It is perhaps in this very matter that her attitude is capable of being most bitterly resented. For we have lost our sense of what is old and good, and we give the sanction of ages to parvenu virtues that are as degraded as the rococo ornaments which were born in the same year. We have (or the Puritans among us have) lost all moral sense in the true meaning of the word, in that we are unable to tell good from bad if it be not among the things that were socially respectable in the year 1860. Ellen Key writes: "The most delicate test of a person's sense of morality is his power in interpreting ambiguous signs in the ethical sphere; for only the profoundly moral can discover the dividing line, sharp as the edge of a sword, between new morality and old immorality. In our time, ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost by the condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their destinies. The majority does not perceive the advance in morality which this implies in comparison with the code of so many men who, without responsibility—and without apparent risk—purchase the repose of their senses. The free union of love, on the other hand, gives them an enhancement of life which they consider that they gain without injuring anyone. It answers to their idea of love's chastity, an idea which is justly offended by the incompleteness of the period of engagement, with all its losses in the freshness and frankness of emotion. When their soul has found another soul, when the senses of both have met in a common longing, then they consider that they have a right to full unity of love, although compelled to secrecy, since the conditions of society render early marriage impossible. They are thus freed from a wasteful struggle which would give them neither peace nor inner purity, and which would be doubly hard for them, since they have attained the end—love—for the sake of which self-control would have been imposed."
It is almost impossible to quote any passage from "Love and Marriage" which is not subject to further practical modification, or which does not present an incomplete idea of which the complement may be found somewhere else. Even this passage is one which states a brief for the younger generation rather than the author's whole opinion. Still, with all these limitations, her view is one which is so different from that commonly held by women that it may seem merely fantastic to hold it up as an example of the conservative instinct of women. Nevertheless, it is so. It must be remembered that the view which holds that the chastity of unmarried women is well purchased at the price of prostitution, is a masculine view. It is a piece of the sinister and cruel idealism of the male mind, divorced (as the male mind is so capable of being) from realities. No woman would ever have created prostitution to preserve the chastity of part of her sex; and the more familiar one becomes with the specific character of the feminine mind, the more impossible does it seem that women will, when they have come to think and act for themselves, permanently maintain it. Nor will they—one is forced to believe—hesitate long at the implications of that demolition.
No, I think that with the advent of women into a larger life our jerry-built virtues will have to go, to make room for mansions and gardens fit to be inhabited by the human soul.
It will be like the pulling down of a rotten tenement. First (with a great shocked outcry from some persons of my own sex) the façade goes, looking nice enough, but showing up for painted tin what pretended to be marble; then the dark, cavelike rooms exposed, with their blood-stained floors and their walls ineffectually papered over the accumulated filth and disease; and so on, lath by lath, down to the cellars, with their hints of unspeakable horrors in the dark.
It is to this conclusion that these chapters draw: That women have a surer instinct than men for the preservation of the truest human values, but that their very acts of conservation will seem to the timid minds among us like the shattering of all virtues, the debacle of civilization, the Götterdämmerung!