The main European stream of influences in this matter within historical times has involved, we can scarcely doubt when we take into consideration its complex phenomena as a whole, the maintenance of an inequality to the disadvantage of women. The fine legacy of Roman law to Europe was indeed favorable to women, but that legacy was dispersed and for the most part lost in the more predominating influence of tenacious Teutonic custom a.s.sociated with the vigorously organized Christian Church. Notwithstanding that the facts do not all point in the same direction, and that there is consequently some difference of opinion, it seems evident that on the whole both Teutonic custom and Christian religion were unfavorable to the equality of women with men. Teutonic custom in this matter was determined by two decisive factors: (1) the existence of marriage by purchase which although, as Crawley has pointed out, it by no means necessarily involves the degradation of women, certainly tends to place them in an inferior position, and (2) pre-occupation with war which is always accompanied by a depreciation of peaceful and feminine occupations and an indifference to love. Christianity was at its origin favorable to women because it liberated and glorified the most essentially feminine emotions, but when it became an established and organized religion with definitely ascetic ideals, its whole emotional tone grew unfavorable to women. It had from the first excluded them from any priestly function. It now regarded them as the special representatives of the despised element of s.e.x in life.[290] The eccentric Tertullian had once declared that woman was janua Diaboli; nearly seven hundred years later, even the gentle and philosophic Anselm wrote: Femina fax est Satanae.[291]
Thus among the Franks, with whom the practice of monogamy prevailed, a woman was never free; she could not buy or sell or inherit without the permission of those to whom she belonged. She pa.s.sed into the possession of her husband by acquisition, and when he fixed the wedding day he gave her parents coins of small money as arrha, and the day after the wedding she received from him a present, the morgengabe. A widow belonged to her parents again (Bedolliere, Histoire de Murs des Francais, vol. i, p. 180). It is true that the Salic law ordained a pecuniary fine for touching a woman, even for squeezing her finger, but it is clear that the offence thus committed was an offence against property, and by no means against the sanct.i.ty of a woman"s personality. The primitive German husband could sell his children, and sometimes his wife, even into slavery. In the eleventh century cases of wife-selling are still heard of, though no longer recognized by law.
The traditions of Christianity were more favorable to s.e.xual equality than were Teutonic customs, but in becoming amalgamated with those customs they added their own special contribution as to woman"s impurity. This spiritual inferiority of woman was significantly shown by the restrictions sometimes placed on women in church, and even in the right to enter a church; in some places they were compelled to remain in the narthex, even in non-monastic churches (see for these rules, Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, art. "s.e.xes, Separation of").
By attempting to des.e.xualize the idea of man and to overs.e.xualize the idea of woman, Christianity necessarily degraded the position of woman and the conception of womanhood. As Donaldson well remarks, in pointing this out (op. cit., p. 182), "I may define man as a male human being and woman as a female human being.... What the early Christians did was to strike the "male" out of the definition of man, and "human being" out of the definition of woman." Religion generally appears to be a powerfully depressing influence on the position of woman notwithstanding the appeal which it makes to woman. Westermarck considers, indeed (Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. i, p. 669), that religion "has probably been the most persistent cause of the wife"s subjection to her husband"s rule."
It is sometimes said that the Christian tendency to place women in an inferior spiritual position went so far that a church council formally denied that women have souls. This foolish story has indeed been repeated in a parrot-like fashion by a number of writers. The source of the story is probably to be found in the fact, recorded by Gregory of Tours, in his history (lib. viii, cap. XX), that at the Council of Macon, in 585, a bishop was in doubt as to whether the term "man" included woman, but was convinced by the other members of the Council that it did. The same difficulty has presented itself to lawyers in more modern times, and has not always been resolved so favorably to woman as by the Christian Council of Macon.
The low estimate of women that prevailed even in the early Church is admitted by Christian scholars. "We cannot but notice," writes Meyrick (art. "Marriage," Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities), "even in the greatest of the Christian fathers a lamentably low estimate of woman, and consequently of the marriage relationship. Even St. Augustine can see no justification for marriage, except in a grave desire deliberately adopted of having children; and in accordance with this view, all married intercourse, except for this single purpose, is harshly condemned. If marriage is sought after for the sake of children, it is justifiable; if entered into as a remedium to avoid worse evils, it is pardonable; the idea of the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity, hardly existed, and could hardly yet exist."
