The Truth About Woman Part 22

Many great thinkers have striven against this profound and primitive connection between the bodily and spiritual impulses, which has seemed to them an intrusion of evil, impairing their pure spirituality by the s.e.xual life. They have thus recommended and followed asceticism in order to arrive at a heightened spirituality. The error here is obvious. The spiritual activities cannot be divided from the physical; as well cut the flower off from its roots, and then expect to gather the fruit. This is why s.e.x-denial and s.e.x-excesses so often go together. Hence the undeniable unchast.i.ty of the mediaeval cloisters.

Nor need the manifestations of s.e.x be physical. Erotic imagination and voluptuous revelations are expressions of s.e.x-pa.s.sion. The monstrous s.e.xual visions of the saints reflect in a typical manner the incredible violence of the s.e.xual perception of ascetics.

We observe it, then, as a fact of wide experience that the ascetic life is rooted really in the functional impulses; and further, that it is only through s.e.xual perception that the spiritual and imaginative can be grasped and reached. What the ascetic has done is to fear overmuch. It must not be overlooked that this continual battle with the primary force of life is necessarily futile in accomplis.h.i.+ng its own aim. For the woman or man who, for the religious or any other ideal, wishes to overcome the s.e.x-needs must keep the subject always before her, or his, consciousness. Thus it comes about that the ascetic is always more occupied with s.e.x than the normal individual.

It seems to me that this is a truth few women have learnt to face.

I am not for a moment denying that the potential energy of the s.e.xual impulse may be transformed with benefit into productive spiritual activities, finding its vent in religion, as also in poetry, in art, and in all creative work. Plato must have had this in his mind when he speaks of "thought as a sublimated s.e.xual impulse." Schopenhauer, and many other thinkers, lay stress on the connection between the work of productive genius and the modification of the s.e.xual impulse. This may be ill.u.s.trated--if examples are needed in proof--by the power that has been exercised so conspicuously by women throughout the world in religious movements. Two of the greater festivals of the Catholic Church, for instance, owe their origin to the illumination of women; the mystic writings of Santa Teresa of Avila give cla.s.sic expression to the highest powers of the spirit. Take again the part played by women as religious leaders of the convents in the early Middle Ages.

In them women of spirit and capacity found a wide and satisfying career, many of them showing great administrative ability and a quite remarkable power for government. In recent times mention may be made of the Theosophists, the most important modern religious movement established in this country and led by women; and of Christian Science, which, under the able guidance of Mrs. Eddy, has sprung up and flourished. It is instructive to note that both these religions are connected with, and largely established on, magical faith and esoteric doctrines and practices. In almost all the religions founded by women we may trace a similar relation with hypnotic phenomena which must be regarded as closely dependent on s.e.xual sources. The proof is wider even than these particular instances. It is without doubt the transformation of suppressed s.e.xual instincts that has made women the chief supporters of all religions.

It may be said that the religious impulse has to a large extent lost its hold upon women. This is true. A new age must expect to see a new departure. As women take active partic.i.p.ation in the work of the world their sense of dependence and need for protection will diminish, and we may look for a corresponding decrease in that display of excessive religious emotion that dependence has fostered. But the needs of woman can never be satisfied alone with work. The natural desires remain imperative; deny these, and there will be left only the barren tree robbed of its fruits. s.e.xuality first breathes into woman's spiritual being warm and blooming life.

