Women's Wild Oats Part 7

I grant this. In the first place I am convinced of the folly of preaching to anyone. Then, as I am always a.s.serting, I believe in the continuous responsibility of woman, and, therefore, if I am to be honest, I must accept here as in all relations between the s.e.xes, the validity of the man's plea that rings--yes, and will continue to ring--through the centuries: "The woman tempted me." We are dealing with forces that I do not believe can be set aside, forces active long before human relations were established, which press on women back and back through the ages. Woman possesses the sacred right of protecting man, it is a duty imposed upon her by nature, and one that she cannot safely escape. Let me a.s.sert that this is no sentimental statement. The essential fact in every relations.h.i.+p of the s.e.xes is the woman's power over the man, and it is the misuse of that power that leads to all prost.i.tution.

VII

I want now, in a final section of this chapter, to consider, as fully as the limits of my s.p.a.ce will allow, the outside facts of prost.i.tution--that is, the popular view on the subject.

Externally, prost.i.tution exhibits two factors: l.u.s.t in men and a dependent condition among women, which makes them surrender themselves as victims to this l.u.s.t. This is the accepted, sentimental, and picturesque description: a sort of compound of sinfulness and pathos, making a draught, if the truth is faced, not always altogether unpleasing to women, a fact which surely accounts for the excitement and veiled pleasurable curiosity with which the subject usually is approached. For the l.u.s.t, men are held responsible, and the chaste characters of women are held up in contrast. Now, it is this view of the matter which affords prost.i.tution one of its most certain opportunities of permanency: also it gives women, when they attack it, all the pleasing satisfaction of virtue that is realized without effort. At the same time, it explains why they object to repressive measures that are framed to end it.

During the agitation, for instance, for the repeal of the 40 D Act, women and women-like men wallowed in righteousness. Never did I hear more nonsense talked than at the meetings I attended on this subject.

Women's instinctive att.i.tude had a unique chance of displaying itself, and one wondered at the combined prudery and sentiment with which the subject was approached, while the most offensive part of their conventionalism was the s.e.x-obsession, which was clotted, like cream turned sour, on all their judgments.

Consider again the controversy that has raged with regard to the providing of prophylactic outfits to our men in the Army and Navy. One would think this was a simple matter. Precautions taken before, or within a short time after contact, enormously lessen the dangers of infection.[141:1] And yet prophylaxis is objected to on the grounds that it is immoral: that it invites to s.e.xual indulgence by providing immunity from infection. It is also held to give rise to a false security.

Really, it is difficult to have patience. Huge sums are being spent in treating these diseases after they have been contracted, but we must not give our young men the means whereby they may be prevented from being contracted. Such miserable prejudice would be funny, unless one remembers the unconscious cause which gives it so burning a strength.

Some months ago, during the war, I attended a conference to protest against the giving of prophylactic outfits to the overseas troops. It was called and conducted by ladies, the incarnation of all the virtues, effervescing in the most appalling sentimentality I have ever come across, even at meetings of women met to discuss the morals of men.

Interminable floods of gus.h.!.+ They talked of nothing but purity, its beauty, its healthfulness, its moral uplifting to the soul of the young man--its Devil knows what. Venereal diseases were nature's punishment for impurity; to provide prophylaxis was to insult the pure youth, to hurry on to sin the youth who was not pure. Such was the pleasing doctrine slowly and solidly defended, while the real problem of how to prevent the spread of venereal diseases--especially how to stop the birth of infected children, was lost in white clouds of virtue. And many of these women themselves were mothers! When I remonstrated, attempted to show that the one fact to go for was the prevention of infection as in that way only could the spread of the plague be stayed and the innocent saved from suffering with the sinner, I was charged, denounced, and cut to pieces. I am sure that every one of those good women pitied me--as a matter of fact, one speaker said frankly that she was very sorry for my son; plainly they were very doubtful of my virtue.

Since that day I have noted that very few invitations to attend Women's Conferences have been sent to me.

