A similar demand for liberty is made by Laurence Gronlund. Economically "the coming commonwealth" will place woman "on an equal footing with man." But she will be "equal," not "alike;" for in the new society the sexes will no longer be free industrial competitors, but each will have its special vocation. Physiological differences will not be ignored. "Woman will become a functionary, she will have suitable employment given her, and be rewarded according to results, just the same as men." Like men she will have suffrage, not as a right or a privilege, but as a trust. "The new order will necessarily, by the mere working of its economic principles, considerably modify" the marriage relation; and "is that relation such an ideal one now, that it would be a sacrilege to touch it? Is marriage not now, at bottom, an establishment for the support of woman? Is not maintenance the price which the husband pays for the appendage to himself? And because the supply generally exceeds the demand—that is, the effective demand—has woman not often to accept the offer of the first man who seems able to perform this pecuniary obligation?" If it be objected that this is taking "rather a commercial view" of the "holy" relation, is not, "as a matter of fact, marriage regarded by altogether too many as a commercial institution? Do not, in fact, the total of young women form a matrimonial market, regulated by demand and supply?" "Now the Co-operative Commonwealth will dissipate this horror," enabling every healthy adult man and woman to find a mate. Thus, contrary to false charges, socialists are not trying to destroy the family: "they want to enable every man and woman to form a happy family!" Modern democracy revolts against the patriarchal constitution of the family, upon whose model all feudal and ancient societies were organized. In the "very nature of things family-supremacy will be absolutely incompatible with an interdependent, a solidaric, commonwealth; for in such a state the first object of education must be to establish in the minds of the children an indissoluble association between their individual happiness and the good of all."[792]
The manifold social evils which take their rise directly or indirectly in marriage as it is—be the actual causes what they may—have always justly aroused the unsparing criticism of socialistic writers. Thus to Robert Owen—whose pure life was unreservedly and courageously devoted to the social good, as he understood it—marriage was a member of his "trinity of causes of crime and immorality among mankind."[793] With almost the fanatical zeal of an apostle of a new religion, he railed at the "single" family.[794] He proclaimed the glad tidings of the swift approach of the new moral order. Then "the imaginative laws of the marriages of the priesthood must be among the first to be abolished, by reason of their extended injurious influence upon human nature, poisoning all the sources of the most valuable qualities which Nature has given to infant man. These marriages have dried up the fountain of truth in human nature; they perpetually insinuate that man can love and hate at his pleasure, and that to be virtuous he must live according to the dictates of the laws and ceremonies devised by the priesthood, that he must hate according to the same dictation, and that if he does not thus love and hate, he is vicious, and he will be eternally punished in another world," while on earth he will suffer from the human laws and by the public opinion which priests have inspired.[795] Under the new moral order all this will be changed. Marriages will be more lasting than now. "Every individual will be trained and educated, to have all his powers cultivated in the most superior manner known; cultivated too under a new combination of external objects, purposely formed, to bring into constant exercise the best and most lovely qualities only of human nature." Wealth for all will be "produced in superfluity." Therefore all will be "equal in their education and condition," and without any distinction except as to age. "There will be then no motive or inducement for any parties to unite, except from pure affection arising from the most unreserved knowledge of each other's character.... There will be no artificial obstacles in the way of permanent happy unions of the sexes; for ... the affections will receive every aid which can be devised to induce them to be permanent;" and the wedded pair "will be placed as far as possible in the condition of lovers during their lives." In "some partial instances," however, happiness might not even thus be secured. In such event, "without any severance of friendship between the parties, a separation may be made, the least injurious to them and the most beneficial to the interests of society."[796] In fine, Robert Owen's book, although often vague in expression and violent in tone, contains in its statements, and still more in its suggestions, practically the whole program of later socialistic writings on the subject of marriage and the family, except the argument based on historical evolution.[797]