From the woman"s point of view, Lily Braun, in her important work on the woman question (Die Frauenfrage, 1901, pp. 28 et seq.) concludes that, in so far as Christianity was favorable to women, we must see that favorable influence in the placing of women on the same moral level as men, as ill.u.s.trated in the saying of Jesus, "Let him who is without sin amongst you cast the first stone," implying that each s.e.x owes the same fidelity. It reached, she adds, no further than this. "Christianity, which women accepted as a deliverance with so much enthusiasm, and died for as martyrs, has not fulfilled their hopes."
Even as regards the moral equality of the s.e.xes in marriage, the position of Christian authorities was sometimes equivocal. One of the greatest of the Fathers, St. Basil, in the latter half of the fourth century, distinguished between adultery and fornication as committed by a married man; if with a married woman, it was adultery; if with an unmarried woman, it was merely fornication. In the former case, a wife should not receive her husband back; in the latter case, she should (art. "Adultery," Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities). Such a decision, by attaching supreme importance to a distinction which could make no difference to the wife, involved a failure to recognize her moral personality. Many of the Fathers in the Western Church, however, like Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose, could see no reason why the moral law should not be the same for the husband as for the wife, but as late Roman feeling both on the legal and popular side was already approximating to that view, the influence of Christianity was scarcely required to attain it. It ultimately received formal sanction in the Roman Canon Law, which decreed that adultery is equally committed by either conjugal party in two degrees: (1) simplex, of the married with the unmarried, and (2) duplex, of the married with the married.
It can scarcely be said, however, that Christianity succeeded in attaining the inclusion of this view of the moral equality of the s.e.xes into actual practical morality. It was accepted in theory; it was not followed in practice. W. G. Sumner, discussing this question (Folkways, pp. 359-361), concludes: "Why are these views not in the mores? Undoubtedly it is because they are dogmatic in form, invented or imposed by theological authority or philosophical speculation. They do not grow out of the experience of life, and cannot be verified by it. The reasons are in ultimate physiological facts, by virtue of which one is a woman and the other is a man." There is, however, more to be said on this point later.
It was probably, however, not so much the Church as Teutonic customs and the development of the feudal system, with the masculine and military ideals it fostered, that was chiefly decisive in fixing the inferior position of women in the mediaeval world. Even the ideas of chivalry, which have often been supposed to be peculiarly favorable to women, so far as they affected women seem to have been of little practical significance.
In his great work on chivalry Gautier brings forward much evidence to show that the feudal spirit, like the military spirit always and everywhere, on the whole involved at bottom a disdain for women, even though it occasionally idealized them. "Go into your painted and gilded rooms," we read in Renaus de Montauban, "sit in the shade, make yourselves comfortable, drink, eat, work tapestry, dye silk, but remember that you must not occupy yourselves with our affairs. Our business is to strike with the steel sword. Silence!" And if the woman insists she is struck on the face till the blood comes. The husband had a legal right to beat his wife, not only for adultery, but even for contradicting him. Women were not, however, entirely without power, and in a thirteenth century collection of Coutumes, it is set down that a husband must only beat his wife reasonably, resnablement. (As regards the husband"s right to chastise his wife, see also Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, vol. i, p. 234. In England it was not until the reign of Charles II, from which so many modern movements date, that the husband was deprived of this legal right.)
In the eyes of a feudal knight, it may be added, the beauty of a horse competed, often successfully, with the beauty of a woman. In Girbers de Metz, two knights, Garin and his cousin Girbert, ride by a window at which sits a beautiful girl with the face of a rose and the white flesh of a lily. "Look, cousin Girbert, look! By Saint Mary, a beautiful woman!" "Ah," Girbert replies, "a beautiful beast is my horse!" "I have never seen anything so charming as that young girl with her fresh color and her dark eyes," says Garin. "I know no steed to compare with mine," retorts Girbert. When the men were thus absorbed in the things that pertain to war, it is not surprising that amorous advances were left to young girls to make. "In all the chansons de geste," Gautier remarks, "it is the young girls who make the advances, often with effrontery," though, he adds, wives are represented as more virtuous (L. Gautier, La Chevalerie, pp. 236-8, 348-50).