The religious ascetic is not common among us to-day. Yet the old seeking for something is there. The impulse towards asceticism has, I think, rather changed its form than pa.s.sed from women. The place of the female saint is being taken by the social ascetic. Desire is not now set to gain salvation, but is turned towards a heightened intellectual individuation, showing itself in nervous mental activity. No one can have failed to note the immense egoism of the modern woman. Women are still in fear of life and love. They have been made ascetics through the long exercise of restraint upon their explosively emotional temperament. They have restrained their natures to remain _pure_. This false ideal of chast.i.ty was in the first place forced upon them, but by long habit it has been accentuated and has been backed up by woman's own blindness and fear. Thus to-day, in their new-found freedom, women are seeking to bind men up in the same bonds of denial which have restrained them. In the past they have over-readily imbibed the doctrine of a different standard of purity for the s.e.xes, now they are in revolt--indeed, they are only just emerging from a period of bitterness in relation to this matter. Men made women into puritans, and women are arising in the strength of their faith to enforce puritanism on men. Is this malice or is it revenge? In any case it is foolishness. Bound up as the s.e.xual impulse is with the entire psychic emotional being, there would be left behind without it only the wilderness of a cold abstraction. The Christian belief in souls and bodies separate, and souls imprisoned in vile clay, has wrought terrible havoc to women. I believe the two--soul and body--are one and indivisible. Women have yet this lesson to learn: the capacity for sense-experience is the sap of life. The power to feel pa.s.sion is in direct ratio to the strength of the individual's hold upon life; and may be said to mark the height of his, or her, attainment in the scale of being. It is only another out of many indications of the strength of s.e.xual emotion in women that so many of them are afraid of the beauty and the natural joys of love.

There is one thing more I would wish to point out in closing this very insufficient survey of an exceedingly complicated and difficult subject. To me it seems that here, in this finer understanding of love, we open the door to the only remedy that will wipe out the hateful fear of women, which has wrought such havoc in the relations.h.i.+p between the s.e.xes. Woman, restrained to purity, has of necessity fallen often into impurity. And men, knowing this better than woman herself, have feared her, though they have failed in any true understanding of the cause. Let me give you the estimate of woman which Maupa.s.sant, in _Moonlight_, has placed in the mouth of a priest.

It is the most illuminating pa.s.sage in one of the most exquisite of his stories--

"He hated woman, hated her unconsciously and instinctively despised her. He often repeated to himself the words of Christ: 'Woman, what have I to do with thee?' And he would add, 'It seems as if G.o.d Himself felt discontented with that particular creation.' For him was that child of whom the poet speaks, impure, through and through impure. She was the temptress who had led away the first man, and still continued her work of perdition; a frail creature but dangerous, mysteriously disturbing. And even more than their sinful bodies he hated their loving souls.... G.o.d, in his opinion, had created woman solely to tempt man, to put him to the proof."

One lesson women and men have to learn: so easy to be put into words, so difficult to carry out by deeds. To get good from each other the s.e.xes must give love the one to the other. The human heart in loneliness eats out itself, causes its own emptiness, creates its own terrors. Nature gives lavishly, wantonly, and woman is nearer to Nature than man is, therefore she must give the more freely, the more generously. There can be no such thing as the goodness of one-half of life without the goodness of the other half. Love between woman and man is mutual; is continual giving. Not by storing up for the good of one s.e.x or in waste for the pleasure of the other, but by free bestowing is salvation. Wherefore, not in the enforced chast.i.ty of woman, but in her love, will man gain his new redemption.

FOOTNOTES:

[318] Velazquez is known to us only by the name of his mother; his father's name was de Silva.

[319] I have taken these pa.s.sages from the chapter on "The Women of Galicia," in my _Spain Revisited_.

[320] _Man and Woman_, p. 377; Mobius, _Stachylogie_, 1901.

[321] The pa.s.sage occurs in a lecture by Prof. Thomson and Mrs.

Thomson on "The Position of Woman Biologically Considered," and was one of a series delivered in Edinburgh to consider and estimate the recent changes in the position of woman. The addresses have been published in a book ent.i.tled _The Position of Woman, Actual and Ideal_.

[322] _s.e.xual Life of Our Times_, p. 74.

[323] _s.e.x and Society_, pp. 306, 307.

[324] Quoted by Bloch, _s.e.xual Life of Our Times_, p. 80.