Robert Dale Owen followed in his father's footsteps. He finds even the Haytian institution of "placement"—an informal union made and dissolved at the pleasure of the contracting persons—far superior in its morality and its stability to the sacramental marriage which exists by its side.[798]
August Bebel, in his able book on Woman and Socialism, draws a powerful indictment of matrimonial relations under the existing order. To this source, in his view, may be traced the prevalence of sexual crimes and the most dangerous tendencies now threatening the integrity of society. Infanticide, abortion, and prostitution; the decline in the birth and marriage rates; the increase in the number of divorces; the subjection of woman—all these, he says, are due mainly to the influence of the present "coercive marriage." This is so because that "marriage is an institution bound up in the closest way with the existing social order and with it must stand or fall." Coercive marriage is the creature of economic conditions, the "normal marriage" of the present bourgeois society; and with that society it is already in process of disruption. "Since all these unnatural conditions, being especially harmful to woman, are grounded in the nature of the bourgeois society and are growing with its duration, that society is proving itself incapable of remedying the evil and of emancipating woman. Another social order is therefore needful for this purpose." In the new state, economically and socially, woman will be entirely independent. She will no longer be the subject of authority and of exploitation; but, free and equal by man's side she will become "mistress of her own destiny."[799]
Whatever may be thought of the remedy suggested by socialistic writers, whether or not our only hope lies in the co-operative commonwealth, it is certain that they have rendered an important public service. They have earnestly studied and set forth the actual facts. With unsparing hand they have laid bare the flaws in our domestic institutions as they really exist. They have clearly proved that the problems of marriage and the family can be solved only by grasping their relations to the economic system. They have shown that progress lies along the line of the complete emancipation of woman and the absolute equality of the sexes in marriage. In accomplishing all this they have in effect done much to arouse in the popular mind a loftier ideal of wedded life.
The liberation of woman in every one of its aspects profoundly involves the destiny of the family. It signifies in all the larger activities of life the relative individualization of one-half of human kind. This means, of course, a weakening of the solidarity of the family group, so far as its cohesion is dependent on the remnants of mediæval marital authority. Will the ultimate dissolution of the family thus become the price of equality and freedom? Or rather, is it not almost certain that in the more salubrious air of freedom and equality there is being evolved a higher type of the family, knit together by ties—sexual, moral, and spiritual—far more tenacious than those fostered by the régime of subjection? How remarkable, in England as well as in America, is the revolution already accomplished! Few facts in social history are more instructive than the change which has taken place in the tone of the literature dealing with woman and her relations to marriage and the family. In the eighteenth century and until far down into the nineteenth it is for the most part utterly frivolous or sentimental. Vapid satire abounds. Erotic or facetious verse at the expense of the "fair sex" or "wedded love" finds ready popular response. Even in what is meant for earnest discussion woman is treated as a helpless being, to be petted, cajoled, or corrected, not too harshly, by her superior lord; or else she is edified with endless lectures on the sacred duty of guarding her virtue—a fact which throws a lurid and unintentional light on the moral standards of the age. Imagine an Essay on Old Maids,[800] tediously spun out in three volumes; or a book like Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator,[801] which, although in four volumes, had already reached its seventh edition in 1771.
