW MORALITY          235\n  _By Beatrice M. Hinkle_\n\n\n\n\n  Styles in Ethics\n  By Bertrand Russell\n\n\n\n\nHon. Bertrand Arthur William Russell\n\n_is a mathematician, writer, and lecturer on international affairs and\nproblems of government. Born at Trellech, England, May 18th, 1872.\nF.R.S. 1908; Late Lecturer and Fellow Trinity College, Cambridge. Heir\npresumptive to 2nd Earl Russell. Author of \u201cGerman Social Democracy,\u201d\n1896; \u201cEssay on the Foundation of Geometry,\u201d 1897; \u201cPhilosophy of\nLeibnitz,\u201d 1900; \u201cPrinciples of Mathematics,\u201d 1903; with D. A. N.\nWhitehead, \u201cPrincipia Mathematica,\u201d 1910; \u201cOur Knowledge of the\nExternal World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy,\u201d 1914;\n\u201cPrinciples of Social Reconstruction,\u201d 1917; \u201cWhy Men Fight,\u201d 1917;\n\u201cMysticism and Logic,\u201d 1918; \u201cRoads to Freedom,\u201d 1918; \u201cIntroduction\nto Mathematical Philosophy,\u201d 1919; \u201cThe Practice and Theory of\nBolshevism,\u201d 1920; \u201cThe Analysis of the Mind,\u201d 1921; \u201cThe Problem of\nChina,\u201d 1922; \u201cThe A. B. C. of Atoms,\u201d 1923; \u201cIcarus, or the Future of\nScience,\u201d 1924._\n\n\n\n\nOUR CHANGING MORALITY\n\n\n\n\nSTYLES IN ETHICS\n\nBY BERTRAND RUSSELL\n\n\nIn all ages and nations positive morality has consisted almost wholly\nof prohibitions of various classes of actions, with the addition\nof a small number of commands to perform certain other actions.\nThe Jews, for example, prohibited murder and theft, adultery and\nincest, the eating of pork and seething the kid in its mother\u2019s\nmilk. To us the last two precepts may seem less important than the\nothers, but religious Jews have observed them far more scrupulously\nthan what seem to us fundamental principles of morality. South Sea\nIslanders could imagine nothing more utterly wicked than eating\nout of a vessel reserved for the use of the chief. My friend Dr.\nBrogan made a statistical investigation into the ethical valuations\nof undergraduates in certain American colleges. Most considered\nSabbath-breaking more wicked than lying, and extra-conjugal sexual\nrelations more wicked than murder. The Japanese consider disobedience\nto parents the most atrocious of crimes. I was once at a charming spot\non the outskirts of Kioto with several Japanese socialists, men who\nwere among the most advanced thinkers in the country. They told me that\na certain well beside which we were standing was a favorite spot for\nsuicides, which were very frequent. When I asked why so many occurred\nthey replied that most were those of young people in love whose parents\nhad forbidden them to marry. To my suggestion that perhaps it would\nbe better if parents had less power they all returned an emphatic\nnegative. To Dr. Brogan\u2019s undergraduates this power of Japanese parents\nto forbid love would seem monstrous, but the similar power of husbands\nor wives would seem a matter of course. Neither they nor the Japanese\nwould examine the question rationally; both would decide unthinkingly\non the basis of moral precepts learned in youth.\n\nWhen we study in the works of anthropologists the moral precepts which\nmen have considered binding in different times and places we find the\nmost bewildering variety. It is quite obvious to any modern reader\nthat most of these customs are absurd. The Aztecs held that it was a\nduty to sacrifice and eat enemies captured in war, since otherwise\nthe light of the sun would go out. The Book of Leviticus enjoins that\nwhen a married man dies without children his brother shall marry the\nwidow, and the first son born shall count as the dead man\u2019s son. The\nRomans, the Chinese, and many other nations secured a similar result by\nadoption. This custom originated in ancestor-worship; it was thought\nthat the ghost would make himself a nuisance unless he had descendants\n(real or putative) to worship him. In India the remarriage of widows\nis traditionally considered something too horrible to contemplate.\nMany primitive races feel horror at the thought of marrying any one\nbelonging to one\u2019s own totem, though there may be only the most distant\nblood-relationship. After studying these various customs it begins at\nlast to occur to the reader that possibly the customs of his own age\nand nation are not eternal, divine ordinances, but are susceptible\nof change, and even, in some respects, of improvement. Books such as\nWestermarck\u2019s \u201cHistory of Human Marriage\u201d or M\u00fcller-Lyer\u2019s \u201cPhasen\nder Liebe,\u201d which relate in a scientific spirit the marriage customs\nthat have existed and the reasons which have led to their growth and\ndecay, produce evidence which must convince any rational mind that\nour own customs are sure to change and that there is no reason to\nexpect a change to be harmful. It thus becomes impossible to cling to\nthe position of many who are earnest advocates of _political_ reform\nand yet hold that reform in our moral precepts is not needed. Moral\nprecepts, like everything else, can be improved, and the true reformer\nwill be as open-minded in regard to them as in regard to other matters.\n\nM\u00fcller-Lyer, from the point of view of family institutions, divides\nthe history of civilization into three periods--the clan period, the\nfamily period, and the personal period. Of these the last is only now\nbeginning; the other two are each divided into three stages--early,\nmiddle, and late. He shows that sexual and family ethics have at all\ntimes been dominated by economic considerations; hunting, pastoral,\nagricultural, and industrial tribes or nations have each their own\nspecial kinds of institutions. Economic causes determine whether a\ntribe will practice polygamy, polyandry, group marriage, or monogamy,\nand whether monogamy will be lifelong or dissoluble. Whatever the\nprevailing practice in a tribe it is thought to be the only one\ncompatible with virtue, and all departures from it are regarded with\nmoral horror. Owing to the force of custom it may take a long time for\ninstitutions to adapt themselves to economic circumstances; the process\nof adaptation may take centuries. Christian sexual ethics, according to\nthis author, belong to the middle-family period; the personal period,\nnow beginning, has not yet been embodied in the laws of most Christian\ncountries, and even the late-family period, since it admits divorce\nunder certain circumstances, involves an ethic to which the church is\nusually opposed.\n\nM\u00fcller-Lyer suggests a general law to the effect that where the state\nis strong the family is weak and the position of women is good,\nwhereas where the state is weak the family is strong and the position\nof women is bad. It is of course obvious that where the family is\nstrong the position of women must be bad, and vice versa, but the\nconnection of these with the strength or weakness of the state is less\nobvious, though probably in the main no less true. Traditional China\nand Japan afforded good instances. In both the state was much weaker\nthan in modern Europe, the family much stronger, and the position of\nwomen much worse. It is true that in modern Japan the state is very\nstrong, yet the family also is strong and the position of women is\nbad; but this is a transitional condition. The whole tendency in Japan\nis for the family to grow weaker and the position of women to grow\nbetter. This tendency encounters grave difficulties. I met in Japan\nonly one woman who appeared to be what we should consider emancipated\nin the West--she was charming, beautiful, high-minded, and prepared to\nmake any sacrifice for her principles. After the earthquake in Tokio\nthe officer in charge of the forces concerned in keeping order in the\ndistrict where she lived seized her and the man with whom she lived\nin a free union and her twelve-year-old nephew, whom he believed to be\nher son; he took them to the police station and there murdered them\nby slow strangulation, taking about ten minutes over each except the\nboy. In his account of the matter he stated that he had not had much\ndifficulty with the boy, because he had succeeded in making friends\nwith him on the way to the police station. The boy was an American\ncitizen. At the funeral, the remains of all three were seized by armed\nreactionaries and destroyed, with the passive acquiescence of the\npolice. The question whether the murderer deserved well of his country\nis now set in schools, half the children answering affirmatively.\nWe have here a dramatic confrontation of middle-family ethics with\npersonal ethics. The officer\u2019s views were those of feudalism, which is\na middle-family system; his victims\u2019 views were those of the nascent\npersonal period. The Japanese state, which belongs to the late-family\nperiod, disapproved of both.\n\nThe middle-family system involves cruelty and persecution. The\nindissolubility of marriage results in appalling misery for the wives\nof drunkards, sadists, and brutes of all kinds, as well as great\nunhappiness for many men and the unedifying spectacle of daily quarrels\nfor the unfortunate children of ill-assorted couples. It involves also\nan immense amount of prostitution, with its inevitable consequence of\nwidespread venereal disease. It makes marriage, in most cases, a matter\nof financial bargain between parents, and virtually proscribes love.\nIt considers sexual intercourse always justifiable within marriage,\neven if no mutual affection exists. It is impossible to be too thankful\nthat this system is nearly extinct in the Western nations (except\nFrance). But it is foolish to pretend that this ideal held by the\nCatholic church and in some degree by most Protestant churches is a\nlofty one. It is intolerant, gross, cruel, and hostile to all the best\npotentialities of human nature. Nothing is gained by continuing to pay\nlip-service to this musty Moloch.\n\nThe American attitude on marriage is curious. America, in the main,\ndoes not object to easy divorce laws, and is tolerant of those who\navail themselves of them. But it holds that those who live in\ncountries where divorce is difficult or impossible ought to submit to\nhardships from which Americans are exempt, and deserve to be held up to\nobloquy if they do not do so. An interesting example of this attitude\nwas afforded by the treatment of Gorki when he visited the United\nStates.\n\nThere are two different lines of argument by which it is possible to\nattack the general belief that there are universal absolute rules of\nmoral conduct, and that any one who infringes them is wicked. One\nline of argument emerges from the anthropological facts which we have\nalready considered. Broadly speaking the views of the average man on\nsexual ethics are those appropriate to the economic system existing\nin the time of his great-grandfather. Morality has varied as economic\nsystems have varied, lagging always about three generations behind. As\nsoon as people realize this they find it impossible to suppose that\nthe particular brand of marriage customs prevailing in their own age\nand nation represents eternal verities, whereas all earlier and later\nmarriage customs, and all those prevailing in other latitudes and\nlongitudes, are vicious and degraded. This shows that we ought to be\nprepared for changes in marriage customs, but does not tell us what\nchanges we ought to desire.\n\nThe second line of argument is more positive and more important.\nPopular morality--including that of the churches, though not that of\nthe great mystics--lays down rules of conduct rather than ends of life.\nThe morality that ought to exist would lay down ends of life rather\nthan rules of conduct. Christ says: \u201cThou shalt love thy neighbor as\nthyself\u201d; this lays down one of the ends of life. The Decalogue says:\n\u201cRemember that thou keep holy the Sabbath Day\u201d; this lays down a rule\nof action. Christ\u2019s conduct to the woman taken in adultery showed the\nconflict between love and moral rules. All his priests, down to our own\nday, have gone directly contrary to his teachings on this point, and\nhave shown themselves invariably willing to cast the first stone. The\nbelief in the importance of rules of conduct is superstitious; what\nis important is to care for good ends. A good man is a man who cares\nfor the happiness of his relations and friends, and, if possible, for\nthat of mankind in general, or, again, a man who cares for art and\nscience. Whether such a man obeys the moral rules laid down by the Jews\nthousands of years ago is quite unimportant. Moreover a man may obey\nall these rules and yet be extremely bad.\n\nLet us take some illustrations. I have a friend, a high-minded man,\nwho has taken part in arduous and dangerous enterprises of great\npublic importance and is almost unbelievably kind in all his private\nrelations. This man has a wife who is a dipsomaniac, who has become\nimbecile, and has to be kept in an institution. She cannot divorce him\nbecause she is imbecile; he cannot divorce her because she affords\nhim no ground for divorce. He does not consider himself morally bound\nto her and is therefore, from a conventional point of view, a wicked\nman. On the other hand a man who is perpetually drunk, who kicks his\nwife when she is pregnant, and begets ten imbecile children, is not\ngenerally regarded as particularly wicked. A business man who is\ngenerous to all his employees but falls in love with his stenographer\nis wicked; another who bullies his employees but is faithful to his\nwife is virtuous. This attitude is rank superstition, and it is high\ntime that it was got rid of.\n\nSexual morality, freed from superstition, is a simple matter. Fraud and\ndeceit, assault, seduction of persons under age, are proper matters for\nthe criminal law. Relations between adults who are free agents are a\nprivate matter, and should not be interfered with either by the law or\nby public opinion, because no outsider can know whether they are good\nor bad. When children are involved the state becomes interested to the\nextent of seeing that they are properly educated and cared for, and it\nought to insure that the father does his duty by them in the way of\nmaintenance. But neither the state nor public opinion ought to insist\non the parents living together if they are incompatible; the spectacle\nof parents\u2019 quarrels is far worse for children than the separation of\nthe parents could possibly be.\n\nThe ideal to be aimed at is not life-long monogamy enforced by legal\nor social penalties. The ideal to be aimed at is that all sexual\nintercourse should spring from the free impulse of both parties, based\nupon mutual inclination and nothing else. At present a woman who sells\nherself successively to different men is branded as a prostitute,\nwhereas a woman who sells herself for life to one rich man whom she\ndoes not love becomes a respected society leader. The one is exactly\nas bad as the other. The individual should not be condemned in either\ncase; but the institutions producing the individual\u2019s action should be\ncondemned equally in both cases. The cramping of love by institutions\nis one of the major evils of the world. Every person who allows himself\nto think that an adulterer must be wicked adds his stone to the prison\nin which the source of poetry and beauty and life is incarcerated by\n\u201cpriests in black gowns.\u201d\n\nPerhaps there is not, strictly speaking, any such thing as \u201cscientific\u201d\nethics. It is not the province of science to decide on the ends of\nlife. Science can show that an ethic is unscientific, in the sense that\nit does not minister to any desired end. Science also can show how to\nbring the interest of the individual into harmony with that of society.\nWe make laws against theft, in order that theft may become contrary to\nself-interest. We might, on the same ground, make laws to diminish the\nnumber of imbecile children born into the world. There is no evidence\nthat existing marriage laws, particularly where they are very strict,\nserve any social purpose; in this sense we may say that they are\nunscientific. But to proclaim the ends of life, and make men conscious\nof their value, is not the business of science; it is the business of\nthe mystic, the artist, and the poet.\n\n\n\n\nModern Marriage and Ancient Laws\n\nBy Arthur Garfield Hays\n\n\nArthur Garfield Hays\n\n_is an attorney practicing in New York City. He was manager of the New\nYork State La Follette campaign, 1924._\n\n\n\n\nMODERN MARRIAGE AND ANCIENT LAWS\n\nBY ARTHUR GARFIELD HAYS\n\n\n\u201cAre we married?\u201d This was a query recently put to a New York lawyer.\nThe woman wanted to have been married, but wished not to be married\nany longer; at the same time she rather objected to a divorce. The man\ndid not care much about it, so long as he could marry, or marry again,\nwithout too much inconvenience arising from the earlier entanglement.\nThe lawyer\u2019s answer was so obvious that it might have been made by a\nlayman: \u201cHow do I know?\u201d\n\nThe two had been living together, had called each other husband and\nwife, and had in general passed as such, but at the beginning of the\nrelationship each had felt that if one wanted to be free the other\nwould not hold him or her; it was agreed that they should have no\nfinancial responsibility for each other and that there should be\nnothing about the arrangement which would make it last \u201ctill death\ndo us part.\u201d In speaking of themselves as \u201chusband and wife\u201d they had\nintended the words to represent merely a formula of their own.\n\nNow common-law marriage as recognized in New York State consists in a\nmeeting of the minds--a contract. Thus, if two people live together\nas husband and wife this may be evidence of a common-law marriage. No\nformal agreement is necessary. But if there has not been even a private\nagreement of marriage their living together would be unimportant. If\nthey wished to separate they would need no divorce, for they would\nnever have been married. By passing as husband and wife they might\ngain the social advantages that come from a recognized relationship,\nand, since there had been no definite agreement, they might save the\ninconvenience of divorce if they wished to separate. Difficulty arises\nonly when both parties do not agree that there was no agreement.\nSometimes one party claims there was and the other that there was not.\nThen the very indefiniteness of the tie means added difficulty and\npublicity in breaking it.\n\nIn order to avoid future disagreement one couple made a contract in\nwhich they stated that they lived as husband and wife in order to avoid\nsocial stigma, but that as between themselves there was no agreement\nof marriage. The situation was trying because they always felt they\nwere living a lie. Their answer was that society foolishly demanded\neither a penalty or a form and they preferred to provide the form.\nFortunately, neither ever had to swear to the status and they felt that\nthis contract--which provided for future maintenance of the wife and\ncustody of the children--solved the problem or doubt of a life-long\nrelationship. To those who made ethical objection, they answered that\nthey were willing to contract on matters which concerned their wills,\nbut knew it was contrary to human nature to contract on matters which\nconcerned their emotions.\n\nNot long ago in New York City a young woman who had scruples about\npromising to love a man forever expressed to the city clerk her\nunwillingness to use the form of marriage ceremony which he had\nproduced committing her to love, honor, and cherish the man for the\nrest of his or her life. She said she was in good faith willing to\ncontract to marry, and that she would do the best she could to make the\nmarriage successful, but that was all; to which the clerk answered that\nif she were entering marriage in that spirit she should not be married\nat all. He was finally persuaded that the parties could be tied merely\nby agreement on her part to become the man\u2019s wife and on his part to\nbecome her husband.\n\nIf the law seems full of vagaries on the problem of entering marriage\nit is still more perplexing and technical when it concerns the question\nwhether or not two people are still legally married when one has\nobtained a supposed divorce--so much so that it is not at all uncommon\nfor a lawyer to be faced by a client asking whether or not he, or she,\nis really married. Some years ago a man was married in Philadelphia\nand later, having separated from his wife, went to New York. She\nobtained a decree of divorce in Pennsylvania, the papers having been\nserved on him in New York. He married again and died a generation\nlater, leaving a considerable fortune and three children by his second\nmarriage. The first wife, or her attorneys, then discovered that the\noriginal divorce was not legal, since the Pennsylvania courts had not\nacquired a jurisdiction which would be recognized in New York. Since\nthe man had left the estate to his \u201cwife,\u201d there were complications.\nAs the question involved the meaning of a will, the matter was one of\nintention and it was not difficult to prove that the deceased intended\nas his beneficiary the woman whom he regarded as his wife. But had\nhe owned real estate at the time of his divorce the first wife might\nhave had a dower interest, and had his status become one of public\nimportance his enemies might successfully have charged him with bigamy.\n\nOrdinarily, people are satisfied with a decree of divorce. It gives\nthem the desired social status. Its technical legality becomes of\nimportance only in connection with estates or the legitimacy of\nchildren. But a difficult question arises in case of remarriage.\nLegality depends upon the jurisdiction of the court. This can be\nacquired by personal service of papers upon the defendant within the\nState or a voluntary submission to the jurisdiction by appearing\nin the case personally or by attorney. But State courts claim and\nrecognize their own jurisdiction even though papers are served outside\nthe State. Under these latter circumstances, suppose a divorce granted\na man in Utah is not recognized in New York. If he remarries in Utah he\nwill have one wife there, while in New York another woman would be his\nwife and he would be obliged to support her there. If his wife in New\nYork married again, she would be guilty of bigamy. In Utah it would be\nhis duty to live with one woman. New York would attempt to make it his\npleasure to live with another, and this on the ground of morality, for,\nalthough, ordinarily, the law of the place of the new marriage (in this\ncase, Utah) would apply, yet this would result in his having two wives\nin New York. So on legal grounds we disregard the divorce, and on moral\ngrounds we negative the second marriage.\n\nForeign divorces raise the question not only of jurisdiction but\nof recognition by treaty of a judgment of the particular foreign\ncountry. For instance, judgments of French courts are not absolutely\nbinding upon the courts of this country, as are the judgments of\nsister-States. In the case of Russia, where any two parties by\nagreement or a single person by request may become divorced, there is\nno treaty whatever. Occasionally, cases arise where persons abroad have\nobtained a decree for a rabbinical divorce. Under the old Jewish custom\na rabbi could pronounce a divorce and the law of the state permitted a\ndecree to be entered upon his pronouncement. Some states and countries\nmake bids for the divorce business; not long ago an advertisement\nappeared announcing that a divorce might be had in Yucatan for $25,\nnot, of course, including the expense of travel. Questions of the\neffect of interlocutory and final judgments, of the provisions of\na divorce decree forbidding remarriage within a certain period, of\nthe _bona fides_ of residence, of the jurisdiction of the court, of\ntreaties with foreign countries may make it difficult to answer the\nquestion whether or not two people are legally married.\n\nAll this confusion represents a beating of wings against a cage--an\nendeavor to obtain a legal paper with a red seal which will avoid a\nsituation which two people find intolerable. We are tending toward a\nnew moral conception of the marriage relationship, well expressed by\nPremier Zahle of Denmark when submitting a new liberal divorce law: \u201cIt\nis based on the fundamental conception that it is morally indefensible\nto maintain a marriage relation by legal statute where all the real\nbonds between the parties are broken. This is a measure which certainly\nmeans a great step forward in the recognition of marriage as a moral\nrelation.\u201d\n\nMarriage is a status resulting from a civil contract, but very few\npeople who enter into it know what this contract is. It assumes\ncertain rights and obligations. What are they? That the wage-earner\nwill provide. This is enforcible, at least theoretically. What else?\nThat the parties live in an emotional and mental state designated by\nan agreement \u201cto love, honor, and cherish,\u201d and, sometimes, \u201cobey.\u201d\nThis is obviously unenforcible. (I make this assertion despite the\nrecent Texas case in which a husband obtained an injunction restraining\nhis wife\u2019s employer from flirting with her.) The contract continues\nfor life, subject to termination for causes which depend chiefly\nupon the place of residence, actual or acquired. If they live in\nSouth Carolina and stay there, the contract is indissoluble. In New\nYork the contract may be terminated for adultery, unless the other\nparty has likewise sought refuge outside of marriage; in Alabama, for\nhabitual drunkenness; in Nevada, for neglect to provide for one year;\nin Kentucky and New Hampshire, for joining a religious sect which\nbelieves marriages unlawful; in New Jersey, for extreme cruelty; in\nWisconsin, if the parties have voluntarily lived separately for five\nyears; in Massachusetts and a host of other States, for desertion; in\nPennsylvania and Oregon, for personal indignities or conduct rendering\nlife burdensome; in Vermont, for intolerable severity; in France, if\nthe parties have other emotional interests; in Denmark, by consent;\nin Russia, by request. Of course, in most of these states there are\nother grounds, but the result is that either party can bring about a\nsituation which permits divorce or can make life so intolerable for\nthe other that he or she consents to it. But these grounds must arise\nsubsequent to marriage; the agreement cannot be made in advance.\n\nIn life the duration of marriage depends upon the desires or consent\nof individuals. In law it is perpetual, subject to termination not\nby agreement made at the outset, or by later consent, but by court\ndecree. At the time of entering into marriage people usually know\nmerely that somehow, somewhere, some time there is a way out if the\nsituation becomes too strained. Technically, since the contract is\nfor life, a divorce is granted for a breach. Thus there is an implied\nterm, as there is in every contract, that relief is granted for a\nbreach--but what constitutes a breach depends not upon the terms of the\ncontract or the law of the place where the contract is made but upon\nthe jurisdiction where relief is sought--a matter of which the parties\nordinarily know nothing when they make the contract. Convention seems\nto demand that the parties know not what they do.\n\nModern society, this summary seems to show, has been moving toward\nfreedom of contract in marriage. Those phases which concern the state,\nsuch as economic provision and children, must be conserved. But time\nwas--and still is in some places--when marriage itself was a tribal\nor a state matter. Then it became a family matter, determined by\nthe parents, and property and family rights and interests were the\nimportant considerations. But parents, knowing by experience that\nthere can be no happiness without security--although there might\nbe unhappiness with it--failed to take into sufficient account the\nemotional content, and, particularly in the Western World, there\ndeveloped a certain freedom of contract in making a choice. To-day,\nwhen people have come to recognize the necessity of sexual and social\ncompatibility, which cannot be determined in advance, there has come\na demand for a further freedom of contract, to which society has\nresponded by more liberal divorce laws. The laws which permit a divorce\nwhere parties have not lived together for a certain length of time make\nthe duration of the marriage relation really a matter of consent. They\nmean in effect that a contract of marriage contains an implied term\nthat it is to continue until the parties consent to its end, and in\nhuman relations this means until one party demands its end.\n\nIf a person proposed that the law recognize a marriage contract which\nwas to continue until either party desired its termination, he would\nbe regarded as a wrecker of our institutions; but society is doing\nthis very thing--obscurely, perhaps, as an after-effect, not as a\npreconceived design; blindly, and not with intelligent forethought.\nMany have suggested that marriages be made harder and divorces easier.\nBut how revolutionary would seem a suggestion that marriage contracts\nbe made in advance, conforming to the teachings of experience,\nproviding for maintenance and custody of children and limited by the\nunderstanding of the parties; that those who, for religious or ethical\nreasons, wished to enter into a life contract be permitted to do so;\nthat those who wished to enter into a contract to terminate by joint\nconsent or at the option of either party likewise be permitted to do\nso? An objection that this would be dangerous assumes that people\nchoose the present form only because compelled to do so. Individuals\nare breaking from the old conventions, and the law, usually a laggard\nby a generation, is following them. In forty-three States desertion is\na ground for divorce; in twenty of them, desertion for one year. In\nseven States, failure or neglect to provide is a ground; in four of\nthem, the period is one year. In some States, if the parties live apart\nfor a certain length of time--in three of them for five years--that\nis ground for divorce. Is not this divorce by agreement? And by\nimplication, since living together requires the willingness of two\nparties, the result is a contract which may be ended by either of the\nparties at any time he or she sees fit--after an intervening cooling\nperiod. Thus does freedom creep in by the back door.