A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil

by Jane Addams

The primary difficulty of military life lies in the withdrawal of large numbers of men from normal family life, and hence from the domestic restraints and social checks which are operative upon the mass of human beings. The great peace propagandas have emphasized the unjustifiable expense involved in the maintenance of the standing armies of Europe, the social waste in the withdrawal of thousands of young men from industrial, commercial and professional pursuits into the barren negative life of the barracks. They might go further and lay stress upon the loss of moral sensibility, the destruction of romantic love, the perversion of the longing for wife and child. The very stability and refinement of the social order depend upon the preservation of these basic emotions.

Social customs are instituted so slowly and even imperceptibly, so far as the conforming individual is concerned, that the mass of men submit to control in spite of themselves, and it is therefore always difficult to determine how far the average upright living is the result of external props, until they are suddenly withdrawn. This is especially true of domestic life. Even the sordid marriages in which the senses have forestalled the heart almost always end in some form of family affection. The young couple who may have been brought together in marriage upon the most primitive plane, after twenty years of hard work in meagre, unlovely surroundings, in spite of stupidity and many mistakes, in the face of failure and even wrongdoing, will have unfolded lives of unassuming affection and family devotion to a group of children. They will have faithfully fulfilled that obligation which falls to the lot of the majority of men and women, with its high rewards and painful sacrifices. These rewards as well as the restraints of family life are denied to the soldier. A somewhat similar situation is found in every large construction camp, and in the crowded city tenements occupied by thousands of immigrant men who have preceded their families to America.

In the light of the history of prostitution in relation to militarism, nothing could be more absurd than the familiar statement that virtuous women could not safely walk the streets unless opportunity for secret vice were offered to the men of the city. It is precisely the men who have not submitted to self-control who are dangerous and they only, as the court records themselves make clear.

In addition to the large social movements for the betterment of Public Health, for the establishment of Temperance, for the promotion of Equal Suffrage, and for the hastening of Peace and Arbitration is the world-wide organization and active propaganda of International Socialism. It has always included the abolition of this ancient evil in its program of social reconstruction, and since the publication of Bebel’s great book, nearly thirty years ago, the leaders of the Socialist party have never ceased to discuss the economics of prostitution with its psychological and moral resultants. The Socialists contend that commercialized vice is fundamentally a question of poverty, a by-product of despair, which will disappear only with the abolition of poverty itself; that it persists not primarily from inherent weakness in human nature, but is a vice arising from a defective organization of social life; that with a reorganization of society, at least all of prostitution which is founded upon the hunger of the victims and upon the profits of the traffickers, will disappear.

Whether we are Socialists or not, we will all admit that every level of culture breeds its own particular brand of vice and uncovers new weaknesses as well as new nobilities in human nature; that a given social development—such, for instance as the conditions of life for thousands of young people in crowded city quarters—may produce such temptations and present such snares to virtue, that average human nature cannot withstand them.

The very fact that the existence of the social evil is semi-legal in large cities is an admission that our individual morality is so uncertain that it breaks down when social control is withdrawn and the opportunity for secrecy is offered. The situation indicates either that the best conscience of the community fails to translate itself into civic action or that our cities are too large to be civilized in a social sense. These difficulties have been enormously augmented during the past century so marked by the rapid growth of cities, because the great principle of liberty has been translated not only into the unlovely doctrine of commercial competition, but also has fostered in many men the belief that personal development necessitates a rebellion against existing social laws. To the opportunity for secrecy which the modern city offers, such men are able to add a high-sounding justification for their immoralities. Fortunately, however, for our moral progress, the specious and illegitimate theories of freedom are constantly being challenged, and a new form of social control is slowly establishing itself on the principle, so widespread in contemporary government, that the state has a responsibility for conditions which determine the health and welfare of its own members; that it is in the interest of social progress itself that hard-won liberties must be restrained by the demonstrable needs of society.

This new and more vigorous development of social control, while reflecting something of that wholesome fear of public opinion which the intimacies of a small community maintain, is much more closely allied to the old communal restraints and mutual protections to which the human will first yielded. Although this new control is based upon the voluntary co-operation of self-directed individuals, in contrast to the forced submission that characterized the older forms of social restraint, nevertheless in predicting the establishment of adequate social control over the instinct which the modern novelists so often describe as “uncontrollable,” there is a certain sanction in this old and well-nigh forgotten history.