This shelving of the real facts, of course, is unconscious on the part of women. The l.u.s.t of men as the true cause of evil is the one popular and accepted view of the situation, and from this it follows that the prost.i.tute is the man's victim, and as such must be protected. This is highly pleasing; a view depending, as it does, on the moral superiority of women, which stands them as Amazons of purity on the glorious mountain heights of virtue, from where they must send down climbing ropes and ladders, in the form of moral warnings and carefully edited s.e.xual instruction, possibly made pleasing by cinemas and theater ill.u.s.trations, to pull men up out of the deep valleys of vice.

Yet this view is singularly untrue; for if we inquire into this question of men's l.u.s.t, it is obvious that not they, but women, are the more responsible. How often it is woman who awakens this male l.u.s.t, fans it to flame, feeds it to keep it at fever heat. Woman indeed must so act, since nature urges behind; but the prost.i.tute uses this power without rest, she lives, not indeed sacrificed by men's l.u.s.t, but kept alive by it. Always there is the invitation--"Come and find me." To be provocative is the one fixed simple rule of her life. Men's l.u.s.t is a necessity to her very existence. Starving nations do not so eagerly await the coming of the food-laden s.h.i.+ps which will keep them alive as the prost.i.tute watches for the rising of the male desire. The dismay when it is reluctant to quicken is as sincere as it is disquieting to acknowledge. In the final result the woman may be the victim, but at the start she is the controller of the a.s.sault. She directs a continuous attack; her relation to men is comparable to that of a magnet to a heap of iron filings.

Most men, it is true, are not only tolerant of women's wiles; they like them. But most men succ.u.mb, I believe, against their will, and often against their inclination to this tyranny of l.u.s.t. Men's chivalry as well as their pride has woven a cloak of silence around this question; this silence has protected women--even the worst.

There is such a thing as too much temptation for a man; temptation that a woman has no right to give unless she knows a man loves her and is ready to marry her. It is d.a.m.nably hard on men.

The truth in these matters is not often spoken. In spite of the emanc.i.p.ation upon which they pride themselves, in spite even of much precocious experience, almost all women lead a s.h.i.+elded life; vast tracts of experience are usually outside their knowledge or their power of comprehension. This explains, I think, their belief in the old fiction that the seduction of men by women does not take place, but all men know it goes on unceasingly. Women have been s.h.i.+elded by men to an extent which few of them acknowledge. This is one reason why the best of them find it so difficult now to face the woman's responsibility in these problems of s.e.x frankly and simply.

At one time this failure in feminine honesty on the part of so many advanced women made me angry as it appeared to me to be a conscious s.h.i.+rking. I know now I was wrong; this att.i.tude is an unconscious one and this makes it much more dangerous. I fear nothing can change it, at least, for a very long time. As women's spiritual temperature rises, their honesty tends to fall, so much sometimes as to freeze their intelligence.

Women, even the fairest and most advanced, are willing to accept little shame for a depravity which their s.e.x shares equally with the inescapable and surrendering enemy--man. Perhaps the position is unavoidable. I am not certain, and it is very difficult to find the truth. But no man, I think, could satisfy completely in woman the craving for dominion, which the delusive humility of his desire awakens.

Then when a woman commits the error--from a womanly point of view--of hunting down her man in haste for gain, instead of drawing and binding him slowly and unconsciously by love, she awakens the same instinct for dominion in the man. It is the l.u.s.t to devour, to crush, quickened into being by suggestion. It explains, perhaps, the cruelty of all wild-love.

The position now in relation to the problem we are considering, and keeping in view these facts of the relations.h.i.+p of the woman and the man, should be clearer: the spread of venereal disease must be attacked by restricting the trade of the prost.i.tute. Action must begin there.

Acknowledging frankly women's power over men and the magnitude of the temptation they exercise, we must accept the best means to control it.

America has proved what can be done. We want strong restrictive laws to prevent street soliciting and make possible the detention of every infected person.