\n\nDoes this work harm to society? There is little difference in the\nmarital or social conditions or in the welfare of children in Norway\nand Sweden, where there are liberal laws, and in England, where divorce\nis a long, complicated, and expensive process. No one could discover\nthat he had crossed the State line from New York to Pennsylvania by\nobservation of the state of society, the happiness or apparent duration\nof marriage, the welfare of children, or the social conventions of\nthe people. Yet in Pennsylvania there was one divorce for every 10.2\nmarriages in 1922 and only one for every 22.6 in New York. In South\nCarolina there are no divorces; in Oregon, the number of marriages\nto one divorce was 2.6; in Wyoming, 3.9; in California, 5.1. In the\nDistrict of Columbia, the banner section, there were 35.8 marriages\nto one divorce. There, as in New York, the only ground is adultery.\nYet San Francisco society seems as stable as that of Washington. Of\ncourse, the figures do not mean that seven times as many Washington\ncouples as California couples, and four times as many New York couples,\nmake a success of marriage or live together when it has ceased to be a\nsuccess; but rather, that New Yorkers and Washingtonians solve their\nmarital troubles elsewhere than at home. Thus, in Nevada in 1922 there\nwere more divorces than marriages, because people married in other\nStates repented in Nevada.\n\nWhatever effect it may have on society, the extension of grounds for\ndivorce which has taken place in the last decade, and the modern\nimprovement in communication and travel, which opens other States or\nforeign countries to an increasing number, brings about a situation\nby which people, though not free to contract, do avail themselves\nof means which have the same effect. Revolutionary changes occur\nunnoticed, while our delusions persist and our sense of conservatism is\ngratified.\n\n\n\n\nChanges in Sex Relations\n\nBy Elsie Clews Parsons\n\n\n\n\nElsie Clews Parsons\n\n_is widely known as an anthropologist and writer. She has contributed\nlargely to scientific journals and in 1922 edited the volume on\nAmerican Indian Life by various students of the subject. Graduated\nfrom Barnard 1896; Ph.D. Columbia 1899. Fellow and Lecturer in\nSociology at Barnard; Lecturer in Anthropology in New School for\nSocial Research. She is editor of the_ Journal of American Folklore;\n_Treasurer of American Ethnological Society; President of Folk Lore\nSociety. Is author of \u201cThe Family\u201d; \u201cThe Old-Fashioned Woman\u201d; \u201cFear\nand Conventionality\u201d; \u201cSocial Freedom\u201d and \u201cSocial Rule.\u201d_\n\n\n\n\nCHANGES IN SEX RELATIONS\n\nBY ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS\n\n\nThe other day I listened to a conversation on marriage and divorce\nbetween a well-known feminist, her daughter, and an Episcopal\nclergyman. The celibate cleric and the younger woman were in fair\naccord: the institution of marriage was invaluable to society and had\nto be protected. Let there be no divorce, said the cleric, on any\nground, at least within the church; children should be cared for by\nboth parents, divorce being sought only as an ultimate recourse, said\nthe girl, who was two years married and had a son.\n\nThe feminist was biding her time. Finally she said: \u201cSo much for the\ninstitution. What of the actual sex life? No divorce and continence or\nno divorce and intimacy with another?\u201d\n\n\u201cThe first, of course,\u201d said the cleric.\n\n\u201cNot at all; the second,\u201d said the girl. \u201cAnd you, mother?\u201d\n\n\u201cOh, on the whole I\u2019m for the brittle marriage as against the lax, the\nAmerican way against the European. But most of all I am for tolerance\nin sex relations and for respecting privacy. Why not all kinds of\nrelations for all kinds of persons? Just as there are now, but with\nrespect or tolerance for the individual and without hypocrisy.\u201d\n\n\u201cEven if we did not agree,\u201d the cleric said later to the feminist, \u201cwe\ncould talk about it as twenty years ago we could not. So much to the\ngood.\u201d\n\n\u201cSo much to the bad,\u201d said the girl\u2019s father, still later; \u201cbetter for\nall of us the old reserve.\u201d The speaker was a lawyer with divorce cases\nin his practice.\n\nHad we not here a mingling of currents from law, the church, feminism,\nand the younger generation which illustrates what divergency of\nattitude on sex and sex institutions or practices may exist to-day,\neven within the same cultural and local circle? Include circles of\ndifferent education and locality and although the range of difference\nwould be no larger the expressions of opinion would vary. Is the\nvariation in opinion due to variation in experience or is it due\nto that contemporaneous lifting of the taboo on discussion which\ncharacterizes not only our talk about sex but about other interests as\nwell? A remarkable and indisputable change of attitude, this release\nfrom verbal taboo, which often gives us a sense of change in general\ngreater perhaps than the facts themselves warrant.\n\nIn the conversation I quoted the women were on the whole the radicals,\nthe men on the whole the conservatives. This alignment was far from\ntypical, I think, and yet in contemporaneous life, whether or not\nin opinion, women have been the exponents of cultural change in sex\nrelations. The increase in the divorce rate, it seems probable, has\nbeen effected predominantly by women; about two-thirds of the total\nnumber of divorces are granted to women. (Of course the tradition that\nit is decent for the man to let the woman get the divorce must not be\nignored in this connection.) This increase in divorce may indicate a\nchanging attitude toward the criteria of marriage on the part of women.\nWomen may be demanding more of marriage than in the day when they had\nlittle to expect but marriage. In other words, marriage standards mount\nas marriage has other relations to compete with. At any rate in the\ntalk of women it seems to me that desire for integral satisfaction\nin marriage is more consciously or realistically expressed than ever\nbefore. Emotional and sexual appeasements are considered as well as\nsocial or economic advantage. What of the part played by women in\nchanges in sex relations outside marriage?\n\nUnfortunately, we have no dependable statistics of prostitution, but\nwhatever decrease there has been in prostitution, and opinion is that\nwith the passing of segregated districts there has been a decrease,\nmay be, on the whole, put down to women, if only indirectly through an\nincrease in illicit relations. Illicit relations are not subject to\nstatistics, but that there has been an increase in them in this country\nin this century will be generally accepted, likewise that in this, too,\nthe increase is due to women, alike more willing to participate in such\nrelations and more tolerant of them in others. Again those curious\nsuits for alienation of affection appear to be brought against women\nas much as against men; and theories of seduction by men have long\nsince been sounding archaic to our ears. Even on the screen, the great\npresent vehicle of traditional manners and morals, although rape is\nalways in order, seduction is infrequent. Seduction with its complement\nof marital honor has been rendered an anachronism, through women.\n\nThe theory of seduction is affiliated with the proprietary theory of\nwoman and, needless to say, this general theory has been undergoing\nconsiderable change for several decades. To-day women are not only not\nproperty, they are property holders, and property holding has become a\nsignificant factor in the social independence of women. Of this social\nindependence, independence in mating is the most recent expression,\nmore recent even than political independence, and less fully realized\nor accomplished. Indeed it would be rash to predict how this type of\nindependence may be expected to come about; apart from the gesture,\nsometimes gay, sometimes merely comic, of keeping one\u2019s name in\nmarriage, there is no conscious feministic movement, in this country at\nleast, toward freedom in sex. The political emancipation of women came\nto us as a reflex from abroad, largely through England. Whatever the\npolitical effect of militancy in England, without the advertisement\nof the British suffragette American women would be voteless to-day.\nQuite likely the direction of emancipation in mating may be determined\nlikewise from abroad, perhaps from innovating Scandinavia or from\nSoviet Russia, where the last legal word has been said on sex equality.\n\nIn the soviet laws on marriage and domestic relations there is no\nmention of suit for breach of promise or for alimony whereby woman\nproclaims herself a chattel, and according to the soviet code husband\nas well as wife is entitled to support if incapacitated for work.\nIncapacity for work is the sole condition which entitles either spouse\nto support. In other words, the Russian state has interested itself\nnot in maintaining the proprietary theory of woman; but in providing\nfor the care of man or woman in distress. Of such clear distinction\nAmerican law is innocent. In American law the husband is still the\nprovider and in this law lags but little behind current opinion, which\nholds that a married woman should work only when she has to. Dr.\nHerskowits tells me that this American attitude is so well represented\nin the Negro population of Harlem that in gathering statistics of\nemployment as soon as he learns the occupation of the husband he can\npredict whether or not the wife is at work. Low-paid employment for\nthe husband means wage-earning by the wife, and highly paid employment\nmeans that the woman is not a wage-earner. Surveys in other parts of\nthe country have shown the same condition. These surveys have been\nmade among wage-earners, and concerned primarily with the margin of\nsubsistence; but familiar enough is the record in other economic\nclasses of the persuasion that marriage exempts a woman from industry\nor professional activity. The standing controversies about married\nwomen as school-teachers are fully documented instances. The Harvard\nprize play acted last year on Broadway hinged on the rigidity of the\nalternative of a man marrying and sacrificing his career or pursuing\nhis career and sacrificing his love. There was not the faintest\nsuggestion that the woman might contribute to the family income and so\nrender marriage and career economically compatible. The young couple,\nto be sure, belonged to smart Suburbia, economically a conservative\ncircle; but there was no indication in the play that the university\nintelligentsia did not hold to the theory of wifely parasitism, nor\nthat audiences might question the theory. And I incline to think that\nfew in those Broadway audiences, although drawn as they were from\nfairly composite circles, did question. Wifely parasitism is holding\nits own.\n\nIn less invidious terms, where income permits, the wife continues to\nbe the consumer, the husband the producer. Conjugal partnership in\nproduction, familiar in Europe, remains by and large unfamiliar in\nthis country. Outside of marriage, on the other hand, the last years\nhave seen considerable lessening in our American forms of segregating\nthe sexes. Not only has there been an increase of women in gainful\noccupations together with an increase of occupations open to women, but\nbetween men and women in business and in the professions relations are\nincreasingly less restricted, influenced less by sex taboo. There is\nmore co\u00f6peration, more goodwill, more companionship.\n\nPossibly this companionship between the sexes at large will have a\nreflex upon marriage, and marriage will become a more comprehensive\npartnership. The question of the married woman in gainful occupations\nis related, however, to a larger economic issue. Our capitalistic and\ncompetitive economy not only suffers parasites and drones, it compels\nthem by reason of its inelasticity in providing for part-time labor.\nThe whole workday or no work at all is the notice given to women who\nwould be part-day home-keepers, either in their child-bearing years or\nbecause of other family exigency, as well as to men who are aging or\ninvalid. For this economic waste and loss to personal happiness and\nwelfare there seems to be no promise of relief in prospect. Just the\nopposite, in fact, for women, since, given the increasing mechanization\nof housekeeping and the ramifying organization of hospital, nursery,\nand school, women at home may have a larger and larger part of the day\non their hands and their functions become less and less significant.\nIn this connection birth control has been for some time an important\nfactor. As knowledge of contraception becomes surer and more widespread\nand births more spaced, even during her child-bearing period the\nhome-staying woman will have less and less call on her vitality and\nenergy.\n\nDiscussion of contraception has been active in the last decade or\nso; but curiously enough its significance aside from contributing\nto directly saner ways of life[1] has been little realized. Birth\ncontrol makes possible such clear-cut distinctions between mating and\nparenthood that it might be expected to produce radical changes in\ntheories of sex attitude or relationship, forcing the discard of many\nan argument for personal suppression for the good of children or the\nhonor of the family, and forcing redefinition of concepts of honor\nand sincerity between the sexes. In such redefinition reciprocity in\npassion, emotional integrity, and mutual enhancement of life might\nshare in the approval once confined to constancy, fidelity, and duty,\nvirtues that are obviously suggested by the hit or miss system of\nmating and reproducing our social organization has favored. With little\nor no self-knowledge or knowledge of men, a girl often marries in\norder to find out how much she cares or whether or not she qualifies,\nand then when her experience has but begun she finds herself an\nexpectant mother, and maternity begins to supersede other interests.\nShe may become a parent without the assurance of being well-mated, if\nnot, more tragically, with the certainty of being mismated. Advocates\nof the monogamous family would do well to consider how essential to\nan enduring union, at least in our society, experience in love may\nbe, together with restraint from child-bearing before experience is\nachieved.\n\nThat neither such considerations nor other changes in the theory of sex\nmorality have yet come to the fore in current discussion is perhaps\nbecause the technique of contraception is still in the experimental\nstage, perhaps because in popular consciousness the morality of\ncontraception in itself is not fully established. How is it going\nto be established? I doubt if through rationalism or rationalistic\npropaganda. Social changes, we begin to know, are rarely due to\ndeliberation, in any society. In our society they are due mainly to\neconomic causes. Housing congestion in New York will in time affect\nbirth-control legislation in Albany; and fear of an overpopulated\nworld will drive church as well as state into a new attitude toward\nmultiplying to the glory of God.\n\nAs in birth control so in other matters of sex intimacy the growth\nof cities and the complexity of our economy may be the more potent\nfactors of change. In very large communities there is an ignorance\nof the personal relations of others, an inevitable ignoring which\ncontributes unconsciously to tolerance toward experiment and variation\nin sex relations. Indifference to the private life of others is almost\nan exigency of our economic organization. Attention is directed to the\nefficiency of the personality encountered and away from the individual\nmeans taken to induce that efficiency. What difference does it make\nto an employer how clerk or stenographer lives after hours provided\nhe or she is competent, alert, and responsive to the business need?\nIn office or in factory one may be but a cog in the machine and yet\nleft larger personal freedom than in a more independent job in a small\nplace or than in a household. Out of such urban influences--negatively,\nof indifference, and positively, of attention to personality _per\nse_--come opportunities for personal freedom that will set men and\nwomen to ordering their sex life to please themselves rather than to\nplease society. That is, ordinary men and women; certain outstanding\nfigures will have to continue to forego freedom. The President of the\nUnited States, presidents of banks or colleges, cinematograph stars,\n\u201csociety ladies,\u201d now and again a clergyman or a prize-fighter--all\nthese will continue to be observed closely in their private life, and,\nlike the gods and goddesses of other cultures or times, will have to\nconform to popular preconceptions of marriage or celibacy, chastity or\nlibertinism. For them, as for other personages in folk-lore, individual\nadjustment or variation would be out of the picture.\n\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[1] Dr. Ogburn informs me that his recent and still unpublished\nanalysis of the census of 1920 shows that in localities where birth\ncontrol is presumedly practiced the marriage rate mounts. He states\nalso that in the country at large there has been a higher marriage rate\nin the last census decade and that the age at marriage is earlier.\n\n\n\n\nToward Monogamy\n\nBy Charlotte Perkins Gilman\n\n\n\n\nCharlotte Perkins Gilman\n\n_feminist, philosopher, writer was born at Hartford, Conn., July 3rd,\n1860. Editor of the_ Forerunner _1909-1916; Author of \u201cWomen and\nEconomics,\u201d 1898; \u201cIn This, Our World,\u201d 1898; \u201cThe Yellow Wall-Paper,\u201d\n1899; \u201cConcerning Children,\u201d 1900; \u201cThe Home, Its Work and Influence,\u201d\n1903; \u201cHuman Work,\u201d 1904; \u201cWhat Diantha Did,\u201d 1910; \u201cThe Man-Made\nWorld,\u201d 1910; \u201cThe Crux,\u201d 1911; \u201cMoving the Mountain,\u201d 1911; \u201cHis\nReligion and Hers,\u201d 1923._\n\n\n\n\nTOWARD MONOGAMY\n\nBY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN\n\n\nPhysiologists tell us that in all our long ages of animal evolution\nwe have not yet completed the physical changes incident to assuming\nan erect posture. Psychologists may as plainly see that in the short\ncenturies of social evolution we have naturally failed to complete\nthe changes incident to our growth from tribal to national and\ninternational relationships.\n\nSince we remained savages for some 90 per cent of the period of human\nlife on earth, it is to be expected that the long-practiced tribal\nmorals should have modified our characters more deeply than those\nevolved in the recent, varied, and fluctuating relationship of larger\nrange. Yet we see, during the short period of progressive civilization,\nsuch swift and amazing development in some lines, such achievement in\nknowledge, in wealth, in ability, in breadth of thought, and nobility\nof feeling that our coincident stupidity and senseless misbehavior\ncall for explanation.\n\nThe main reason for this peculiar delay and irregularity in social\nevolution is that it has been limited to half the race, the other half\nbeing restricted to domestic industry and to the still lower level of\nmisused sex. Our specialized knowledge, power, and skill are developed\nthrough the organic relationships of the social group; as are also\nthose characteristics of mutual loyalty and love, of truth, honor, and\ncourage which are as natural to a human society as the distinctive\nvirtues of ants or beavers to their groups.\n\nHumanity\u2019s major error, the exploitation of the female by the male,\nhas not only kept her at the lowest step in social progress--solitary\nhand-labor in and for the family--but has resulted in excessive\nsex-development through prolonged misuse. This has made her\nultra-feminine, to a degree often injurious to motherhood; and him\nultra-masculine, his social advance confused, impeded, and repeatedly\ndestroyed by his excessive emotions. In social morals he has of course\noutdistanced her, as he alone has entered into the relationships\nwhich develop them; but he has carefully exempted his essentially male\nactivities from this elevating influence, maintaining that \u201call\u2019s fair\nin love and war.\u201d Of her, domestic morality demanded but one virtue,\nsex-loyalty; her mate or master taking it upon himself to be both judge\nand executioner in case of failure. She might be a liar and a coward,\nlazy, selfish, extravagant, or cruel, but if chaste these traits were\noverlooked. If unchaste, no array of other virtues was enough to save\nher. In her household labors she developed minor virtues natural to\nthe position; a tireless industry, an instinct for cleanliness and\norder, with great capacity for self-denial and petty economy. Speaking\nbroadly, of a race where the young, though necessarily inheriting\nfrom both parents, yet are divided almost from birth in training and\nexperience, it may be said that the social virtues have belonged to\nmen, the domestic virtues to women.\n\nOur present age, counting the incredible advance of the last century\nand the swift fruition of these immediate years, shows among its\nnewly distinguishing social movements one of supreme importance.\nWithin a hundred years women, in most civilized countries, have moved\nfrom domestic into social relationship. Such a sudden and enormous\nchange, while inherently for the improvement of society, is naturally\naccompanied by much local and immediate dislocation in previously\naccepted conditions. Many are alarmed at what is considered \u201cthe danger\nto the home\u201d resultant from the refusal of an increasing number of\nwomen to spend their lives as house-servants; they fear \u201cthe menace to\nthe family\u201d due to similarly increasing numbers of women who refuse\ncompulsory motherhood; they are shocked at a looseness, even grossness,\nof behavior between the sexes which seems to threaten marriage\nitself. Few seem able to look beyond the present inconveniences to a\nspecialized efficiency in household management which will raise the\nstandard of public health and private comfort, with large reduction\nin the cost of living; to such general improvement in child-culture\nas will lift the average of citizenship and lower the death-rate\nappreciably; and to a rational and permanent basis for our monogamous\nmarriage.\n\nTo understand rightly this trying period, to be patient with its\nunavoidable reactions and excesses, to know what tendencies to approve\nand promote and what to condemn and oppose, requires some practical\nknowledge of biology and sociology. Men, though as yet beyond women\nin social morality, are unreliable judges in this time of change\nbecause their ox is gored--they are the ones who are losing a cherished\npossession. The overdeveloped sex instinct of men, requiring more\nthan women were willing to give, has previously backed its demands\nby an imposing array of civil and religious laws requiring feminine\nsubmission, has not scrupled to use force or falsehood, and held final\npower through the economic dependence of women. It is easy to see that\nif women had been equally willing no such tremendous machinery of\ncompulsion need have been evolved.\n\nBut now that the woman no longer admits that \u201che shall rule over her,\u201d\nand is able to modify the laws; now that she has become braver, and\nabove all is attaining financial freedom, her previous master has no\nhold upon her beyond natural attraction and--persuasion. Toward this\nend he manifests an instant and vigorous activity. Whereas in the past\nwomen were taught that they had no such \u201cimperative instincts\u201d as men,\nand the wooer, even the husband, sought to preserve this impression,\nnow it is quite otherwise. All that elaborate theory of feminine\nchastity, that worship of virginity, goes by the board, and women are\ngiven a reversed theory--that they are just the same as men, if not\nmore so; our \u201cdouble standard\u201d is undoubled and ironed flat--to the\nlevel of masculine desire.\n\nClothed in the solemn, newly invented terms of psychoanalysis, a theory\nof sex is urged upon us which bases all our activities upon this one\nfunction. It is exalted as not only an imperative instinct, but as\n_the_ imperative instinct, no others being recognized save the demands\nof the stomach. Surely never was a more physical theory disguised in\nthe technical verbiage of \u201cpsychology.\u201d We should not too harshly blame\nthe ingenious mind of man for thinking up a new theory to retain what\nthe old ones no longer assured him; nor too severely criticize the\nsubject class, so newly freed, for committing the same excesses, the\nsame eager imitations of the previous master, which history shows\nin any recently enfranchised people. Just as women have imitated the\ndrug-habits of men, without the faintest excuse or reason, merely\nto show that they can, so are they imitating men\u2019s sex habits, in\nlarge measure. Those who go too far in such excesses will presumably\ndie without issue, doing no permanent harm to the stock. This wild\nexcitement over sex, as if it were a new discovery peculiar to our\ntime, will be allayed by further knowledge. Even a little study of the\ncommon facts of nature has a cooling and heartening influence.\n\nThe essential facts are these: That all living forms show the tendency\nto maintain and to reproduce themselves; that some, in differing\ndegree, show tendencies to vary and to improve; that after an immense\nperiod of reproduction without it (showing that as the \u201clife force\u201d\nit was quite unnecessary) the distinction of sex appeared as a means\nto freer variation and improvement; that the male characteristics of\nintense desire for the female, personal display, and intermasculine\ncombat, as well as the female\u2019s instinct of selection, are visible\ncontributions to the major purpose of improvement; that in the higher\nand later life-forms further and more rapid improvement has been made\nthrough the development in the female of new organs and functions\nfor the benefit of the young; through her alone have come the upward\nsteps of viviparous birth, the marsupial pouch, and that crowning\nadvantage, the mammary glands; the female solely is responsible for the\ndevelopment of nature\u2019s aristocracy, Order Mammalia.\n\nIn the human species she adds to her previous contributions to racial\nprogress the invention of our primitive industries, which were evolved\nby her in service to the young, and later carried out by men into the\ntrades and crafts which support human life. In the developing care\nand nurture of her children she laid the foundation for those social\nfunctions of government, education, and co\u00f6perative industry which are\nso vitally important to social progress that we have called the family\n\u201cthe unit of the state.\u201d\n\nThis is an error. The family is the prototype of the state, a tiny\nprimitive state in itself, often quite inimical to the interests of\nthe larger state which has developed through the wider interaction of\nindividuals. The state does not elect families, tax families, punish\nfamilies, nor thrive where physical inheritance is made the basis of\nauthority. Where the family persists too powerfully, as in China, there\nis a commensurate lack in the vitality and efficiency of the state. By\nrestricting women to the family relationship, with its compulsory woman\nservice and domestic morality, we have checked and perverted social\ngrowth by keeping out of it the most effective factor in that growth,\nthe mother.\n\nThe world having been for so long dominated by the individualistic\nand combative male, with that vast increment of masculine thought and\nemotion embodied in our literature, our religion, our art, modifying\nall our ideals, it is not to be wondered at that the newly freed women\nare as yet unable to see their opportunity, their power, and their\nlong-prevented sex duty--race improvement.\n\nThe collapse of the arbitrary and unjust domestic morality of the past\nwill presently be followed by recognition of the social morality of\nthe future. Rightly discarding artificial standards of virtue based\non the pleasure of men, we shall establish new ones based on natural\nlaw. Repudiating their duty to an owner and master, women have yet\nto accept and fulfill their duty to society, to the human race. This\nis not generally clear to them. In their legitimate rebellion against\ndomestic service and compulsory sex-service they almost inevitably\nconfuse these things with marriage, with which indeed they have been\nlong synonymous. Some of our most valuable women, as well as many of\nnegligible importance, speak of marriage as if it were an invention\nof Queen Victoria. Surely no excessive education is needed to learn\nthat monogamy, among many of the higher carnivora and birds, is as\nnatural a form of sex union as the polygamy of the grass eaters or\nthe promiscuity among insects, reptiles, and fish. Monogamy appears\nwhen it is to the advantage of the young to have the continued care\nof both parents. This means that the parents share in the activities\nof supporting the family; it does not mean that the female becomes\nthe servant of the male. Because of the united activities and mutual\nservices of the pair love is developed, and stays. Such profound\naffection is found in some of these natural \u201cmarriages\u201d that if one\nof a pair is killed the other will not mate again. Mated leopards\nor ostriches do not remain together because they are \u201cVictorian\u201d or\n\u201cpuritanical,\u201d but because they like to. They could form as many and as\nvariegated \u201cfree unions\u201d as Greenwich Villagers if they choose; there\nis nothing to stop them.