An equality between man and woman had suddenly been decreed politically; philanthropists were already talking about it morally; the younger generation carrying the movement one step further is experimenting with it intellectually. What they think, they say. Does it matter who is there? Bah! Victorian prudery. There are no secrets now between the sexes.
But part of this knowledge of good and evil was common sense—when once the Puritan and Victorian nonsense had been destroyed. It is only to a sex-maniac that the shortening of skirts can possibly do any harm. What, cries the younger generation, is the difference between showing one’s legs, and one’s arms; bobbing one’s hair is the same, or smoking, or drinking, or swearing. If they aren’t good for the physique—well and good, they are bad; but if they are only bad because our Puritan or Victorian ancestry say so—or because Moses fell down the mountain with some tombstones under his arm—what the hell?—they aren’t bad at all.
So the gentlemen and ladies of the past lift their monocles and their lorgnettes to watch these semi-nude girls, these godless men. “Dear, dear,” they say. “Gracious me. That’s not a nice young man.”
What really has happened, say the younger generation, is that America for some time has been living up to ideals which they have never expressed, and have expressed, in lieu of these, ideals which they have never lived down to. Silly little superficial rules, and some hideous inhibitions grew up out of these expressed ideals. Otherwise they have been like corpses rotting before the very eyes of those who created them. They were never alive at all, say the younger generation. So it considers itself a generation of building, not of destroying. With frankness a dominant characteristic it must express the futility of the old expressed, as well as the strength of the old unexpressed ideals. But it lays the emphasis on the old unexpressed. For instance, it is not proud that it has torn down the absurd anthropomorphic God of the literature of the Past, but it is proud, that, having gotten rid of that miasma, it has proceeded to the conclusion that God is but the vision of the potentiality of mankind realized. That with Thomas Hardy it can go forward
“with dependence placed
On the human heart’s resource alone,
In brotherhood bonded close, and graced
With loving kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.”
It is not proud of having torn the veil off the carefully draped Victorian womanhood, but having done so it is proud of the constructive results, that no longer having ignorance, it can see the beauty and purity in the nakedness of the sex. It has torn down the ugly lies that covered the world with a respectable and morne garland of fig-leaves, but out of the ruins of this demolition it is creating a naked sanity, of which it is reasonably proud.