It seems a fair assumption that the association of sin with sex-desire may have arisen from the antagonism between individual inclination and the domination of the group. Among peoples where the clan or the family is the final category, marriage is far from being exclusively a matter of individual interest and preference; indeed the individuals concerned may have little or nothing to say about it. The marriage is arranged by their elders, and the principals may not even see one another before their wedding day. Marriage under these conditions is a contract between families, an arrangement for founding a new economic unit and for perpetuating the tribe, as royal marriages are purely dynastic arrangements in behalf of a political order. Sexual preference can have little place in such a scheme; nothing, indeed, is more inimical to it. Love becomes an interloping passion, threatening the purely utilitarian basis upon which sex has been placed; and as such it must be discountenanced, and young men and women carefully segregated in order that this inconvenient sentiment may have no chance to spring up unauthorized between them.
In the Christian world this association of sin with the sexual appetite has prevailed since the days of St. Paul.[5] Sexual desire has been regarded as a base instinct, and its gratification under any circumstances as a kind of moral concession; therefore woman, as the instrument of sexual satisfaction in the dominant male, must be repressed and regulated accordingly, and to this end she was always to be under obedience to some man, either her husband or a male relative. “Nothing disgraceful,” says Clement of Alexandria, “is proper for man, who is endowed with reason; much less for woman, to whom it brings shame even to reflect of what nature she is.” Repression has combined with the proprietary idea to make chastity a woman’s principal if not her only virtue, and unchastity a sin to be punished with a severity that, in another view, seems irrational and disproportionate, by permanent social ostracism, for example, as in most modern communities, or, as in Egypt and mediaeval Europe, by violent death. An extraordinary inconsistency appears in the fact that since Christian thought has chiefly connected morality with chastity, woman came to be regarded as the repository of morality, and as such to be considered on a higher moral plane than man. But it was really her economic and social inferiority that made her the repository of morality. She must embody the ideal of sexual restraint that her husband often found it inconvenient or onerous to attain for himself; and any unfaithfulness to this ideal on her part inflicted upon him a mysterious injury called “dishonour.” He might indulge his own polygamous leanings with impunity, but his failure to make effective his sexual monopoly of his wife made him liable to contempt and ridicule. So strongly does this notion persist that one may find anthropologists, usually the most objective among our men of science, gauging the morality of a primitive people by the chastity of its women.
Of course the effect of the attempt to make the chastity of women a matter of morality and law, has been the precise opposite of the one aimed at. Society can never be made virtuous through arbitrary regulation; it can only be made unhappy and unamiable. The attempt to suppress all unauthorized expression of the sex-impulse in women tended to make them not only miserable and abject, but hypocritical and deceitful; and it tended also to make men predatory. This was its inevitable result in a society where women paid an exorbitant penalty for unchastity and men paid no penalty at all; a result which has made the relations between the sexes in the Christian world about as bad as any that could be imagined. Theoretically, to be sure, Christianity exacted of men the same degree of chastity as of women; practically it did no such thing, as may be amply proved even now by a study of the marriage and divorce laws of Christian nations, not excepting our own.[6] The sexual license of the dominant male was limited only by the practicable correspondence between his own desires and his opportunities; and thanks to that convenient being, the prostitute, his opportunities were plentiful. Hence for him, women were divided into two classes: the chaste and respectable from whom he chose the wife who kept his home, bore his children, and embodied his virtue; and those outcasts from society who promoted the chastity of the first class by offering themselves, for a price, as sacrifices to illicit sexual desire. Neither class was he bound to respect; for the only thing that compels respect is independence, and in neither the first nor the second class were women independent. From the man’s point of view, such a social arrangement was superficially satisfactory. It provided for what might be called the utilitarian ends of sex; that is to say, the man’s name was perpetuated and his natural appetites gratified. But beyond this it left a good deal to be desired. Its worst effect was by way of a complete evaporation of the spiritual quality of union between man and woman and the very considerable dehumanization that in consequence set in. Both the wife and the prostitute were man’s creatures quoad hoc, to be used for different purposes but equally to be used. It is hardly to be wondered at that man came to regard women as “the sex,” and through his own management of their degradation came to feel and to express toward them a degree of contempt that cast considerable doubt on his own humanity. It is invariable that the person who is able to regard any class of human beings as per se his natural inferiors, will by so doing sacrifice something of his own spiritual integrity. In his relation to woman, man occupied a position of privilege analogous to that occupied by the aristocracy in the State; and he paid the same penalty for his exercise of a usurped and irresponsible power: a coarsening of his spiritual fibre. One of the oddest of the many odd superstitions that have grown out of male domination is the notion that men suffer less spiritual harm from sexual promiscuity than women; and this in spite of the biblical injunction, applied exclusively to their sex: “None who go unto her return again.” This superstition is accountable for abundant and incurable misery; and so slow is it to disappear that one is inclined to advocate a movement for the emancipation of men, a movement to free them from the prejudices and prepossessions concerning women that are inculcated by the traditional point of view.