\n\nBut natural monogamy is as free from sex service as from domestic\nservice. The pairing species adhere to their mating season as do the\npolygamous ones, or even the promiscuous. Man is the only animal using\nthis function out of season and apart from its essential purpose.\nThese natural monogamists are not \u201cascetics.\u201d They are not dominated\nby religious doctrine or civil law. They fulfill their natural desires\nwith the utmost freedom, but these desires do not move them out of\nseason.\n\nThe human species, with all its immense advantages, has made many\nconspicuous missteps. Its eating habits are such as to have induced a\nwide assortment of wholly unnecessary diseases; its drinking habits\nare glaringly injurious; and its excessive indulgence in sex-waste has\nimperiled the life of the race.\n\nDomestic morality vaguely recognized some duty to society and sought\nthrough religion to limit masculine desires or at least to restrict\ntheir indulgence to marriage. But the desires of a vigorous polygamist\nare not easily restricted to one wife; and our polygamous period was\nfar longer than that of the recently established monogamy. It is a most\nreassuring fact in social evolution that monogamy, naturally belonging\nto our species, has persisted among the common people and in popular\nideals: even in \u201cThe Arabian Nights\u201d the love story is always about\none man and one woman, never of the mad passion for a harem! So with\nthe accelerated progress of recent centuries monogamous union becomes\naccepted, and is carefully buttressed by the law, while religion, with\ncommandments and ceremonies, does its best to establish \u201cthe sanctity\nof marriage.\u201d But as religion, law, and family authority were all in\nthe hands of men, they naturally interpreted that sanctity to suit\nthemselves, ignored the religious restrictions, and so handled the law\nas to apply its penalties to but one party in a dual offense.\n\nSocial morality requires the promotion of such lines of conduct as are\nbeneficial to the maintenance and improvement of society. It will\ndemand of both man and woman the full development of personal health\nand vigor, careful selection of the best mate by both, with recognition\non her side of special responsibility as the natural arbiter. It\nwill encourage such sex relations as are proved advantageous both to\nindividual happiness and to the race. We are as yet so hag-ridden\nby domestic morality, with its arbitrary restrictions, and by the\nthreats and punishments of law and religion, that we shrink from the\nbroader biological judgment as if it involved blame, punishment,\ncompulsory reform. Not at all. Men and women are no more to blame for\nbeing oversexed than a prize hog for being over-fat. The portly pig\nis not sick or wicked, he is merely overdeveloped in adipose tissue.\nOur condition does not call for condemnation, nor can we expect any\nsudden and violent change in our behavior resting on foolish ideals of\ncelibacy, of self-denial, or of \u201csublimated sex.\u201d It will take several\ngenerations of progressive selection, with widely different cultural\ninfluences, to re\u00ebstablish a normal sex development in _genus homo_,\nwith its consequences in happier marriage, better children, and wide\nimprovement in the public health.\n\nIt is to this end, with all its widening range of racial progress, that\nsocial morality tends.\n\n\n\n\nWomen--Free for What?\n\nBy Edwin Muir\n\n\n\n\nEdwin Muir,\n\n_poet and essayist, has been assistant editor of the_ New Age\n(_London_) _as well as dramatic critic for the_ Scotsman _and the_\nAthen\u00e6um. _He was a frequent contributor to_ The Freeman.\n\n\n\n\nWOMEN--FREE FOR WHAT?\n\nBY EDWIN MUIR\n\n\nIn the beginning of the Scottish Shorter Catechism there is a beautiful\naffirmation. \u201cThe chief end of man,\u201d it says, \u201cis to glorify God and\nenjoy Him forever.\u201d\n\nTo any one nourished on the literature and thought of the last\nhalf-century that sentence, which defines the chief purpose of life as\npraise and enjoyment, comes like an audacious blasphemy, a blasphemy,\nhowever, bringing light and freedom. The terms of the dogma are a\nlittle antiquated now, but it would be easy to restate them in modern\nlanguage. For \u201cGod\u201d we might substitute \u201cnature and man\u201d or, if we\nwere metaphysically inclined, \u201cGod in nature and man.\u201d The authors of\nthe Shorter Catechism, entangled as they were in a gloomy theology,\nrecognized that the significance of life cannot reside in the labor by\nwhich men maintain it, but in some kind of realization of ourselves\nand of the world which is the highest enjoyment conceivable of both.\n\nLet us go back for a few decades and see if we can catch the values of\nour time confusedly shaping themselves within the framework of human\nlife. I say shaping themselves, for as Nietzsche said fifty years ago,\nthe time of the conscious valuers has passed; our values for a century\nhave not been created, they have happened. They happened because men\nhad become skeptical not merely of God, or of the existence of a moral\norder, but of life itself, and could not set before themselves any\npurpose justifying life, but only its bare mechanism, work, duty,\nthe preservation of society. It has been, thus, one of the main\nachievements of modern thought to banish from the world the notion\nof enjoyment. This was begun first in a philosophical way by the\nutilitarians, who were reasonably convinced that, factories existing\nfor the first time as far as they knew in history, it was incumbent\non men to work in them. A fine philosophy, truly; yet men believed in\nit. After the utilitarians came the advocates of self-help, who showed\nthat the utilitarian policy might not be without individual advantage;\nthat if one cut off one\u2019s pleasures, or at least those which cost\nmoney, one might win a bizarre, undreamed-of success. The anchorites of\nwealth arose, the great men who, when they had acquired riches which\nmight have built a new Florence, if scarcely a new Jerusalem, could\nmake no use of them, preferring to teach in Sunday-schools and endow\nuniversities. In the eyes of these men wealth was justified only if\nit could not be enjoyed, for enjoyment was the one thing which went\nagainst all their ideas, all those instincts which had set them where\nthey stood. Wealth, thus, could not be enjoyed, could not be used, for\nwhen they had reached their end the means still remained means.\n\nThe disciples of Smiles have disappeared; men get rich in other ways\nnow; nevertheless a whole view of life has been left behind which we\nhave not fundamentally questioned. The Victorians established the basis\nof morals in utility; we have come to the stage when we imagine that\nthe basis of life itself is utility. For recreation as an end in itself\nwe have so little appreciation that even sport has become a kind of\nduty, and nothing is more devastating than the scorn of a conscientious\nathlete for those who, enjoying perfectly good health, do not go\nto the trouble of keeping themselves fit. A little unpremeditated\npleasure still persists in our common lives, in fox-trotting, drinking,\nand revues, but it is without either taste or resource; it is not\nexpression but simply relaxation, an amusing way of being tired.\nThe one thing that people will not pardon is the taking of pleasure\nseriously as an end in itself. The \u00e6sthete, at the Renaissance a type\nof the opulence of life, and quite a common, indeed an expected type,\nis in our day an aberration demanding our satire when once we have\novercome our indignation. Nothing shows more disastrously how incapable\nwe are of entertaining the conviction that life in itself, apart from\nthe labor necessary to make it possible, is a thing worth living. Even\nart has justified itself for several decades chiefly by its social\nutility, and only now, against strong opposition, is it escaping from\nthe barriers set up by the generation overawed by Mr. Shaw and Mr.\nWells. The notion that men may be on the earth for something else than\nsweating is dead. We have arrived at an amazing incapacity for joy;\nand life is to us always less worth living than it should be.\n\nThis exaltation of means has brought about a general\ninstrumentalization of life. It weighs heavily upon men; but upon women\nits weight is crushing, for women have not such a ready capacity as\nmen for transforming themselves to the image of their functions, and\nthey disfigure themselves more in the attempt. Consequently, as woman\nhas taken a large and larger part in our tentative and unsatisfactory\ncivilization she has undergone, in fact and in people\u2019s minds, a\ndistorting process. It is true, woman, lovely woman, the fair charmer,\nhas passed away; but we are hardly better off now when she has become\na term like economics. After the economic man has come the economic\nwoman; that is, an entity almost as useful as machinery, and for the\ninner culture of mankind almost as uninteresting.\n\nHow, in striving for emancipation, woman has reached such a dismal\nstage in her development is one of the saddest stories of our time.\nThe age is an age of work; woman desires freedom, the right of every\nhuman being; and freedom in such an age can only mean the freedom to\nwork. But to work, except in a few vocations such as art, is in our\ntime to specialize oneself, and the freedom of women has necessarily\nresolved itself into a permission to do little things which can give\nthem no final satisfaction. Their freedom is bounded by the slavery\nunder which men, too, suffer; and in changing their occupations they\nhave not escaped from the cage, but only out of one compartment of\nit into another, a little more cheerless than the first. They have\nachieved a little more liberty than they had before; but this liberty\nis disenchanting because it leaves them as far away as ever from the\nfull liberty of their spirit. Perhaps in no other age has woman been,\nin a deep, instinctive sense, so skeptical as she is at present.\n\nAnd for all this the age--an age in which labor has a fantastic\nprominence--is responsible; for it is in a time when everybody works,\nand when there is nothing conceivable that one can do but work, that\nthe cantankerous question of inequality arises. Only in a race can one\nbe slower than another; only then does the necessity to become as good\na runner as the fastest come home poignantly to every one. But if it\nshould happen that life is not a race at all? Where leisure is regarded\nas a more important thing than work and work falls into its proper,\nsubordinate place as the mere means to leisure one does not think very\nmuch about inequality, for it has no longer any urgent importance.\nNor does one set much value, except in superficials, on uniformity.\nAmong people free from crushing labor (as the whole human race may\nsome time be) there has always been delight in diversity and scorn\nfor uniformity; for, to people enjoying their spirit and the world,\ndiversity even when it is exasperating is of infinite interest, giving\na satisfying sense of the richness of life.\n\nComedy--and comedy is idleness tolerantly enjoying itself--is founded,\nit has been said, upon a recognition of the equality of the sexes; but\nit would be more just to say that it is founded upon a view of life\ninto which the notions of equality and inequality do not enter at all,\nbecause they are unnecessary. To Congreve and Stendhal women were not\nthe inferior sex, for, in spite of the conventions in which ostensibly\nthey moved, they were free, and therefore interesting. And remote\nas these figures are from us, they demonstrate a very useful truth,\nthat the way to get over our stupid obsession with inequality is to\nreach a stage where diversity will be the norm, involving disadvantage\nto no one. Toward that stage, which can only be made possible by a\nmore general leisure, we are moving, if what the reformers and the\nscientists tell us is true. It will be a stage in which rules will have\nmore importance than laws and spontaneous actions than obligations;\nand most of the things we do will be regarded as play rather than\nduty. Conduct will probably be about a fourth of life, instead of the\nthree-fourths postulated by Matthew Arnold. And although this state\nhas not come yet and may not come for a long time, it would be as\nsensible to found a philosophy upon it as upon a period of transition\nas dismal and impermanent as ours. Moreover the values of the past are\nagainst us as well as those of the future which we imagine. There is a\ncertain ignobility in the dispute over human inequality, a failure to\nrise to the human level. It is not a question but a misunderstanding,\nwhich the accumulated imaginative culture of the world might have made\nimpossible. A little sense of the richness of life would disperse\nit. Who would be so fantastic as to say that Falstaff is greater or\nless than Ophelia, or whether Uncle Toby is the exact equal of Anna\nKarenina? To ask the question is to evoke at once an image of the\ndiverse riches of human nature and of the poverty of mind which can\nreduce it to such terms, destroying all interest and all nuance.\n\nBut where our instrumental philosophy has had the most grotesque\neffect has been upon our conception of love. People have come to\nregard love as merely a device for propagating the race. Now this view\nof love is not new; it has always been dear to the bourgeoisie, who\nhave always thought it a matter of immense moment that they should\nhave sons to carry on their businesses when they were dead. It is the\nimmemorial philistine conception of love: the strange thing is that it\nhas been taken over by the intelligentsia and glorified. This is in\nthe strictest sense a revolution in thought. No one who has written\nbeautifully of love has thought of it as the intellectuals think. To\nPlato and Dante the essence of love did not reside in procreation;\nnor has procreation been anything but a divine accident to the poets.\nAnd that is in the human tradition, and probably in the natural order\nof things; for it is possible that both love and procreation are most\nperfect when they are unpremeditated, and the child comes as a gift and\na surprise; for in the fruits of joy there is a principle of exuberance\nwhich distinguishes them from the fruits of duty.\n\nThe intellectuals have destroyed the humanistic conception of love\nas pure spontaneity, as expression, by setting its justification not\nwithin itself, but in the child. In \u201cMan and Superman\u201d Mr. Shaw makes\nTanner say that if our love did not produce another human being to\nserve the community, the community would have the sacred right of\nkilling us off, just as the hive kills off the drones who do not attain\nthe queen bee. But what does that mean? It means that happiness is of\nno importance, that it is a matter of the slightest moment whether, in\na life which will never be given to us again, we realize some of the\npotentialities of our being or pass through it blind to the end. If it\nis worth while living at all, this must needs be the precise opposite\nof the truth. The child, like everything else, is justified; but it is\nnot justified because it adds to the potential wealth of society, but\nbecause it adds to our present delight, and moreover lives a life as\nvalid as our own. The truth is that we dare not admit that any pleasure\nwhatever has a right to exist without serving society, and serving it\ndeliberately. The joys of other generations have become our duties; and\nit is significant that Mr. Shaw and the bulk of the intelligentsia are\nat one on the birth-rate with the Roman Catholic Church, that church\nwhich has on many occasions through its theologians affirmed its belief\nthat sensual love is a guilty thing, and, using its own kind of logic,\nhas exhorted man to multiply and replenish the earth.\n\n\u201cThe chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever\u201d; and\nthat being so, it is the task of those who are a little more serious\nthan the serious to set about discovering the principles of glory\nand enjoyment in life. And--I am setting down a truism--the main\nprinciple of enjoyment for the human race is not art, nor thought, nor\nthe practice of virtue, but for man, woman, and for woman, man. The\nexchange of happiness between the sexes is not only the creative agent\nin human life, perpetuating it; it is also the thing which gives the\nperpetuation of life its chief meaning. People have always felt this\nvaguely; it has made labor endurable to them; but hardly ever have they\nrecognized it clearly, and to the poets and artists who know it they\nhave always responded a little skeptically. They have thought of love\nas a justification a little too materialistic for life; but love is\nonly materialistic when it is regarded as a means.\n\nTo accept men and women as ends in themselves, to enter into their\nlife as one of them, is to partake of absolute life, that life which\nat every moment realizes itself, existing for its own sake. We cannot\nlive in that life continuously; for the accomplishment of the intricate\npurposes of society we must at certain times and with part of our\nminds regard our fellow-creatures as instruments; but the more we tend\nto do so the more we banish joy from life. Life does not consist,\nwhatever the utilitarians may say, in functioning, but in living; and\nlife comes into being where men and women, not as functions, but\nas self-constituted entities, intersect. This is the state which in\nreligion as well as art has been called life; this is the final life\nof the earth, beyond which there is no other. We may accept it or pass\nit by; but whatever we may do with it, it is our chief end, giving\nmeaning to the multitudinous pains of humanity. This commerce between\nmen and women is not merely sexual, in the narrow sense which we have\ngiven the word; it involves every human joy, all the thoughts and\naspirations of mankind stretching into infinity. It is the thing which\nhas inspired all great artists, mystical as well as earthy. It is the\npoint of reference for any morality which is not a disguised kind of\nadaptation; for virtue consists in the capacity to partake freely of\nhuman happiness. All reform, all economic and political theory has a\nmeaning in so far as it makes for this; and that was recognized by the\nfirst reformers, the utopians who had not yet become mere specialists\nin reform.\n\nThe libertarian movement has been such a dismal affair, thus, not\nbecause it has been too free, but because it has not been free enough.\nThe democracies and the women of the world have been potentially\nliberated; but not so very long ago they were slaves, and they have\nstill a slave\u2019s idea of freedom. Instead of equal joys they have\nasked for equal obligations; and the whole world is in the grip of\na psychological incapacity to escape from the idea of obligation.\nAgainst the unreasonable solemnity which this has imposed on everything\nthere is little left for us except a deliberate and reasonable\nlight-heartedness; this, and the faith that the human race will some\ntime attain the only kind of freedom worth striving for, a freedom in\njoy.\n\n\n\n\nVirtue for Women\n\nBy Isabel Leavenworth\n\n\nIsabel Leavenworth\n\n_is an instructor in philosophy at Barnard College_.\n\n\n\n\nVIRTUE FOR WOMEN\n\nBY ISABEL LEAVENWORTH\n\n\nIn the turmoil of discussion regarding present modes of sex life one\ncan discern a pretty general approval of just one element in the whole\nsituation: the ideal by which the good woman has for so long been\ncontrolled. It is commonly held that if changes are to be made they\nshould be in the direction of persuading men, and also the few women\nwho have been at fault, to be just as good as our good women have\nalways been. Thus the young girl of to-day is criticized on the ground\nthat instead of raising men to her level she is descending to theirs.\nEven those who are inclined to belittle the damage which she is doing\nto the social structure accompany their mild defense with the consoling\nreminder that human nature does not change and that in the end the girl\nof to-day will turn out as well as did the girls of yesterday; that is,\nshe will finally come around to the good old feminine way of doing\nthings.\n\nIt seems to me most unfortunate that the majority of people hope to\nimprove matters through an extension of the feminine ideals of the\npast. In the established scheme of things one finds a peculiarly gross\nform of immorality, an immorality incommensurably greater than the\ndreaded evil of promiscuity; and it is only as an element in this total\nscheme that woman\u2019s ideals have any significance. The fact that they\nhave always constituted one side of a \u201cdouble standard\u201d is not merely\nsomething which may be said about their relation to other elements\nafter their essential characteristics have been considered. These\ncharacteristics can be described only in terms of the double standard\nand of its attendant evils. It would be as impossible, then, to destroy\nthe double standard and still keep the feminine ideal intact as it\nwould be to preserve the convex nature of a mathematical curve while\ndestroying the concave. According to the present system there is a\nstandard of conduct set up for women which is to constitute virtue.\nThis standard is a combination of specific positive commands and, more\nespecially, of specific prohibitions. There are certain things which\nno nice woman will do--a great many things, in fact. She must learn\nthem by heart and accept them on faith as the Pythagoreans must have\nhad to learn their curious list of taboos, a list running from the\ntaboo against eating beans to that against sitting on a quart measure.\nThis ideal of virtue does not apply with equal rigidity to men; quite\ndifferent things are expected of them and accepted for them. It is\nobvious that two such conflicting ideals by the very nature of their\ncombination will produce a class of women who do not live up to the\nstandard of virtue set them as members of their sex. This class is not\nmerely an excrescence but an integral part of the situation created by\nthe total sex ideal of society. The function of women of this class is\nto make possible for men the way of life commonly considered as suited\nto their sex and to make possible a virtuous life for the remainder of\nwomankind. In fulfilling this function such women lose, in the eyes of\nsociety, their moral nature and forfeit the right to live within the\npale of social morality. They are considered unfit for normal social\nintercourse and are denied those relationships and responsibilities\nwhich ordinarily serve as the basis for moral growth. From all normal\nresponsibility toward them society regards itself as released. That\nwhich is personal, the inner life, the character, the soul--whatever\none prefers to call it--having been sacrificed in the service of the\nsocial scheme, one is to treat what is left as of no value in itself,\nbut merely as an instrument to be used in the service of man\u2019s pleasure\nor woman\u2019s virtue. The prostitute is to society that one thing, defined\nby the purpose which she serves, and that is all she is, all she is\nallowed to be. The depersonalization, the moral non-existence, one\nmight call it, of a large number of women is, then, implicit in the\nsocial system currently accepted. It is not a punishment meted out to\nthose who fail to act in accordance with the social scheme (though\nit is as such, of course, that society defends it) but is itself an\nabsolutely essential element in the social scheme, an element woven in\nand out through the entire fabric of current sex morality.\n\nIt is curious how many people feel that a choice between the present\nsystem and any other is reducible to a choice between different\ndegrees of promiscuity. Promiscuity would be an evil, but it does\nnot in itself involve this particular immorality. The worst evils in\nthe present situation are due not to the \u201clower\u201d half of the double\nstandard but to the doubleness itself.\n\nIt is true that the ideal of womanly virtue is only one element in the\nconventional system of sex morality. But, like a Leibnitzian monad, it\nreflects the whole universe within itself--the universe of sex mores.\nIt is in no real sense any \u201chigher\u201d than the ideal by which men have\nlived. They are warp and woof of the same fabric. According to this\nideal it is woman\u2019s prime duty to keep aloof from evil. This sounds\ncommendable enough. And it would be at least innocuous if one could\ninterpret it as meaning that woman should hold herself aloof from some\nimagined evil that would become existent were she to embrace it. This\nis not, however, a possible interpretation of the varied collection of\nprohibitions which it is her duty to respect. Their import is clearly\nenough that she is to keep aloof from evil which is already existent,\nwhich is an acknowledged part of her background. She is to shun all\nof those vulgarities, coarsenesses, and immoralities which are to\nenter into the lives of men and for which, one is forced to conclude,\nthe \u201cother\u201d women are to provide. And from this other class of women\nshe is, of course, to keep herself absolutely separate, distinct. I\nrecently heard an elderly Boston lady make a remark which expresses the\nhorror commonly aroused by any conduct which endangers the distinction\nbetween the two classes. \u201cDo you know,\u201d she said, \u201cI heard that a young\nman of our set said he and his friends no longer had to go to girls of\nanother kind for their enjoyment. They can get all they want from girls\nof their own class.\u201d This was the outrage. The nice girls were allowing\nthe classes to become confused. Much the same attitude is revealed in\nthe frequent remark that the young girl of to-day appears like \u201cany\nchorus girl\u201d or like any \u201ccommon woman.\u201d The horrid picture is usually\nrounded off with the comment that you simply can\u2019t tell the difference\nany more between the nice girl and the other kind. One can imagine that\nthis might cause considerable inconvenience. Each of the two classes\nof women has served a special purpose and it is, to say the least,\ndisconcerting for a person not to know which way to turn when he knows\nvery well which purpose he wants fulfilled.\n\nThe precautions which a good woman takes to preserve her purity are\nindeed legion. There are places where no nice woman will go, situations\nwith which she must have no immediate acquaintance, people with whom\nshe must not associate; there are various embodiments of evil, in\nshort, to which she must not expose herself. That these evils should\nexist, that they should be tolerated as meeting certain needs in the\nlives of men and be made possible by other women--all this the average\ngood woman swallows without repulsion, or, more commonly, ignores.\nShe is aroused to a state of true indignation only when her own moral\nexclusiveness, or that of her kind, is threatened. The same woman who\naccepts with a good deal of equanimity the fact that men she associates\nwith also associate with \u201cgay\u201d women would be considerably upset if\nthese men were to attempt to associate with both kinds of women at\nthe same time. Why is the average woman so upset if a man of her\nacquaintance makes \u201cimproper advances\u201d? Is it that she is horrified to\nfind that he is willing to indulge his irregular sex desires? No. She\nis outraged because he thinks she is willing to indulge hers, because\nhe holds her virtue too lightly. Sex evils, coarsenesses are then to be\npart of the good woman\u2019s environment in the intimate sense that they\noften enter into the lives of the men she accepts as friends, even of\nthe men with whom she is to have the most personal and supposedly ideal\nrelationships. Her sole function is to turn her back on these evils.\nThe point of prime importance to her is that they should not pollute\nher; and the first demand which she makes upon men is that they shall\nshow their respect for this ideal by keeping her apart.\n\nThe acceptance of this situation is implied in the ideals which are\npassed down to girls by the good old-fashioned parent. Do the mothers\nwho insist that their daughters shall not go with boys on certain\noccasions and at certain hours unchaperoned expect boys to refrain\nfrom seeing any girls except on occasions thus carefully timed and\nadequately supervised? I doubt it. Whatever their expectations may be,\nit is certain that they would rather that the good girl should cling\nto protection, letting the man seek gayety where he may, than that she\nshould take the chance involved in seeking gayety by his side. They\nwould rather have what they consider the evil sex element taken care\nof by men and by a class of women devoted by society to that purpose\nthan to risk any slip in conduct on the part of their own daughters.\nPurity purchased at such a price may be purity in some magical sense,\nsimilar to that secured in the ancient mysteries by passing through\nfire or going in bathing with sacred pigs. Purity in any moral sense\nit certainly is not. It is simply a social asset, like physical beauty\nor pleasing accomplishments, so tremendously valuable to woman that\nfor it she has been willing to pay any moral price, however degrading.\nIts non-moral character is revealed in the common assumption that any\nman can, without injury to himself, pass through experiences or be\nplaced in situations from which, since they would pollute her, every\ngood woman must be guarded. This assumption, so obviously insulting to\nwomen, is at present complacently accepted by them as something of a\ncompliment.\n\nWilliam Graham Sumner in his remarkably unemotional and objective\ntreatment of social customs devotes some pages to a description of the\nhouses of prostitution established and run by the cities of medieval\nEurope \u201cin the interest of virtuous women.\u201d In this connection Mr.\nSumner for once indulges in terms of opprobrium, judging the custom\nas \u201cthe most incredible case\u201d illustrating \u201cthe power of the mores\nto extend toleration and sanction to an evil thing.\u201d The inmates of\nthese houses were dedicated entirely to this special function, wore\ndistinctive dress, and were taboo to all \u201cgood\u201d women whose virtue,\naccording to the scheme of things, they made possible. Authority for\nsuch a custom can be found, as Sumner points out, in Saint Augustine,\nthe reformed rake. \u201cThe bishop,\u201d writes Sumner, \u201chas laid down the\nproposition that evil things in human society, under the great orderly\nscheme of things which he was trying to expound, are overruled to\nproduce good.\u201d Is not this the position taken by people who hold\nthat it is better to have prostitution in order to provide for the\nassumed sex irregularity of men than to risk the loss of a woman\u2019s\n\u201cvirtue\u201d through the removal of those conventions and taboos which\nprevent her from coping with the situation herself and making her own\nmoral decisions? I can see no difference. Has man at any period of\nhis checkered moral career devised a more unpleasant method of saving\nhis own soul? The good woman sits serenely on the structure upheld\nfor her by prostitutes and occasionally even commits the absurdity of\nattempting to \u201creform\u201d these women, the necessity for whose existence\nis implied by the beliefs according to which she herself lives.\n\nIt is hard to follow the mental processes of those persons who, while\ndeploring the increased freedom allowed women and the tendency to judge\nthem less severely, still claim belief in a single standard for both\nsexes. In so far as woman\u2019s virtue consists in aloofness from the evils\nwhich the double standard implies it quite obviously cannot be adopted\nas the single standard by which all members of society are to live.\nEven aside from this consideration it would seem to be as undesirable\nas it is impossible to extend to men the traditions and restrictions\nwhich have for so long governed women. Does any one really wish to\nhave grown boys constantly accompanied and watched over by their\nelders? Does any one wish that the goings and comings of men should be\nas specifically determined as those of women have always been? Should\nwe look forward to a day when a man will be judged as good or bad on\nthe sole basis of whether or not he has ever had any irregular sex\nrelation?\n\nOne would think that the suspicions of even the most uncritical might\nbe aroused by the rigidly absolute and impersonal nature of women\u2019s\nsex ideals. The notion of purity as lying in the abstention from a\nparticular act except under carefully prescribed circumstances has\nall the marks of a primitive taboo and none of the characteristics of\na rational moral principle. The ideals of woman\u2019s honor and chastity\nhave without doubt been built up in answer to human wants--the defense\nwhich is invariably given of customs, good or bad. Probably those\nsociologists are not far wrong who hold that they have developed as\na response, in early times, to the sentiments of man as a property\nowner; later, in response to masculine vanity and jealousy, though\nthese motives have, of course, been idealized beyond all recognition.\nWe need not be surprised, then, to find that they bear no relation\nto an interest in woman\u2019s spiritual welfare and growth, an interest\nto which society is only now giving birth with pitiable pains of\nlabor. To follow an ideal which almost entirely excludes sex interest\nas something evil is to condemn one of the richest elements in\npersonal experience. And this ideal has regulated not only woman\u2019s\nsex experience but has demanded and received incalculable sacrifices\nin all the phases of her life, mercilessly limiting the sphere of her\nactivities, smothering interests of value and nourishing others to an\nunnatural state of development, and warping her character to satisfy\nits most exacting demands. Because she must first of all conform\nto an unpolluted archetype, and because society must be secure in\nthe knowledge that she is indeed so conforming, she has never been\nable to meet life freely, to make what experience she could out of\ncircumstances, to poke about here and there in the nooks and crannies\nof her surroundings better to understand the world in which she lives.\nWe find here a more subtle but more deadly limitation than exclusion\nfrom institutions of learning or from political privileges. And under\nthis limitation woman has labored in the service of a paltry ideal.\n\nNot only is it undesirable that men should attempt to follow such\nan ideal but it is quite obvious that as long as they accept it\nas adequate for women they are prevented in innumerable ways from\ndeveloping intelligent principles for their own guidance. For one\nthing, they will come to look upon the sex element in most of its forms\nas a moral evil. Experience tells them, however, that it is, in their\nown case, a natural good. Thus they are led to accept a distinction\nfatal to moral integrity and progress. The sex element is admitted to\nthe life of the average man by the back door; once within, it has fair\nrun of the establishment though it is always looked on askance by the\nother members of the household. Sex interests are to be recognized and\nindulged but divorced from all that is \u201cfine\u201d and \u201cideal.\u201d They are\nconsidered desirable though immoral and so are to be tolerated just to\nthe extent that they are divorced from those elements in society--the\nfamily, the home, and good women--which are supposed to embody virtue.\nIt is not realized that virtue, far from being a rival of the other\ngood things of life, is to be attained only through an intelligent\ninterest in good things, and that to divorce moral from natural good\nis to deal a death blow to both. We cannot wonder that at present sex\ninterest so often expresses itself in the form of dubious stories,\ncoarse revues, and degrading physical relations. While the \u201cgood\u201d woman\nwho considers sex somehow lowering is apt to develop a personality\nwhich is anemic and immature, the man who accepts the conventional\nscheme of life develops a personality coarse and unco\u00f6rdinated.\n\nI do not mean to say that there have been no elements of value in the\nideal of purity by which some women have lived. It is undoubtedly true\nthat unregulated and impersonal sex desires and activities quarrel with\nmore stable and fruitful interests in life. But while the most valuable\nexperiences of love are, in general, to be found in more lasting\nrelations, it does not follow that society should prescribe for every\none of its members a particular line of sex conduct and attempt to see,\nthrough constant supervision, that its prescriptions are carried out.\nThe sacrifice in terms of freedom of activity and experience is too\ngreat and the living flower of personal purity cannot be manufactured\nby any such artificial methods.\n\nThe sex relations of an individual should no more be subjected to\nsocial regulation than his friendships. There is indeed a closely\nrelated matter for which he is immediately responsible to society--that\nis the welfare of any children resulting from such relations. The two\nmatters are, however, quite distinguishable and no one could hold that\nthe effort which society makes to control sex relations is to any\nextent based upon concern for the welfare of possible offspring. If\nthis were so, one would not hear so much condemnation of birth-control\nmeasures on the ground that they \u201cencourage immorality.\u201d No. It is\npersonal experience which society would like to prescribe for its\nmembers, personal virtue that it would like to mold for them. But\nvirtue is not a predetermined result, a kind of spiritual dessert that\nany one can cook up who will follow with due care the proper ethical\nreceipt. It is, on the contrary, something which is never twice alike;\nsomething which appears in ever new and lovely forms as the fruit\nof harmoniously developed elements in a unique character complex.\nExperience cannot be defined in terms of external circumstances and\nbodily acts and thus judged as absolutely good or bad. Sex experiences,\nlike other experiences, can be judged of only on the basis of the part\nwhich they play in the creative drama of the individual soul. There\nare as many possibilities for successful sex life as there are men and\nwomen in the world. A significant single standard can be attained only\nthrough the habit of judging every case, man or woman, in the light of\nthe character of the individual and of the particular circumstances in\nwhich he or she is placed.\n\nFrom the changes taking place in sex morality we may, with sufficient\nwisdom and courage, win inestimable gains. Certainly we should be\ngrateful that young people are forming the habit of meeting this old\nproblem in a quite new way--that is, with the co\u00f6peration of the two\nsexes. In the interest of this newer approach we should accord to\ngirls as much freedom from immediate supervision as we have always\ngiven to boys. The old restrictions, imposed upon girls alone, imply,\nof course, the double standard with all its attendant evils; imply the\nplacid acceptance of two essentially different systems of value; imply\nthe preference for physical purity over personal responsibility and\ntrue moral development. We should encourage the daughters of to-day\nin their fast developing scorn for the \u201crespect\u201d which our feminine\npredecessors thought was their due--a respect which man was expected\nto reveal in the habit of keeping the nice woman untouched by certain\nrather conspicuous elements, interests, and activities in his own life.\nIn so far as there is something truly gay in these aspects of life,\nsomething which men know at the bottom of their hearts they should not\nbe called on to forego, there is much that women can learn. Most people\nto-day hold in their minds an image of two worlds--one of gayety and\nfreedom, the other of morality. It is because gayety and morality are\nthus divorced that gayety becomes sordidness, morality dreariness.\nNot until men and women develop together the legitimate interests\nwhich both of these worlds satisfy will the present inconsistency and\nhypocrisy be done away with and both men and women be free to achieve,\nif they can, rich and unified personal lives.\n\n\n\n\nWhere Are the Female Geniuses?\n\nBy Sylvia Kopald\n\n\n\n\nSylvia Kopald\n\n_is primarily a specialist in labor and the author of a recent study of\noutlaw strikes, \u201cRebellion in Labor Unions.\u201d_\n\n\n\n\nWHERE ARE THE FEMALE GENIUSES?\n\nBY SYLVIA KOPALD\n\n\nMany years ago, Voltaire was initiated into the mysteries of Newton by\nMme. du Ch\u00e2telet. Finishing her translation and her rich commentary\nupon the _Principles_, in a glow he extended to her the greatest\ntribute which man has yet found for exceptional women. He said, \u201cA\nwoman who has translated and illuminated Newton is, in short, a very\ngreat man.\u201d Genius has long been a masculine characteristic, although\nsome more generous authors admit its possession by certain \u201cdepraved\u201d\nwomen. Only the courtesans of classical antiquity could be women and\nindividuals at once, and, therefore, Jean Finot found it necessary to\nremind us emphatically even in 1913 that \u201cwomen of genius and talent\nare not necessarily depraved.\u201d Not necessarily, mind you. No, the\ngreat woman may be, in short, a great man, but she is not necessarily\ndepraved.\n\nAs the twentieth century progresses and women capture the outposts of\nindividuality one after the other, the old questions lose much of their\nold malignancy. Women battle with the problem of how to combine a home\nand a career and men become less sure (especially in these days of high\nliving costs) that woman\u2019s place is in the home. As women enter the\ntrades and the arts and the professions, men begin to discover comrades\nwhere there were only girls and wives and mothers before. It is an\nexciting century, this women\u2019s century, and even though prejudices\ncrumble slowly, they crumble. Yet one of the old questions remains,\nstalwart and unyielding as ever: Where are the female geniuses?\n\nEven a pessimist may find cause for rejoicing in this final wording\nof the \u201cwoman question.\u201d Man\u2019s search for the female genius is more\nconsoling than his sorrowful quest for the snows of yesteryear. For\nsnows, like all beauty, have a way of melting with time; a mind ripens\nand mellows with age. Granted a mind which it is no longer a shame or a\nbattle to develop, women can look upon the passing of the years with at\nleast as great an equanimity as does man. She remains in the picture\nof life long after the Maker\u2019s paints have begun to dry. And that is\ngood. But as long as the female geniuses remain undiscovered, it must\nbe also a bit insecure. Women may have minds--every average man will\nnow grant that. But (he will quickly ask) have they ever much more than\naverage minds? Look at history, which this time really does prove what\nyou want it to. Every high peak in the historic landscape is masculine.\nPoint them out just as they occur to you: Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe,\nVirgil, Horace, Catullus, Plato, Socrates, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur,\nWatt, Edison, Steinmetz, Heine, Shelley, Keats, Beethoven, Wagner,\nBach, Tolstoi....\n\nWhere are the _female_ geniuses?\n\nIt has really become much more than a question of feminist\nconversation. Science has attempted to put its seal of approval upon\nthe implied answer to this rhetorical question. It has sought to put\nthe notion that \u201ca woman is only a woman, but a genius is a man,\u201d into\nimpressively scientific lingo. The argument goes something like this:\nIn regard to practically all anatomical, physiological, and psychic\ncharacteristics, the male exhibits a greater variability (i.e. a\ngreater range of spreading down from and up above the average) than\nthe female. The male is the agent of variation; the female is the\nagent of type conservation. This sex difference operates in the realm\nof mental ability as everywhere. In any comparable group of men and\nwomen, the distribution of intelligence will tend to follow the law of\nchances (Gaussian Curve). But female intelligence will cluster far more\nabout its average than male. There will be more imbeciles and idiots\namong men, but there will also be more geniuses. It is really very\nsimple, as the following arbitrary example will show. Supposing you\ntake comparable sample groups of 1000 men and 1000 women from a given\npopulation. After testing them for grade of intelligence, you classify\nthem according to previously accepted \u201cintelligence classes.\u201d Your\nresults would tend to read a little like this:\n\n                         _Number_  _Number_\n  _Intelligence Class_    _Men_     _Women_\n  Idiots                    10         3\n  Inferior                 100        50\n  Slow                     200       150\n  Average                  380       595\n  Able                     200       150\n  Highly Talented          100        52\n  Geniuses                  10        ..\n\nOf course none of the proponents of this theory would state the alleged\nfacts of man\u2019s greater variability in such bald terms. But all of them\nwould agree that men do vary more than women and in some such fashion.\nIn this greater variability they see the explanation of men\u2019s monopoly\nof genius.\n\nAccording to Karl Pearson this \u201claw of the greater variability of the\nmale\u201d was first stated by Darwin. Somewhat earlier, the anatomist\nMeckel had concluded that the female is more variable than the male.\nIt is interesting to note in passing that he consequently judged\n\u201cvariation a sign of inferiority.\u201d By the time Burdach, Darwin, and\nothers had declared the male more variable, however, variation had\nbecome an advantage and the basis and hope of all progress. To-day\ngreat social significance is attached to the comparative variability\nof the sexes, especially in its application to the questions of\nsex differences in mental achievement. Probably the outstanding\nEnglish-speaking supporters of the theory in its modern form have been\nHavelock Ellis and Dr. G. Stanley Hall. But even so cautious a student\nas Dr. E. L. Thorndike has granted it his guarded support. And Dr.\nJames McKeen Cattell has explained the results of his study of 1000\neminent characters of history by means of it. Indeed many others hold\nthe theory in one form or another--e.g. M\u00fcnsterburg, Patrick. What is\nmost important, of course, is that its supporters do not stop with the\nmere statement of the theory. They ascribe to it tremendous effects\nin the past and ask for it a large influence in the shaping of our\npolicies in the present.\n\nFor Havelock Ellis, the greater variability of the male \u201chas social\nand practical consequences of the widest significance. The whole of\nour human civilization would have been a different thing if in early\nzo\u00f6logical epochs the male had not acquired a greater variational\ntendency than the female.\u201d (\u201cMan and Woman,\u201d p. 387.) Professor Hall\nbuilds up upon it a scheme of gushingly paradisaical (and properly\nboring) education for the adolescent girl, which \u201ckeeps the purely\nmental back\u201d and develops the soul, the body, and the intuitions.\n(\u201cThe Psychology of Adolescence,\u201d Vol. II, Chap. 17.) Just because\nProfessor Thorndike is so careful in his statements, his practical\ndeductions from the theory are most interesting: \u201cThus the function of\neducation for women, though not necessarily differentiated by the small\ndifferences in average capacity, is differentiated by the difference\nin range of ability. Not only the probability and desirability of\nmarriage and the training of children as an essential feature of\nwomen\u2019s career but also the restriction of women to the mediocre grades\nof ability and achievement should be reckoned with by our educational\nsystems. The education of women for such professions as administration,\nstatesmanship, philosophy, or scientific research, where a few very\ngifted individuals are what society requires, is far less needed\nthan education for such professions as nursing, teaching, medicine,\nor architecture, where the average level is essential. Elementary\neducation is probably an even better investment for the community in\nthe case of girls than in the case of boys; for almost all girls profit\nby it, whereas the extremely low grade boy may not be up to his school\neducation in zeal or capacity and the extremely high grade boy may get\non better without it. So also with high school education. On the other\nhand, post graduate instruction to which women are flocking in great\nnumbers is, at least in its higher reaches, a far more remunerative\nsocial investment in the case of men.\u201d (\u201cSex in Education,\u201d _Bookman_,\nVol. XXIII, April, 1906, p. 213.)\n\nBefore we begin the revision of our educational systems in accordance\nwith this theory, we must make sure that it really explains away\nthe \u201cfemale geniuses.\u201d For although the theory is still widely held\nby biologists and psychologists, it requires only a short study to\ndiscover how tenuous is the evidence adduced in support of it--in\nall its phases, but especially in regard to mental traits. Darwin\napparently gave no statistical evidence to support \u201cthe principle,\u201d\nas he called it, and those who have followed him have done little to\nfill the lack. Professor Hall offers evidence that is almost entirely\nempirical; Havelock Ellis has been attacked by Karl Pearson for\ndoing much \u201cto perpetuate some of the worst of the pseudo-scientific\nsuperstitions to which he [Ellis] refers, notably that of the greater\nvariability of the male human being.\u201d Professor Thorndike, in spite\nof his conclusions, admits that it \u201cis unfortunate that so little\ninformation is available for a study of sex differences in the\nvariability of mental traits in the case of individuals over fifteen.\u201d\nAnd while the overwhelming majority of Professor Cattell\u2019s 1000 eminent\ncharacters are men, he merely states without proving his explanation\nthat \u201cwoman departs less from the normal than man.\u201d\n\nWise feminists to-day are concentrating their forces upon this theory.\nWomen have won the right to an acknowledged mind; they want now the\nright to draw for genius and high talents in the \u201ccurve of chance.\u201d\nAnd this is no merely academic question. For while genius may overcome\nthe sternest physical barriers of environment, it is nourished and\ndeveloped by tolerant expectancy. Men may accomplish anything,\npopular thought tells them, and so some men do. But if women are\nscientifically excluded from the popular expectation of big things, if\ntheir educations are toned down to preparation for \u201cthe average level,\u201d\nif motherhood remains the _only_ respected career for _all_ women,\nthen the female geniuses will remain few and far between. And, more\nimportant still, all thinking women will continue restless over the\nproblem of how to secure the chance to vary in interests and abilities\nfrom the average of their sex, and at the same time to be wives and\nmothers.\n\nIn this fight for a full chance to compete, woman may do one (or all)\nof three things. She may merely ignore the theory and go on \u201cworking\nand living,\u201d trusting that as environmental barriers fall one after\nthe other, this final question, too, will lose its meaning. She can\npoint out in support of this attitude that the past does contain its\nfemale geniuses, however few; and certainly if all the barriers that\nhave been set up against woman\u2019s entry into the larger world have not\nentirely stifled female genius, we may at least look forward hopefully\nto a kinder future. Something of this attitude, of this demand for free\nexperimentation, must make part of every woman\u2019s armor against the\nimplications of this theory. But taken alone, it becomes more merely\ndefensive than the status of the theory deserves. For it is really the\ntheory that must defend itself. It must not only bring forward more\naffirmative evidence, but it must also meet the contrary findings of\nsuch investigation as has been made. It must, again, prove its title\nto _the cause_ of the scarcity of female geniuses when so many other\nmore eradicable causes may be at its bottom.\n\nThe actual evidence that has been gathered on this question is still\nuncertain and fragmentary. While it does not yet establish anything\ndefinitely, it points to rather surprising conclusions. In all cases\ninvestigated the discovered differences in variability have been\nvery slight, and if they balance either way tend to prove a greater\nvariability among women. Neither sex need have a monopoly of either\nimbeciles or geniuses, but women may yet be found to be slightly more\nfavored with both!\n\nThe first painstaking investigation in this field was made by Dr. Karl\nPearson who published his interesting results as one essay in his\n_Chances of Death and Other Studies in Evolution_ in 1897. Under the\nheading \u201cVariation in Man and Woman\u201d (Vol. I, pp. 256-377), written\nas a polemical attack upon Havelock Ellis\u2019s stand in this theory, he\nset forth results of measurements upon men and women in seventeen\nanatomical characteristics. He obtained his data from statistics\nalready collected, from measurements of living men and women, and\nfrom post-mortem and archeological examinations. Female variability\n(coefficients of variation) proved greater in eleven of these seventeen\ncharacteristics, male in six. He concluded among other things that\n\u201cthere is ... no evidence of greater male variability, but rather\nof a slightly greater female variability. Accordingly the principle\nthat man is more variable than woman must be put on one side as a\npseudo-scientific superstition until it has been demonstrated in a more\nscientific manner than has hitherto been attempted.\u201d\n\nTo round out this evidence Doctors Leta Hollingworth and Helen Montague\nmeasured 20,000 infants at their birth in the maternity wards of the\nNew York Infirmary for Women and Children. They sought to discover\nwhether environmental influences played any determining r\u00f4le in\nproducing the results obtained by Pearson from measurements upon\nadults. From the ten anatomical measurements made upon these babies\nthey found that \u201cin all cases the differences in variability are very\nslight. In only two cases does the percentile variation differ in the\nfirst decimal place. In these two cases the variability is once greater\nfor males and once greater for females.\u201d (\u201cThe Comparative Variability\nof the Sexes at Birth,\u201d _American Journal of Sociology_, Vol. XX,\n1914-1915, pp. 335-370.)\n\nThe findings on anatomical variability do not, of course, necessarily\nprove anything about differences in the range of mental ability. They\ndo, however, suggest the probability of parallel results and such\nstudies as have been made tend, on the whole, to bear this out. All\nthe recent work in this field (and it is still fragmentary) seems to\npoint at least to equal mental variability among men and women. In\n1917, Terman and others in their \u201cStanford Revision of the Binet-Simon\nScale for Measuring Intelligence\u201d investigated this problem among\nschool children from five to fourteen years old. They obtained the\nIntelligence Quotients of 457 boys and 448 girls and compared these\nI.Q.\u2019s with teachers\u2019 estimates and judgments of intelligence and work\nand with the age grade distribution of the sexes for the ages of 7 to\n14. After making all necessary qualifications, they concluded that\nthe tests revealed a small superiority in the intelligence of the\ngirls that \u201cprobably rests upon a real superiority in intelligence,\nage for age.\u201d But \u201capart from the small superiority of the girls, the\ndistribution of intelligence shows no significant differences in the\nsexes. The data offer no support to the wide-spread belief that girls\ngroup themselves more closely about the median or that extremes of\nintelligence are more common among boys\u201d (p. 83).\n\nDr. Hollingworth, again, has made a study of mental differences\nfor adults. She has summarized the results of recent studies in\nsex differences in mental variability and in tastes, perceptions,\ninterests, etc. Her conclusions on this score are interesting: \u201c(1) The\ngreater variability of males in anatomical traits is not established,\nbut is debated by authorities of perhaps equal competence. (2) But even\nif it were established, it would only suggest, not prove, that men are\nmore variable in mental traits also. The empirical data at present\navailable on this point are inadequate and contradictory, and if they\npoint either way, actually indicate greater female variability....\u201d\n(\u201cVariability as Related to Sex Differences in Achievement,\u201d _American\nJournal of Sociology_, Vol. XIX, pp. 510-530, Jan., 1914.)\n\nIt seems hardly safe scientifically, therefore, to restrict women to\nthe average levels in education and work and profession on the ground\nthat eminence is beyond their range. But if the female geniuses have\nnot been cut off by a comparatively narrowed range of mental ability,\nwhere are they? Certainly history does not reveal them in anything like\nsatisfactory number. And it is now that women may bring forward their\nthird weapon of attack. The female geniuses may have been missing not\nbecause of an inherent lack in the make-up of the sex, but because of\nthe oppressive, restrictive cultural conditions under which women have\nbeen forced to live.\n\nThe important r\u00f4le played by cultural conditions in the cultural\nachievement of various nations and races has been noted with increasing\nemphasis by the newer schools of sociology and anthropology. No scholar\ncan now defend unchallenged a thesis of \u201clower or higher races\u201d by\nurging the achievements of any race as an index of its range of mental\nability. Culture grows by its own laws and the high position of the\nwhite race may be as much a product of favorable circumstances as\nof exceptional innate capacities. Similarly the expression taken by\nthe genius of various nations appears to vary strikingly. This is\nespecially impressive in the realm of music. The Anglo-Saxon peoples\nare singularly lacking in great musical composers. Neither Britain nor\nAmerica, nor indeed any of the northern countries have contributed\none composer worthy of mention beside the Beethovens and Wagners and\nChopins of this art. Indeed the great names in music are generally of\nGerman, Latin or Slavic origin. Yet no one thinks of urging this fact\nas evidence of an Anglo-Saxon failure of major creativeness. Instead\nwe point to achievements in other fields or at most attempt to explain\nthis peculiar lack by some external causation. Similarly all our\nimpatience with the un-artistic approaches of the American people does\nnot lead us to frame a theory of their lack of genius. There are many\ncultural factors to be considered first.