Women's Wild Oats: Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

This difference is partly due directly to religious influences. Christianity considers marriage as a concession to human wickedness and the continuance of the race a doubtful benefit. "A remedy for sin" as the English Prayer Book states with such delightful frankness. When I remember this Christian view of marriage, I am not surprised at the corruptions into which we have fallen; it is an atmosphere rich for the development of industrial values. The Jews have never fallen into this hateful denial of life. Judaism still considers it a command of God to increase and multiply: the unmarried life, not the married life, is regarded as sinful. The ascetic view of marriage, as well as the romantic view that love is everything, are both anti-Jewish.

The Jews, and, I think, even more strongly the women, can never be individualists. I must again emphasize this fact, for everything else depends upon it. Never can the Jewish wife and mother come to seek personal pleasure as the chief aim in marriage, or delight greatly in expressing her own individuality in spiritual union. She is not absorbed by her own joy or engrossed by her own sorrow. She is content to be married, and accepts any disadvantages that come from that state; she believes in her husband, in her children, and even if these fail her, she believes in her race, her religion, and the inheritance of her people: this gives her a center of gravity outside of herself. For thousands of years Jewish women have been taught the value of service; the dedication of the Self to an ideal. At the same time, they have been held firm to the realities of marriage by their worship. These two influences will, I believe, forever make it impossible for Jewish women in any numbers to accept the egoistic view of marriage and the duties of women that has been set up in England, as also in other European lands and in America, indeed wherever Self-assertion has been admitted as the ruling principle of life.

For these reasons the Jewess, with her special attitude toward marriage and to life, offers a picture of the deepest significance for the study of all industrial races. That is why I turn to her in the hope of making plain to us Western women our mistakes. She, in my opinion, can show us the path wherein alone in future we can find happiness.

The Jewish women have inherited the most perfect feminist ideal that as yet the world has known; an ideal of service within the home of which full life she is the high-priestess; an ideal turning to foolishness the false values of this industrial age. And this ideal of service, shared by all, gives to the most unlearned Jewish woman the priceless knowledge of an eternal truth: a truth that has to be learnt by each one among us before we can find happiness—that only by losing ourselves can we find the Self that is eternal. The Jewish woman learns this truth by living it.

The deep reasons of life lie beyond the realm of individual advantage. The Jewish spirit, pursuing its ends deliberately and wisely, demands of women and of men two different devotions. It asks of women devotion to men, to their children, to their homes; of men, devotion to ideals. Jewish women do not wait to ask if men are worthy, their thought is of service. They understand that in each devotion lies an equal glory, an equal joy, and an equal honor in the sight of God and of man.

There is so much more I would like to say. I would wish to show you something at least of the success with which religion among the Jews has been turned to domestic uses. No detail of the home life is left unhallowed. Even the poorest Jewish home is saved by its ceremonies from the degrading indifference to decency and tenderness, which is the terrible feature of the industrial homes of poverty. The sanctity of the home is an affectionate tradition linking the Jews through the ages with a golden chain. The purity of home life has fought and triumphed over all the unsanitary conditions of ghetto life.

I wish that the limits of my space allowed me to write in detail of these beautiful and happy services. The lighting of the Sabbath candles, the joyous festivals so attractive to our children, all are used to consecrate the daily life. The dietary laws may be said to be a religion of the kitchen. The description of the Virtuous Woman, from the book of Proverbs—the woman who "looks well to the ways of her household," whose clothing are "strength and majesty," who "laugheth at the time to come"—is appropriately read on Friday evenings by the master of the house to exalt the perpetual provident, charitable and joyous house-mistress. A true Jewish home must always be a beautiful place, because its duties are fixed by tradition and hallowed, by the symbols of God's dealing with His people in the past.

Abundant evidence is forthcoming of the honor that was always paid by the Jewish husband to his wife. His duties toward her are set forth in detail in the usual form of the Ketubah. In the body of that instrument he binds himself to work for her, and to honor her, to support and maintain her. The Talmudic sayings on this subject of the honor in which the wife is held and the husband's dependence on her are numerous. Let me quote one or two: "Who is rich? He whose wife's actions are comely. Who is happy? He whose wife is modest and gentle." Again: "A man's happiness is all of his wife's creation"; and yet again: "God's presence dwells in a pure and loving home." "Be not cruel or discourteous to your wife," said a first century teacher, "if you thrust her from you with your left hand, draw her back to you with your right hand." Another says: "A man should always be careful lest he vex his wife: for as her tears come easily, the vexation put upon her comes near to God." A seventeenth century writer states: "Never quarrel with your wife"; this is not to be done even "if she asks for too much money."