Nevertheless, the beginning of an efficient agitation for woman's rights was then made. As early as 1696 appeared Mary Astell's vigorous Defense of the Female Sex, further developing views which she had expressed two years earlier.[802] The next year Defoe, advocating an "academy for women," made a strong plea for the equal education of the sexes.[803] A singularly clear and incisive exposure of the Hardships of the English Laws in relation to Wives was published in 1735. The writer, apparently a woman, while protesting that her adversaries for want of arguments resort to "points of wit, smart jests, and all-confounding laughter," presents many striking proofs from judicial annals and elsewhere to show that in England the "estate of wives is more disadvantageous than slavery itself;" that they "may be made prisoners for life at the discretion of their domestick governors;" and that they "have no property, neither in their own persons, children, or fortunes."[804] In 1739 an anonymous writer, signing herself "Sophia," produced a forceful Vindication of the natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem with the Men, in which, appealing to "rectified reason," she urged that difference in sex relates to the "propagation of human nature," whereas in "soul there is no sex," and diversity must therefore come from education and environment.[805] Mary Wollstonecraft's better known and much more elaborate Vindication of the Rights of Woman,[806] published in 1792, was therefore not without helpful predecessors. But it is immensely superior to them in its literary power and its intellectual grasp. The fearless, direct, and unaffected way in which the subject is handled, especially the questions of sex and education, discloses the dawn of a new era of discussion. More clearly than ever before the liberation of woman appears as a sociological problem of the greatest moment to mankind. True, much space is devoted to combating objections which may now seem trivial; but to the average mind of Mary Wollstonecraft's day they were by no means trivial, and they had to be cleared away before the full light could come in.
The foundations were thus laid upon which, chiefly during the last half-century,[807] a vast literary superstructure—controversial, historical, and scientific—has been erected; a many-sided literature worthily embodying the thought of a great transitional stage in social progress. The opponents of woman's liberation have been forced to choose new weapons. Satire and mockery are no longer in vogue. Both sides are very much in earnest. The tone of present discussion is nothing if not serious. Moreover, while the battle for sexual equality in the family and in the state is very far from being yet fought out, the ultimate victory seems already assured.
It would, indeed, be very strange if some incidental harm should not result from the veritable revolution in the condition of American women which little more than a generation has produced. This is the inevitable penalty which social progress has always to pay. Yet in the present case the transitional loss to the family or to the larger social body is exceedingly slight compared even with the immediate gain. This is especially true of woman's new intellectual life with all its manifold activities. It matters not whether she is showing herself mentally man's equal. If any justification of her new rôle were needed it might suffice to affirm that she has precisely the same right as man to free and unhampered self-development in whatever direction and in whatever manner she herself shall find most conducive to her happiness. But it is amply justified by its social results. It cannot be seriously doubted that woman's admission to equal privilege of higher education is enabling her better to share with man in doing the world's work. Besides, in spite of the vain imaginings of misogynistic philosophers,[808] the problem of special sexual function in its relation to mental capacity is being settled in woman's favor. "Science," declares Lourbet, in completing his valuable survey, "is incapable of demonstrating the 'irremediable' mental inferiority of woman.... The pretended antagonism between mental power and sexual power, which does not withstand rigorous analysis, appears definitively to be destroyed by experience, by the tangible facts which incessantly strike the eye."[809] Herbert Spencer reaches the conclusion that "were liberties to be adjusted to abilities, the adjustment, even could we make it, would have to be made irrespective of sex."[810]
It is singular what acute anxiety is felt by adherents of the old régime[811] lest woman's new intellectual life should prove disastrous to her physical constitution, unmindful of the fact that even now for the majority of married women the burdens of the orthodox "natural sphere" are far more harmful. The tables are decidedly turned by a radical writer who with truth declares that "evidence is rapidly accumulating which makes it almost impossible to deny that the feminine constitution has been disastrously injured during the long ages of patriarchal rule, and that this beloved 'sphere' of woman, where she was thought so safe and happy, has, in fact, been a very seed-bed of disease and misery and wrong;" that "through these ages of overstrain of every kind—physical, emotional, nervous—one set of faculties being in perpetual activity while the others lay dormant, woman has fallen into a state that is more or less ailing and diseased; that upon her shoulders has been laid the penalty of the injustice and selfishness of men."[812] Even if the participation of woman in the mental activities and the public vocations which men have hitherto monopolized should prove harmful to her, has she not a right to discover the fact by experience? "I consider it presumptuous," said John Stuart Mill in the outset of the organized emancipation movement, "in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised, and no one can safely pronounce that if woman's nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men's, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves."[813]