Next in privilege and position to the "lady" is the mistress, the woman who is selected by the ruling class man, not primarily to bear his children, but to entertain and divert him. She may, of course, bear children also. In barbaric societies, and up to quite recent times, the importance of the ruling class man was indicated by the number of concubines he had, and the position of these women was hardly inferior to that of the wife or queen. In the days of the French monarchy, the king's mistress was frequently more important than the queen; she was a woman of ability, maintaining her supremacy in the intrigues of the court. In ancient Greek society, the "hetairae" were a recognized class, and Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, was the most brilliant and most conspicuous woman in Athens. In modern France, the position of the mistress is recognized by the phrase "demi-monde," or half-world. The American plutocracy has developed upon a superstructure of Puritanism, and therefore, in America, hypocrisy is necessary. But in the great cities of America, the vast majority of the ruling class men keep mistresses before marriage, and a great many keep them afterwards; and these mistresses are coming to be more and more openly flaunted, and to acquire more and more of what is called "social position." It is possible now in the "smart set" for a lady to accept the status of mistress, delicately veiled, without losing caste thereby, and actresses and other free lance women who got their start in life by taking the position of mistress, are coming more and more to be recognized as "ladies," and to be received into what are called the "best circles."
There remains to be considered the position of the lower class women. In barbarous society these women were very little different from slaves. They had no rights of their own, except such rights as their master man chose to allow them for his own convenience. They were sold in marriage by their parents, and they went where they were sold, and obeyed their new master. They became his household drudges, and reserved their affections for him; if they failed to do this, he stoned them to death, or strangled them with a cord and tied them in a sack and threw them into the river.
And, of course, the rights of the master man yielded to the rights of men of higher classes. The king or nobleman could take any woman he wished at any time, and he made laws to this effect and enforced them. In feudal society the lord of the manor claimed the right of the first night with the wives of his serfs; this was one of the ruling class privileges which was abolished in the French revolution. Wherever the French revolution did not succeed in affecting land tenure, the right of the land owner to prey upon his tenant girls continues as a custom, even though it is not written in the law, and would be denied by the hypocritical. It prevails in Poland, as you may discover by reading Sienkiewicz's "Whirlpools"; it prevails in England, as you may discover from Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." You will find that it prevails in every part of the world where women have poverty and men have wealth and prestige, dress suits and automobiles. You will find it wherever there are leisure class hotels, or colleges, or other gatherings of ruling class young males. You will find it in the theatrical and moving picture worlds. It is well understood in the theatrical world of Broadway that the woman "star" in the profession gets her start in life by becoming the mistress of a manager or "angel." In the moving picture world of Southern California it is a recognized convention, known to everyone familiar with the business, that a young girl parts with her virtue in exchange for an important job.
CHAPTER XXX
SEX AND YOUNG AMERICA
(Discusses present-day sex arrangements, as they affect the future generation.)
Our first task is to consider how people actually behave in the matter of sex—as distinguished from the way they pretend to behave. The first and most necessary step in the cure of any disease is a correct diagnosis, and in this case we have not merely to make the diagnosis, but to prove it; because the most conspicuous fact about our present sex-arrangements is a mass of organized concealment. Not merely do teachers and preachers for the most part suppress all mention of these subjects; but the defenders of our present economic disorder are accustomed to acclaim the private property régime as the only basis of family life. So long as people hold such an idea, there is no use trying to teach them anything on the subject. There is no use talking to them about monogamous love, because all they understand is hypocrisy. In this chapter, therefore, we shall proceed to hold up the mirror in front of capitalist morality.
I pause and consider: Where shall I begin? At the top of society, or at the bottom? With the city or the country? With the old or the young? I think you care most of all about your boys and girls, so I am going to tell you what is happening to the youth of America in these days of triumphant reaction.
I have a son, about whom naturally I think a great deal; just now he is a student at one of our state universities, and he wrote me the other day: "I went to a dance, and believe me, father, if you knew what these modern dances mean, you would write something about them." I know what they mean. They have come to us straight from the brothels of the Argentine, among the vilest haunts of vice in the world. Others have come from the jungle, where they were natural. The poor creature of the jungle has his sex-desire and nothing else; he is not troubled with brains, he does not have a complicated social organism to build up and protect, consequently he does not need what are called "morals." But we civilized people need morals, and we are losing them, and our society is disintegrating, going back to the howling and fighting and cannibalism of the jungle.
Prof. William James, America's greatest psychologist, tells us that going through the motions appropriate to an emotion automatically causes that emotion to be felt. If you watch an actor preparing to rush on the stage in an emotional scene, you will see him walking about, clenching his fists, stamping his feet, making ferocious faces, "working himself up." And now, what do you think is going on in the minds of young men and women, while with their bodies they are going through procedures which are nothing and can be nothing but imitations of sexual contact?
The parents, it appears, are ignorant and unsophisticated, and have left it for the children to find out what these dances mean. In Rhode Island, one of our oldest states, is Brown College, chosen by New England's aristocracy for the education of its sons; and these boys go to social affairs in the best homes in Providence, and they call them "petting-parties." And here is what they write in their college paper: