Bloch has asked the question if we can ever do away with the menace to public health which promiscuity entails? He seems to think from the evidence of history and psychiatry that men certainly, and women probably, are not naturally unitarian in their affections; therefore the sooner we seriously wrestle with the realities and leave off hoping for the “something to change nature,” the better. Above all, it is most important for women to realize at once that the most innocent contact with the unmentioned diseases—the contact, say, of a cut finger or a chapped lip—is enough to endanger the health, unless it is attended to at once.
As for the aspect of the prostitution question entailed in taking money, the sale of virginity and so forth, it comes under the general consideration whether it is right for any woman to become the property of a man in exchange for money. A woman who loves does naturally become the property of the man she loves for the time being. The wiser she is, the less she will let him know it. The money bargain I cannot help regarding as a device invented by unattractive men whom no woman would voluntarily look at. Again, as to women whose love affairs are numerous, I do not think they would care to practise promiscuity unless they were intoxicated. On the other hand, I think most women are capable of several love affairs. I said before that their love ebbed and flowed with the sweep of a tide, while men’s love glittered and dulled like the shaken silver of the waves; still, there are more tides than one in many women’s experience. We cannot read the autobiographies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries without observing that.
That love becomes very stale in time is a regrettable fact. Many women distract their thoughts with work or amusements. But the greatest amusement of all is flirtation. It is an amusement peculiarly fitted to the English. In the Latin countries flirtation is admittedly not only an amusement, but a vital part of women’s lives. It cannot be denied that, after a time, a childless wife, or a wife who is not absorbed in her children, begins to feel like a withered rose tree, and a flirtation comes to her like springtime after winter. I do not think it is often her sensual nature, but her emotional nature, that makes a woman unfaithful to a husband of whom she has really been passionately fond. Unfortunately there is a charm about the first steps of a love affair, in the half-admissions and the uncertainties, which it is almost impossible to feel after a year of married life. The truth is that to feel a charm we must be in a state of emotional exultation which is above the average exultations of daily life. The great question for the race is what this feeling of charm means, and whether it is of value to the race, and to be encouraged? Or even then whether the destruction of our present fixed social arrangements is too great a sacrifice to make for the vital improvement of mankind? In the meantime, until this question of changing charm versus habitual love can be settled, and the value of emotion as a factor in race improvement be proved by careful inquiry into the experiences of the parents of conspicuous children, I reiterate what I have said. Marrying women owe it to themselves and to their children to do all they can to make the conditions of prostitutes sanitary. Above all, they should remember the green houses of Japan, and recognize that if women are degraded it is generally because they have been treated with contempt, and not because they are essentially any more contemptible than the rest of us.
VI
BEAUTY AND MOTHERHOOD