In England Pollock and Maitland (History of English Law, vol. ii, p. 437) do not believe that a life-long tutela of women ever existed as among other Teutonic peoples. "From the Conquest onwards," Hobhouse states (op. cit., vol. i, p. 224), "the unmarried English woman, on attaining her majority, becomes fully equipped with all legal and civil rights, as much a legal personality as the Babylonian woman had been three thousand years before." But the developed English law more than made up for any privileges thus accorded to the unmarried by the inconsistent manner in which it swathed up the wife in endless folds of irresponsibility, except when she committed the supreme offence of injuring her lord and master. The English wife, as Hobhouse continues (loc. cit.) was, if not her husband"s slave, at any rate his liege subject; if she killed him it was "petty treason," the revolt of a subject against a sovereign in a miniature kingdom, and a more serious offence than murder. Murder she could not commit in his presence, for her personality was merged in him; he was responsible for most of her crimes and offences (it was that fact which gave him the right to chastise her), and he could not even enter into a contract with her, for that would be entering into a contract with himself. "The very being and legal existence of a woman is suspended during marriage," said Blackstone, "or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband, under whose wing, protection and cover she performs everything. So great a favorite," he added, "is the female s.e.x of the laws of England." "The strength of woman," says Hobhouse, interpreting the sense of the English law, "was her weakness. She conquered by yielding. Her gentleness had to be guarded from the turmoil of the world, her fragrance to be kept sweet and fresh, away from the dust and the smoke of battle. Hence her need of a champion and guardian."
In France the wife of the mediaeval and Renaissance periods occupied much the same position in her husband"s house. He was her absolute master and lord, the head and soul of "the feminine and feeble creature" who owed to him "perfect love and obedience." She was his chief servant, the eldest of his children, his wife and subject; she signed herself "your humble obedient daughter and friend," when she wrote to him. The historian, De Maulde la Claviere, who has brought together evidence on this point in his Femmes de la Renaissance, remarks that even though the husband enjoyed this lofty and superior position in marriage, it was still generally he, and not the wife, who complained of the hardships of marriage.
Law and custom a.s.sumed that a woman should be more or less under the protection of a man, and even the ideals of fine womanhood which arose in this society, during feudal and later times, were necessarily tinged by the same conception. It involved the inequality of women as compared with men, but under the social conditions of a feudal society such inequality was to woman"s advantage. Masculine force was the determining factor in life and it was necessary that every woman should have a portion of this force on her side. This sound and reasonable idea naturally tended to persist even after the growth of civilization rendered force a much less decisive factor in social life. In England in Queen Elizabeth"s time no woman must be masterless, although the feminine subjects of Queen Elizabeth had in their sovereign the object lesson of a woman who could play a very brilliant and effective part in life and yet remain absolutely masterless. Still later, in the eighteenth century, even so fine a moralist as Shaftesbury, in his Characteristics, refers to lovers of married women as invaders of property. If such conceptions still ruled even in the best minds, it is not surprising that in the same century, even in the following century, they were carried out into practice by less educated people who frankly bought and sold women.
Schrader, in his Reallexicon (art. "Brautkauf"), points out that, originally, the purchase of a wife was the purchase of her person, and not merely of the right of protecting her. The original conception probably persisted long in Great Britain on account of its remoteness from the centres of civilization. In the eleventh century Gregory VII desired Lanfranc to stop the sale of wives in Scotland and elsewhere in the island of the English (Pike, History of Crime in England, vol. i, p. 99). The practice never quite died out, however, in remote country districts.
Such transactions have taken place even in London. Thus in the Annual Register for 1767 (p. 99) we read: "About three weeks ago a bricklayer"s laborer at Marylebone sold a woman, whom he had cohabited with for several years, to a fellow-workman for a quarter guinea and a gallon of beer. The workman went off with the purchase, and she has since had the good fortune to have a legacy of 200, and some plate, left her by a deceased uncle in Devonshire. The parties were married last Friday."
The Rev. J. Edward Vaux (Church Folk-lore, second edition, p. 146) narrates two authentic cases in which women had been bought by their husbands in open market in the nineteenth century. In one case the wife, with her own full consent, was brought to market with a halter round her neck, sold for half a crown, and led to her new home, twelve miles off by the new husband who had purchased her; in the other case a publican bought another man"s wife for a two-gallon jar of gin.
It is the same conception of woman as property which, even to the present, has caused the retention in many legal codes of clauses rendering a man liable to pay pecuniary damages to a woman, previously a virgin, whom he has intercourse with and subsequently forsakes (Natalie Fuchs, "Die Jungfernschaft im Recht und Sitte," s.e.xual-Probleme, Feb., 1908). The woman is "dishonored" by s.e.xual intercourse, depreciated in her market value, exactly as a new garment becomes "second-hand," even if it has but once been worn. A man, on the other hand, would disdain the idea that his personal value could be diminished by any number of acts of s.e.xual intercourse.
This fact has even led some to advocate the "abolition of physical virginity." Thus the German auth.o.r.ess of Una Poenitentium (1907), considering that the protection of a woman is by no means so well secured by a little piece of membrane as by the presence of a true and watchful soul inside, advocates the operation of removal of the hymen in childhood. It is undoubtedly true that the undue importance attached to the hymen has led to a false conception of feminine "honor," and to an unwholesome conception of feminine purity.
Custom and law are slowly changing in harmony with changed social conditions which no longer demand the subjection of women either in their own interests or in the interests of the community. Concomitantly with these changes a different ideal of womanly personality is developing. It is true that the ancient ideal of the lordship of the husband over the wife is still more or less consciously affirmed around us. The husband frequently dictates to the wife what avocations she may not pursue, what places she may not visit, what people she may not know, what books she may not read. He a.s.sumes to control her, even in personal matters having no direct concern with himself, by virtue of the old masculine prerogative of force which placed a woman under the hand, as the ancient patriarchal legists termed it, of a man. It is, however, becoming more and more widely recognized that such a part is not suited to the modern man. The modern man, as Rosa Mayreder has pointed out in a thoughtful essay,[292] is no longer equipped to play this domineering part in relation to his wife. The "n.o.ble savage," leading a wild life on mountain and in forest, hunting dangerous beasts and scalping enemies when necessary, may occasionally bring his club gently and effectively on to the head of his wife, even, it may be, with grateful appreciation on her part.[293] But the modern man, who for the most part spends his days tamely at a desk, who has been trained to endure silently the insults and humiliations which superior officials or patronizing clients may inflict upon him, this typical modern man is no longer able to a.s.sume effectually the part of the "n.o.ble savage" when he returns to his home. He is indeed so unfitted for the part that his wife resents his attempts to play it. He is gradually recognizing this, even apart from any consciousness of the general trend of civilization. The modern man of ideas recognizes that, as a matter of principle, his wife is ent.i.tled to equality with himself; the modern man of the world feels that it would be both ridiculous and inconvenient not to accord his wife much the same kind of freedom which he himself possesses. And, moreover, while the modern man has to some extent acquired feminine qualities, the modern woman has to a corresponding extent acquired masculine qualities.
Brief and summary as the preceding discussion has necessarily been, it will have served to bring us face to face with the central fact in the s.e.xual morality which the growth of civilization has at the present day rendered inevitable: personal responsibility. "The responsible human being, man or woman, is the centre of modern ethics as of modern law;" that is the conclusion reached by Hobhouse in his discussion of the evolution of human morality.[294] The movement which is taking place among us to liberate s.e.xual relationships from an excessive bondage to fixed and arbitrary regulations would have been impossible and mischievous but for the concomitant growth of a sense of personal responsibility in the members of the community. It could not indeed have subsisted for a single year without degenerating into license and disorder. Freedom in s.e.xual relations involves mutual trust and that can only rest on a basis of personal responsibility. Where there can be no reliance on personal responsibility there can be no freedom. In most fields of moral action this sense of personal responsibility is acquired at a fairly early stage of social progress. s.e.xual morality is the last field of morality to be brought within the sphere of personal responsibility. The community imposes the most varied, complicated, and artificial codes of s.e.xual morality on its members, especially its feminine members, and, naturally enough, it is always very suspicious of their ability to observe these codes, and is careful to allow them, so far as possible, no personal responsibility in the matter. But a training in restraint, when carried through a long series of generations, is the best preparation for freedom. The law laid on the earlier generations, as old theology stated the matter, has been the schoolmaster to bring the later generations to Christ; or, as new science expresses exactly the same idea, the later generations have become immunized and have finally acquired a certain degree of protection against the virus which would have destroyed the earlier generations.
The process by which a people acquires the sense of personal responsibility is slow, and perhaps it cannot be adequately acquired at all by races lacking a high grade of nervous organization. This is especially the case as regards s.e.xual morality, and has often been ill.u.s.trated on the contact of a higher with a lower civilization. It has constantly happened that missionaries-entirely against their own wishes, it need not be said-by overthrowing the strict moral system they have found established, and by subst.i.tuting the freedom of European customs among people entirely unprepared for such freedom, have exerted the most disastrous effects on morality. This has been the case among the formerly well-organized and highly moral Baganda of Central Africa, as recorded in an official report by Colonel Lambkin (British Medical Journal, Oct. 3, 1908).
As regards Polynesia, also, R. L. Stevenson, in his interesting book, In the South Seas (Ch. V), pointed out that, while before the coming of the whites the Polynesians were, on the whole, chaste, and the young carefully watched, now it is far otherwise.
Even in Fiji, where, according to Lord Stanmore-who was High Commissioner of the Pacific, and an independent critic-missionary effort has been "wonderfully successful," where all own at least nominal allegiance to Christianity, which has much modified life and character, yet chast.i.ty has suffered. This was shown by a Royal Commission on the condition of the native races in Fiji. Mr. Fitchett, commenting on this report (Australasian Review of Reviews, Oct., 1897) remarks: "Not a few witnesses examined by the commission declare that the moral advance in Fiji is of a curiously patchy type. The abolition of polygamy, for example, they say, has not told at every point in favor of women. The woman is the toiler in Fiji; and when the support of the husband was distributed over four wives, the burden on each wife was less than it is now, when it has to be carried by one. In heathen times female chast.i.ty was guarded by the club; a faithless wife, an unmarried mother, was summarily put to death. Christianity has abolished club-law, and purely moral restraints, or the terror of the penalties of the next world, do not, to the limited imagination of the Fijian, quite take its place. So the standard of Fijian chast.i.ty is distressingly low."
It must always be remembered that when the highly organized primitive system of mixed spiritual and physical restraints is removed, chast.i.ty becomes more delicately and unstably poised. The controlling power of personal responsibility, valuable and essential as it is, cannot permanently and unremittingly restrain the volcanic forces of the pa.s.sion of love even in high civilizations. "No perfection of moral const.i.tution in a woman," Hinlon has well said, "no power of will, no wish and resolution to be "good," no force of religion or control of custom, can secure what is called the virtue of woman. The emotion of absolute devotion with which some man may inspire her will sweep them all away. Society, in choosing to erect itself on that basis, chooses inevitable disorder, and so long as it continues to choose it will continue to have that result."
It is necessary to insist for a while on this personal responsibility in matters of s.e.xual morality, in the form in which it is making itself felt among us, and to search out its implications. The most important of these is undoubtedly economic independence. That is indeed so important that moral responsibility in any fine sense can scarcely be said to have any existence in its absence. Moral responsibility and economic independence are indeed really identical; they are but two sides of the same social fact. The responsible person is the person who is able to answer for his actions and, if need be, to pay for them. The economically dependent person can accept a criminal responsibility; he can, with an empty purse, go to prison or to death. But in the ordinary sphere of everyday morality that large penalty is not required of him; if he goes against the wishes of his family or his friends or his parish, they may turn their backs on him but they cannot usually demand against him the last penalties of the law. He can exert his own personal responsibility, he can freely choose to go his own way and to maintain himself in it before his fellowmen on one condition, that he is able to pay for it. His personal responsibility has little or no meaning except in so far as it is also economic independence.