[325] _s.e.xual Life of Our Times_, pp. 80, 81.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER X

THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE s.e.xUAL RELATIONs.h.i.+P

I.--_Marriage_

The difficulty of the problem of marriage--Facts to be considered--Marriage and the family among the animals--Among primitive peoples--Progress from lower to higher forms of the s.e.xual a.s.sociation--An examination of the purpose of marriage--The fear of hasty reforms--Practical morality--Marriage an inst.i.tution older than mankind--The practical moral ends of marriage--The racial and individual factors--No real antagonism between the two--What is good for the individual must react also for the benefit of the race--Various systems of marriage--Monogamy the form that has prevailed--The higher law of the true marriage--Conventional monogamic marriage--Its failure in practical morality--Coexistence with polygamy and prost.i.tution--Chief grounds for the reform of marriage--An indictment by Mr.

Wells--Our marriage system based upon the rights of property--This not necessarily evil--The Egyptian marriage contracts--The Roman marriage--The influence of Christianity--Asceticism and the glorification of virginity--Confusions and absurdities--The failure of our s.e.xual morality--Mammon marriages--Sins against the race--Two examples from my own experience--The iniquity of our b.a.s.t.a.r.dy laws--The waste of love--Free-love--Its failure as a practical solution--The reform of marriage--The tendency to place the form of the s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p above the facts of love--The dependence of the consciousness of duty upon freedom--The s.e.xual responsibility of women.

II.--_Divorce_

Traditional morality--Practical conditions of divorce--The moral code--This must be modified to meet new conditions--The enforced continuance of an unreal marriage--This the grossest form of immorality--The barbarism of our divorce laws--The action of the Church and State--Confusion and absurdities--Divorce relief from misfortune, not a crime--Personal responsibility in marriage--A recognition of the equality of the mother with the father--Sanction by the State of free divorce--The example of Egypt and Babylon--The Roman divorce by consent--The condemnation of free divorce not the outcome of true morality--The immorality of indissoluble marriage--Loyalty and duty in love--The claims of the child--One advantage of free divorce--Adoption of children under the State--Growing disinclination against coercive marriage--The waste to the race--Our responsibility to the future.

III.--_Prost.i.tution_

The dependence of prost.i.tution upon marriage--The extent and difficulties of the problem involved--Prost.i.tution essentially a woman's question--Women's past att.i.tude towards it--The diffusion of disease by means of prost.i.tution--Apathy and ignorance of women--This changing--What action will women take in the future?--Grounds for fear--The White Slave Bill--Its absurd futility--The opinion of Bernard Shaw--Poverty as a cause of prost.i.tution--This not the only factor--The real evil lies deeper--The economic reformer--The moral crusade--Men's pa.s.sions--Seduction--These causes need careful examination--Lippert's view--Idleness, frivolity, and love of finery as causes--The desire for excitement--The need for personal knowledge of the prost.i.tute--What I have learnt from different members of this profession--The prost.i.tute's att.i.tude towards her trade--The sale of s.e.x very profitable to the expert trader--The s.e.xual frigidity of the prost.i.tute--Importance and significance of this--A further examination into the causes of the evil--Poverty seldom the chief motive for prost.i.tution--The influence of inheritance upon the s.e.xual life--The degradation of our legitimate loves the ultimate cause of prost.i.tution--The demand for the prost.i.tute by men--Causes of this demand--Repression of the primitive s.e.xual instincts by civilisation--The foolishness of casting blame upon men--The duplex morality of the s.e.xes--Its influence on the degradation of pa.s.sion--Woman's unprofitable service to chast.i.ty--The connection with prost.i.tution--My belief in pa.s.sion as the only source of help.

CHAPTER X

THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE s.e.xUAL RELATIONs.h.i.+P

_I.--Marriage_

"The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement; it is a statement of fact. In so far as we are individuals, in so far as we seek to follow merely individual ends, we are accidental, disconnected, without significance, the sport of chance. In so far as we realise ourselves as experiments of the species for the species, just in so far do we escape from the accidental and the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves."--H.G. WELLS.

