It is another modern disease and has little connection with flirting and lightness of character, though often the two are confused. Too restless to be faithful, born spiritual adventurers, these worshipers of emotionalism set up elaborate pretenses of pure friendships, ignoring the hot glow within: they love romantically, but rarely are strong enough to obey their inclinations. Such women are out on an eternal quest, and every now and again, they believe they have found what they are seeking. Then they discover they have not found it, so their search is taken up anew; while often the social scheme drives them into dangerous corners, forces them to turn from their quest or to use mean weapons of deceit, does not give them a chance.
These romantic seekers of love, suffering continual frustration from the evaporation of emotional interest that defies their own needs; the many types of efficient workers, alert, hard, self-satisfied, not wholly cynical, yet with a touch of something that borders on cynicism, submitting almost with a secret repugnance to the mysterious but supreme bond which holds the sexes miserably together; and the prostitute woman of all kinds, out to seize every advantage from men, ruthless, living upon sex—these are, it seems to me, the three main types of women resulting in our so-called civilization of to-day, from our repressions and falsehoods, our indefinite wills, from our confused ideals and failure in living; and it is hard to say which is the most harmful, which is the most wronged, which is the most unhappy, the furthest removed from the type that is eternal—the ideal woman, satisfied and glad, whom a happier future may again permit to live.
V
It was Mr. Wells who said in one of his novels, "suppose the liberation of women simply means the liberation of mischief." "Suppose she is wicked as a sex, suppose she will trade on her power of exciting imaginative men."
Something very like this has been happening in the world to-day.
We are all to pieces morally. The consciences of many people are their neighbor's opinions, and the removal of so many young girls and men from their home surroundings, their relations and old friends, has greatly slackened the watchful safe-guarding of morals, so that any slightest infringement has not been at once observed and quickly punished. The important barriers of difference in class, in social positions, and in race have also broken through. Conditions in the five war-years and most of the arrangements of society have discouraged morality very heavily, and the wise thing for us to do in the matter is not to grow eloquent about sin, but at once to do intelligent things to make right conduct easier.
An organized freedom and independence for women has certainly had startling moral results. The reasons are obvious enough. It is a necessary consequence of our modern insistence on individual values; the harping of one generation on freedom, which has caused our young women, in many directions, to carry their ideas of freedom far beyond the accepted conventions of our ordinary civilized human association. It has been shown as manifestly true that for all ordinary young women that intimate association with men, fellowship in the workshops and factories and in play, turns them with extreme readiness to love-making. Now, I am very far from wishing to blame women; rather am I glad that what I have asserted, for so long and against so much opposition, about the elementary power of sex in women, has been vindicated by themselves.
Life for women so often has been wrong and discordant, and the wretchedness has been greatly increased by the way we have left, in the immediate past, the force of sex unregulated and unrecognized, thereby causing much of the modern companionship of women with men, of girls with boys, to be really a monstrous sham, maintained and made exciting by false situations that often have closed around the two like a trap.
There are, and always have been, far more women and girls than we like to acknowledge who are by their inclinations sexually promiscuous. It is just conventional rot to talk of sex impulse being weaker and quite different in women from men; of constancy as the special virtue of women. Sometimes it is, but oftener it is not. It depends on the type of woman. A great and possibly increasing number of girls to-day regard love affairs in very much the same way as they are regarded by the average sensual man, as enjoyable and exciting incidents of which they are ashamed only when they are talked about and blamed. Such girls very rarely give trouble to men or make scenes, they don't care enough; that, I think, is why they always find lovers. It is also why it is easy for them to have secret relations. With no sex-conscience, such girls, even when quite young, exhibit a logic and a frankness that sometimes is rather startling. They seem to have no modesty, though many of them are prudes; they have no consciousness of responsibility; they feel no kind of shame. Such libidinous temperaments have been common at all times and in all societies, if in stricter periods so many women did not follow their inclinations with the openness now so frequent, it was simply out of fear; possibly they took more careful precautions against discovery.