We have seen that the Christian philosophy looked upon woman as man’s creature and his chief temptation, and that Christian society took good care to keep her in that position. In doing so, it made her the enemy of man’s better self in a way that apparently was not foreseen by St. Paul, whose concern with the temptations of the flesh seems to have been a matter of more passionate conviction than his concern with those of the spirit. Woman’s subordinate position; her enforced ignorance; the narrowness of the interests that were allowed her; the exaggerated regard for the opinion of other people that was bound to be developed in a creature whose whole life depended on her reputation—these conditions were calculated to evolve the sort of being which is hardly able to give clear recognition either to her own spiritual interest or to that of other people. Such a being would be the enemy of man’s spiritual interest primarily through sheer inability to understand it. Public opinion was the arbiter of her own destiny; how could she be expected to conceive of any other or higher for man? Her whole life must be lived for appearances; how could she help man to live for actualities, and to make the sacrifice of appearances that such an ideal might entail? The only renunciation of the world that figured in her life was that which led to the convent; of that renunciation which involves being in the world but not of it—that steady repudiation of its standards which clears the way to spiritual freedom—of such a renunciation she would almost certainly be unable even to dream. The inevitable result of this enforced narrowness was well stated by John Stuart Mill in the essay which remains the classic of feminist literature; he pointed out that in a world where women are almost exclusively occupied with material interests, where their standard of appraisal is the opinion of other people, their ambition will naturally connect itself with material things, with wealth and prestige, no matter how inimical such an ambition may be to the spiritual interests of the men upon whom they depend. That there have been distinguished exceptions to this rule does credit to the strength of character which has enabled an individual now and then to attain something like spiritual maturity in spite of a disabling and retarding environment.
III
The effects of repression and seclusion on the character of woman have given rise, and an appearance of reason, to a host of other superstitions about her nature; notions which have been expressed in terms by many writers and have coloured the thought of many others. To offer a petty but interesting example, one of the most widely prevalent and most easily disproved of these is the belief that women are by nature more given to self-decoration than men. Certainly the practice in civilized society at present seems to bear out this notion. But when we turn to primitive communities we find, on the contrary, that the men are likely to be vainer of finery and more given to it than the women. The reason is simple: decoration of the person arises from the desire to enhance sex-attraction; and it is most industriously practised by that sex among whose members there is the keener competition for favour with members of the opposite sex. In European civilization marriage has been practically the only economic occupation open to women; but monogamous marriage, accompanied by an excess of females and an increasing proportion of celibacy among males, has made it impossible for every woman to get a husband; therefore the rivalry among them has been keen, and their interest in self-decoration has been largely professional. “If in countries with European civilization,” says Westermarck, “women nevertheless are more particular about their appearance and more addicted to self-decoration than the other sex, the reason for it may be sought for in the greater difficulty they have in getting married. But there is seldom any such difficulty in the savage world. Here it is, on the contrary, the man who runs the risk of being obliged to lead a single life.”
M. Vaerting, on this subject, takes the view that “the inclination to bright and ornamental clothing is dependent not upon sex, but upon the power-relation of the sexes. The subordinate sex, whether male or female, seeks ornament.” But it would seem, in view of the accepted theory that self-decoration originates in the desire to enhance sex-attraction, that Westermarck’s is the more reasonable explanation; moreover it covers certain cases in primitive life where the women, although their position is abject, nevertheless go plainly clad while the men are given to elaborate decoration of their persons.
In spite of all the evidence which anthropology arrays against it, however, the notion persists that woman is by nature more addicted to self-decoration than man; and there are not wanting advocates of her subjection, among them many women, who maintain that it shows the essential immaturity of her mind!
The notion that women are by nature mentally inferior to men, is primarily due to the fact that their enforced ignorance made them appear inferior. This is one of the strongest superstitions concerning women, as it is also one of the oldest. It has been much weakened by modern experience, but it has by no means disappeared. Indeed, it has stood in the way of dispassionate scientific study of the relative mental capacity of the sexes. Havelock Ellis, in his “Man and Woman,” says that “the history of opinion regarding cerebral sexual difference forms a painful page in scientific annals. It is full of prejudices, assumptions, fallacies, over-hasty generalizations. The unscientific have a predilection for this subject; and men of science seem to have lost the scientific spirit when they approached the study of its seat.... It is only of recent years that a comparatively calm and disinterested study of the brain has become in any degree common; and even today the fairly well ascertained facts concerning sexual differences may be easily summed up.” He then proceeds to show that those differences are few. It might be remarked here that such actual differences as appear are differences between man and woman as they now are, and can not be taken as final. If brain-mass, for example, depends to some extent on physical size and strength, the mass of woman’s brain should tend to increase as she abandons her unnatural seclusion, engages in exacting occupations and indulges in vigorous physical exercise. Already there has been an astonishing change in the female figure. An interesting indication of this is a recent dispatch from Germany stating that according to the shoe-manufacturers of that country the average German woman of today wears a shoe two sizes larger than the woman of a century ago. If woman’s body tends thus to enlarge with proper use, so in all likelihood will her brain.
Even Plato, who advocated the education of woman, held that while her capacities did not differ in kind from those of man, they differed in degree because of her inferiority in physical strength. It was a broad-minded view; for the most part women have simply been held to be by nature relatively weak-minded and therefore relatively ineducable. They have already passed one general test of educability, by entering schools on the same footing with men and showing themselves equally able to achieve a high scholastic standing; yet the Platonic notion persists that they are physically incapable of going as far as men can go in intellectual pursuits. This question can probably not be settled a priori to any one’s satisfaction. It must be conceded, after the fact, however, that considering the short time that women have been tolerated in the schools and in the practical prosecution of intellectual pursuits, the showing they have made has really been quite as good as might reasonably be expected, and that it certainly has not been such as to warrant any arbitrary fixing of limits beyond which they can not or shall not go. Moreover, the physical weakness which is supposed to disable woman intellectually may be itself a result of her adaptation to her environment. There is no way that I know of to forecast with any kind of accuracy what a few generations of freedom will accomplish specifically in the way of spiritual development. Considering that human beings are “creatures of a large discourse,” the matter is probably determinable only by experiment—solvitur ambulando.