In civilized societies as they attain maturity, the women tend to acquire a greater and greater degree alike of moral responsibility and economic independence. Any freedom and seeming equality of women, even when it actually a.s.sumes the air of superiority, which is not so based, is unreal. It is only on sufferance; it is the freedom accorded to the child, because it asks for it so prettily or may scream if it is refused. This is merely parasitism.[295] The basis of economic independence ensures a more real freedom. Even in societies which by law and custom hold women in strict subordination, the woman who happens to be placed in possession of property enjoys a high degree alike of independence and of responsibility.[296] The growth of a high civilization seems indeed to be so closely identified with the economic freedom and independence of women that it is difficult to say which is cause and which effect. Herodotus, in his fascinating account of Egypt, a land which he regarded as admirable beyond all other lands, noted with surprise that, totally unlike the fashion of Greece, women left the men at home to the management of the loom and went to market to transact the business of commerce.[297] It is the economic factor in social life which secures the moral responsibility of women and which chiefly determines the position of the wife in relation to her husband.[298] In this respect in its late stages civilization returns to the same point it had occupied at the beginning, when, as has already been noted, we find greater equality with men and at the same time greater economic independence.[299]
In all the leading modern civilized countries, for a century past, custom and law have combined to give an ever greater economic independence to women. In some respects England took the lead by inaugurating the great industrial movement which slowly swept women into its ranks,[300] and made inevitable the legal changes which, by 1882, insured to a married woman the possession of her own earnings. The same movement, with its same consequences, is going on elsewhere. In the United States, just as in England, there is a vast army of five million women, rapidly increasing, who earn their own living, and their position in relation to men workers is even better than in England. In France from twenty-five to seventy-five per cent. of the workers in most of the chief industries-the liberal professions, commerce, agriculture, factory industries-are women, and in some of the very largest, such as home industries and textile industries, more women are employed than men. In j.a.pan, it is said, three-fifths of the factory workers are women, and all the textile industries are in the hands of women.[301] This movement is the outward expression of the modern conception of personal rights, personal moral worth, and personal responsibility, which, as Hobhouse has remarked, has compelled women to take their lives into their own hands, and has at the same time rendered the ancient marriage laws an anachronism, and the ancient ideals of feminine innocence shrouded from the world a mere piece of false sentiment.[302]
There can be no doubt that the entrance of women into the field of industrial work, in rivalry with men and under somewhat the same conditions as men, raises serious questions of another order. The general tendency of civilization towards the economic independence and the moral responsibility of women is unquestionable. But it is by no means absolutely clear that it is best for women, and, therefore, for the community, that women should exercise all the ordinary avocations and professions of men on the same level as men. Not only have the conditions of the avocations and professions developed in accordance with the special apt.i.tudes of men, but the fact that the s.e.xual processes by which the race is propagated demand an incomparably greater expenditure of time and energy on the part of women than of men, precludes women in the ma.s.s from devoting themselves so exclusively as men to industrial work. For some biologists, indeed, it seems clear that outside the home and the school women should not work at all. "Any nation that works its women is d.a.m.ned," says Woods Hutchinson (The Gospel According to Darwin, p. 199). That view is extreme. Yet from the economic side, also, Hobson, in summing up this question, regards the tendency of machine-industry to drive women away from the home as "a tendency antagonistic to civilization." The neglect of the home, he states, is, "on the whole, the worst injury modern industry has inflicted on our lives, and it is difficult to see how it can be compensated by any increase of material products. Factory life for women, save in extremely rare cases, saps the physical and moral health of the family. The exigencies of factory life are inconsistent with the position of a good mother, a good wife, or the maker of a home. Save in extreme circ.u.mstances, no increase of the family wage can balance these losses, whose values stand upon a higher qualitative level" (J. A. Hobson, Evolution of Modern Capitalism, Ch. XII; cf. what has been said in Ch. I of the present volume). It is now beginning to be recognized that the early pioneers of the "woman"s movement" in working to remove the "subjection of woman" were still dominated by the old ideals of that subjection, according to which the masculine is in all main respects the superior s.e.x. Whatever was good for man, they thought, must be equally good for woman. That has been the source of all that was unbalanced and unstable, sometimes both a little pathetic and a little absurd, in the old "woman"s movement." There was a failure to perceive that, first of all, women must claim their right to their own womanhood as mothers of the race, and thereby the supreme law-givers in the sphere of s.e.x and the large part of life dependent on s.e.x. This special position of woman seems likely to require a readjustment of economic conditions to their needs, though it is not likely that such readjustment would be permitted to affect their independence or their responsibility. We have had, as Madame Juliette Adam has put it, the rights of men sacrificing women, followed by the rights of women sacrificing the child; that must be followed by the rights of the child reconst.i.tuting the family. It has already been necessary to touch on this point in the first chapter of this volume, and it will again be necessary in the last chapter.
The question as to the method by which the economic independence of women will be completely insured, and the part which the community may be expected to take in insuring it, on the ground of woman"s special child-bearing functions, is from the present point of view subsidiary. There can be no doubt, however, as to the reality of the movement in that direction, whatever doubt there may be as to the final adjustment of the details. It is only necessary in this place to touch on some of the general and more obvious respects in which the growth of woman"s responsibility is affecting s.e.xual morality.
