Our Changing Morality: A Symposium

by Unknown

Our present age, counting the incredible advance of the last century and the swift fruition of these immediate years, shows among its newly distinguishing social movements one of supreme importance. Within a hundred years women, in most civilized countries, have moved from domestic into social relationship. Such a sudden and enormous change, while inherently for the improvement of society, is naturally accompanied by much local and immediate dislocation in previously accepted conditions. Many are alarmed at what is considered “the danger to the home” resultant from the refusal of an increasing number of women to spend their lives as house-servants; they fear “the menace to the family” due to similarly increasing numbers of women who refuse compulsory motherhood; they are shocked at a looseness, even grossness, of behavior between the sexes which seems to threaten marriage itself. Few seem able to look beyond the present inconveniences to a specialized efficiency in household management which will raise the standard of public health and private comfort, with large reduction in the cost of living; to such general improvement in child-culture as will lift the average of citizenship and lower the death-rate appreciably; and to a rational and permanent basis for our monogamous marriage.

To understand rightly this trying period, to be patient with its unavoidable reactions and excesses, to know what tendencies to approve and promote and what to condemn and oppose, requires some practical knowledge of biology and sociology. Men, though as yet beyond women in social morality, are unreliable judges in this time of change because their ox is gored—they are the ones who are losing a cherished possession. The overdeveloped sex instinct of men, requiring more than women were willing to give, has previously backed its demands by an imposing array of civil and religious laws requiring feminine submission, has not scrupled to use force or falsehood, and held final power through the economic dependence of women. It is easy to see that if women had been equally willing no such tremendous machinery of compulsion need have been evolved.

But now that the woman no longer admits that “he shall rule over her,” and is able to modify the laws; now that she has become braver, and above all is attaining financial freedom, her previous master has no hold upon her beyond natural attraction and—persuasion. Toward this end he manifests an instant and vigorous activity. Whereas in the past women were taught that they had no such “imperative instincts” as men, and the wooer, even the husband, sought to preserve this impression, now it is quite otherwise. All that elaborate theory of feminine chastity, that worship of virginity, goes by the board, and women are given a reversed theory—that they are just the same as men, if not more so; our “double standard” is undoubled and ironed flat—to the level of masculine desire.

Clothed in the solemn, newly invented terms of psychoanalysis, a theory of sex is urged upon us which bases all our activities upon this one function. It is exalted as not only an imperative instinct, but as the imperative instinct, no others being recognized save the demands of the stomach. Surely never was a more physical theory disguised in the technical verbiage of “psychology.” We should not too harshly blame the ingenious mind of man for thinking up a new theory to retain what the old ones no longer assured him; nor too severely criticize the subject class, so newly freed, for committing the same excesses, the same eager imitations of the previous master, which history shows in any recently enfranchised people. Just as women have imitated the drug-habits of men, without the faintest excuse or reason, merely to show that they can, so are they imitating men’s sex habits, in large measure. Those who go too far in such excesses will presumably die without issue, doing no permanent harm to the stock. This wild excitement over sex, as if it were a new discovery peculiar to our time, will be allayed by further knowledge. Even a little study of the common facts of nature has a cooling and heartening influence.

The essential facts are these: That all living forms show the tendency to maintain and to reproduce themselves; that some, in differing degree, show tendencies to vary and to improve; that after an immense period of reproduction without it (showing that as the “life force” it was quite unnecessary) the distinction of sex appeared as a means to freer variation and improvement; that the male characteristics of intense desire for the female, personal display, and intermasculine combat, as well as the female’s instinct of selection, are visible contributions to the major purpose of improvement; that in the higher and later life-forms further and more rapid improvement has been made through the development in the female of new organs and functions for the benefit of the young; through her alone have come the upward steps of viviparous birth, the marsupial pouch, and that crowning advantage, the mammary glands; the female solely is responsible for the development of nature’s aristocracy, Order Mammalia.

In the human species she adds to her previous contributions to racial progress the invention of our primitive industries, which were evolved by her in service to the young, and later carried out by men into the trades and crafts which support human life. In the developing care and nurture of her children she laid the foundation for those social functions of government, education, and coöperative industry which are so vitally important to social progress that we have called the family “the unit of the state.”

This is an error. The family is the prototype of the state, a tiny primitive state in itself, often quite inimical to the interests of the larger state which has developed through the wider interaction of individuals. The state does not elect families, tax families, punish families, nor thrive where physical inheritance is made the basis of authority. Where the family persists too powerfully, as in China, there is a commensurate lack in the vitality and efficiency of the state. By restricting women to the family relationship, with its compulsory woman service and domestic morality, we have checked and perverted social growth by keeping out of it the most effective factor in that growth, the mother.

The world having been for so long dominated by the individualistic and combative male, with that vast increment of masculine thought and emotion embodied in our literature, our religion, our art, modifying all our ideals, it is not to be wondered at that the newly freed women are as yet unable to see their opportunity, their power, and their long-prevented sex duty—race improvement.

The collapse of the arbitrary and unjust domestic morality of the past will presently be followed by recognition of the social morality of the future. Rightly discarding artificial standards of virtue based on the pleasure of men, we shall establish new ones based on natural law. Repudiating their duty to an owner and master, women have yet to accept and fulfill their duty to society, to the human race. This is not generally clear to them. In their legitimate rebellion against domestic service and compulsory sex-service they almost inevitably confuse these things with marriage, with which indeed they have been long synonymous. Some of our most valuable women, as well as many of negligible importance, speak of marriage as if it were an invention of Queen Victoria. Surely no excessive education is needed to learn that monogamy, among many of the higher carnivora and birds, is as natural a form of sex union as the polygamy of the grass eaters or the promiscuity among insects, reptiles, and fish. Monogamy appears when it is to the advantage of the young to have the continued care of both parents. This means that the parents share in the activities of supporting the family; it does not mean that the female becomes the servant of the male. Because of the united activities and mutual services of the pair love is developed, and stays. Such profound affection is found in some of these natural “marriages” that if one of a pair is killed the other will not mate again. Mated leopards or ostriches do not remain together because they are “Victorian” or “puritanical,” but because they like to. They could form as many and as variegated “free unions” as Greenwich Villagers if they choose; there is nothing to stop them.

But natural monogamy is as free from sex service as from domestic service. The pairing species adhere to their mating season as do the polygamous ones, or even the promiscuous. Man is the only animal using this function out of season and apart from its essential purpose. These natural monogamists are not “ascetics.” They are not dominated by religious doctrine or civil law. They fulfill their natural desires with the utmost freedom, but these desires do not move them out of season.