\n\nBut as soon as we approach the problem of female genius, too many of us\nare apt to bring forward an entirely different kind of interpretation.\nWe pass over the undoubted female geniuses lightly--granting Sappho and\nBonheur and Brunn and Eliot and Bront\u00eb and Amster and Madame Curie and\nCaroline Herschel and perhaps even Chaminade and Clara Schumann and\nseveral others. We admit the undoubtedly significant parts women are\nplaying in modern literature. But the question always remains.\n\nYet in no national or racial group have cultural influences exercised\nso restrictive an influence as among the entire female sex. Not only\nhas the larger world been closed to them, not only has popular opinion\nassumed that \u201cno woman has it in her,\u201d but the bearing and rearing\nof children has carried with it in the past the inescapable drudgery\nof housework. And this is \u201ca field,\u201d as Dr. Hollingworth points out,\n\u201cwhere eminence is not possible.\u201d\n\nIt was Prudhon who sneered in response to a similar argument that\n\u201cwomen could not even invent their distaff.\u201d But we now know enough\nabout the laws of invention to realize how unfair such sneering\nis. Professor Franz Boas and his school have long demonstrated\nthat cultural achievement and mental ability are not necessarily\ncorrelated. For material culture, once it begins, tends to grow by\naccumulation and diffusion. Each generation adds to the existing stock\nof knowledge, and as the stock grows the harvests necessarily become\ngreater. Modern man need have no greater mental ability than the\nmen of the ice ages to explain why his improvements upon the myriad\nmachines and tools that are his yield so much larger a harvest than\nthe Paleolithic hunters\u2019 improvements upon their few flint weapons\nand industrial processes. For, as Professor Ogburn has well shown (in\n\u201cSocial Change,\u201d Part III) all invention contains two elements--a\ngrowing cultural base and inventive genius to work with the materials\nit furnishes. The number of new inventions necessarily grows with the\ncultural base. Even 50 times 100 make only 5000, but 2 times 1,000,000\nmake 2,000,000. Countless generations have added their share to the\ntotal material culture which is ours and which we shall hand down still\nmore enriched to posterity.\n\nIt must be at once obvious that there has been no such cultural\ngrowth in housework. Housework has long remained an individualized,\nnon-cumulative industry, where daughter learns from mother the old\nways of doing things. The small improvements and ingenuities which\nmost housewives devise seldom find their way into the whole stream of\nculture. Thus it is that the recent great inventions which are slowly\nrevolutionizing this last stronghold of petty individualism have come\nfrom the man-made world. Workers in electricity could more easily\ndevise the vacuum cleaner than the solitary housewife; the electric\nwasher, parquet floors, the tin can, quantity production of stockings,\nwool, clothing, bread, butter, and all the other instruments that have\nreally made possible women\u2019s emancipation have naturally come not from\nwomen\u2019s minds (any more than from men\u2019s) but from the growth of culture\nand the minds that utilize that growth for further expansion.\n\nConsequently, as women participate in the work of the world and win\nthe right to acquire the results of past achievement in science and\ntechnique and art, we may expect their contributions to the social\nadvance to appear in ever greater numbers. Until we give them this\nfull chance to contribute, we have no right to explain the paucity of\ntheir gifts to society by inherent lacks. And it seems reasonable to\nexpect that such a chance will render the old quest for female geniuses\nproperly old-fashioned. For they will be there, these women--the able\nand talented and geniuses--working side by side with men, not as \u201cvery\ngreat men\u201d nor as necessarily \u201cdepraved\u201d nor in any way unusual. They\nwill be there as human beings and as women.\n\n\n\n\nMan and Woman as Creators\n\nBy Alexander Goldenweiser\n\n\n\n\nAlexander Goldenweiser,\n\n_psychologist and anthropologist, is a lecturer at the New School for\nSocial Research in New York_.\n\n\n\n\nMAN AND WOMAN AS CREATORS\n\nBY ALEXANDER GOLDENWEISER\n\n\n\u201cA hen is no bird, a woman--no human,\u201d says a Russian proverb. In this\ndrastic formulation stands written the history of centuries. Woman\u2019s\nclaim to \u201chuman\u201dness was at times accepted with reservations, at other\ntimes it was boldly challenged and even to-day when woman\u2019s legal,\nsocial, economic and political disabilities have been largely removed,\nwoman\u2019s acceptance in society as man\u2019s equal remains dependent on a\ndefinition of the \u201cequal.\u201d\n\nAs in the case of the mental capacity of races, the question of woman\u2019s\nintellectual status was never judged on its merits. Rather, it was\naccepted as a practical social postulate, then rationalized into the\nlikeness of an inductive conclusion. The problem seems so replete with\ntemptations for special pleading that a thoroughly impartial attitude\nbecomes well-nigh impossible. However, let us attempt it!\n\nIs woman psychologically identical with man? or, if there is a\ndifference, is it one of superiority and inferiority? And of what\npractical significance is this issue to society?\n\nTwo ways of approach are open: subject men and women to psychological\ntests, or observe performance in life and, exercising due critical\ncare, infer capacity.\n\nBoth methods have been tried. The first enjoys to-day a certain vogue:\nit is the method of science, of experimental psychology. Unfortunately,\nthe findings of science in this field have to date resulted in\nprecisely nothing. It was feasible to assume that woman was man\u2019s\nequal in elementary sensory capacity, in memory, types and varieties\nof associations, attention, sensitiveness to pain, heat and cold, etc.\nExperimental psychology has confirmed these assumptions. But what of\nit? What can we make of it? Precisely nothing. What we are interested\nin is whether woman can think \u201cas logically\u201d as man, whether she is\nmore intuitive, more emotional, less imaginative, more practical, less\nhonest, more sensitive, a better judge of human nature. These, among\nmany other interesting issues cannot even be broached by experimental\npsychology \u201cwithin the present state of our knowledge.\u201d\n\nRemains the second method, to observe performance and infer capacity.\n\nTo examine in this fashion all the issues involved would require a\nsmall library. I select only one, creativeness. Is woman man\u2019s equal\nin creativeness? The choice is justified by the highly controversial\ncharacter of the issue as well as its practical bearings.\n\nTwo periods in the history of civilization lend themselves admirably\nfor our purpose, the primitive and the modern.\n\nThe primitive world was not innocent of discrimination against woman.\nIn social and political leadership, in the ownership and disposition of\nproperty, in religion and ceremonialism, woman was subjected to more\nor less drastic restrictions. It would, therefore, be obviously unfair\nto expect her creativeness in these fields to have equaled or even\napproximated that of man. Not so in industry and art, where division of\nlabor prevailed, but no sex disability. As one surveys the technical\nand artistic pursuits of primitive tribes, woman\u2019s participation is\neverywhere in evidence. The baskets of California, the painted pots of\nthe Pueblos, the beaded embroideries of the Plains, the famous Chilkat\nblankets, the tapa cloth of Polynesia, all of these were woman\u2019s\nhandiwork. Almost everywhere she plans and cuts and sews and decorates\nthe garments worn by women as well as men. Also, in all primitive\ncommunities she gathers the wild products of vegetation and transforms\nthem into palatable foods. More than this, in societies that know not\nthe plow woman is, with few exceptions, the agriculturist. It follows\nthat the observations, skills, techniques and inventions involved in\nthese pursuits must also be credited to woman.\n\nIt will be conceded that in primitive society woman\u2019s record is\nimpressive: wherever she is permitted to apply her creativeness she\nmakes good, and the excellence of her achievement is equal to that of\nman, certainly not conspicuously inferior to his.\n\nIn evaluating these findings, however, it is important to take\ncognizance of the submergence of individual initiative by the tribal\npattern, a feature characteristic of primitive life. This applies\nto men and women, to artisans and artists. Imaginative flights being\ncut short by traditional norms, the individualism and subjectivism of\nmodern art are here conspicuous by their absence.\n\nHow does this record compare with a survey of the modern period?\n\nHere again woman\u2019s disabilities in the social, political and religious\nrealms were so marked that creative participation was impossible.\nThe same is true of architecture. Then come philosophy, mathematics,\nscience, and sculpture, painting, literature, music and the drama. In\nphilosophy and mathematics there is no woman in the ranks of supreme\nexcellence. Even Sonya Kovalevsky, though a talent, was not a great\nmathematician. In science also, where women have done fine things, none\nare found among the brightest luminaries. It must be added, moreover,\nthat the few women who have made their mark in the scientific field,\nnotably Mme. Curie, have done so in the laboratory, not in the more\nabstract and imaginative domain of theoretical science.\n\nAt this point some may protest that the period during which women\nhave had a chance to test their talents in philosophy, mathematics and\nscience was too short, their number too small, and that here once more\nperformance cannot fairly be used as a measure of possible achievement.\nWe must heed this protest.\n\nAs to sculpture, painting, literature, music and the drama, I claim\nthat woman\u2019s protracted disabilities cannot in any way be held\naccountable for whatever her performance may be found to be. Women\nartists, musicians, writers and, of course, actresses, have been with\nus for a long time. Their number is large and on the increase. Whether\nmarried or single, they devote their energies to these pursuits quite\nunhampered by social taboos. There are in this field no taboos against\nwomen. In the United States, in fact, these occupations are held to be\nmore suitable for women than for men.\n\nBut what do we find?\n\nIn painting and sculpture, no women among the best, although\nconsiderable numbers among the second best and below. There is no woman\nRodin or Meunier or Klinger or Renoir or Picasso.\n\nIn literature the case for woman stands better. Here women have\nperformed wonderfully, both in poetry and prose. If they have fallen\nshort, it is only of supreme achievement.[2]\n\nFinally we come to music and the stage. The case of music is admirably\nsuited for our purpose, is really a perfect test case. What do we find?\nAs performers, where minor creativeness suffices, women have equaled\nthe best among men. As composers, where creativeness of the highest\norder is essential, they have failed. We have a Carre\u00f1o or Novaes to\nmatch a Hofmann or Levitski, a Melba or Sembrich to match a Caruso\nor deReszke, a Morini or Powell or Parlow to match a Heifetz or Elman\nor Kreisler; but there is no woman to match a Beethoven or Wagner or\nStrauss or Mahler or Stravinsky, or Rachmaninoff--a composer-performer.\n\nThe situation in drama is almost equally illuminating. Here women\nhave reached the top, have done it so frequently and persistently, in\nfact, as to challenge men, some think successfully so. But as dramatic\nwriters the few women who tried have never succeeded to rise above\nmoderate excellence. A Rachel or Duse can hold her own as against a\nPossart or Orlenyev, a Bernhardt looms as high as an Irving, Booth or\nSalvini; but there is no woman to compare with a Moli\u00e8re or Ostrovski\nor Rostand or Hauptmann or Chekhov or Kapek.\n\nIf now we glance once more at the primitive record the conclusion\nsuggested by an analysis of music and the drama is greatly re\u00ebnforced.\nIn primitive society woman, whenever opportunity was given her, equaled\nman in creativeness; in modern society she has uniformly failed in\nthe highest ranges. The results are not incompatible. As indicated\nbefore, in early days cultural conditions precluded the exercise of\ncreativeness on the part of the individual except on a minor scale, in\nmodern society major creativeness is possible and has been realized.\nWoman\u2019s creative achievement reaches the top when the top is relatively\nlow; when the top itself rises, she falls behind.\n\nTo analyze this fact further is no easy task. We may not assume, as\nsome do, that the difference between major and minor creativeness\nlies in degrees of rationality. This is certainly erroneous. The true\ncreator is what he is, not because of his rationality but because of\nwhat he does with it. The differentia, as I see them, are two: boldness\nof imagination and tremendous concentration on self. The creator, when\nhe creates, is spiritually alone; he dominates his material by drawing\nit into the self and he permits his imagination, for once torn off the\nmoorings of tradition and precedent, to indulge in flights of gigantic\nsweep. Imagination and personality exalted to the _n_th power--not\nrationality--are the marks of the highest creativeness.\n\nIn the possession of these traits, then, as here understood, woman is\nsomehow restricted. She has them, of course, and exercises them, but\nnot on the very highest level.\n\nWe might stop right here, but it is hard to suppress at least a\ntentative interpretation.\n\nIf the personality-imagination complex is where woman fails at the\ntop, then it becomes _a priori_ probable that this difference between\nman and woman constitutes a remote sex characteristic. And if this\nis so, then it may prove worth our while to look for a corresponding\ndifference on a level more directly connected with sex life. No sooner\nis this done than a difference does indeed appear, and it meets\nour expectations, for it lies in the direction of personality or\nself-concentration as well as of imagination. Woman is never so much \u201ca\npart of\u201d as when she loves, man never so \u201cwhole\u201d; her self dissolves,\nhis crystallizes. Also, woman\u2019s love is less imaginative than man\u2019s:\nman is more like what woman\u2019s love makes him out to be than woman is\nlike what man\u2019s love makes her out to be. Relatively speaking, his love\nis romantic, hers realistic.\n\nThis difference in the diagnostic features of man\u2019s love and woman\u2019s\nlove confirms our suspicion that the discrepancy in performance, where\nthe personality-imagination complex is involved, constitutes a remote\nsex characteristic.\n\nWe must now turn once more to woman\u2019s achievement in the different\nfields of cultural creativeness, for the variation in the degree of\nexcellence reached by her provides a valuable clue as to where her\nstrength lies. In an ascending series of woman\u2019s achievements musical\ncomposition is at the bottom of the list, then come sculpture and\npainting, then literature (with a strange drop in dramatic writing),\nthen instrumental and vocal performance; acting, finally, heads the\nlist.\n\nThis order is most illuminating. The relative excellence of woman\u2019s\nachievement is seen to rise with the concreteness of the task and\nthe prominence of the technical and human elements. Creativeness is\nmore abstract in music than in the plastic and graphic arts, more\nabstract in these than in literature; and in each case woman\u2019s relative\nachievement increases as abstractness decreases. Even the peculiar drop\nin dramatic writing when compared with other forms of literature is\nexplicable in terms of a more abstract sort of creativeness required\nby the formal elements of dramatic art. Again, the high position\nin the list of musical performers and actresses, must in part be\nascribed to the importance of the technical element in these arts. The\npreeminence of the musical performers is probably entirely due to this\nfactor, although the intrusion of the human element (performing for an\naudience) may also have a share in the result.\n\nIn the case of acting the human element is the most important factor,\nfor here there is not only an audience to act to but the human content\nof the acting itself. The human orientation also accounts for the\nrelatively high position of literature in the list when compared\nto sculpture and painting and to musical composition. Finally, the\ncreativeness of musical performance and acting--two fields in which\nwoman excels--is concrete when compared to that of literature, the arts\nand musical composition. Incidentally, a sidelight is thus thrown on\nthe case of science where woman\u2019s relative preeminence is found in the\nconcrete and technical domain of the laboratory.\n\nThe preceding analysis leads to the conclusion that woman\u2019s strength\nlies in the concrete as contrasted with the abstract, the technical\nas contrasted with the ideational, the human as contrasted with the\nuniversal and detached. This conclusion, it may be of interest to\nnote, harmonizes perfectly with the general consensus of mankind, as\nexpressed in lay opinion and the judgments of literary men.\n\nTo summarize: in all fields of cultural activity opened to her, woman\nhas shown creative ability, but since cultural conditions have made\nmajor creativeness possible, she has failed, in comparison with man, in\nthe highest ranges of abstract creativeness. On the other hand, woman\nhas shown in her psychic disposition affinities for the concrete, the\ntechnical and the human.\n\nBefore closing, these findings may be utilized for a prognostication of\nwoman\u2019s activities in the immediate and more remote future.\n\nThe present tendency toward equalizing the cultural opportunities\nof man and woman will no doubt persist. Thus the range of woman\u2019s\ncultural contributions will expand and the excellence of her creative\nachievement will rise, especially in the fields in which she has so far\nhad but little chance to try her hand. It is to be expected, however,\nthat in the highest ranges of abstract creativeness in philosophy,\nscience, art, music, and perhaps literature, she will fail as she\nhas hitherto failed to equal man. Her concrete-mindedness will ever\ncontinue to provide a useful counterpoise to the more imaginative\nand abstract leanings of her male companion. Her technical talents\nwill shine more brilliantly in a world in which the crafts will again\noccupy the prominent place which was theirs once before. But her unique\ncontributions will come in the range of the human element.\n\nIn this respect, woman\u2019s principal affinity is calculated to bear\nits choicest fruits in a world better than the one we live in. When\nformalism recedes from the field of education, as indeed it has already\nbegun to do, and gives room for more individual and psychologically\nrefined processes, woman\u2019s share in education will grow in scope and\ncreativeness. When the family has left behind the agonies of its\npresent readjustments, the reconstruction of a freer and happier family\nlife will largely rest on the shoulders of woman. When prisons will\nbe turned into hospitals and criminals will be treated as patients,\nwoman\u2019s sensitiveness, insight and tact will bring her leadership in\nthis field. When a return of leisure and the reduction of economic\npressure will permit a revival of the more intimate forms of social\nintercourse, woman\u2019s social talents will find new fields to conquer.\nWhen the world of nations will sheathe its sword forever--an event\ntoward the realization of which woman will probably contribute more\nthan man--woman, to whom nothing human is foreign, will at last be free\nto show the world what she can accomplish as the mother of the family\nof man.\n\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[2] We need not mention a Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes or\nMilton. Perhaps these are too far back. Not so Tolstoi, Dostoyevski,\nTurgenev, Goethe, Heine, Balzac, Maupassant, the Goncourts, Flaubert,\nByron, Browning, Shelley, Emerson, Walt Whitman. Where are their equals\namong women? And coming down to the modern period, when literature is\nflooded with feminine figures, is there one who can be placed beside\nAnatole France or d\u2019Annunzio or Proust or Gorki or even Bernard Shaw\n(not to mention Ibsen)? The feminine names that might be cited in\ncomparison are obvious enough, but would any of them measure up to\nthese--quite? However, let me mention Katherine Mansfield, Edith\nWharton, Edna St. Vincent Millay. And I may add Sheila Kaye-Smith,\nWilla Cather, Selma Lagerl\u00f6f and Margu\u00e9rite Audou.\n\nI realize, of course, that such comparisons, except in a most sweeping\nstatement, are invidious. A better picture could be obtained by\njuxtaposing, one to one, writers of similar type and literary form--but\nthis is a task for a volume.\n\n\n\n\nDominant Sexes\n\nBy M. Vaerting\n\n\n\n\nM. Vaerting,\n\n_one of a group of German anthropologists whose lectures and articles\nhave attracted much attention in Europe; is also part author of \u201cThe\nDominant Sex,\u201d recently published in the United States._\n\n\n\n\nDOMINANT SEXES\n\nBY M. VAERTING\n\n\nCertain peculiarities of physical form are to-day considered typical\nfeminine sex characters. Thus roundness and fullness of figure are\ngenerally regarded as characteristic of women; larger size and strength\namong men are accepted as a sex difference, biologically determined.\n\nBut this theory, like the entire doctrine of secondary sex characters,\nstands upon a doubtful basis. It has grown up out of a comparison of\nmen and women in very unequal situations. The bodies of men and women\nwhose field of work and type of occupation differ widely have been\ncompared. The man attends to the extra-domestic activities, while the\nwoman is chiefly occupied at home. Bachofen writes: \u201cIf a man sits at a\nspinning-wheel a weakening of body and of soul will inevitably follow.\u201d\nCharles de Coster in his \u201cWedding Journey\u201d makes the significant\nremark: \u201cWork in the fields had given Liska hips like a robust man\u2019s.\u201d\nCertain of the physical differences between men and women may therefore\nbe sociologically determined rather than due to inborn differences.\n\nOne may object that the division of labor between the sexes, in which\nthe woman takes the domestic and the man the extra-domestic sphere, is\nitself determined by inborn sex differences. Even in Socrates\u2019s time\nit was believed that the nature of the sexes fixed their fields of\nactivity. Man was unquestionably intended for matters which must be\nattended to outside the house, \u201cwhile the weak and timid woman was by\ndivine order assigned to the inner work of the home.\u201d After thorough\ninvestigation it appears that this hoary theory, which still persists,\nis false. The division of labor between man and woman corresponds not\nto an innate difference but to their power-relation. If man dominates\nhe says that woman\u2019s place is the home, and that work outside the home\nis fit only for men. If woman is dominant then she has the opposite\nopinion, takes care of business outside the home, and leaves the man to\ntake care of the family and the housekeeping. The ruling sex, whether\nmale or female, always puts the domestic duties on the subordinate\nsex and takes to itself work outside the home. To-day man is dominant,\nbut there have been many peoples among whom woman was dominant and the\nr\u00f4le of man and woman was the reverse of that common to-day. In ancient\nEgypt there was a period when women ruled. Herodotus reports that they\nunnaturally performed \u201cmasculine\u201d activities, carried on commerce in\nthe market-place, while the men stayed at home, sewed, and attended to\ndomestic difficulties. To Herodotus, who came from a state where men\nwere dominant, the work of the Egyptian women naturally seemed \u201cmale.\u201d\nIn the Talmud Herodotus\u2019s report is confirmed. The children of Israel,\nit tells us, were disturbed because their men were forced to do women\u2019s\nwork and their women men\u2019s work. In Sophocles\u2019s \u201c\u0152dipus Kolonos\u201d\n\u0152dipus says to his two daughters: \u201cHa, how they imitate the Egyptians\nin the manner and meaning of life. There the men stay home and sit at\nthe spinning-wheel, and the women go out to meet the needs of life.\u201d\n\u0152dipus also mentions the fact reported also by Herodotus, that only\nthe daughters, not the sons, were compelled in Egypt to support their\nparents. The sons could not fulfill that duty, Sophocles says, because,\nlike the Greek girls, they stayed at home and had no income from their\nlabor. Furthermore, they had only a limited right to own property.\n\nOne might cite many other peoples where the woman was dominant. Among\nthe Kamchadales the men, in the days of female dominance, were such\ncomplete housewives that they cooked, sewed, washed, and were never\nallowed to stay away from home for more than a day. Similarly among\nthe Lapps there was a period when the men did the housework while the\nwomen fished and sailed the sea. Under such circumstances the men also\ntook care of the children. Strabo and Humboldt both report of the\nVasko-Iberian races that the women worked in the fields; after child\nbirth they turned the child over to the man and themselves resumed\ntheir work in the fields. A similar arrangement prevailed in the days\nwhen women ruled Lybia, which bordered upon Egypt.\n\nWhen one sex is dominant there is always a division of labor.\n\nThis differentiation of occupation is one of the chief causes of\ncertain differences in physical form between men and women. It changes\nthe fundamental conditions of development--among others the course\nof the inner secretions. Where man rules he does the active outside\nwork and is accordingly larger and stronger; where woman rules and\ndoes the same \u201cman\u2019s work\u201d her body assumes what are to-day regarded\nas typically male proportions, whereas the man develops what we call\nfeminine characteristics. We have a few definite proofs of this from\nstates dominated by women.\n\nWhen woman ruled among the Gauls, and worked outside the home, we are\ntold by Strabo that the female was the larger and stronger sex.\n\nAmong the Adombies on the Congo women were in power and did all the\nhard work. According to Ellis they were stronger and better developed\nthan the men. The same was true of the Wateita in East Africa. Fritsch\nand Hellwald report that the woman is larger than the man among the\nBushmen. Female and male pelvises show no differences, but are alike\n\u201cmale\u201d in our sense of the word.\n\nThe Spartan women in the days of their rule had a reputation for\nenormous strength. Aristophanes says that a Spartan woman could\nstrangle an ox bare-handed. The Egyptian women at the height of their\npower were called by their neighbors the \u201clionesses of the Nile,\u201d\nand they seemed to like the name. When Heracles visited the Lybians,\nwhose state bordered on Egypt and of whose rule by women we have many\nwitnesses, he had to work, like the other men of the country, with the\ndistaff. His wife Omphale, however, wandered about clad in a lionskin\nand armed with a club, and won respect for her strength.\n\nA very striking report comes from near New Guinea, where the woman\nwas stronger than the man. There it was a common sight to see a woman\nspanking her husband with a paddle. Through the brute force of superior\nstrength she oppressed the man just as men oppress women where the\nwoman is weaker.\n\nThus through legend and the records of travelers we have clear\ntestimony that man is not larger and stronger than woman because of\ninnate differences, as is generally supposed, but that physical\nsuperiority is a characteristic of the dominant sex, regardless whether\nthat be male or female.\n\nSimilarly those secondary physical characteristics which are to-day\nregarded as female are found among males when they occupy the\nsubordinate position in which woman lives to-day. Woman is inclined\nto-day to full, rounded curves and even to stoutness. Among the Celts\nthe woman dominated, and according to Strabo the men of that people\nwere inclined to be fat and heavy-paunched. The same was true of\nthe Kamchadales in the days of woman rule. The men were strikingly\nvoluptuous and well rounded. The male Eskimos too were inclined\nto fatness in the days when they did the housekeeping. The more\nsubordinate the fatter.\n\nIn this connection the Oriental women are typical; their exuberance\nof figure is as well known as their absolute subordination and their\nconfinement to the home. They may be contrasted with the fat and\nsubordinate male Kamchadales, whose wives were slim and firm breasted\ninto old age.\n\nEqual rights do away with this division of labor. There are no longer\nmale and female jobs; not sex but inclination and fitness now begin\nto determine the individual\u2019s occupation. In late Egypt, when the\ndomination of woman was merging into a period of equal rights, there\nare many indications that both sexes did the same work without any\ndifferentiation of occupation. In the marriage contract in the time of\nDarius, the woman--who then made the contract alone--says, \u201cAll, which\nyou and I may together earn....