Concerning Women

by Suzanne La Follette

IV

Marriage, illegitimacy and prostitution are so closely related, as social problems, that it is impossible to draw firm lines of demarcation between them. The unlegalized union—which is betrayed by illegitimate birth—may be a marriage in all but law; the legalized marriage may be merely a respectable form of prostitution; prostitution may take the form of a more or less permanent union which may even assume the dignity of a true marriage. Illegitimacy, marriage, and prostitution do not exist independently; they exist in relation to one another and are often confused in people’s minds—as when it is assumed that all mistresses are essentially harlots. They are the three faces of mankind’s disastrous attempt to impose arbitrary regulation upon the unruly and terrifying force of sex; they form a triptych of which the central panel is institutionalized marriage and the other panels the two chief aspects of its failure. The title might appropriately be “The Martyrdom of Woman.”

Experience has amply proved that as individualism progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to impose upon people more than an appearance of conformity in sexual matters. Society can not really regulate anything so essentially personal and private in its nature as the sexual relation: it can only take revenge upon its natural result—and thereby encourage the prevention of that result by artificial means. For every unmarried mother who is persecuted by society, there are ten unmarried women who escape the social consequences of an unauthorized sexual relation. For every faithful husband there is another who deceives his wife with other women; nor are wedded wives by any means always faithful to their marriage vows. There are people who live together in the sexual uncleanness of loveless marriages; and there are those who live purely in extra-legal union. The sexual impulse is too variable and too imperious to be compressed into a formula.

Christian society, as I have remarked, early surrendered its uncompromising asceticism and settled down to an easy acceptance of the mere appearance of conventional sexual virtue—that is, so far as men were concerned. Women, as inferior and evil beings, who, incongruously enough, at the same time embodied Christian morality, must naturally be under the rigid surveillance of their male tutors, and no deviation from established rules might be allowed them. Thus worldly motives in marrying might be united with sacramental monogamy; for the man might avail himself of extra-marital union as a safety-valve for the emotional needs to which marriage gave no scope. The needs of the woman were not considered, save when savage punishment was visited upon their illicit satisfaction. Thus hypocrisy and deceit were tacitly encouraged, and the monogamic ideal was degraded; and countless generations lived a gigantic social lie which distorted and perverted their spiritual vision as only an accepted lie can distort and pervert it.

I do not mean by this that there have not been millions of really monogamous marriages. To intimate that the greater sexual freedom allowed men by law and custom has led all men into licence would be as stupid as to assume that repression and surveillance have kept all women chaste. But the institution of marriage, in Christian society, has represented compromise, and the fruit of compromise is insincerity—such insincerity, for example, as the Government of South Carolina shows when it forbids divorce, and fixes by law what proportion of his estate a man may leave to his concubine.

Any people which wishes to attain dignity and seriousness in its collective life must resolve to cast aside compromise and insincerity, and to look at all questions—even the vexed one of sex—squarely and honestly. The person who would do this has first some prepossessions to overcome: he must forget tradition long enough to appraise institutionalized marriage by its value to the human spirit; he must resolve for the time to regard men and women as equally human beings, entitled to be judged by the same standards, and not by different sets of traditional criteria; and he must put away fear of sex and fear of autonomy. If he can do these things, he may be able to look clear-eyed down the long vista of the centuries and realize the havoc that has been wrought in the souls of men and women by a sexual code and a system of marriage based on a double standard of spiritual values and of conduct. He may perceive how constant tutelage degrades the human spirit, and how much greater would be the sum of human joy if freedom were substituted for coercion and regulation—if men and women were without legal power to harass and bedevil one another simply because the State, through the marriage-bond, allows them humiliating rights in one another; if virginity and chastity were matters of self-respect and taste, instead of being matters of worldly self-interest to women and unconcern to men; if the relations between the sexes were based on equality and regulated only by affection and the desire to serve and give happiness.