"There is no subject," says Bernard Shaw in his delightful preface to _Getting Married_, "on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage." And, in truth, it is not easy to avoid such foolishness if we understand at all the complexity of the relations.h.i.+p of the s.e.xes. Sentiment rules our actions in this connection, whereas our talk on the subject is directed by intellect. And the demands of the emotions are at once more imperious and tyrannical, and more fastidious and more critical, than are the demands of the mind. Thus the more firmly reason checks the riot of imagination the greater the danger of error. Of all of which what is the moral? This: It is useless to talk or to think unless it is also possible and expedient to act.

Be it noted, then, first that our marriage customs and laws are founded and have been framed not for, or by, the personal needs--that is, the likes and dislikes of men and women, but by the exigencies of social and economic necessities. Now, from this it will be readily seen that individual inclinations are very likely, even if not bound, to clash with, as they seek to conform to, the usages of society.

Always there will tend to be prevalent everywhere a hostility--at times latent, at others active--between these two forces; against the special desires of women and men on the one hand, and the laws enforced by a social and economic community on the other. Always there will tend to arise some who will desire to change the accepted marriage form, those who, considering first the personal needs, will advocate the loosening or the breaking of the marriage-bond; while others, looking only to the stability which they believe to be founded in law and custom, will seek to keep and to make the tie indissoluble.

This perpetual conflict is, it seems to me, the greatest difficulty that has to be faced in any effort to readjust the conditions of marriage. In our contemporary society there is a deep-lying dissatisfaction with the existing relations of the s.e.xes, a yearning and restless need for change. In no other direction are the confusions and uncertainty of the contemporary mind more manifest. The change that has taken place so rapidly in the att.i.tudes of women and men has brought with it a very strong and, what seems to be a new, revolt against the ignominious conditions of our amatory life as bound by coercive monogamy. We are questioning where before we have accepted, and are seeking out new ways in which mankind will go--will go because it must.

Yet just because of this imperative urging the greater caution is called for in introducing any changes in the laws or customs affecting marriage. Present social and economic conditions are to a great extent chaotic. It would be a sorry thing if in haste we were to establish practices that must come to an end, when we have freed ourselves from the present transition; changes that would not be for the welfare of generations still unborn. It will, however, hardly be denied by any one that reform is needed. All will admit that a change must be made in some direction, and an attempt to say where it should be tried must therefore be faced.

Does Nature give us any help in solving the problem? None whatever. It would seem, indeed, that Nature has in some ways arranged the love relation in regard to the needs of the two s.e.xes very badly. But putting this aside for the present, it is clear that in regard to the form of marriage Nature has no preference; all ways are equal to her, provided that the race profits by them, or at least does not suffer too much from them. We found abundant proof of this in our examination of marriage and the family as established already in the animal kingdom; the modes of s.e.xual a.s.sociation offer great variety, no species being of necessity restricted to any one form of union.

Polygamy, polyandry, and monogamy all are practised. The family is sometimes patriarchal, though more often it is matriarchal, with the female the centre of it, and her love for the young infinitely stronger and more devoted than the male, though even in this direction there are many and notable exceptions. When we came to study the history of mankind we found similar conditions persisting. Separate groups living as they best could without caring about theories; their s.e.xual conduct ordered by a compromise between the procreative needs on the one hand, and the necessities of the social conditions on the other. Marriage forms, as we understand them, were for long unknown, the relations of the s.e.xes slowly evolving from a more or less restricted promiscuity to a family union at first merely temporary, and only later becoming fixed and permanent. Thus very gradually the primitive instinctive s.e.x impulses underwent expansion, and always in the direction of the control of the individual desires in the interest of the family.

The unit of the group or state is the family, therefore s.e.x-customs arise and laws are made not to suit the convenience of the woman or the man, but for the preservation and good of the family. In a word, the children--they are the pivot about which all regulations of marriage should turn.

It is certain, however, that such control and such laws have never in the past, and never in the future can be fixed to one unchanging form.