The most superficial student of social customs quickly discovers the practically unlimited extent to which public opinion has always regulated marriage. If the traditions of one tribe were endogamous, all the men dutifully married within it; but if the customs of another decreed that wives must be secured by capture or purchase, all the men of that tribe fared forth in order to secure their mates. From the primitive Australian who obtains his wives in exchange for his sisters or daughters, and never dreams of obtaining them in any other way, to the sophisticated young Frenchman, who without objection marries the bride his careful parents select for him; from the ancient Hebrew, who contentedly married the widow of his deceased brother because it was according to the law, to the modern Englishman who refused to marry his deceased wife’s sister because the law forbade it, the entire pathway of the so-called uncontrollable instinct has been gradually confined between carefully clipped hedges and has steadily led up to a house of conventional domesticity. Men have fallen in love with their cousins or declined to fall in love with them, very much as custom declared marriages between cousins to be desirable or undesirable, as they formerly married their sisters and later absolutely ceased to desire to marry them. In fact, regulation of this great primitive instinct goes back of the human race itself. All the higher tribes of monkeys are strictly monogamous, and many species of birds are faithful to one mate, season after season. According to the great authority, Forel, prostitution never became established among primitive peoples. Even savage tribes designated the age at which their young men were permitted to assume paternity because feeble children were a drag upon their communal resources. As primitive control lessened with the disappearance of tribal organization and later of the patriarchal family, a social control, not less binding, was slowly established, until throughout the centuries, in spite of many rebellious individuals, the mass of men have lived according to the dictates of the church, the legal requirements of the state, and the surveillance of the community, if only because they feared social ostracism. It is easy, however, to forget these men and their prosaic virtues because history has so long busied herself in recording court amours and the gentle dalliances of the overlord.

The great primitive instinct, so responsive to social control as to be almost an example of social docility, has apparently broken with all the restraints and decencies under two conditions: first and second, when the individual felt that he was above social control and when the individual has had an opportunity to hide his daily living. Prostitution upon a commercial basis in a measure embraces the two conditions, for it becomes possible only in a society so highly complicated that social control may be successfully evaded and the individual thus feels superior to it. When a city is so large that it is extremely difficult to fix individual responsibility, that which for centuries was considered the luxury of the king comes within the reach of every office-boy, and that lack of community control which belonged only to the overlord who felt himself superior to the standards of the people, may be seized upon by any city dweller who can evade his acquaintances. Against such moral aggression, the old types of social control are powerless.

Fortunately, the same crowded city conditions which make moral isolation possible, constantly tend to develop a new restraint founded upon the mutual dependences of city life and its daily necessities. The city itself socializes the very instruments that constitute the apparatus of social control—Law, Publicity, Literature, Education and Religion. Through their socialization, the desirability of chastity, which has hitherto been a matter of individual opinion and decision, comes to be regarded, not only as a personal virtue indispensable in women and desirable in men, but as a great basic requirement which society has learned to demand because it has been proven necessary for human welfare. To the individual restraints is added the conviction of social responsibility and the whole determination of chastity is reinforced by social sanctions. Such a shifting to social grounds is already obviously taking place in regard to the chastity of women. Formerly all that the best woman possessed was a negative chastity which had been carefully guarded by her parents and duennas. The chastity of the modern woman of self-directed activity and of a varied circle of interests, which gives her an acquaintance with many men as well as women, has therefore a new value and importance in the establishment of social standards. There was a certain basis for the belief that if a woman lost her personal virtue, she lost all; when she had no activity outside of domestic life, the situation itself afforded a foundation for the belief that a man might claim praise for his public career even when his domestic life was corrupt. As woman, however, fulfills her civic obligations while still guarding her chastity, she will be in position as never before to uphold the “single standard,” demanding that men shall add the personal virtues to their performance of public duties. Women may at last force men to do away with the traditional use of a public record as a cloak for a wretched private character, because society will never permit a woman to make such excuses for herself.