[6] In July, 1923, the law was amended and adultery in the husband became a sufficient ground of divorce.
As a result of the above-mentioned considerations we may expect that the practice of birth-control will profoundly modify our sexual habits. It will enable the pleasures of sex to be tasted without its penalties, and it will remove the most formidable deterrent to irregular intercourse.
It is this consideration which lies at the root of the opposition to birth-control. Deep down in most of us there lurks something of the old Puritanical attitude, which insists that pleasure cannot or should not be had without paying for it. This at least is true of pleasures we do not share. And it is this sentiment which is outraged by the immunity from the consequences of sexual pleasure which birth-control confers. The Puritans objected to bear baiting not so much because of the pain which it gave to the bear, as because of the pleasure which it gave to the spectators. In the same way the great mass of decent middle class citizens object to birth-control not because of the evil which it does to the race, but because of the pleasure which it gives to those who practice it. The Puritans are up in arms; the dowagers, the aunts, the old maids, the parsons, the town councillors, the clerks, the members of Vigilance Committees and Purity Leagues, all those who are themselves too old to enjoy sex, too unattractive to obtain what they would wish to enjoy, or too respectable to prefer enjoyment to respectability—in a word, the makers of public opinion—are outraged in their deepest feelings by the prospect of shameless, harmless and unlimited pleasure which birth-control offers to the young. And if they can stop it it will be stopped.
Hence concurrently with the increased freedom which economic independence and birth-control will give to young people, and to young women in particular, there is likely to be a growth in restrictive and purely inhibitory morality on the part of the middle-aged.
We are in, then, for a wave of Puritanism on the one hand combined with the possibility of a new liberty of action on the other. What will be the outcome?
CHAPTER IV
The Coming Clash
Before I endeavour to answer the question with which I concluded the last chapter, there are one or two additional considerations to which it is necessary to refer, since they must affect our estimate of the future.
I have spoken of the possibility of a new freedom for women due to birth-control and economic independence. Other factors are likely to make such freedom more imperative on social grounds and less intimidating on moral ones.