“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”; and that being so, it is the task of those who are a little more serious than the serious to set about discovering the principles of glory and enjoyment in life. And—I am setting down a truism—the main principle of enjoyment for the human race is not art, nor thought, nor the practice of virtue, but for man, woman, and for woman, man. The exchange of happiness between the sexes is not only the creative agent in human life, perpetuating it; it is also the thing which gives the perpetuation of life its chief meaning. People have always felt this vaguely; it has made labor endurable to them; but hardly ever have they recognized it clearly, and to the poets and artists who know it they have always responded a little skeptically. They have thought of love as a justification a little too materialistic for life; but love is only materialistic when it is regarded as a means.
To accept men and women as ends in themselves, to enter into their life as one of them, is to partake of absolute life, that life which at every moment realizes itself, existing for its own sake. We cannot live in that life continuously; for the accomplishment of the intricate purposes of society we must at certain times and with part of our minds regard our fellow-creatures as instruments; but the more we tend to do so the more we banish joy from life. Life does not consist, whatever the utilitarians may say, in functioning, but in living; and life comes into being where men and women, not as functions, but as self-constituted entities, intersect. This is the state which in religion as well as art has been called life; this is the final life of the earth, beyond which there is no other. We may accept it or pass it by; but whatever we may do with it, it is our chief end, giving meaning to the multitudinous pains of humanity. This commerce between men and women is not merely sexual, in the narrow sense which we have given the word; it involves every human joy, all the thoughts and aspirations of mankind stretching into infinity. It is the thing which has inspired all great artists, mystical as well as earthy. It is the point of reference for any morality which is not a disguised kind of adaptation; for virtue consists in the capacity to partake freely of human happiness. All reform, all economic and political theory has a meaning in so far as it makes for this; and that was recognized by the first reformers, the utopians who had not yet become mere specialists in reform.
The libertarian movement has been such a dismal affair, thus, not because it has been too free, but because it has not been free enough. The democracies and the women of the world have been potentially liberated; but not so very long ago they were slaves, and they have still a slave’s idea of freedom. Instead of equal joys they have asked for equal obligations; and the whole world is in the grip of a psychological incapacity to escape from the idea of obligation. Against the unreasonable solemnity which this has imposed on everything there is little left for us except a deliberate and reasonable light-heartedness; this, and the faith that the human race will some time attain the only kind of freedom worth striving for, a freedom in joy.
Virtue for Women
By Isabel Leavenworth
Isabel Leavenworth
is an instructor in philosophy at Barnard College.
VIRTUE FOR WOMEN
BY ISABEL LEAVENWORTH
In the turmoil of discussion regarding present modes of sex life one can discern a pretty general approval of just one element in the whole situation: the ideal by which the good woman has for so long been controlled. It is commonly held that if changes are to be made they should be in the direction of persuading men, and also the few women who have been at fault, to be just as good as our good women have always been. Thus the young girl of to-day is criticized on the ground that instead of raising men to her level she is descending to theirs. Even those who are inclined to belittle the damage which she is doing to the social structure accompany their mild defense with the consoling reminder that human nature does not change and that in the end the girl of to-day will turn out as well as did the girls of yesterday; that is, she will finally come around to the good old feminine way of doing things.