Though these divisions give somewhat roughly general group types, humanity shows infinite variety of expression, and individuals may change from time to time according to influence and environment. Each may be developed through her special abilities. One notes with interest that associated with physical sex expression there is frequently great cleverness in cookery and crochet. Each must be stabilized on her own level.
An interesting report comes from El Retiro, the experimental school for correctional education established by the city and county of Los Angeles during the war. Of two hundred girls passing through this institution during the first three years, only two have drifted to the underworld, these being drug addicts when they came from the court. One hundred and ninety-eight are functioning socially in the community. These girls were all under twenty-one years. On arriving at El Retiro each girl is studied by a group consisting of the referee of the court, the psychologist, the superintendent, the teacher and the head of student government. So soon as her interests and special abilities are discovered, a project is chosen which will prepare her for constructive living in the community. The girls are stimulated to mental expression of energy, not set to hours of dull routine, scrubbing floors or paring potatoes. Not punishment but responsibility develops power and leads to higher expression and achievement. Science is teaching us that man is an epitome of the past,—that in each human being is retained the impress of prehuman behavior. As one analyst puts it, “Each day is an adjustment between the higher nerve centers and the spinal column.” We must study this conservation of life force that we may strengthen those manifestations which show ascending effort and decrease the tendency to revert to action patterns of earlier forms.
A dictum of the percipient mind of the biologist-sociologist, Lester Ward, should startle us into fresh appraisal of life’s values. Shortly before his death he said, “The day will come when society shall be as much shocked at the crime of perpetuating the least taint of hereditary disease, insanity or other serious defect, as it is now at the comparatively harmless crime of incest.”
As an equation is solved more simply by algebra than arithmetic, so any subject carried up into the next higher universe of discourse becomes clarified, falls into proper perspective, and is more easily understood. This thought in conjunction with the statement of Lester Ward shows the need of extending our discussion to include women both in and out of wedlock, and instead of differentiating the good from the bad by legal definition, the ethics of human mating must be based upon those laws of nature which secure the finest human values, the essential aim being an ever better next generation.
The fundamental function of woman being motherhood, this with its secondary manifestations explains much of her behavior. The devotion of the young girl to the cadet who enslaves her reveals the same instinct which holds a wife faithful through difficulties and degradation,—the instinct from which have developed the virtues of loyalty, endurance and self-sacrifice. The period of pregnancy should be (if the imagination be not filled with old wives’ tales) one of health, exhilaration, development of psychic values and social consciousness. Any woman experiencing this wonderful functioning should be aided to as complete psycho-biological fulfillment as her personality and the social situation permit. Should the higher love and association of the father of her child be lacking, so much the greater is her need of genuine help and encouragement. Given this, she may be strengthened and stabilized whether the man desert or become disaffected before or after a legal ceremony.
Though mating and its resulting responsibilities have evolved our highest virtues, marriage is now under attack. Not only are divorce and illegitimacy evidenced as showing its failure, but intellectual women are demanding freedom and self-expression which they find doubtful in marriage. In Paris one woman who believed the relation of the unmarried mother to her child more ethical under French law than that of the married mother, lived out of wedlock for years of monogamous mating, her daughter bearing her name. She and the father of her child were leaders in La Ligue pour le Droit des Femmes, of which Victor Hugo was an early president. Fundamentally this attack is encouraging, indicating effort to bring law up to newer ideals of ethical mating. Man’s marriage law was based upon economics, upon the idea of possession and inheritance of possessions. In Scandinavia, where woman has for some time been voting, there is a tendency to make the law conform to biology. In Norway all births are registered. The father as well as the mother must be held responsible and there are no illegitimate children. Under their law for children born out of wedlock which went into effect in 1915, in only nine out of the first five thousand cases was paternity contested. Here law is conforming to biologic fact. Before science can offer a new marriage law the psychology of mating must be further studied. Women are classifying as prostitution a marriage in which psychical values are ignored. They seek chastity in marriage according to the definition given in Doctor S. Herbert’s Fundamentals in Sexual Ethics, “Chastity—true chastity—has reference not so much to actions as to feelings and motives. It is the quality of the emotion in relation to sexual acts that constitutes a state of purity or impurity.”
Mr. Thomas’s study quite disproves the former theory of psychologists and criminologists that the prostitute is a type and can live no other way. Girls may come through a measure of prostitution, marry and make successes of their lives. In China a girl will sometimes earn through prostitution the money which makes marriage possible. In that country, where the seclusion of wives necessitates the entertainment of men guests at public places, the so-called prostitute may be called to act as hostess at dinner, to provide music or dancing at regular stipulated prices, according to the class to which she belongs, this not necessarily including the barter of the body. Even dominoes are played at so much a game. It would seem strange to our Y. W. C. A. hostesses at the army camps that their hospitality to the soldiers would in China have been classed as activities of the prostitute.
One of the surprises of the war work was the definite number of married women carrying on not commercial prostitution, but clandestine relationships. They were not vicious but immature. Their husbands being away, they seemed unable to get on without the aid of a friendly man. The need was not money but affectionate companionship. In some cases women were glad to escape from conditions of marital cruelty, yet they were so simple-minded as to accept instead most casual relationships.
Few people are able to live without some affectional alliance. An unmarried woman may establish a permanent friendship with another woman; one of less stable personality may pass from one “crush” to another, leaving havoc in her wake as does the promiscuous male, yet for this she may not be haled into court. If affection be lacking it takes a strong purpose in life to steady either a man or woman.
To claim that a girl need not be ruined or may recover from sex conflict expressed or repressed is not advocating promiscuity. Far from it. Nor in this effort of women to free themselves from the blunders hidden under the sanction of marriage should young people be encouraged to believe that to repeat those same blunders freely is the ideal of mating. Much nervous disease and delinquency are traceable to early emotional shock. Each case requires special study of personality. The results of any conflict are dependent upon previous environment, training, characteristics, interests, ideals. Freud says that if two little girls, one the daughter of intellectual parents, the other the child of the janitor, should have some sex experience, the former might later suffer neurosis while the latter would probably be unharmed. Cases of disease and of delinquency show the persistence of the association of idea, the strange continuance of symptoms fixed as conditioned reflexes which hamper a human being for years. Recent study of pre-delinquent groups has revealed children “with normal or even superior native endowment who are prevented from showing their ability by factors acting upon their feelings.” These illustrate the dangers of affectional wound,—the sensitivity of personality to emotional shock. A conflict may make or break an individual.