The modification which institutionalized marriage has been undergoing since the partial emergence of woman, its chief victim, have been in the direction of equality and freedom. The relative ease with which divorce may now be had marks a long step towards recognition of marriage as a personal rather than a social concern; and so does the tendency to abolish the legal disabilities resulting from the marriage-bond. Nothing augurs better for the elevation of marriage to a higher plane than the growing economic independence of women and the consequent improvement in the social position of the unmarried woman; for only when marriage is placed above all considerations of economic or social advantage will it be in a way to satisfy the highest demands of the human spirit.

But the emergence of women has had another significant effect, namely: an increase in frankness concerning extra-legal sexual relations, if not in their number. Of late there has been much public discussion of the wantonness of our modern youth; which, being interpreted, means the disposition of our girls to take the same liberty of indulgence in pre-nuptial sexual affairs that has always been countenanced in boys. This tendency is an entirely natural result of woman’s increased freedom. The conditions of economic and social life have undergone revolutionary change in the past half-century; and codes of morals always yield before economic and social exigency, for this is imperious. It is for this reason, as Dr. A. Maude Royden has acutely observed, that women of the lower classes have always enjoyed a certain immunity from the taboos that reduced women of the middle and upper classes to virtual slavery. “If among the poor,” says Dr. Royden, “these ‘protections’ have been dispensed with, it has not been because the poor have thought either better or worse of their women, but merely because they are too poor to dispense with their labour, and labour demands some small degree of freedom.” Labour not only demands, it gives freedom. The woman who is economically independent need no longer observe rules based on male dominance; hence the new candour in woman’s attitude towards the awe-inspiring fetich of sex.

If there is about this attitude an element of bravado, akin to that of the youth who thinks it clever and smart to carry a hip-pocket flask, it bears testimony, not to the dangers of freedom, but to the bankruptcy of conventional morality. The worst effect of tutelage is that it negates self-discipline, and therefore people suddenly released from it are almost bound to make fools of themselves. The women who are emerging from it, if they have not learned to substitute an enlightened self-interest for the morality of repression, are certainly in danger of carrying sexual freedom to dishevelling extremes, simply to demonstrate to themselves their emancipation from unjust conventions. There is no reason to expect that women, emerging from tutelage, will be wiser than men. One should expect the contrary. It is necessary to grow accustomed to freedom before one may walk in it sure-footedly. “Everything,” says Goethe, “which frees our spirit without increasing our self-control, is deteriorating.” This so-called wantonness, this silly bravado, simply shows that the new freedom is a step ahead of the self-discipline that will eventually take the place of surveillance and repression. It would not be so, perhaps, if girls and boys had ever been enlightened concerning the real sins of sex, and their true consequences. Women, in the past, have been taught to keep virgin or chaste for the sake of their reputations, of their families, of their chances in the marriage-market; they have been scared into chastity in the name of religion; but they have not been taught to be chaste for the sake of the spiritual value of chastity to themselves. Men, having been expected to “sow their wild oats”, have been taught to sow them with a certain degree of circumspection. Girls have been intimidated by pictures of the social consequences of a misstep; boys have been warned of the physical danger involved in promiscuous sexual relations. This may not have been the invariable preparation of youth for the experiences of sex; but it has unquestionably been the usual one, and it is one of utter levity and indecency.

The real sins of sex are identical for men and women; and they differ from infractions of the conventional moral code in this respect among others: that they do not have to be found out in order to be punished. They carry their punishment in themselves, and that punishment is their deteriorative effect upon the human spirit. They are infractions of spiritual law; and there is this significant distinction to be observed between spiritual laws and the laws of men: that regulation plays no part in their administration. The law of freedom is the law of God, who does not attempt to regulate the human soul, but sets instinct there as a guide and leaves man free to choose whether he will follow the instinct which prompts obedience to spiritual law, or the desire which urges disregard of it. The extreme sophistication of the conventional attitude towards sex has dulled the voice of instinct for countless generations, with the inevitable result of much unnecessary suffering and irreparable spiritual loss.