Why can't we face the situation now when we are trying to tidy up our social life. Health, that was necessary in war time, is surely equally important in peace? Even the prost.i.tute, the professional and the amateur, will benefit: restrict the opportunities of this easy way of getting money and presents from men and other ways of living and obtaining presents must be resorted to. Thus there will be a finer chance of reformation than ever there was before. To urge moral reforms, to talk sloppy nonsense about liberty, about the poor prost.i.tute, police interference, and all that humbug; to seek cover under "the unequal action of the laws between men and women," or any other form of excuse, is willfully to falsify the position. For myself, I a.s.sert without a shadow of hesitation, that I would quite gladly be wrongfully accused of street soliciting, submit to medical examination, be mistakenly detained in prison or any other indignity, if by so doing I knew I lessened by ever so little the chance of a syphilitic child being born.

Is the evil to remain uncorrected from one generation to another? That is the question. Uncorrected evil multiplies itself, and the sum is a huge national disaster. I wish pa.s.sionately that I had greater powers to make you see what to me is so plain. The mistake has been the muddle-headed thinking that sets apart these diseases from all other sicknesses of our bodies, obscuring the plain and comparatively simple question of cure with the entirely opposed problem of punishment; a confusion and losing of the way that leads inevitably into a forest-tangle of difficulty and unanswerable questions. And this heritage of wrong-thinking has compa.s.sed our feet, binding them and throwing us down, as soon as we try to move on, always hindering reform from generation to generation, and, until that entanglement is broken through, by bringing into it the light of honest thinking, the evil will go on, unchecked by our futile tearings here and there at withered branches. The supporting stem will continue to flourish and the devastating diseases will be spread.

(See Sir G. Archdall Reid's letter in Appendix.)

FOOTNOTES:

[117:1] See Ed. Carpenter, "Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure."

[129:1] The Conference was held in the ball-room of the Club of the Allied Officers at Cannes.

[129:2] In this connection, it should be noted that there was a time when syphilis was unknown in our civilisation. It cannot be traced with any certainty in Europe before the fifteenth century, although its origin is involved in some controversy. The attempt to suppress venereal diseases by proper treatment is of little more than twelve years duration. Three men--Wa.s.sermann, Ehrlich, and Noguchi--have supplied the knowledge whereby the evil may be attacked. See "Motherhood and the Relations.h.i.+p of the s.e.xes," p. 283, _et seq._

[132:1] "The Fight against Venereal Disease," by Raymond B. Hod.i.c.k, _The New Republic_, Nov. 30, 1918.

[134:1] My own opinions have been greatly influenced by what has been done in England with regard to drink, and in the American Army in maintaining the health of the Army by restricting prost.i.tution, which explains a change in my att.i.tude, since writing the chapter on "Prost.i.tution" in _The Truth about Woman_.

[141:1] On this question the testimony of the American Army is urgent.

They say, "Prophylaxis is under favorable circ.u.mstances secondary only in effectiveness to actual prevention of exposure.... When every other means have been used to make contact difficult if not impossible, prophylaxis, while not one hundred per cent. efficient, is invaluable as a last resort, and has contributed a large share towards maintaining in our Army the lowest venereal disease rate ever before known." Article before cited.

_Fifth Essay_

IF A CHILD COULD CHOOSE?

A PLEA FOR PROTECTION FOR THE ILLEGITIMATELY BORN CHILD.

"I have called and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand and no man regarded."--Pro. i. 24.

I

Circ.u.mstances, at different times, have made me think and care very deeply about the injustice suffered by children born outside the protection of legal marriage; it was, indeed, when I was still young--young in experience and very ignorant of life; long before I began to write, at the time when I was headmistress of a private school for girls, that the question first forced itself into my consciousness.

