[17] The first passage I have quoted is from “Love and Marriage”; the other two I have taken from Miss Key’s “The Younger Generation,” simply because I found the ideas they contain somewhat more clearly and definitely expressed in that book than in the other.
[18] Franz Oppenheimer, Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Œkonomie. Berlin, 1912.
[19] For a striking and characteristic example of this ineptitude, I refer my readers to Dr. Havelock Ellis’s little book, “Eugenics Made Plain.”
CHAPTER IV WOMAN AND MARRIAGE
I
Perhaps the most pronounced conventional distinction between the sexes is made in their relation to marriage. For man, marriage is regarded as a state; for woman, as a vocation. For man, it is a means of ordering his life and perpetuating his name, for woman it is considered a proper and fitting aim of existence. This conventional view is yielding before the changing attitude of women toward themselves; but it will be long before it ceases to colour the instinctive attitude of the great majority of people toward women. It is because of the usual assumption that marriage is woman’s special province, that I have discussed its general aspect somewhat at length before considering its relation to women in particular. This assumption, I may remark, has been justified expressly or by implication by all those advocates of freedom for women who have assured the world that woman’s “mission” of wifehood and motherhood would be better fulfilled rather than worse through an extension of her rights. If we imagine the signers of the Declaration of Independence, in place of proclaiming the natural right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, arguing with King George that a little more freedom would make them better husbands and fathers, we shall imagine a pretty exact parallel for this kind of argument on behalf of the emancipation of women.
The belief that marriage and parenthood are the especial concern of women is rooted in the idea that the individual exists for the sake of the species. Biologically, this is of course true; but it is equally true of male and female. Among primitive peoples, where individuation has not progressed as far as among more highly civilized peoples, this idea still prevails in regard to both sexes. Among these peoples the man who must remain unmarried and childless is considered quite as unfortunate as the woman who suffers the same fate. Among civilized peoples, on the other hand, where individuation has progressed farthest, it is not usual to look upon the male as existing solely for the species; but it is usual for the female to be so regarded, because, having had less freedom than the male, she has not been able to assert to the same extent her right to live for herself. The one-sided view that the future of the race depends solely on women has curious results: a nation may send the best of its male youth to be destroyed in war without overmuch anxiety being manifested in any quarter over the effect of this wholesale slaughter upon future generations; but if the idea of enlisting women in military service be so much as broached, there is an immediate outcry about the danger to posterity that such a course would involve. Yet it requires only a moderate exercise of intelligence to perceive that if there must be periodic slaughter it would be better, both for the survivors and for posterity, if the sexes were to be slaughtered in equal numbers; and more especially is this true, for obvious reasons, where monogamy is the accepted form of marriage. Again, although it is extremely hard to get laws passed to protect men from the hazards of industry, the laws designed to protect women—i.e., posterity—which have been passed at the instance of reformers and social workers, already constitute a serious handicap to women workers in their necessary competition with men in the labour-market. Yet every child must have two parents, and certainly unfitness or disability in the father must have a bad effect upon his offspring, even though it be less harmful than unfitness or disability in the mother.
The view of woman as a biological function might be strongly defended on the ground of racial strength if that function were respected and she were free in discharging it. But it is not respected and she is not free. The same restrictions that have kept her in the status of a function have denied her freedom and proper respect even in the exercise of that function. Motherhood, to be sure, receives a great deal of sentimental adulation, but only if it is committed in accordance with rules which have been prescribed by a predominantly masculine society. Per se it is accorded no respect whatever. When it results from a sexual relationship which has been duly sanctioned by organized society, it is holy, no matter how much it may transgress the rules of decency, health, or common sense. Otherwise it is a sin meriting social ostracism for the mother and obloquy for the child—an ostracism and an obloquy, significantly enough, in which the father does not share.