The first and most obvious way in which the sense of moral responsibility works is in an insistence on reality in the relationships of s.e.x. Moral irresponsibility has too often combined with economic dependence to induce a woman to treat the s.e.xual event in her life which is biologically of most fateful gravity as a merely gay and trivial event, at the most an event which has given her a triumph over her rivals and over the superior male, who, on his part, willingly condescends, for the moment, to a.s.sume the part of the vanquished. "Gallantry to the ladies," we are told of the hero of the greatest and most typical of English novels, "was among his principles of honor, and he held it as much inc.u.mbent on him to accept a challenge to love as if it had been a challenge to fight;" he heroically goes home for the night with a lady of t.i.tle he meets at a masquerade, though at the time very much in love with the girl whom he eventually marries.[303] The woman whose power lies only in her charms, and who is free to allow the burden of responsibility to fall on a man"s shoulder,[304] could lightly play the seducing part, and thereby exert independence and authority in the only shapes open to her. The man on his part, introducing the misplaced idea of "honor" into the field from which the natural idea of responsibility has been banished, is prepared to descend at the lady"s bidding into the arena, according to the old legend, and rescue the glove, even though he afterwards flings it contemptuously in her face. The ancient conception of gallantry, which Tom Jones so well embodies, is the direct outcome of a system involving the moral irresponsibility and economic dependence of women, and is as opposed to the conceptions, prevailing in the earlier and later civilized stages, of approximate s.e.xual equality as it is to the biological traditions of natural courtship in the world generally.
In controlling her own s.e.xual life, and in realizing that her responsibility for such control can no longer be shifted on to the shoulders of the other s.e.x, women will also indirectly affect the s.e.xual lives of men, much as men already affect the s.e.xual lives of women. In what ways that influence will in the main be exerted it is still premature to say. According to some, just as formerly men bought their wives and demanded prenuptial virginity in the article thus purchased, so nowadays, among the better cla.s.ses, women are able to buy their husbands, and in their turn are disposed to demand continence.[305] That, however, is too simple-minded a way of viewing the question. It is enough to refer to the fact that women are not attracted to virginal innocence in men and that they frequently have good ground for viewing such innocence with suspicion.[306] Yet it may well be believed that women will more and more prefer to exert a certain discrimination in the approval of their husbands" past lives. However instinctively a woman may desire that her husband shall be initiated in the art of making love to her, she may often well doubt whether the finest initiation is to be secured from the average prost.i.tute. Prost.i.tution, as we have seen, is ultimately as incompatible with complete s.e.xual responsibility as is the patriarchal marriage system with which it has been so closely a.s.sociated. It is an arrangement mainly determined by the demands of men, to whatever extent it may have incidentally subserved various needs of women. Men arranged that one group of women should be set apart to minister exclusively to their s.e.xual necessities, while another group should be brought up in asceticism as candidates for the privilege of ministering to their household and family necessities. That this has been in many respects a most excellent arrangement is sufficiently proved by the fact that it has nourished for so long a period, notwithstanding the influences that are antagonistic to it. But it is obviously only possible during a certain stage of civilization and in a.s.sociation with a certain social organization. It is not completely congruous with a democratic stage of civilization involving the economic independence and the s.e.xual responsibility of both s.e.xes alike in all social cla.s.ses. It is possible that women may begin to realize this fact earlier than men.
It is also believed by many that women will realize that a high degree of moral responsibility is not easily compatible with the practice of dissimulation and that economic independence will deprive deceit-which is always the resort of the weak-of whatever moral justification it may possess. Here, however, it is necessary to speak with caution or we may be unjust to women. It must be remarked that in the sphere of s.e.x men also are often the weak, and are therefore apt to resort to the refuge of the weak. With the recognition of that fact we may also recognize that deception in women has been the cause of much of the age-long blunders of the masculine mind in the contemplation of feminine ways. Men have constantly committed the double error of overlooking the dissimulation of women and of over-estimating it. This fact has always served to render more difficult still the inevitably difficult course of women through the devious path of s.e.xual behavior. Pepys, who represents so vividly and so frankly the vices and virtues of the ordinary masculine mind, tells how one day when he called to see Mrs. Martin her sister Doll went out for a bottle of wine and came back indignant because a Dutchman had pulled her into a stable and tumbled and tossed her. Pepys having been himself often permitted to take liberties with her, it seemed to him that her indignation with the Dutchman was "the best instance of woman"s falseness in the world."[307] He a.s.sumes without question that a woman who has accorded the privilege of familiarity to a man she knows and, one hopes, respects, would be prepared to accept complacently the brutal attentions of the first drunken stranger she meets in the street.