It was in this way. I was told suddenly that the parents of two sisters who had entered my school as boarders were living together without being married. I was requested to send the children away. I can recall the scene through the length of the years; the excitement of the parent who was my informer; the kind of curious enjoyment she displayed in telling me the story, an enjoyment which surprised me so much and angered me at the time, but which, of course, is so easy to account for. I did not understand then those "ever-moving and so to speak immortal wishes of our Unconscious,"[151:1] residing in us all, ready to break loose and force some expression in our daily lives.

I am glad to know that young and ignorant as I was my quick instinctive dislike to this moral mud-raking helped and saved me. I would not send the two children away, and refused to take any notice whatever of their illegal birth.

I can hear still the sharp, surprised notes of Mrs. X's unpleasant voice as she turned to me and asked: "Now, Miss Gasquoine Hartley, what are you going to do?" How great was her amazement when I answered "Nothing!"

She urged the necessity for action on account of my position and for the welfare of the school; pleaded the possible hurt done to her own children and all the other pupils. "You must be sensible," she insisted, "and send these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds away. Of course, it is very sad for them, and one would not like to have to do it, but the sins of the parents," etc., etc.... You know the kind of beastly hypocritical talk. I need not continue.

Although I had no vivid realization at that time of the injustice of this view, anger sprang up hot within me. I was rude. I told Mrs. X that she might take her daughters away from my school; that I was willing for her to tell her beastly story to the parents of all my other pupils; that then they, if they wished to do so, might remove their daughters, as for me, I would continue my school with two pupils--the children she had told me were b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

I rather fancy, so ignorant was I then, that this was the first time I had heard that word "b.a.s.t.a.r.d," at any rate I felt the word emotionally, in a sharp and different way, when I heard it applied to little children, whom I knew and loved, was caring for and teaching. In this way, the greatest good was done me. I was made to feel. And when, in the later years of my life, I was brought by circ.u.mstances to consider the fate of the illegitimately born child, I was prepared already to understand the unprotected helplessness of these unfortunate little ones. I fully realized the cruel uncertainty that dogs like a foul shadow their young footsteps, the shame of their unhonored birth, which separates them from other children (and a child suffers so terribly from being separated, dislikes so pa.s.sionately being different from its companions), shame that may always be brought suddenly as a hindrance against them, so that, even under the most favorable circ.u.mstances, they live in danger; grow up sensitive and pa.s.sionately possessive, because so many things all other children have by right, relations who really are relations, a father and the right to use his name, a birth-certificate that does not record their parents' sin, are demanded from them in vain, so that at every turn they must fear the sword of contempt, against which they have no s.h.i.+eld.

II

In many ways the position of the illegitimately born child, always sufficiently bad, has been rendered worse under war conditions. For one thing, their number has increased; the illegitimate birth-rate has steadily gone up in the war years and now is the highest on record.[153:1] And although it is easily possible to exaggerate the action of s.e.xual irregularities, manifestly there can be no doubt that this war has acted directly as, indeed, war always does in increasing illegitimate births. Indirectly also the effect, after a war of such magnitude as this one has been, must be even greater in the immediate future in consequence of the resultant inequality of the s.e.xes. All other factors determinant of illegitimacy are really dependent on the ratio of the number of unmarried males capable of paternity to the number of unmarried women capable of maternity in the community at a given time. Whenever the circle of nubile women surrounding the virile male becomes larger, there will be a corresponding increase in the number of illegitimately born children.[154:1]

A further difficulty, very pressing at the present time, arises from the fact that the supply of reliable foster-mothers has diminished everywhere, especially in London and the large cities. Even where women suitable for this purpose are still attainable, the weekly sum asked for the child's keep is so high that in spite of increased wages and the raising from 5/- to 10/- of the maximum amount allowed against the father under an affiliation order, few mothers can afford to pay it and live decently themselves. The bitter cry of the driven mother frequently is, "Help me to get rid of my baby."

We have demanded too much from the unmarried mother. As a rule she is very young. She is faced with an almost impossible task, and often she is weak in character, incapable, without guidance of so difficult a duty as the up-bringing of the little creature she has helped so greatly to wrong by its very birth.

III