\u201d Victor Marx has studied the position\nof woman in Babylon in the period 604-485 B.C., and finds a similar\nsituation. In an inheritance case of that period a woman recites that\n\u201cI and my husband carried on business with my dowry and together\nbought a piece of land.\u201d Such common businesses by man and woman are\nfrequently mentioned. Under such circumstances it was natural that\nneither man nor woman bound themselves at marriage to live in the same\nhouse, for both went to work outside the home.\n\nTo-day, when we are passing from male domination to equal rights it\nis natural that the woman should be seeking more and more to get out\nof the home. The greater her power the more she seeks to level the\nlines between male and female work. This effort is strongest in the\nsubordinate sex--in this case the feminine--because it seeks naturally\nto better its position. In this transition period, therefore, women\nare pressing into male pursuits much faster than men into domestic\noccupations. Yet even in Germany a beginning has been made. For\nwomen the male professions seem higher and better, because they have\nhitherto belonged to the dominant sex, while for the men feminine\noccupations seem to have about them something degrading; but the more\nwomen approach equality the less odium attaches to what has been their\nsphere, and the more men tend to enter it.\n\nThe same phenomenon may be observed in periods of transition from\nfemale to male domination. Among the Batta, for instance, both sexes\nworked in the fields, but the man alone cared for the children. This\nwas obviously a step toward equal rights. The men already shared the\nextra-domestic occupations of the women, but the women still refused to\nshare the work of the hitherto subordinate men.\n\nWhen equal rights put an end to the differentiation of occupation\nthe physical differences between men and women also disappear. We are\nto-day still far enough away from equality of the sexes, but there\nhave been people where equal rights prevailed, and among such people\nthe physical form of the two sexes was so like that they could hardly\nbe distinguished. In Tacitus\u2019s day, when equality was probably general\namong the Germans, men and women are reported to have had exactly the\nsame weight and strength. Albert Friedenthal says of the Cingalese\nthat a stranger could not distinguish the sexes. Men and women were so\nalike among the Botocudos that one had to count their tresses to tell\nthem apart. Lallemant found among this people \u201ca swarm of men-women and\nwomen-men, not a single man or a single woman in the whole tribe.\u201d This\ngood man came from a state where men dominated and did not suspect that\nwhen the power-relation of the sexes changed their physical appearance\nchanged too. If a Botocudo had come to Europe in those days he would\npresumably have judged by his own standards and noted with equal horror\nthe outer differences of European men and women.\n\nEvery age holds its own standards absolute. The domination of one sex\ndepends upon the artificial development of as many and as striking\nbodily differences as possible, and therefore approves them and insists\nupon emphasizing them. Equal rights tend to develop the natural\nsimilarity of the sexes and considering that the norm, regards it as\nideal.\n\nThere is ample opportunity to observe to-day that equality of the sexes\ncoincides with a tendency slowly to do away with artificial physical\ndifferences. The disappearance of the so-called feminine figure was\nso striking in America, where the sexes are more nearly equal than in\nEurope, that Sargent and Alexander prophesied in 1910 that soon men\nand women could hardly be distinguished from one another. A comparison\nwith pictures of thirty or forty years ago makes it plain that even\nin Europe male and female figures are coming closer to each other.\nThe narrow waists and full bosoms of the women and the full beards of\nthe men have disappeared. And, as a result of our investigation, we\nmay prophesy that the coming equality will still more completely iron\nout those differences which hitherto have been regarded as genuine\nsecondary sex characters.\n\nWhenever one sex is dominant there is a tendency to differentiate male\nand female costume. The more completely one sex dominates the greater\nwill be the differences in clothes, and as the sexes become equal the\ndifferences disappear. When the two sexes are really equal they will\nwear the same clothing.\n\nThe clothing of the dominant sex usually tends to be uniform and\ntasteless, that of the subordinate to be varied and richly ornamented.\nTo-day man is still dominant, and his clothes are monotonous, dull,\nand less subject to shifts of fashion. Especially in formal dress he\nwears a sort of uniform. All men, of whatever age or position, wear\ndress clothes of the same cut and color. A grandfather wears a dinner\ncoat exactly like that of his eighteen-year-old grandson. This seems\nnatural, but the situation is reversed with the subordinate sex, most\ncompletely when the subordination is most complete. Only twenty or\nthirty years ago it was a crime in Germany for a mother to dress as\n\u201cyouthfully\u201d as her unmarried daughter. A grandmother who dared to\ndress like her eighteen-year-old granddaughter would have been laughed\nto scorn. As woman\u2019s power has grown, this has changed. Custom no\nlonger requires a grandmother to emphasize her age by her clothes.\n\nWhere woman dominates she tends to wear darker and plainer clothing and\nthe man dresses himself more richly and variously. Erman writes of the\nold Egyptians:\n\n While according to our conceptions it befits the woman to love finery\n and ornament, the Egyptians of the old Empire seem to have had an\n opposite opinion. Beside the elaborate costumes of the men the women\u2019s\n clothing seems very monotonous, for, from the fourth to the eighteenth\n dynasty, all, from the king\u2019s daughter to the peasant woman, wore the\n same garb--a simple garment without folds.\n\nHerodotus, indeed, reported that Egyptian men had two suits, women\nonly one. Erman naturally cannot explain the simplicity of the women\u2019s\nclothes and the eagerness of the men for color and ornament, because it\ncontradicted current theories of the character of the two sexes. To-day\nthe view is current which Runge expressed when he said that \u201cWomen\u2019s\ndesire to please and love of ornament is dependent upon her sex life.\u201d\nThis view, though still common, is fundamentally false. The inclination\nto bright and ornamental clothing is dependent not upon sex but upon\nthe power-relation of the sexes. The subordinate sex, whether male or\nfemale, seeks ornament. Strabo tells of the love of finery and cult of\nthe body among Lybian men. They curled their hair, even their beards,\nwore gold ornaments, diligently brushed their teeth and polished their\nfinger-nails. \u201cThey arrange their hair so tenderly,\u201d he writes, \u201cthat\nwhen walking they never touch one another, in order not to disturb it.\u201d\nIt is usual in states where women are dominant for the men to wear long\nhair and pay particular attention to their barbering. The men of Tana,\nin the Hebrides, wore their hair 18 to 20 inches long, divided into six\nor seven hundred tiny locks, in the days when women ruled. Among the\nLatuka the men wore their hair so elaborately that it took ten years to\narrange it. The Konds also wore very long hair, elaborately arranged.\n\nThe stronger tendency of the subordinate sex to ornamentation\napparently is closely related to the division of labor. The subordinate\nsex, working at home, has more leisure and opportunity for ornament\nthan the dominant. Furthermore, leisure stimulates the erotic feelings.\nSince the partner does not share the leisure the lonely erotic often\nseeks a way out in self-ornamentation. At the same time the ornament is\nintended for the partner, for the stimulated eroticism increases the\ndesire to please the other sex.\n\nWhen the sexes are equal the clothes of the two sexes tend to be alike.\nWe have noted that the Cingalese were physically similar; their clothes\nwere exactly the same. The only difference was that the men wore a\nmother-of-pearl comb in the hair, the women none. Among the Lepka the\nsexes can be distinguished only by the fact that the men wear their\nhair in two braids, the women in one. Tacitus reports that the old\nGermans wore the same clothes and wore their hair alike.\n\nWe can observe the tendency to similarity of costume in this transition\nperiod. Many such attempts fail the first time, but finally succeed.\nMore than a decade ago Paris attempted to establish a fashion of\nknickerbockers and bobbed hair. The attempt failed, but to-day the\nbobbed head has invaded every civilized country, almost in direct\nproportion to the degree in which women have acquired equal rights.\nIt is reported from England that English women can already go to\ntheir work in trousers, heavy shoes, and short hair without exciting\nattention. The reader may judge of the accuracy of these reports. In\nGermany the police forbid one sex to wear the clothes of the other, but\nduring the war when German women had to enter male trades they usually\nwore men\u2019s clothing.\n\nAmong men too the tendency to similarity is evident. Thirty years ago\nthe beard was a generally accepted sign of manhood; it has fallen out\nof fashion. In the Youth Movement there is a tendency to leave the\nshirt open at the neck and to adopt a hair-cut like a bobbed girl\u2019s. A\nnote in Jean Paul\u2019s \u201cLevana,\u201d which appeared in 1806, is interesting.\nHe writes: \u201cA few years ago it was fashionable in Russia for the men to\nfill out their clothing with high false bosoms.\u201d That was in the days\nfollowing the French Revolution, when a short wave of freedom, even for\nwomen, swept across the earth. It showed also in the women\u2019s fashion\nwhich Jean Paul mentions:\n\n A fortunate accident for daughters is the Grecian costume of the\n present Gymnosophists (naked female runners), which, it is true,\n injures the mothers but hardens the daughters; for as age and custom\n should avoid every fresh cold so youth exercises itself on it as on\n every hardship until it can bear greater.... So, likewise, the present\n naked manner of dressing is a cold bath into which the daughters are\n dipped, who are exhilarated by it.\n\n\n\n\nModern Love and Modern Fiction\n\nBy J. W. Krutch\n\n\nJoseph Wood Krutch\n\n_has been Professor of English at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute,\nand is now dramatic editor and regular critic of fiction of_ The Nation.\n\n\n\n\nMODERN LOVE AND MODERN FICTION\n\nBY J. W. KRUTCH\n\n\nSeeing upon the jacket of a recent book the legend \u201cSolves the Sex\nProblem,\u201d my first reaction was a fervent hope that it did nothing\nof the sort, for I had no desire that fiction should be rendered\nsupererogatory or, what is the same thing, that life should be made a\nless difficult art. Problems of housing, wages, taxation, militarism,\nand the like may be solved, temporarily at least, but what a\ncontemporary writer has called \u201cthe irony of being two\u201d is a sufficient\nguaranty of one never-to-be-resolved complexity. Until each individual\nof the human species becomes a complete biological entity, until, that\nis to say, hermaphrodism is universal, there can be no fear lest we\nshould cease to live dangerously.\n\nWere I speaking of happiness I should be compelled to argue that\nthe attitude of society and the individual toward sex is the most\nimportant thing in the world, but speaking as I am of life as\nmaterial for art I must maintain, on the contrary, that it is much\nless important. As long as they have an attitude and as long as that\nattitude remains, as it has always remained, an inadequate one, those\nunresolved discords which make living and reading interesting will\ncontinue to arise. As a critic I \u201cview with alarm\u201d nothing except\nthe possibility that the problem should be solved to everybody\u2019s\nsatisfaction, but that calamity does not seem at all likely to occur\nsince I have never heard of a saint in the desert or a debauch\u00e9 in a\nbrothel who was not sufficiently maladjusted to be a fruitful subject\nfor fiction.\n\nAfter all, the things we do are both more significant and less changing\nthan our attitude toward our acts. We burn men at the stake to light\na Roman garden, to save the world from the horror of heresy, or to\nprotect the sanctity of female virtue and assure the supremacy of\nthe white race, but we burn them always; we fight because arms are\nglorious, because the service of God demands the rescue of His holy\nsepulcher from the infidel, or because we must make the world safe\nfor peace, but always we fight; and the most important thing is the\ninsistent lust of cruelty or the impulse to fight rather than the\nrationalization of these motives. So, too, with love. Paphnutius is\nharried out of apathy into a state in which he sees visions because of\nthe temptations of the devil, Milton because God gave Eve to Adam as a\ncomforter, Shelley because woman is the symbol of the unutterable, and\nShaw (presumably) because only by the process of reproduction can the\nLife Force perform its perfectionist experiments; but the resultant\nimpulses are not so very different. Mr. F. W. Myers once referred to\nthe procreation of children in these lines:\n\n  Lo! When a man magnanimous and tender,\n  Lo! When a woman desperate and true,\n  Make the inevitable sweet surrender,\n  Show one another what the Lord can do,...\n\nbut I doubt if the states of mind which called forth these lines and,\nsay, Swinburne\u2019s Dolores were as different as the verses would suggest\nor as the authors imagined. Without going so far as to say that the two\npoems are of equal literary merit, one can at least say that they are\nalmost equally interesting and delightful to the observer of life or\nart and that as long as the mystical, the ascetic, the sentimental, and\nthe biological attitudes toward love continue to exist side by side or\nto follow one another in succeeding epochs, the critic will not find\nliterature either dull or monotonous.\n\nIf at the end of a period of twenty-five years during which fiction\nhas frankly concerned itself to an unusual degree with sex the problem\nseems more complicated than ever before, there is no cause for\nsurprise. Even the specious pretense that a solution has been found\ncan only be maintained when, as during the Victorian era, the mass of\nmen agree to assume that no difficulties exist which are not solvable\nby that rule of thumb known as the social and moral code, and insist\nthat sexual battles shall be fought out behind closed doors in life and\nbetween the chapters in books. By dragging them out into public view we\nhave been able, no doubt, to palliate some of the commoner tragedies\nof stupidity. But chiefly we have been upon a voyage of discovery,\nand it ought to be evident now, if it has never been evident before,\nthat we cannot possibly solve the problem because its most important\naspects are not social but human. They have their roots in man\u2019s\nironic predicament between gorilla and angel, a predicament perfectly\ntypified by the fact that as he grows critical he realizes that love\nis at once sublime and obscene and that only by walking a spiritual\ntight-rope above the abysses can he be said to live at all in any true\nsense. The very fact that the social aspects can to a certain extent\nbe worked out makes them less interesting and explains the fact that\nthose novels intended to prove, for example, that the mother of an\nillegitimate child may still be within the human pale have come to seem\nso unutterably dull. No doubt they \u201cdid good,\u201d but like all forms of\nuseful literature their life was short. By far the most interesting\ncontemporary writers who deal chiefly with sex are largely concerned\nwith the individual problem.\n\nThanks partially to modern fiction we have attained a certain measure\nof freedom. But freedom, as everybody who understands either the\nmeaning of the word or the value of the thing knows, raises problems\ninstead of settling them. It is true that our attitude has changed.\nThere is hardly a serious contemporary novel which does not take for\ngranted things which would have outraged even liberal thinkers of\nthe past century, and the changes have been mostly in the direction\nof clarification. It would be impossible for any one to-day to fail\nto see, as George Eliot failed to see, that the natural working of\nthe \u201cinevitable moral law\u201d which punished Hetty Sorrel was neither\ninevitable nor natural. The things which happened to her came entirely\nfrom society and not at all from nature, so that the story which\nthe author meant to be a tragedy of the ineluctable becomes merely\na description of human stupidity. So, too, we are clearer on other\nthings; we are not quite so hopelessly at sea as we once were when it\ncomes to distinguishing between frigidity and chastity or purity and\nprudishness. But these things mean only that more choices are open to\nus, that we have come to see that sexual conduct cannot be guided or\njudged by a few outwardly applied standards, and that, accordingly, the\nconduct of life has been made more thrillingly difficult.\n\nMost sex novels of the past have been concerned chiefly with what might\nbe called the right to love. They have combated an extremely old idea\nwhich Christianity found congenial and embodied in the conception of\nlove as a part of the curse pronounced upon man at the Fall, and hence\nat best a necessary evil. They have been compelled solemnly to assure\nus that the early Christian Fathers were wrong in assuming that the\nhuman race would have been better off if it had been able to propagate\nitself by means of some harmless system of vegetation, and they have\nhad to fly in the face of all laws and social customs which are seen,\nif examined closely, to rest upon the assumption that desire is merely\na dangerous nuisance, fatal to efficiency and order, and hence to be\nregimented at any cost. It is now pretty generally admitted among the\neducated class that love is legitimate, even that it has an \u00e6sthetic as\nwell as a utilitarian function. We have got back to the point which\nOvid had reached some two thousand years ago of realizing that there is\nan art of love. During the next quarter of a century fiction will be\nconcerned, I think, more with the failure or success of individuals to\nattain this art than with the exposition of theses which most accept.\n\nNo doubt some of the more na\u00efvely enthusiastic crusaders really\nbelieved that as soon as man was freed from the more grossly stupid\nrestrictions from without and from the artificially cultivated\ninhibitions within, love would become simple and idyllic, but one\nneeds look only at the books of D. H. Lawrence or Aldous Huxley to\nbe relieved of this stupid delusion. The characters of both of these\nauthors have long ago ceased to care what law or society thinks and\nthey are surely untroubled by traditional asceticism, but their\nproblems are not less acute. Indeed it is just because these novelists\nare so completely concerned with love as a personal matter that they\nare the freshest of those contemporary writers with whom sex is the\ndominant interest. Each is concerned with something fundamental--the\none with the problem of the adjustment of personalities and the other\nwith the evaluation of sexual love.\n\nIf by \u201cimmoral\u201d is meant \u201ctending to excite lubricity,\u201d then nothing\ncould be more absurd than the opinion, apparently held by some, that\nthe books of these men are immoral. They are so completely unable to\nlose themselves carelessly in passion and so insistent upon the need of\nadjusting it somehow to the other interests of life that they strike\none as more like saints than like gallants, and their books are far\nmore chilling than inflammatory. Huxley and Joyce try to laugh sex\naway, but their scorn of the flesh suggests Erasmus more than Rabelais,\nand, as for Lawrence, his novels constitute so solemn a warning that\none imagines him as thoroughly bored with the exigencies of passion and\nmore likely to make his disciples celibates than debauch\u00e9s.\n\nIn Lawrence\u2019s morbidly sensitive and exaggeratedly individualistic\ncharacters one sees as through a magnifying-glass the thousand\nimpingements of personality upon personality which make love more and\nmore difficult as it becomes more intimate and personal. His people,\nlike Schopenhauer\u2019s porcupines, are continually coming together for\nwarmth only to find themselves pricked by one another\u2019s quills and to\npart snarling, so that his perpetual prayer is a \u201cLord deliver us from\nthis need which can be neither stilled nor satisfied.\u201d And abnormal\nthough he is, his abnormality is one of degree only, for when sexual\nlove is developed beyond the impulse of the animal and desires the\ncontact of spirit as well as body that contact is bound to be both\nincomplete and painful.\n\nNor is the even more fundamental problem with which Aldous Huxley is\nconcerned likely ever to receive a permanent or a general solution.\nHe is in search of love, but he can find only ridiculous and obscene\nbiological facts, for love, like God and the other most important human\npossessions, does not exist. It is an illusion created by the effort of\nthe imagination to transform the unsatisfactory materials which life\nhas furnished it into something acceptable to the soul; but being an\nillusion, it is unstable and perpetually tending, if not created anew,\nto dissolve into its elements. The racial need for the continuation\nof the species and the individual need for the satisfaction of a\nphysiological impulse exist, but they are hard, unsatisfying realities,\nand the struggle of mankind is to create some fiction which will as far\nas possible include and at the same time transcend them.\n\nAnd nothing derogatory is, of course, meant by the word \u201cfiction.\u201d All\nthat distinguishes man from nature is such a fiction, and it is by his\ninsistent belief in these imaginary things that civilization has been\ncreated. All of Mr. Huxley\u2019s books are confessions, first cynically\ntriumphant and then despairing, of his inability to be poet or mystic\nor ironist enough to achieve this transcendence and find in his\nanimal heritage a satisfaction for his spiritual needs. Like everyone\nelse, he is compelled to love, and love implies a certain amount of\nidealization. How, he asks in effect, is he to poetize this ridiculous\nfunction, which he shares with the beasts, and concerning which science\nis constantly presenting us with an increasing amount of disillusioning\nknowledge? Exercising the most perverse ingenuity in confronting\nromance with biology and in establishing the identity (in the realm of\nfact) of love and lust, he has continually tracked the trail of the\nbeast into the holy of holies--but only because it hurt him so much to\nfind it there. The obscenities in which he seems to revel are defiances\nof the inner idealist who has dared to assimilate the loathsome\ntrivialities of sex into something capable of satisfying spiritual\ndesires. When he sings one of his philosopher\u2019s songs or when, in\n\u201cAntic Hay,\u201d he describes some particularly revolting orgy there is\nnothing new in the psychological state which provokes his obscenity.\nHis attitude is a result of failure to reconcile physical fact with\nspiritual feeling. He is not far from Huysmans, who ended \u201cA Rebours\u201d\nwith the words: \u201cFor the man who has written such a book there are only\ntwo alternatives--a pistol or the foot of the cross.\u201d Only of course\nHuysmans was wrong. Anatole France and James Branch Cabell are not less\nsophisticated, but through the perfection of sophistication they have\nachieved a peaceful irony in which they can worship a non-existent\nGod and believe again in the illusions they create. Huxley, too\nsophisticated for simple faith and too downright for ironic worship, is\nlost.\n\nWhen the conception of love is, as it has tended to be in modern\ntimes, legalistic, these problems are submerged. As long as marriage\nis a matter of contract, the importance of the inward harmony of\npersonalities is of the slightest, for children may be begotten\nand reared whether the parents love or hate. As long as passion is\ngenerally conceded to be but a shameful concession to unregenerate\nhumanity, the average man is not likely to be concerned if he finds\nthat the ideal of the poets is not realized in his own nuptial couch.\nBut when love is free and unashamed then it is made ten times more\ndifficult, for lives are recognized as frank failures which once would\nhave seemed useful and satisfactory. Fiction, too, becomes, not more\ninteresting, but more important. It ceases completely to be what it\nalways tends to be when opinion is fixed, namely, a mere illustration\nof the working out of social or moral \u201claws\u201d; it becomes frankly the\nrecord of individual souls in search of a successful way of life. It\nrecords, no doubt, more failures than successes, but it furnishes the\nbest and perhaps only really important material for the study of that\nart of life which grows ever more complicated as we demand that it be\nmore complete and beautiful.\n\n\n\n\nCan Men and Women Be Friends?\n\nBy Floyd Dell\n\n\n\n\nFloyd Dell\n\n_was born at Barry, Illinois, June 28th, 1887. Is the author of several\nnovels and collections of essays including \u201cJanet March,\u201d a story of\na young woman and her adjustment to modern standards. His latest book\nis \u201cLooking at Life.\u201d Other books are \u201cWomen as World Builders,\u201d 1913;\n\u201cWere You Ever a Child?\u201d 1919; \u201cMoon Calf,\u201d 1920; \u201cThe Briary Bush,\u201d\n1921._\n\n\n\n\nCAN MEN AND WOMEN BE FRIENDS?\n\nBY FLOYD DELL\n\n\nFriendship between men and women is rather a new thing in the history\nof the world. Friendship depends upon equality and choice, and there\nhas been very little of either in the relations of the sexes, up\nto the present. A woman does not choose her male relatives, nor is\nshe according to archaic family laws their equal; motives other\nthan personal choice might lead her to become a man\u2019s wife; wholly\nimpersonal reasons might place her in the relationship of kept\nmistress. Only in her r\u00f4le of paramour was there any implication of\nfree choice; and even here there was no full equality, not even of\ndanger. None of these customary relationships of the past can be said\nto have fostered friendship between men and women. Doubtless it did\nexist, but under difficulties.\n\nFamily bonds, however, are being more and more relaxed, women are no\nlonger the wards of their male relatives, and friendship with a father\nor brother is more than ever possible. Further, the free personal\nchoice which marked only the romantic amours of the age of chivalry is\nnow popularly regarded in America as essential to any decent marriage,\nwhile the possibility of divorce tends to make free choice something\nbesides a mere youthful illusion. More than ever before, husbands and\nwives are friends.\n\nAt the same time the intensity of friendships between people of the\nsame sex appears to be diminishing. This intensity, in its classic\ninstances, as in Greece, we now regard as an artificial product, the\nresult of the segregation of the sexes and the low social position\nof women. As women become free and equal with men such romantic\nintensity of emotion finds a more biologically appropriate expression.\nFriendships between people of the same sex must to-day compete on the\none hand with romantic love and on the other with the more fascinating\nthough often less enduring friendships which can now be enjoyed between\nmen and women. Neglect of these latter opportunities is coming to be\nregarded as a kind of spiritual cowardice, or at least as a failure in\nenterprise.\n\nThe influences of the machine age, so destructive to fixed\nauthoritarian relationships, appear to foster the growth of friendship\nbetween the sexes; so much so that we may expect it to become, in its\nfurther developments, a characteristic social feature of the age that\nlies immediately before us.\n\nFriendship will become a more and more important aspect of marriage\nitself; but, except in the effects of its wider spread, this will\nhardly be a new thing--we have friendships between husbands and\nwives now. Nor will extra-marital friendships between men and women\nbe precisely a new thing. What will be new, furnishing us with an\ninteresting theme for sociological speculation, are the conventions\nwhich will gradually come into existence to give social protection and\ndignity to extra-marital friendships.\n\nConventions are, doubtless, always rather ridiculous, inevitably a\nshackle upon the free motions of the soul, being imposed by fear.\nBut it will be remembered that we, in America, with a vast amount\nof freedom of intersexual association, have thus far only begun to\ndispense with the locks and bars and whippings and chaperons which\nwere the appurtenances of a physical segregation of the sexes; the\nvast paraphernalia of psychic segregation, including sexual taboos\nwhich hark back to the primeval darkness, are with us still. Our minds\nare habituated to unreasonable fears in all matters concerning the\nrelations of the sexes. For a long time, extra-marital friendships\nof men and women may be expected to be hedged about with elaborate\nand specific permissions, for the sake of keeping them under social\ncontrol. Yet these conventions may be very convenient; and however\nirksome they may seem to the free spirits of a future day, they may\nstill be such as would appear to us generously libertarian.