[5] Report of Labour Delegation, 1925.
Sexual morality in men springs from the same economic source, but is more limited in scope and less fiercely embraced. This is a natural deduction from what has just been said. If the livelihood of women is bound up with the strict observance of the marriage tie, the maintenance of the moral restrictions upon which marriage as an institution depends is their special concern. In a purely promiscuous community the livelihood of women would be intolerably insecure. Hence women are the natural guardians of morality, knowing that it guarantees their bread and butter. It is not too much to say that morality as a going concern is kept up by women. Men on the whole, despite their strong property sense, are not interested in moral questions. They have not the woman’s delight in nosing out scandals, and, except when they are whipped up into a state of moral horror by their women folk, are much too prone to live and let live. The attitude of deliberate uncharitableness towards erring sisters which the sex affects does not come naturally to men, and left to themselves, they would condone offences which their outraged spouses insist on punishing with social ostracism.
It is on the whole true to say that the moral sense, so far as sex is concerned, only begins to function in men after marriage and, except in the case of one’s own daughter whose saleable value in the marriage market is thought to be diminished by inchastity, it centres upon the wife. Since the wife is in origin a piece of property purchased by the husband for his own enjoyment, to her must be extended the jealous guardianship which presides over property in general. The wife is the most valuable of a man’s indoor possessions; in return for the use of her body he has agreed to maintain her in such dignity and leisure as he can afford. This obligation to maintain the wife is a permanent one persisting even after the enjoyment of her person has ceased. Thus when a wife divorces or lives apart from her husband, he is usually required to maintain her, so long as she remains chaste. So soon, however, as she bestows the enjoyment of her person upon another, the obligation to maintenance ceases, presumably on the ground that the new consumer should be saddled with the obligation of keeping up what he enjoys. In nothing is the property basis of marriage more clearly discernible than in the ‘dum casta’ clause of the English divorce law.
It is upon the same economic basis that the husband’s objection to infidelity chiefly rests. If another man is permitted to enjoy for nothing what he himself has purchased at a heavy outlay, the husband naturally feels aggrieved. He is also rendered ridiculous. It is for this reason that the cuckold is always presented in literature as a comic figure; he is in the position of a man who is unconsciously having his pocket picked. The husband’s predilection for fidelity in the wife is thus as strong as the wife’s demand for fidelity in the husband—at times it is even stronger—and springs from the same economic source. So long as the wife is in essence a piece of property, it is naturally felt that only the man who has paid for her should have the use of her; so long as a woman can only obtain her living by selling herself to a man, she not unnaturally demands that others should not be allowed to undercut her.
We have spoken of this situation as if it existed in the present; but it is already in many respects an affair of the past. The history of the last fifty years has recorded the growing and continuous influx of women into wage-earning employment which bears no relationship to sex. Women cure the sick, plead in the law courts, teach in the schools, do manual labour in garden, field, factory, and workshop, and serve increasingly as clerks, typists and shop assistants. Three were recently found among the five hundred applicants for the post of public executioner in Hungary.
Men have not unnaturally resented this change. The dependence of women has on the whole suited them, and they do not like to see those whose economic helplessness has made them a natural prey to male predatoriness rendered capable of standing on their own feet. Having deliberately deprived women of the skill, the training, the knowledge, and the qualifications necessary to make their way in the world, men have then proceeded to justify themselves by proving the moral and intellectual inferiority of women from the fact that she is ignorant, unskilled and uneducated. When it is remembered that the same causes that have left woman no alternative but concubinage (married or unmarried) or starvation, have compelled her, as often as not, to perform the duties of an unpaid housekeeper, it is not difficult to see how much man was the gainer by the transaction. But, unfortunately for him, he has been unable to stem the rising tide of feminism. It has long ceased to be true that a woman’s only means of earning her living is by exploiting her sex-attraction, and all the evidence points to the fact that the number of women in wage-earning employment will be augmented in the future. This estimate leaves out of account the probability of the endowment of motherhood, which will place all mothers, whether married or unmarried, in the category of independent wage-earners.
The effect of this economic change upon the situation I have briefly sketched, and upon the moral sentiments to which it gives rise is likely to be twofold.
In the first place the unmarried woman will tend increasingly to form temporary, irregular unions. This result will follow:
(1) Because her knowledge that she can earn her living in other ways will not force her to demand from the man a pledge of life-long maintenance as the price of her love.