A healthy instinct warns against lightness in sexual relationships; and with reason, for the impulse of sex is one of the strongest motive forces in human development and human action. It touches the obscurest depths of the soul; it affects profoundly the functions of the mind and the imagination—can not, indeed, be dissociated from them. The fact that it is also strongly physical leads to misunderstanding and disregard of its relation to the mind and spirit; a misunderstanding and disregard which are immensely aggravated in a society where woman, because of her inferior position, may be used for the gratification of physical desire, with no consideration of her own desires or her spiritual claims. Prostitution, for example, has exerted a most deleterious influence on the attitude of men toward sex and toward women. But degradation of the sex-impulse is inevitably punished. The sheerly physical indulgence to which it leads produces a coarsening of spiritual fibre, an incapacity for appreciation of spiritual values. Moreover, it produces a cleavage between passion and affection which renders impossible the highest and most beautiful form of the sexual relation, the relation in which passion and affection are fused in a love which offers complete understanding and fulfilment. It is to this fusion (and not to monogamy, which, Spencer thought, developed love) that we owe “the many and keen pleasures derived from music, poetry, fiction, the drama, etc., all of them having for their predominant theme the passion of love.” True monogamy, the product of this highest love, is not a regulation to be observed; it is an ideal to be attained, and it will not be attained by the person who fails to recognize and to respect the spiritual aspects of the sexual relation.

Nor will it be attained by the person who mistakes excitement for love, and who flits from one temporary attachment to another, thinking always to find the beautiful in the new. Such promiscuous philandering not only precludes depth of affection and thus renders constancy impossible; it also blunts perception. Its effect was never better expressed than by Burns, who was one of its unhappy victims.

I waive the quantum o’ the sin,

The hazard of concealin’,

But och! it hardens a’ within,

And petrifies the feelin’.

This is the penalty of levity in human relations: that it petrifies feeling. One pays the price in spiritual deterioration. There is probably no more striking testimony to this than the first part of Goethe’s “Faust.” Consider what we know of the nature of Goethe’s relations with women; and then consider the spiritual insensitivity, the failure to perceive and draw upon the inexhaustible spiritual treasures that life holds in store, that are implied in his failure to devise for Faust, brought back from the brink of the grave at cost of his immortal soul, any more animating employment for his new-found youth than a low intrigue with an ignorant peasant girl.

I will pass by the contention that men are by nature polygamous and women monogamous; for it rests on evidence created by a dual standard of conduct for the sexes. Certain women of independent spirit are at present rather conspicuously engaged in proving themselves not merely polygamous but promiscuous; and a great many men have always proved themselves to be monogamous. Probably human beings vary in respect of these tendencies as of others. All people, perhaps, can not attain the highest plane in love, either for want of capacity or of opportunity; nor can all people conform to a single mode of conduct. But all people can attain sincerity in sexual relations, and at least a certain degree of self-knowledge. Sincerity, self-knowledge, respect for oneself and for other people; these are essential to a genuine ethic of sex; and they are uncontemplated by the sanctions of conventional morality. Yet the person who violates this ethic sins against his own spirit, which is to sin against the Holy Ghost, and on the spiritual plane he will be punished.

An increase in extra-legal relationships does not of itself imply spiritual retrogression. It might imply instead one of two things, or both, namely: an increase in the economic obstacles to legal marriage; or a growing disinclination to admit an affair so personal as the sex-relation to sanction and regulation by people whom it did not concern. If men and women were economically equal and independent, the number of marriages might increase enormously; on the other hand, institutionalized marriage might be superseded by marriage without legal sanction, which before the birth of children might not be even known or recognized as marriage.[25] Free people would probably want less of official interference in their personal affairs, rather than more. But for those who wanted to avoid the terrors of autonomy there would still be marriage; and for those who wanted to walk in the strait and ennobling way of freedom, there would be the right to love without official permission, and to bring forth children unashamed. Those who wished to sell themselves would be free to do so if they could find buyers; but no one would be forced to live by violating the law of love which is the law of life. Freedom implies the right to live badly, but it also implies the right to live nobly and beautifully; and for one who has faith in the essential goodness of the human spirit, in the natural aspiration towards perfection which flowers with touching beauty even in the bleak soil of that hardship, degradation and crime to which injustice condemns the mass of humanity—for one who has this faith in the human spirit, there can be no question what its ultimate choice would be.