Woman in Modern Society

by Earl Barnes

The most powerful influence in shaping our lives to-day is the sexual impulse which has created the institution we call the family. Few of us, at least in our modern democracies, live in daily fear that our neighbors will attack and kill us, or carry us off into slavery. Even the hunger for food, that once forced men into action, plays little direct part in the shaping of the lives of most of us. None of those who read these pages would starve if they never did any more work. If they tried to starve, they would be arrested and sent to jail; and if they persisted, they would be fed by force.

Meantime it is sex hunger, manifesting itself in a hundred forms of beauty and ugliness, courtesy and insult, cultivated conversation and ribald jest, beautiful dancing and suggestive indecencies, honor and dishonor, self-repression and prostitution, love and lust, children of gladness and children of shame, that lifts us to such heights as we attain, or plunges us into the hells we create for ourselves. If one could insure one good thing in life for the child one loves, one would ask, not money nor fame, but a continuously happy marriage.

In the past, women have always looked upon marriage and family life as a career; and the majority of men have found their most significant life in the building up of the family institution. To-day, however, family life as a career is everywhere called in question. Many women claim to prefer educational opportunity, professional recognition or an independent bank account to husband and children. Social service is exalted; domestic service is debased. Why is it so much nobler to care for other people's children in a social settlement, or in a school, than to care for one's own in a home? Why should women mass themselves together in vast groups as industrial workers, as teachers, as suffragettes? We hear of women's work, of women's careers, of women's clubs, associations and parties, of women's interests, movements, causes. In November, 1911, two hundred and twenty women were arrested in London for assaulting the English government in the supposed interest of women. Why do women prefer social to domestic service?

Two reasons spring at once to the mind of any intelligent observer of the life about him. The first is the complexity of our modern life; the second is the nature of the institution of marriage.

A man or woman wishes to live with the one he or she loves. Sexual love is in its very nature restricted, circumscribed, monopolistic—in a word, monogamic. As has been said repeatedly in this volume, the human unit is neither a man nor a woman; it is a man and a woman united in a new personality through the unifying and blending power of love. To say that this unit is exclusive and monogamic is simply saying that it respects its own personality. It can no longer act simply as a man or a woman; it is a family and it must act as such in order to satisfy its own demands. A man can no more act independently of the woman he loves than the heart can act independently of the lungs. The man and woman who compose the new unit are not only flesh of one flesh, but they are one soul, one life; they are a complete organism. And the life of this organism must be persistent to realize its own aims. In all the higher forms of existence, processes move slowly. For nine months a woman carries her baby as a part of her own body; then for three years the father and mother carry the child in their arms; for a score of years they must support, protect and train it before they let it go to seek its own. Hence sexual love must be persistent as well as monogamic.

From all this it follows that each half of the human unit must find the major part of its adult life in devotion to the one it has chosen as its complement. This is no hardship; it is divine opportunity, if love binds the lives in harmonious unity. If love is lacking, then there is no new organism; and such a case falls outside this discussion.

Under the simpler forms of civilization that have prevailed in the past, it was comparatively easy to find the complement for any particular man or woman. With physical sympathy and desire, little more was needed than common race and the same general social position. With simple personalities even the marriage of convenience was apt to prove happy.

But, to-day, not only have men become infinitely more complex and self-conscious than formerly, but women have ceased to be a general class; and, in becoming individuals, they have developed wide ranges of individual needs. Instead of fitting at the two or three points of physical desire, race and social position, a man or woman, to live strongly and well in this close union of body and soul, must fit each other at many points. To the older sympathies must be added a common attitude toward religion, education, artistic tastes, social ambitions, industrial aptitudes, and a score of other living sympathies, if the days are to pass in happiness, and each is to maintain his fair share of the life of the new unit. Physical desire still remains the paramount thing, but these other sympathies tend to strengthen it, or their absence may weaken and ultimately destroy it. It is comparatively easy for a person to find a complement to two or three of his, or her, qualities; it is very difficult for a person to find fulfilment for a score of his personal needs in another personality.

In earlier times, too, the individual reached such maturity as he or she was to attain much earlier than now, when education has become a life-long process. Once united, there was comparatively little danger that passing years would develop latent tastes that might prove dissimilar. To-day, complete union at twenty may mean many oppositions at forty, if each half of the unit goes on developing its powers. And we must add to this individual complexity and slower development of the present-day men and women the intense self-consciousness of modern times which makes it impossible for us to forget our conditions and go on living in a world once significant and true but now empty or false.

A second cause for the unrest of the present is doubtless to be found in the inflexibility of the institution of the family, under which lovers are allowed to live together and bring into existence the children of their love. The family, as we have it, was shaped under the stress of mediæval disorder. In such a time men are willing to pay any price for peace and quiet. And so the barbarian invaders, living among the broken fragments of Greek and Roman civilization, gradually shaped feudalism, culminating in absolute monarchy, which gave them political security. They shaped the Holy Roman Catholic Church that they might worship in peace. They shaped the guilds that they might work quietly, and enjoy the fruits of their labors. The family, with its civil and ecclesiastical sanctions, was formed to protect the personal lives of men and women who wished to live together and rear children.