There are as well as these wantons, girls of a different type, who are more contradictory and difficult because of a less simple sexuality, but who are equally, even if not more, harmfully destructive in the utter misery they often create. This is the type of girl who ripens to a premature and too emotional sexuality, and who, though still keeping herself physically intact, is spiritually corrupt. The spiritual masochism of a woman may lead to depths of cruelty rarely understood.[208:1]
Many other nobler types of women have been playing with vice. Many wild impulses have found strange expressions. Women have been very like children playing at desperate rebels, who take up weapons to use far more deadly than they knew. All this playing with love is detestable, all of it. It shows a shameful shirking of responsibility. Women are the custodians of manners in love, and very many, who have not dreamt of the results of their slackenings, have been urging on the young to a riotous festival, extravagant and disquieting.
It must, I think, be acknowledged that a vast impatience on the part of women has made conduct less decent and less responsible. Lovers are more reckless, even sometimes more consciously and vulgarly vicious. Women of profound and steadfast emotional nature are rare. The great majority now, perhaps, are not entirely light-minded, but they are less serious, more noisily determined to do what they want, and get what they can both out of men and out of life.
And the great fact that stands out from all this—the great need for our private personal good as well as the public good—is the need of the young for guidance and regulation, the necessity for refixing of moral standards in sexual conduct, of formulating a code of good manners, to meet the present needs. Nothing else, in my opinion, can avert even greater disasters of license in the future, than those conditions we are now facing.
VI
New wine is being put into old bottles and the wine of life is being poured out and wasted. The old convention that irregular love is excusable in the case of the man, but always to be punished in the case of the woman will never again be accepted, at least not by women. It is not women's ideas so much that are confused as their emotions, and wills. Their impulses are not focused to any ideal. They are driven hither and thither. That is the essential failure to-day. The irregular unions, now so common, are but the more intimate aspect of a general attitude toward life. Many women who have entered them, have done so rather in a mood of protesting refractoriness than from any serviceable desire; already they find themselves left after transitory passionate friendships in difficult situations in which there is as yet no certain tradition of behavior. And in this way, there is left open an inviting door to those who are weak, as well as to those who are corrupt, to behave irresponsibly and commit every kind of uncleanness.
Where is this wild love going to end?
These dissatisfied women of strong sexuality, and women of the other types I have noted, must either marry or must continue lawless careers of unregulated promiscuity, each one acting according to her own fancy, curbed only by the will of her lover or lovers, and the circumstances in which she is placed: there is at present no third course.
Now, the moralist, who does not face facts, would have them all marry. Certainly this is an easy way to settle the matter, but is it wise? is it even right? Moreover, even if this were possible and there was no surplus of women, would this solution be acceptable to these women? I am doubtful if it would. Many of them who want a lover do not want a husband, they make a surprisingly clear distinction between the two. There is, as I have before said, a hardly-yet-realized change in woman's attitude: they are beginning to take the ordinary man's view of these affairs,—to regard them as important and providing interest and pleasure, but not to be exaggerated into tragedies. They deliberately want to keep love light and dread the bondage of any deep emotions.