\n\nTo-day, in the absence of such conventions, it does not suffice that\na man and woman, too well married to be afraid of extra-marital\nfriendships, grant them to each other by private treaty; relatives,\nfriends, and neighbors do not fail to be duly alarmed. Extra-marital\nfriendship exists in an atmosphere of social suspicion which a few\nconventions would go far to alleviate.\n\nAs an example in a different field, the convention with regard to\ndancing may be adduced. If dancing were not a general custom, if it\nwere the enlightened practice of an advanced few, how peculiar and\nsuspicious would seem the desire of Mr. X and Mrs. Y to embrace each\nother to music; and how scandalized the neighbors would be to hear that\nthey _did_! No one would rest until the pair had been driven into an\nelopement.\n\nWe build huge palaces for the kind of happy communion which dancing\nfurnishes; we tend more and more to behave like civilized beings\nabout the impulses which are thus given scope. We are less socially\nhospitable to the impulses of friendship between men and women.\n\nIn friendship there are many moods; but the universal rite of\nfriendship is _talk_. Talk needs no palaces for its encouragement;\nit is not an expensive affair; it would seem to be well within the\nreach of all. Yet it isn\u2019t. For the talk of friendship requires\nprivacy--though the privacy of a table for two in a crowded and noisy\nrestaurant will suffice; and it requires time. Such talk does not\nreadily adjust itself to the limitations of the dinner hour. It is a\nflower slow in unfolding; and it seems to come to its most perfect\nbloom only after midnight. But, unfortunately, not every restaurant\nkeeps open all night. It is satisfied with two comfortable chairs;\na table to lean elbows on is good, too; in winter an open fire,\nwhere friendly eyes may stare dreamily into the glowing coals--that\nis very good; hot or cold drinks according to the season, and a\ncigarette--these are almost the height of friendship\u2019s luxury. These\nseem not too much to ask. Yet the desire for privacy and uncounted\nhours of time together is, when considered from that point of view,\nscandalous in its implications; quite as much so as the desire of Mr.\nX and Mrs. Y to embrace each other to music. However, Mr. X and Mrs. Y\ndo, under the \u00e6gis of a convention, indulge their desire and embrace\neach other to their heart\u2019s content with the full approval of civilized\nsociety; and it seems as though another convention might grow up, under\nthe protection of which Mr. X and Mrs. Y might sit up and talk all\nnight without its seeming queer of them.\n\nQueer, at the least, it does seem nowadays, except under the\nconventions of courtship; friends who happen to be married to each\nother can of course talk comfortably in bed. These bare facts are\nsufficient to explain why so many men and women who really want to\nbe friends and sit up all night occasionally and talk find it easy\nto believe that they are in love with each other. They find it all\nthe easier to believe this, because friendship between the sexes is\nusually spiced with some degree of sexual attraction. But a degree of\nsexual attraction which might have kept a friendship forever sweet\nmay prove unequal to the requirements of a more serious and intimate\nrelationship. Disillusionment is the penalty, at the very least.\nSociety could well afford to grant more freedom to friendship between\nmen and women, and save the expense of a large number of broken hearts.\n\nIt is worth while to wonder if a good deal of \u201cromance\u201d is not, after\nall, friendship mistaking itself for something else; or rather, finding\nits only opportunity for expression in that mistake. Among civilized\npeople, after the romance has ended, the friendship remains. It may\nperhaps have been worth while to imagine oneself in love, in order to\nenjoy a friendship; but it seems rather a wasteful proceeding.\n\nYet those who, taking a merely economical view of the situation,\nattempt to enjoy such friendships without becoming involved or\ninvolving others in such waste, may with some embarrassment\ndiscover--what Mrs. Grundy could have told them all along--that\nfriendship and sexual romance may sometimes be difficult to relegate\nto previously determined boundaries. Friendship between the sexes may,\nif only for a moment, seem to demand the same tokens of sincerity\nas romantic love. Does not this fact threaten the traditional,\njealously-guarded dignity of marriage?\n\nPerhaps it does. At present, in any conflict of claims between a\nmarriage and a friendship, there is \u201cnothing to arbitrate\u201d; marriage\nhas all the rights, friendship none. If the rights of friendship are\nto be at all considered and protected, marriage may have to yield\nsomething. It may not be good manners for husbands and wives to be\njealous of the quite possible momentary exuberances of each other\u2019s\nfriendships; it may be that such incidents will be regarded as being\nwithin the discretion of the persons immediately concerned, and not\nquite proper subjects for inquiry, speculation, or comment by anybody\nelse.\n\nAnd this might have an effect unsuspected by those whom such a prospect\nof liberty would most alarm to-day. When a moment\u2019s rashness does not\nnecessarily imply red ruin and the breaking up of homes, when sex is\nfreed to a degree from the sense of overwhelming social consequences,\nit may well become a matter of more profound personal consequence; and\nwith nothing to fear except the spoiling of their friendship, men and\nwomen in an ardent friendship may yet prefer talk to kisses.\n\n\u201cBut what if they don\u2019t?\u201d A complete answer to that question, from the\nUtopian point of view, would take us far afield from the subject of\nfriendship; yet some further answer may seem to be required, if only by\nway of confessing to Mrs. Grundy that the problem is not so simple as\nit may seem. Well, then, out of many possibilities which the future\nholds, I offer this one for what it may be worth. Such friendships,\nlet us agree, tend to merge insensibly into romantic sexual love.\nBut if marriage may be conceived as yielding some of its traditional\nrights, extra-marital romance may well be called upon for similar\nconcessions. The first thing that extra-marital romance might be asked\nto surrender would be its intolerable and fatuous airs of _holiness_.\nYes, \u201choliness\u201d is the word--a holiness all the more asserted by such\nextra-marital lovers because their relations are likely to be taken\ndisrespectfully by a stupid world. Oh, unquestionably, if you ask\nthem, never was any legal and conventional love so high and holy as\nthis romantic passion of theirs! Its transcendental holiness calls\nfor sacrifices. So they sacrifice themselves--and, incidentally,\nothers--to it. Anything less, they feel, would be cowardly. They must\nnot palter with these sacred emotions--not even by the exercise of\ntheir dormant sense of humor!--So it is to-day: but perhaps in a future\nwhere extra-marital romance is made room for with a tender and humorous\ncourtesy, it may give up these preposterous and solemn airs, and\nactually learn to smile at its illusions--illusions which will still\ngive the zest of ultimate danger to relationships of merely happy and\nlight-hearted play. Thus life will continue to be interesting.\n\nAs for the talk of friendship, my Utopian speculations uncover for\nme no respect in which the thing itself can be improved upon. The\ncircumstances can be made happier, the attitude of society can\nfoster it; but the talk of friendship has already reached a splendid\nperfection beyond which my imagination is unable to soar. At its best\nit has, despite its personal aspect, an impersonal beauty; it is a\npoignant fulfillment of those profound impulses which we call curiosity\nand candor; it serves human needs as deep as those which poetry and\nmusic serve, and is in some sense an art like them. The art exists, and\nit remains only for the future to give it an adequate hospitality.\n\n\n\n\nLove and Marriage\n\nBy Ludwig Lewisohn\n\n\n\n\nLudwig Lewisohn\n\n_author of \u201cUp Stream,\u201d \u201cDon Juan\u201d and other books and contributing\neditor of_ The Nation, _is now studying conditions in Eastern Europe\nand Palestine. Was born May 30th, 1882, in Berlin--came to America\nin 1890--B.A. and M.A. College of Charleston, S. C., 1901--M. A.\nColumbia, 1903--Editorial staff, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1910-1911.\nInstructor in German, University of Wisconsin, and Literature at\nOhio State University. Dramatic Editor_, Nation, _1919. Author of\n\u201cThe Broken Snare,\u201d 1908;--\u201cA Night in Alexandria,\u201d 1909; \u201cGerman\nStyle--an Introduction to the Study of German Prose,\u201d--1910; \u201cThe\nModern Drama,\u201d 1915; \u201cThe Spirit of Modern German Literature,\u201d 1916;\n\u201cThe Poets of Modern France,\u201d 1918; Editor with W. P. Trent of \u201cLetters\nof an American Farmer,\u201d 1909; \u201cA Book of Modern Criticism,\u201d 1909.\nTranslator--Feuchlersleben\u2019s \u201cHealth & Suggestion,\u201d 1910; Sudermann\u2019s\n\u201cJudean City,\u201d 1911; Halbe\u2019s \u201cYouth,\u201d Hirschfeld\u2019s \u201cThe Mothers,\u201d\n1916; Latzko\u2019s \u201cThe Judgment of Peace,\u201d 1919; Wassermann\u2019s \u201cWorld\u2019s\nIllusion.\u201d Editor and chief translator of Gerhardt Hauptmann\u2019s Dramatic\nWorks, 1916, 1917; Contributing Editor, Warner\u2019s Library of World\u2019s\nBest Literature. His latest book is \u201cThe Creative Life,\u201d 1924._\n\n\n\n\nLOVE AND MARRIAGE\n\nBY LUDWIG LEWISOHN\n\n\nUtopia is the loveliest of all countries; it is also the farthest away.\nOne may make magnificent generalizations concerning the future of the\nrelations of the sexes; one may set down truths that are theoretically\nunanswerable. Only one will change nothing, help not a single soul. Let\nme cling to a few humble facts....\n\nSo far as any one can see the habit of one man living with one woman\nwill persist. The young will hear of nothing else, since they are\nunder the sway of romantic passion which is, subjectively, exclusive\nand final; those who are older will hear of nothing else because\nexperience has shown this method of life capable of securing the\nhealthiest freedom from preoccupation with sex and the maximum amount\nof ordered activity. To be a rake or even a fastidious \u201cvarietist\u201d is\nthe costliest of occupations. Rational monogamy is in no danger. The\ntrouble lies elsewhere; it lies in the fact that current notions of\nmonogamy are, I use the word advisedly, insane.\n\nLocal bill-board advertisements of moving pictures have recently shown\na ball-room in which an irate gentleman in evening-dress grasped the\nshoulder of another gentleman who looked crushed and crest-fallen. With\nan inimitable gesture of moral indignation the first gentleman pointed\nto a quivering female on the other side of the room. The caption of\nthis stirring lithograph was \u201cHis Forgotten Wife.\u201d The exquisite\nabsurdity of this picture is clear. It is significant of the way in\nwhich we are all brow-beaten by the sodden nonsense of the tribe that\nit took me some minutes of reflection to come upon the unreason of the\nthing. If the crushed looking gentleman had forgotten the lady, she was\nnot, of course, his wife and could never have truly been. If we are\ndealing with a euphemism and are to understand that he wanted to forget\nher, she may once have been his wife, but had, quite obviously, ceased\nto be.\n\nIn this moving picture there is illustrated what I call the insane\nview of monogamic marriage, namely, that it is put on like a shirt or\na coat and must be kept on however ill-fitting, comfortless, unclean,\nor dangerous, and that in this mere keeping on there is virtue. There\nis the further implication that marriage has nothing to do with good\nbehavior, which is rewarded even in penitentiaries, or with ill; that\nit is, indeed, an abstract kind of fate, a magical or infernal machine,\na metaphysical trap. Once you are caught in it, you must stay caught.\nTo wriggle is sin.\n\nDo I seem to be discussing the matter on too low a plane? I wish I\nwere. The truth is that cultivated and liberal people have not yet\nfreed their minds from the concepts with which that amusing picture\ndeals. It is in action, not in fireside talk that these things are\ntested. And it is true that even such people will pay an uninhibited\nrespect to a depraved character, cruel, treacherous, stupid, who\npractices that moving-picture theory of marriage which, in ways no\nless real for being subtle and but half-conscious, they will be\ntempted to withhold from a person of the utmost spiritual grace and\ncharm who practices that kind of marriage of which, theoretically and\noutspokenly, they so eloquently approve.\n\nThis very tentative argument, then, is not directed against marriage. I\nam not even ready to plead--that would be Utopian--that the relations\nof the sexes be withdrawn from social control. Our first step, at\nleast in America, must be an attempt to sanitate marriage. This can be\ndone--if it can be done at all--by relating marriage and its practice\nto certain notions of good and decency and honor that already have a\ntenure, however feeble, upon the public consciousness. Marriage, in\nbrief, should be held to be created by love and sustained by love. I\nshall, of course, be accused of meaning passion. I mean that precise\nblending of passion and spiritual harmony and solid friendship without\nwhich, as even those who will not admit it know, the close association\nof a man and a woman is as disgusting as it is degrading. And marriage\nshould be dependent, though this matter is included in the first, on\ngood behavior. I will not keep a man or a woman as my friend whom I\ndiscover to be a liar, slanderer, thief. Much less ought one to keep\nsuch a person as husband or wife. Who is to judge, it will be asked?\nNo objective judgment is needed. A subjective conviction of this sort\nsuffices to reduce the union in question to dust and ashes.\n\nHere is the one practical point; here the one possibility of hope. To\nframe a rational theory of the relations of men and women is easy and\nagreeable. The very fashioners of such theories, being human, will be\nbrought, under the discomforts of social pressure, to _seem_ to assent\nto all that their minds most passionately deny. A man or a woman of\nthe highest philosophic insight will struggle through the ignominy\nof the divorce courts not so much in order to dissolve a meaningless\nlegal bond as to save some one whom he or she loves and reveres from\nthe criticism of the vulgar. For we live in a vulgar world. There is no\nsafe and ultimate escape; its vulgarity in precisely these matters will\noften affront us where we least expected it. To mitigate that vulgarity\nmust be our first task.\n\nI do not know whether it can be done at all. But if so, then it must\nbe done by making an unhappy union disgraceful. People who are always\nbickering with each other, who are obviously unhappy in each other\u2019s\npresence, who always hold opinions acridly opposed, who are always\ntrying either subtly or obviously to escape from each other--such\ncouples must fall under social disapproval. And this disapproval\nmust apply even though one of the two prefers possessiveness to\neither happiness or decency or self-respect. Similarly those who are\ndeliberately unfaithful should be disgraced--not for the act of unfaith\nbut for the hypocrisy of remaining in a union which that very act,\nwhich the temptation to that very act, shows to have lost its purpose\nand its meaning.\n\nThis sort of social control is not my ideal. Love is like religion,\na matter for the individual soul. To change partners in love is very\nmuch like changing one\u2019s opinion on some deep and vital matter. The\nspirit must bear its own inherent witness. But I promised myself not\nto be Utopian. And may it not conceivably be brought home to a few\npeople to begin with that the men who laugh so spontaneously when\nthe song-and-dance man sings \u201cMy wife\u2019s gone to the country, hurray,\nhurray!\u201d are leading immoral lives and reducing their partners to the\nr\u00f4le of disagreeable prostitutes and unsatisfactory servants?\n\nI am not prepared to stress the point unendurably. True marriage,\nthe true and lovely union of a man and a woman, body and spirit, is\nrare. But to-day it is not even an ideal, not even something admired\nand striven for. Love in itself is rare and married love is perhaps\nas rare as beauty or genius. Happiness, too, is rare, happiness in\nany relation. But even as a man or a woman has made an obvious and\nshattering mistake if his or her chosen work does not produce a\nreasonable minimum of lasting inner satisfaction, so may marriage also\nbe tested by a reasonable minimum of lasting--let us say, preference\nand blessedness. To fall below that minimum is to cheat both the self\nand society, both the present and posterity, to sacrifice honor to a\nfetish and vitality to decay.\n\n\n\n\nCommunist Puritans\n\nBy Louis Fischer\n\n\n\n\nLouis Fischer\n\n_is Moscow correspondent of the New York_ Nation.\n\n\n\n\nCOMMUNIST PURITANS\n\nBY LOUIS FISCHER\n\n\nThe Soviet state is omnipotent and omnipresent. Bukharin, the\narch-theorist, contends that this is a transitional phase in the\ndevelopment of Communism toward perfection. The Bolsheviks\u2019 professed\naim is the _reductio ad administratum_ of the functions of the state;\nthey would make government the traffic cop of the nation but not the\nall-pervading busybody and touch-everybody-everywhere which it is\nnow in Russia. The transitional period, however, may last long. In\ndefault of a world revolution it may project itself beyond the present\ngeneration and even beyond the next. And in the meantime it is good\nCommunist doctrine to maintain an Argus-eyed, Herculanean-clubbed\nstate. The Soviet Government is alike an administrator, politician,\nstatesman, merchant, manufacturer, banker, shipbuilder, newspaper\npublisher, school-teacher, and preacher.\n\nSuch a state is the highest expression of the anti-individualism of\nsocialist philosophy. The single _simian erectus_ is nothing; it is the\nclass, the nation which counts.\n\nThe citizen lives for the state. Mind and muscle must ever be at its\nservice. A Communist who is a loose liver is an anomaly. There is\nvirtue even in a grain of asceticism and in \u201cmorality,\u201d not, it is\nimportant to note, because luxury and license are sinful and lead to\ndamnation and hell but because the excessive gratification of physical\ndesires, be they for sex or for alcohol, and any over-indulgence of\none\u2019s selfish mental weaknesses reduce the energy and attention which\nthe individual can offer to the state and to society.\n\nThe Bolsheviks do not believe in evolution in the realm of politics;\nthey are revolutionists. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century liberalism\ntended toward the survival of the fittest. But the essence of the\nRussian revolution is the protection of the under dog, of the\nproletarian and peasant who, unaided, would not survive in the unequal\nstruggle with the capitalist and landowner. The function of the Soviet\nstate is to support the oppressed majority against the vested and\nacquired interests of the economically powerful minority.\n\nThe doctrine of the survival of the fittest, translated into every-day\nlife, permits freedom of action, as little restraint as possible, the\nfreest play for nature and human nature. Communist doctrine involves\nthe negation of individual freedom; human nature is discounted in the\nsocialist scale of weights and measures; laissez-faire is replaced by\ndiscipline, if need be, by force. Only once did the Communists reveal\na liberal vein. It was in their treatment of conscientious objectors\nduring the civil wars. Russia has many sects such as the Dukhobors who\nare opposed to violence on grounds of conscience. Though the Government\nwas engaged in a death struggle, it respected these sentiments. But in\nall else, whenever its own interests have been at stake, the state has\ndisregarded the wishes and inclinations of the human unit. Liberty of\nthe individual is not as sacred an ikon as it is in the West. To give\neconomic freedom to the mass is a nobler aim. Thus the Communists would\nexplain and justify (but in my opinion this does not justify) the\nabsence of a free press in Russia and the activities of the G. P. U.\n\nThe aim of the Bolsheviks was not merely to overthrow one government\nand to establish their own. This was a means toward creating a new\nsociety. To that extent the Bolsheviks are as presumptuous as most\nreformers. In 1917 they must have argued to themselves much to this\neffect: \u201cWe are a minority. The majority has not invited us to rule\nit. But we know better than the majority what is good for it.\u201d In the\ninterest of the new society a powerful state was set up. The powerful\nstate was privileged to ride roughshod over the individual. The\nBolsheviks presume to tell the individual how to act and how to live.\nThis is the \u201csuperiority complex\u201d which is one of the most essential\ncharacteristics of puritanism. \u201cI am perfect. Watch me. Go thou and do\nlikewise.\u201d The Russian Communists are puritans without religion.\n\nIn matters of morals the Communists advocate and agitate but do not\nuse force. Only in the case of members of the Communist Party do\nthey interfere if the individual\u2019s actions are likely \u201cdirectly or\nindirectly to discredit the party.\u201d (Such a phrase permits of the\nwidest interpretation and misinterpretation.) Thus in an article in\nthe _Pravda_ on The Party and Personal Life, O. Zortzeva, an official\nof the Central Control Committee, writes that \u201cnot long ago one of\nthe representatives of the Control Committee in the South asked for\ninstructions to combat the evil of divorce.\u201d She cites an instance (and\nthere must be many more such instances) where a Communist was required\nto explain why he left his wife. He replied he could not live with\nher because she was unfit to mingle in the society of his new friends\nand acquaintances. The reply was regarded as unsatisfactory. The\nSoviet state enforces a most liberal divorce law. But the Communists\ndiscourage divorce. Within the party it is looked upon with disfavor.\n\nThe war, the revolution, the civil wars have worked havoc with the\nRussian family. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that family\nlife is crumbling. Trotzky, who has given more active attention to\nthese questions of personal behavior than any other Communist leader,\nseeks to re\u00ebnforce the collapsing buttresses of the family. (It\nwill be recalled that Engels, the author with Marx of the \u201cCommunist\nManifesto,\u201d wrote the \u201cOrigin of the Family\u201d to prove that the family\nwas a new, unnecessary, and reactionary institution.) Trotzky urges the\n\u201ccommunalization of the family household\u201d so as to \u201cdisencumber the\nfamily of kitchen and laundry.\u201d Take the burden of washing, cooking,\nsewing, child-raising from the family and \u201cthe relation between husband\nand wife will be cleansed of all that is external, foreign, forced,\naccidental. Each would cease to spoil the life of the other....\u201d\n\nThe family life of most Communist leaders would probably find favor\nin the eyes of the Bishop of New York, and we can imagine that Cotton\nMather, if he returned to the flesh and visited Moscow, would hurry to\nTrotzky, slap him untheologically on the back, and say, \u201cThou art a\nman.\u201d There was something ascetic and impersonal in the way Lenin used\nto live. There is something reminiscent of Christian self-abnegation\nin Chicherin\u2019s, Bukharin\u2019s, Radek\u2019s disdain for good clothes. A\nCommunist is required to contribute to the party treasury all the\nsalary he earns above $95 a month. And even if his writings bring him a\nsupplementary income he must not spend it for luxuries. The Communists\nare the shock troops of the Soviet r\u00e9gime. They must be like athletes\nin training. They must not consume mental and spiritual ice creams and\npastries.\n\nAlexandra Kollontai, now Soviet ambassador in Christiania, stands for\nthe utmost freedom in sexual relations. But a review in the official\npress of her book, \u201cLove Among Laboring Bees,\u201d stigmatizes her views\non the subject as \u201cprostitution\u201d and \u201cintellectual tomfoolery.\u201d \u201cIt\nis imperative,\u201d reads the last sentence of the criticism, \u201cto guard\nagainst the harmful influence of Comrade Kollontai.\u201d This is the\nattitude which in other countries leads to the appointment of vice\ncensors. Russia, fortunately, is too advanced to subject itself to such\na humiliation. Only the lives of Communists are censored. In respect\nto the great mass of the people the Bolsheviks content themselves with\npreaching.\n\nTrotzky\u2019s sermons will certainly do the people no harm. Russians\nhave barely a trace of puritanism. Take the instance of their\nfamous, many-ply \u201cmother\u201d oaths. Beside them the worst product of the\nBritish navvy looks pale. Says Trotzky: \u201cOne would have to consult\nphilologists, linguists, and folk-lore experts to find out whether\nany other people has such unrestrained, filthy, and disgusting oaths\nas we have. As far as I know, there is no other.\u201d The Communists have\ninitiated an anti-swearing campaign. In some factories the workers\nthemselves decided to fine any one who used an \u201cexpression.\u201d Wherever\none goes, in industrial plants, in beer saloons, in clubs, one sees the\ncolored \u201cDon\u2019t Swear\u201d poster. Even in the army, where curses once found\ntheir most fertile field, they are becoming increasingly rare.\n\nA Communist should not play cards. A member of the party will not, if\nhe is a good Communist, enter a gambling casino. (The Moscow gambling\ncasinos, incidentally, have been closed by order of the Government.)\nNewly initiated Communists ask their instructors whether they are to\npermit their wives to powder their faces. A Communist would hardly come\nto her office with her lips rouged and even non-Communist workers in\nmany Soviet commissariats feel that it is bad form to use the lipstick.\nCertainly very few if any women Communists dress to fashion. Most of\nthem dress badly. There are more serious things to do than to mind the\nclothes on one\u2019s back. It is unworthy of a Communist, and Communists\nthink it is unworthy of all Russians, to give too much thought to the\nflesh. I know a non-Communist Soviet official who likes to carry a\ncane, but he leaves it home when he goes to work.\n\nThere can be no let-up, says Trotzky, in the war against alcohol.\nThe Government has abolished vodka, but the bootleg \u201csamogonka\u201d has\nreplaced it. The police arrest men and women (in Russia most of\nthe apprehended bootleggers are women) but force removes as little\nof the evil here as it does in the United States. So strong is the\ndrink tradition in Russia that even many Communists indulge in the\npermissible wines and light beers. But the party reminds its members\nthat they must inhibit such desires. It will not do for the best\nsoldiers of the state and the master-builders of a new society to\nbecome inebriated, or lose their heads and time in the pursuit of\nwomen, or play cards, or stop to adjust their neckties while the\nfoundations of the structure are being laid.\n\n\n\n\nStereotypes\n\nBy Florence Guy Seabury\n\n\n\n\nFlorence Guy Seabury\n\n_is a frequent contributor to the_ New Republic _and to various popular\nmagazines._\n\n\n\n\nSTEREOTYPES\n\nBY FLORENCE GUY SEABURY\n\n\nIf Clarissa Harlow could have stepped out of her pre-Victorian world\nto witness some of the women stevedores and \u201clongshoremen\u201d now at work\nalong the New York water front, she would certainly have fainted so\nabruptly that no masculine aid could have restored consciousness. If\nwe can believe the 1920 census, a goodly number of Clarissa\u2019s timid\nand delicate sex are toiling gloriously in the most dangerous and\nviolent occupations. Nor are they only engaged in handling steel beams\nand freight, running trucks and donkey engines, but as miners and\nsteeplejacks, aviators and divers, sheriffs and explorers--everything,\nin fact that man ever did or thought of doing. They have proved,\nmoreover, as successful in such a new occupation as capturing jungle\ntigers as in the old one of hunting husbands, as deft in managing big\nbusiness as in running a little household.\n\nBut the census bureau, compiling all the facts of feminine industry,\nforgot to note that woman might perform these amazingly varied\noperations, outside the home, without changing in any measurable degree\nthe rooted conception of her nature and activities. She may step out\nof skirts into knickers, cut her hair in a dozen short shapes and\neven beat a man in a prize fight, but old ideas as to her place and\nqualities endure. She changes nothing as set as the stereotyped image\nof her sex which has persisted since Eve.\n\nThe Inquiring Reporter of the New York _Sun_ recently asked five\npersons whether they would prefer to be tried by a jury of men or\nwomen. \u201cOf men,\u201d cried they all--two women and three men. \u201cWomen would\nbe too likely to overlook the technical points of the law.\u201d \u201cWomen are\ntoo sentimental.\u201d \u201cThey are too easily swayed by an eloquent address.\u201d\n\u201cWomen are by nature sentimental.\u201d Almost anybody could complete the\nlist. Ancient opinions of women\u2019s characteristics have been so widely\nadvertised that the youngest child in the kindergarten can chirp the\nwhole story. Billy, aged ten, hopes fervently that this country may\nnever have a woman president. \u201cWomen haven\u2019t the brains--it\u2019s a\nman\u2019s job.