BY ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
The other day I listened to a conversation on marriage and divorce between a well-known feminist, her daughter, and an Episcopal clergyman. The celibate cleric and the younger woman were in fair accord: the institution of marriage was invaluable to society and had to be protected. Let there be no divorce, said the cleric, on any ground, at least within the church; children should be cared for by both parents, divorce being sought only as an ultimate recourse, said the girl, who was two years married and had a son.
The feminist was biding her time. Finally she said: “So much for the institution. What of the actual sex life? No divorce and continence or no divorce and intimacy with another?”
“The first, of course,” said the cleric.
“Not at all; the second,” said the girl. “And you, mother?”
“Oh, on the whole I’m for the brittle marriage as against the lax, the American way against the European. But most of all I am for tolerance in sex relations and for respecting privacy. Why not all kinds of relations for all kinds of persons? Just as there are now, but with respect or tolerance for the individual and without hypocrisy.”
“Even if we did not agree,” the cleric said later to the feminist, “we could talk about it as twenty years ago we could not. So much to the good.”
“So much to the bad,” said the girl’s father, still later; “better for all of us the old reserve.” The speaker was a lawyer with divorce cases in his practice.
Had we not here a mingling of currents from law, the church, feminism, and the younger generation which illustrates what divergency of attitude on sex and sex institutions or practices may exist to-day, even within the same cultural and local circle? Include circles of different education and locality and although the range of difference would be no larger the expressions of opinion would vary. Is the variation in opinion due to variation in experience or is it due to that contemporaneous lifting of the taboo on discussion which characterizes not only our talk about sex but about other interests as well? A remarkable and indisputable change of attitude, this release from verbal taboo, which often gives us a sense of change in general greater perhaps than the facts themselves warrant.
In the conversation I quoted the women were on the whole the radicals, the men on the whole the conservatives. This alignment was far from typical, I think, and yet in contemporaneous life, whether or not in opinion, women have been the exponents of cultural change in sex relations. The increase in the divorce rate, it seems probable, has been effected predominantly by women; about two-thirds of the total number of divorces are granted to women. (Of course the tradition that it is decent for the man to let the woman get the divorce must not be ignored in this connection.) This increase in divorce may indicate a changing attitude toward the criteria of marriage on the part of women. Women may be demanding more of marriage than in the day when they had little to expect but marriage. In other words, marriage standards mount as marriage has other relations to compete with. At any rate in the talk of women it seems to me that desire for integral satisfaction in marriage is more consciously or realistically expressed than ever before. Emotional and sexual appeasements are considered as well as social or economic advantage. What of the part played by women in changes in sex relations outside marriage?