Our Changing Morality: A Symposium

EDITED BY FREDA KIRCHWEY
ALBERT & CHARLES BONI NEW YORK 1924
Copyright, 1924, by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America by J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK
BY FREDA KIRCHWEY
The subject of sex has been treated in this generation with a strange, rather panic-stricken lack of balance. Obscenity hawks its old wares at one end of the road and dogmatic piety shouts warnings at the other—while between is chaos. And the chaos extends beyond ideas and talk, beyond novels and scenarios and Sunday feature stories, into the realm of actual conduct. Religion has indeed found substantial matter for its words of caution and disapproval: never in recent generations have human beings so floundered about outside the ropes of social and religious sanctions.
But while John Roach Straton and Billy Sunday point a pleasant way toward hell, while sensationalism finds in new manners of life subject for five-inch headlines, and while modern novelists make their modern characters stumble through pages of inner conflict to ends of darkness and desperation, a few people are at work quietly sorting out the elements of chaos and holding fragments of conduct up in the sun and air to find what they really are made of.
No one seeks to argue chaos away. Certainly Mr. Straton and Mr. Sunday are right: Men and women are ignoring old laws. In their relations with each other they are living according to tangled, conflicting codes. Remnants of early admonitions and relationships, the dictates of custom, the behavior of their friends, their own tastes and desires, elusive dreams of a loveliness not provided for by rules—all these are scrambling to fill the gap that was left when Right and Wrong finally followed the other absolute monarchs to an empty, nominal existence somewhere in exile. But the traditional, ministerial method with chaos was not Jehovah’s method. He brought order and light into the world; but the way of our current moralists has been to clamp down the hatches even though “sin” bubbled beneath. A few courageous, matter-of-fact glances into the depths have been embodied in the articles in this volume. The men and women who have written them have approached the subject variously; the fragments they have brought up to examine do not necessarily fit together. But none of these writers is afraid to saunter up to the edge and see what moral disorder looks like.