\u201d A. S. M. Hutchinson, considerably older than Billy, has\nequally juvenile fears: that the new freedom for women may endanger her\nfunctions in the home. Whatever and wherever the debate, the status\nand attributes of women are settled by neat and handy generalizations,\npassed down from father to son, and mother to daughter. For so far,\nmost women accept the patterns made for them and are as likely as not\nto consider themselves the weaker vessel, the more emotional sex, a lay\nfigure of biological functioning.\n\nOptimists are heralding a changed state in the relationship of men and\nwomen. They point to modern activities and interests as evidence of a\ndifferent position in the world. They say that customs and traditions\nof past days are yielding to something freer and finer. The old order,\nas far as home life is concerned, has been turned topsy-turvy. Out of\nthis chaos, interpreters of the coming morality declare that already\nbetter and happier ways have been established between man and maid.\n\nIt sounds plausible enough, but the trouble remains, that, so far, it\nisn\u2019t true. The intimate relationship of men and women is about as it\nwas in the days of Cleopatra or Xanthippe. The most brawny stevedorette\nleaves her freight in the air when the whistle blows and rushes home\nto husband as if she were his most sheltered possession. Following the\ntradition of the centuries, the business woman, whose salary may double\nthat of her mate, hands him her pay envelope and asks permission to\nbuy a new hat. Busts and bustles are out, flat chests and orthopedic\nshoes are in, while the waist line moves steadily toward the thigh--but\nwhat of it? Actualities of present days leave the ancient phantasies\nunchanged.\n\nCurrent patterns for women, as formulated by the man in the street, by\nthe movies, in the women\u2019s clubs and lecture halls can be boiled down\nto one general cut. Whatever she actually is or does, in the stereotype\nshe is a creature specialized to function. The girl on the magazine\ncover is her symbol. She holds a mirror, a fan, a flower and--at\nChristmas--a baby. Without variety, activity, or individuality her\nsugary smile pictures satisfying femininity. Men are allowed diversity.\nSome are libertines, others are husbands; a few are lawyers, many are\nclerks. They wear no insignia of masculinity or badge of paternity and\nthey are never expected to live up to being Man or Mankind. But every\nwoman has the whole weight of formulated Womanhood upon her shoulders.\nEven in new times, she must carry forward the design of the ages.\n\nOne of the quaint hang-overs of the past is that men are the chief\ninterpreters of even the modern woman. It may be that the conquest of\nvaried fields and the strain of establishing the right to individuality\nhas taken all her time and energy. Or it may be that the habit of\nvicarious expression has left her inarticulate. Whatever it is, in the\nvoluminous literature of the changing order, from the earnest tracts on\n\u201cHow It Feels to Be a Woman,\u201d by a leading male educator to the tawdry\nand flippant syndicated views of W. L. George, masculine understanders\ntake the lead. And the strange part of their interpretations is that\nthey run true to ancient form. Old adages are put in a more racy\nvernacular, the X-ray is turned on with less delicacy, but when the\nfroth of their engaging frankness disappears, hoary old ideas remain\nthickly in the tumbler.\n\nTake the intimate life story of a girl of the younger\ngeneration--Janet March--written by that good friend of women, Floyd\nDell. The blurb on the jacket of the book announces that she moves\ntoward \u201cnot a happy ending but an intelligent one.\u201d And the end? Janet\nfinds her mate and the curtain falls to the soft music of maternity.\n\u201cOne has to risk something,\u201d Janet cries. \u201cAll my life I\u2019ve wanted to\n_do_ something with myself. Something exciting. And this is the one\nthing I can do. I can\u201d--she hesitated. \u201cI can create a breed of fierce\nand athletic girls, new artists, musicians, and singers.\u201d\n\nAs a conclusion this is acceptable to any one with a heart, but wherein\nis it intellectual and not happy? Queen Victoria, the Honorable Herbert\nAsquith, or the Reverend Lyman Abbott would be equally pleased by its\none hundred per cent womanliness. And how does it differ from our\ncherished slogan, \u201cWoman\u2019s place is in the home\u201d? Only because Floyd\nDell cuts Janet in a large, free-hand design. The advance pattern calls\nfor a wealth of biological and gynecological explanation, pictures the\ngirl as a healthy young animal who \u201csmoked but drew the line on grounds\nof health at inhaling,\u201d and, following the fashion of peasants in\nforeign countries, consummated the marriage before it was celebrated.\nYet Janet, who claimed her right to all experience and experiment,\nfinally raises her banner on the platform of fireside and nursery.\n\nDespite its unquestionable orthodoxy, Janet March was retired from\ncirculation. But no one has successfully dammed the flowing tide of W.\nL. George. He draws with somewhat futuristic effect, at times, but his\nconclusions are those of the old masters. \u201cNo woman,\u201d he enunciates\nauthoritatively, \u201cvalues her freedom until she is married and then she\nis proud to surrender it to the man she has won.\u201d Or take this: \u201cAll\nwomen are courtesans at heart, living only to please the other sex.\u201d\nWherein does this differ from the sentiment of Alexander Pope who,\none hundred and fifty or more years before the birth of W. L. George,\ndeclared:\n\n  Men, some to business, some to pleasures take,\n  But every woman is at heart a rake.\n\nH. L. Mencken, stirred by debates about the intelligence of woman and\nher newer activities, essayed \u201cIn Defense of Women,\u201d to put his old\nwine in a fancy bottle, but it was the same home brew. Generously\nconceding brains to women, he proves his point on the evidence that\nthey are used to ensnare men, who weak-minded and feeble in flight are\nusually bowled over in the battle of wits. \u201cMarriage,\u201d he says, \u201cis\nthe best career a woman can reasonably aspire to--and in the case of\nvery many women, the only one that actually offers a livelihood.\u201d...\n\u201cA childless woman remains more than a little ridiculous and ill at\nease.\u201d... \u201cNo sane woman has ever actually muffed a chance.\u201d... \u201cThe\nmajority of inflammatory suffragettes of the sex hygiene and birth\ncontrol species are simply those who have done their best to snare a\nman and failed.\u201d\n\nIn H. L. Mencken\u2019s favor is his absence of the usual gush about\nfeminine beauty. He declares with refreshing honesty that in contrast\nto the female body a milk jug or even a cuspidor is a thing of\nintelligent and gratifying design. Of woman\u2019s superior mental ability\nhe says, \u201cA cave man is all muscle and mush. Without a woman to think\nfor him, he is truly a lamentable spectacle, a baby with whiskers,\na rabbit with the frame of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous\ncaricature of God.\u201d What a pity that women use all these advantages of\nsuperior mentality and ability only in the age-old game of man-hunting.\nBut do they?\n\nD. H. Lawrence shares this philosophy of the chief business of women,\nand he is much more gloomy about it. In fact, he is decidedly neurotic\nin his fear of the ultimate absorption of man. Woman he describes\nperpetually as a great, magnetic womb, fecund, powerful, drawing,\nengulfing. Man he sees as a pitiful, struggling creature, ultimately\ndevoured by fierce maternal force. \u201cYou absorb, absorb,\u201d cries Paul\nto Miriam in \u201cSons and Lovers,\u201d \u201cas if you must fill yourself up with\nlove because you\u2019ve got a shortage somewhere.\u201d The Lawrence model,\nmadly, fiercely possessive, differs from older forms in the abundance\nof physiological and pathological trimming. His conclusion, as voiced\nagain by Paul to Miriam is, \u201cA woman only works with part of herself;\nthe real and vital part is covered up.\u201d And this hidden reality is her\nterrific, destructive, fervid determination to drown man in her embrace.\n\nSo it goes. To Floyd Dell woman is a Mother, to H. L. Mencken a Wife,\nto W. L. George a Courtesan, and to D. H. Lawrence a Matrix--always\nspecialized to sex. There may be men who are able to think of woman\napart from the pattern of function, but they are inarticulate. Most of\nthem spend their lives associating with a symbol. The set pieces they\ncall Mary, Martha, Elaine, or Marguerite may follow the standardized\ndesign of grandmother, mother, or aunt. Or in more advanced circles,\nthe pattern may call for bobbed hair, knickers, and cigarette case.\nUnder any form of radicalism or conservatism the stereotype remains.\n\nThe old morality was built upon this body of folk-lore about women.\nWhether pictured as a chaste and beautiful angel, remote and untainted\nby life\u2019s realities, or more cynically regarded as a devil and the\nsource of sin, the notion was always according to pattern. Naturally,\nthe relationship of men and women has been built upon the design,\nand a great many of our social ideals and customs follow it. The\nangel concept led, of course, to the so-called double standard which\nprovides for a class of Victorian dolls who personify goodness, while\ntheir sisters, the prostitutes, serve as sacrificial offerings to\nthe wicked ways of men. The new morality, as yet rather nebulous and\nsomewhat mythical, has fewer class distinctions. The angel picture,\nfor instance, has had some rude blows. As portrayed by the vanguard of\nradicals and interpreters, however, the changing conventions have their\nroots in the old generalizations and phantasies.\n\nPerhaps this is only to be expected, for the man or woman does not\nexist whose mind has not become so filled with accepted ideas of human\nbeings and relationships before maturity, or even adolescence, that\nwhat is seen thereafter is chiefly a fog of creeds and patterns. If\nseveral hundred babies, children of good inherited backgrounds, could\nbe brought up on an isolated island, without a taint of superimposed\ncustom and never hearing generalizations about themselves--never\nhaving standardized characteristics laid heavily upon their shoulders,\nperhaps a different type of relationship founded upon actualities,\nwould be evolved. Without a mythology of attributes, based chiefly upon\nbiological functions, real human beings might discover each other and\ncreate new and honest ways of comradeship and association. As it is\nto-day, we do not know what the pristine reactions of individuals, free\nfrom the modifications of stereotype, would be like.\n\nIt was the development of means by which beliefs could be separated\nfrom actual facts which brought modern science into being and freed\nthe world from the quaint superstitions of the ages. Not until the\nnature of substance could be proved and classified in contrast with the\nmass of ignorant notions which clogged ancient thought was the amazing\nmechanical, economic, and scientific advance of the last century\npossible. The world of antiquity had standardized life and tied thought\ndown to speculative creeds. Empirical science discarded all supposition\nand centered itself upon building up another picture--life as an\nexamination of its actual nature proved it to be.\n\nIn the creating of a new order which will bring with it a different\ntype of social and personal contact, something similar must take place.\nFor most of our ideas, even those classified as liberal and advanced,\nare built upon the reactions of an alleged, not an actual human being.\nMen have suffered from pattern-making, but never have they been\nburdened with the mass of generalizations that are heaped upon women\nfrom birth. Nobody knows what women are really like because our minds\nare so filled with the stereotype of Woman. And this picture, even in\nthe interpretations of those who claim to understand the modern woman,\nis chiefly of function, not character. It is impossible to create a\nsatisfying relationship between a red-blooded individual and a symbol.\nA changed morality cannot successfully emerge when half of those who\nparticipate are regarded not as people but functions. As long as women\nare pictured chiefly as wife, mother, courtesan--or what not--defining\nmerely a relationship to men--nothing new or strange or interesting is\nlikely to happen. The old order is safe.\n\n\n\n\nWomen and the New Morality\n\nBy Beatrice M. Hinkle\n\n\n\n\nBeatrice M. Hinkle\n\n_is a physician and psycho-analyst who follows in general the beliefs\nof Jung. She is the author of \u201cRecreating the Individual.\u201d_\n\n\n\n\nWOMEN AND THE NEW MORALITY\n\nBY BEATRICE M. HINKLE, M.D.\n\n\nIn the general discussions of morality which are the fashion just now,\nsex morality seems to occupy the chief place. Indeed, judging from\nthe amount of talk on this subject one would be inclined to think it\nthe outstanding problem of our time. Certainly the whole of humanity\nis concerned in and vitally affected by the sexual aspect of life.\nSexuality in its capacity as an agent of transformation is the source\nof power underlying the creativeness of man. In its direct expression,\nincluding its influence upon human relationships in general, it is\nwoman\u2019s particular concern. The position of importance it is assuming\nseems, therefore, to be justified, regardless of the protests of the\nintellect and the wish of the ego to minimize its significance.\n\nA general weakening of traditional standards of ethics and morals and\ntheir gradual loss of control over the conduct of individuals have\nlong been observed in other activities--in business affairs and in\nthe world of men\u2019s relations with each other. This has taken place so\nquietly and with so much specious rationalizing that sharp practices\nand shady conduct which formerly would have produced scandals, shame,\nand social taboos now scarcely cause a protest from society. These\naspects of morality belong to the masculine world in particular and\nproduce little agitation, while the upheaval in sex morals particularly\naffects the feminine world and by many people can scarcely be\nconsidered calmly enough for an examination. The changes in this field\nare the most recent and are being produced by women; they are taking\nplace in full view of all with no apologies and with little hesitation.\nThey appear, therefore, most striking and disturbing. It can be said\nthat in the general disintegration of old standards, women are the\nactive agents in the field of sexual morality and men the passive,\nalmost bewildered accessories to the overthrow of their long and firmly\norganized control of women\u2019s sexual conduct.\n\nThe old sex morality, with its double standard, has for years been\ncriticized and attacked by fair-minded persons of both sexes. It\nhas been recognized that this unequal condition produced effects\nas unfortunate for the favored sex as for the restricted one, and\nthat because of this it could not be maintained indefinitely by a\npsychologically developing people. As a matter of course, whenever\nthe single standard was mentioned, the standard governing women was\ninvariably meant, and the fact was ignored that it is easier to break\ndown restrictions than to force them upon those who have hitherto\nenjoyed comparative freedom. Furthermore, it was not realized that a\nsex morality imposed by repression and the power of custom creates\nartificial conceptions and will eventually break down.\n\nThis forced morality is in fact at the present time quite obviously\ndisintegrating. We see women assuming the right to act as their\nimpulses dictate with much the same freedom that men have enjoyed for\nso long. The single standard is rapidly becoming a _fait accompli_, but\ninstead of the standard identified with women it is nearer the standard\nassociated with men. According to a universal psychological law,\nactual reality eventually overtakes and replaces the cultural ideal.\n\nAlthough this overthrow of old customs and sex ideals must be chiefly\nattributed to the economic independence of women brought about through\nthe industrialism of our age, it is safe to say that no man thought\nahead far enough or understood the psychology of women sufficiently\nto anticipate the fruit of this economic emancipation. As long as\nwomen were dependent upon men for the support of themselves and their\nchildren there could be no development of a real morality, for the\nlove and feelings of the woman were so intermingled with her economic\nnecessities that the higher love impulse was largely undifferentiated\nfrom the impulse of self-preservation. True morality can only develop\nwhen the object or situation is considered for itself, not when it is\nbound up with ulterior and extraneous elements which vitiate the whole.\nThe old morality has failed and is disintegrating fast, because it was\nimposed from without instead of evolving from within.\n\nA morality which has value for all time and is not dependent upon\ncustom or external cultural fashions can arise only from a high\ndevelopment of the psychological functions of thinking and feeling,\nwith the developed individual as the determiner of values instead of\ngeneral custom or some one else\u2019s opinion. The function of feeling and\nthe realm of the emotions have been universally regarded as woman\u2019s\nspecial province; therefore it is women who are specially concerned\nwith testing out moral values involving sexual behavior. Women have\nbeen reproached by men again and again as being only sexual creatures,\nand they have meekly accepted the reproach. Now, instead of examining\nthe statement, they have accepted the sexual problem of men as though\nit were their own, and with it the weight of man\u2019s conflict and his\narticulateness. For sexuality as a problem and a conflict definitely\nbelongs to man\u2019s psychology; it is he primarily who has been ashamed\nof his domination by this power and has struggled valiantly to free\nhimself; his egotistic and sexual impulses have always been at war with\neach other. But whoever heard of women being ashamed of yielding to the\npower of love? Instead they gloried in the surrender of themselves and\ncounted themselves blessed when love ruled. It is this need of man to\nescape from the power of the sensual appeal that has made him scorn sex\nand look upon the great creative power of life as something shameful\nand inferior, and in modern days treat it as a joke or with the\nindifferent superficiality which betrays emasculation and inadequacy.\n\nOne has only to \u201clisten in\u201d where any large group of men, young or\nold, are gathered together in easy familiarity (the army camps were\nrecent examples on a large scale) to discover the degree to which\nsexuality still dominates the minds of men, even though its expression\nis confined so largely to the jocose and the obscene. Many men can\ncorroborate this report from a military camp--\u201cwe have sexuality in\nall its dirty and infantile forms served daily for breakfast, lunch,\nand dinner.\u201d It is the inferior and inadequate aspect of masculine\nsexuality that has made it necessary for man to conceive it as\nsomething shameful and unclean, and to insist that woman must carry his\npurity for him and live the restrictions and suppression that rightly\nbelonged to him. Woman on her part became an easy victim of his ideas\nand convictions, because of the very fact that the function of feeling\nand the emotions so largely dominate her psychology. The translation\nof feeling into thought-forms has been slow and difficult. About\nherself woman has been quite inarticulate and largely unconscious.\nThis inarticulateness inevitably made her accept man\u2019s standards and\nvalues for her, for little directed thinking is achieved without form\nand words. Because of her sexual fertility and fruitfulness woman had\nno sexual conflict; therefore, man easily unloaded his psychological\nburden upon her, and claimed freedom for the satisfaction of his own\ndesires.\n\nThus, woman was made a symbol or personification of man\u2019s morality. She\nhad to live for him that which he was unable to live for himself. This\nwas the reason for his indignation at moral transgressions on her part.\nShe had injured the symbol and revealed his weakness to him. However,\nwith the discovery by women that they could be economically independent\nof men, they commenced to find themselves interesting. As they have\ngradually come to think for themselves about fundamental questions,\nthere has begun a tremendous activity and busyness in regard to the\nvery subject which was previously taboo.\n\nA recent writer boasts that men have changed their attitude regarding\nsexual problems very little and are not much concerned in the new\ninterest of women. This is probably true, for man has contributed\nall he has to give to the subject. He has laid down his taboos and\nexternalized his restrictions, chiefly applicable to the other sex,\nand he is finished with the subject--bored by having it thrust forward\nas an unfinished problem needing reconsideration. All of his knowledge\nor understanding of the sexual aspect of life--the aspect underlying\nhuman creativeness, the faulty development of which is responsible\nfor a large part of his woes, \u201ccan be told in two hours to any\nintelligent sixteen year old boy,\u201d another writer recently stated. It\nis this youthful ignorance and assurance that the last word has been\nspoken on this subject that has awakened women, no longer dependent\neconomically, to the fact that they must also become independent of men\nintellectually if they wish to gain expression for their knowledge\nor to form their own rules of conduct based on their psychology. In\nthe true scientific spirit of the age they are now experimenting and\nusing nature\u2019s method of trial and error to find out for themselves by\nconscious living experience what feeling has vaguely told them. This is\nthe first step towards objectifying and clarifying woman\u2019s intuitive\nknowledge.\n\nWith the revolt of women against the old restrictions and the demand\nfor freedom to experience for themselves, there has appeared a most\nsignificant phase of the changed morality--the new relation of women\ntoward each other. The significance of this enormous change which\nhas been taking place very quietly and yet very rapidly is scarcely\nappreciated. However, when one realizes that only a generation ago the\nnewspapers were still publishing their funny paragraphs at the expense\nof women (\u201cThe dear creatures; how they love one another\u201d), the great\ndifference in their relations today becomes evident. The generally\naccepted distinction between the personal loyalties of the sexes can be\nsummed up in the statement that women are loyal in love and disloyal\nin friendship, while men are loyal in friendship and disloyal in love.\nIt is this attitude of women that is gradually disappearing with the\nawakening of a new sense of themselves as individuals. Their changed\nattitude towards each other--the recognition of their own values, and\nthe growing realization that only in solidarity can any permanent\nimpression be made on the old conception of woman as an inferior,\ndependent creature, useful for one purpose only--constitutes the most\nmarked difference between their present social condition and that of\nthe past.\n\nAs long as women remained psychologically unawakened, their individual\nvalues were swallowed up in their biological value for the race. They\nwere under the unconscious domination of their sexual fruitfulness\nand an enemy of themselves as individuals. Weininger gives as the\nchief difference between the masculine and feminine creeds that \u201cMan\u2019s\nreligion consists in a supreme belief in himself--woman\u2019s in a supreme\nbelief in other people.\u201d These other people being men, the sex rivalry\namong women that has so long stood in the way of their further\ndevelopment is easily understood. It has been a vicious circle which\ncould only be broken by women\u2019s gaining another significance in the\neyes of the world and in their own eyes. This other significance is the\neconomic importance which they have acquired in the world of men.\n\nIt makes little difference within the social structure how many\nindividual women exist who have forged a position for themselves and\nhave won a freedom and independence equal to that possessed by the\nordinary man, so long as they are isolated phenomena having little\nunderstanding of the peculiar difficulties and problems of women as a\nwhole, and no relation with each other. These women have always existed\nin all culture periods, but they have produced little effect upon the\nsocial condition or psychology of women in general. There was no group\naction because the majority of women were inarticulate. The woman who\nwas different became abnormal in the eyes of the world.\n\nThis lack of an adequate self-consciousness among women, their\ngeneral inability to translate feeling into form capable of being\nunderstood by the masculine mind, accounts for their acceptance of the\nstatements made about them by men in an effort to understand creatures\napparently so different from themselves. There is no doubt that woman\u2019s\ninarticulateness about herself, even when her feelings were very\ndifferent from those she was told were normal, has been responsible for\na vast amount of the nonsense written about her.\n\nThis passive acceptance of the opinions of others has been most\ndisastrous for woman\u2019s development. Her superior psychological\nprocesses consist of feelings and intuitions, and when these are\nstultified or violated by being forced into a false relation, or are\ninhibited from development, the entire personality is crippled. The\ninadequate development of the function of thought and the dominating\nr\u00f4le played by the function of feeling in the psychology of woman have\nproduced an obviously one-sided effect and have caused men to postulate\ntheories about her, which are given forth as though they were the last\nword to be said--fixed and unchangeable. Indeed the statement that\nwomen are incapable of change and that no growth is possible for them\nis one of the favorite assertions of the masculine writers upon the\nsubject of women\u2019s psychology. As the present is the first time in our\nhistorical period in which there has been any general opportunity for\nwomen as a whole to think for themselves and to develop in new ways,\nthe basis for this assertion does not exist, and it obviously conceals\nan unconscious wish that women should not change.\n\nThe effect of collective ideas and cultural traditions upon the\npersonality is immeasurable. The greatest general change that is\ntaking place today is the weakening of these ideas and the refusal\nof women to be bound by them. Women are for the first time demanding\nto live the forbidden experiences directly and draw conclusions on\nthis basis. I do not mean to imply that traditional moral standards\ncontrolling woman\u2019s sexual conduct have never been transgressed in the\npast. They have very frequently been transgressed, but secretly and\nwithout inner justification. The great difference today lies in the\nopen defiance of these customs with feelings of entire justification,\nor even a non-recognition of a necessity for justification. In other\nwords, there has arisen a feeling of moral rightness in the present\nconduct, and wrongness in the former morality. Actually the condition\nis one in which natural, long-restrained desire is being substituted\nfor collective moral rules, and individuals are largely becoming a law\nunto themselves. It is difficult to predict what will be the result\nof the revolt, but it is certain that this is the preceding condition\nwhich renders it possible for a new morality in the real sense to be\nborn within the individual. It has already produced the first condition\nof all conscious psychic development--a moral conflict--and woman has\ngained a problem.\n\nIn the general chaos of conflicting feelings she is losing her\ninstinctive adaptation to her biological r\u00f4le as race bearer, and is\nattempting adaptation to man\u2019s reality. She is making the effort to win\nfor herself some differentiation and development of the ego function\napart from her instinctive processes. This is the great problem\nconfronting woman today; how can she gain a relation to both racial and\nindividual obligations, instead of possessing one to the exclusion of\nthe other? Must she lose that which has been and still is her greatest\nstrength and value? I for one do not think so, although I am fully\nconscious of the tremendous psychic effort and responsibility involved\nin the changing standards. It is necessary that women learn to accept\nthemselves and to value themselves as beings possessing a worth at\nleast equal to that of the other sex, instead of unthinkingly accepting\nstandards based on masculine psychology. Then women will recognize\nthe necessity of developing their total psychic capacities just as\nit is necessary for men to do, but they will see that this does not\ninvolve imitation of men or repudiation of their most valuable psychic\nfunctioning. The real truth is that it has at last become apparent to\nmany women that men cannot redeem them.\n\nIt is not the purpose of this article to deal with the practical\nissues involved in the new moral freedom. One thing however is clearly\nevident: Women are demanding a reality in their relations with men\nthat heretofore has been lacking, and they refuse longer to cater to\nthe traditional notions of them created by men, in which their true\nfeelings and personalities were disregarded and denied. This is the\nfirst result of the new morality.\n\n\n\n\nTranscriber\u2019s Notes\n\nA few minor errors in punctuation have been corrected.","title":"Our Changing Morality: A Symposium","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":40269}