In proof of this I must refer the reader back to the historical section of this book, where nothing stands out clearer than that the most diverse morality and customs prevail in matters of s.e.x. Wherever for any reason there arises a tendency towards any form of s.e.xual a.s.sociation, such form is likely to be established as a habit, and, persisting, it comes to be regarded as right, and is enforced by custom and later by law, and also sometimes sanctified by religion. It comes to be regarded as moral, and other forms become immoral.

Now, all this may seem to be rather far away from the matter we are discussing--the present dissatisfaction with our marriage system. But the point I want to make clear is this: there is no rigid and unchangeable code of right or wrong in the s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p. Our opinions here are based for the most part on traditional morality, which accepts what is as right because it is established. A small but growing minority, looking in an exact opposite direction, turn to an ideal morality, considering the facts of s.e.x not as they are, but as they think they ought to be. Both these att.i.tudes are alike harmful.

The one refuses to go forward, the other rushes on blindly, goaded by sentiment or by personal desires. And to-day the greater danger seems to me to rest with the hasty reformers. It is an essentially feminine crusade. By this I do not mean that it is advocated alone by women, but that in itself it must be regarded as _feminine_; a view which elevates a subjective ideal relations.h.i.+p of s.e.x above all objective facts. The desires and feelings and sentiments are set up in opposition to historical experience and communal tradition. We hear much, and especially in the writings and talk of women, of such vapid phrases as "Self-realisation in love," "The enhancement of the individual life," and "The spiritualising of s.e.x." Such personal views, which exalt the pa.s.sing needs of the individual above the enduring interests of the race, are in direct opposition to progress.

What is rather needed is an examination of marriage and other forms of our s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps by practical morality, by which I mean the estimating of their merits and defects in relation to the vital needs of the community under the circ.u.mstances of the present.

To do this we must first clear our minds from the belief that regards our present form of monogamic marriage as ordained by Nature and sanctified by G.o.d. He who accepts the development of the love of one man for one woman from other and earlier forms of a.s.sociation may well look forward in faith to a future progress from our existing marriage: yet, though eager for reform, he will, remembering the slowness of this steady upward progress in love's refinement in the past, refrain from acting in haste, understanding the impossibility of forcing any Utopia of the s.e.xes. No change can be made in a matter so intimate as marriage by a mere altering of the law. Only such reforms as are the natural outgrowth of an enlightened public feeling can be of benefit, and thus permanent in their result. I must go further than this and say that what may very possibly be right for the few cannot be regarded as practically moral and good until it can be accepted and acted upon by the people at large. In s.e.x more than in any other department of life we are all linked together; we are our brother's keeper, and the blood of the race will be required at our hands. Many women, and some men, do not realise at all the immense complications of s.e.x and the claims pa.s.sion makes on many natures. I am sure that this is the explanation of much of the foolish talk that one hears. I tried to make clear in the first chapters of this book the irresistible elemental power of the uncurbed s.e.xual instincts. And this force is at least as strong now as it was in the beginning of life. For in s.e.x we have, as yet, learnt very little. We who are living among the sophistication of aeroplanes, the inheritors of the knowledge of all the ages, have still to pa.s.s in wonder along the paths of love, entering into it blindly and making all the old mistakes.

Am I, then, afraid that I plead thus for caution? No, I am not. I rest my faith in the development of the racial element in love side by side with its personal ends of physical and spiritual joy. For the s.e.x impulses, which have ruled women and men, will a.s.suredly come to be ruled by them. Just as in the past life has been moulded and carried on by love's selection, acting unconsciously and ignorant of the ends it followed, so in the future the race will be developed and carried onwards by deliberate selection, and the creative energy of love will become the servant of women and men. The mighty dynamic force will then be capable of further and, as yet, unrealised development. This is no vain hope. It has its proof in the past history of the selective power of love. The problems of our individual loves are linked on to the racial life. The hope for improvement rests thus in a growing understanding of the individual's relation to the race, and in an expansion of our knowledge and practice of the high duties love enforces.

Let us look now at the practical direction of the present. We have reached these conclusions as a starting-point--

(1) We have inherited marriage as a social, nay more, a racial inst.i.tution.