It was the a.s.sumption of woman"s falseness which led the ultra-masculine Pepys into a sufficiently absurd error. At this point, indeed, we encounter what has seemed to some a serious obstacle to the full moral responsibility of women. Dissimulation, Lombroso and Ferrero argue, is in woman "almost physiological," and they give various grounds for this conclusion.[308] The theologians, on their side, have reached a similar conclusion. "A confessor must not immediately believe a woman"s words," says Father Gury, "for women are habitually inclined to lie."[309] This tendency, which seems to be commonly believed to affect women as a s.e.x, however free from it a vast number of individual women are, may be said, and with truth, to be largely the result of the subjection of women and therefore likely to disappear as that subjection disappears. In so far, however, as it is "almost physiological," and based on radical feminine characters, such as modesty, affectability, and sympathy, which have an organic basis in the feminine const.i.tution and can therefore never altogether be changed, feminine dissimulation seems scarcely likely to disappear. The utmost that can be expected is that it should be held in check by the developed sense of moral responsibility, and, being reduced to its simply natural proportions, become recognizably intelligible.
It is unnecessary to remark that there can be no question here as to any inherent moral superiority of one s.e.x over the other. The answer to that question was well stated many years ago by one of the most subtle moralists of love. "Taken altogether," concluded Senancour (De l"Amour, vol. ii, p. 85), "we have no reason to a.s.sert the moral superiority of either s.e.x. Both s.e.xes, with their errors and their good intentions, very equally fulfil the ends of nature. We may well believe that in either of the two divisions of the human species the sum of evil and that of good are about equal. If, for instance, as regards love, we oppose the visibly licentious conduct of men to the apparent reserve of women, it would be a vain valuation, for the number of faults committed by women with men is necessarily the same as that of men with women. There exist among us fewer scrupulous men than perfectly honest women, but it is easy to see how the balance is restored. If this question of the moral preeminence of one s.e.x over the other were not insoluble it would still remain very complicated with reference to the whole of the species, or even the whole of a nation, and any dispute here seems idle."
This conclusion is in accordance with the general compensatory and complementary relationship of women to men (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, fourth edition, especially pp. 448 et seq.).
In a recent symposium on the question whether women are morally inferior to men, with special reference to apt.i.tude for loyalty (La Revue, Jan. 1, 1909), to which various distinguished French men and women contributed their opinions, some declared that women are usually superior; others regarded it as a question of difference rather than of superiority or inferiority; all were agreed that when they enjoy the same independence as men, women are quite as loyal as men.
It is undoubtedly true that-partly as a result of ancient traditions and education, partly of genuine feminine characteristics-many women are diffident as to their right to moral responsibility and unwilling to a.s.sume it. And an attempt is made to justify their att.i.tude by a.s.serting that woman"s part in life is naturally that of self-sacrifice, or, to put the statement in a somewhat more technical form, that women are naturally m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic; and that there is, as Krafft-Ebing argues, a natural "s.e.xual subjection" of woman. It is by no means clear that this statement is absolutely true, and if it were true it would not serve to abolish the moral responsibility of women.
Bloch (Beitrage zur aetiologie der Psychopathia s.e.xualis, Part II, p. 178), in agreement with Eulenburg, energetically denies that there is any such natural "s.e.xual subjection" of women, regarding it as artificially produced, the result of the socially inferior position of women, and arguing that such subjection is in much higher degree a physiological characteristic of men than of women. (It has been necessary to discuss this question in dealing with "Love and Pain" in the third volume of these Studies.) It seems certainly clear that the notion that women are especially p.r.o.ne to self-sacrifice has little biological validity. Self-sacrifice by compulsion, whether physical or moral compulsion, is not worthy of the name; when it is deliberate it is simply the sacrifice of a lesser good for the sake of a greater good. Doubtless a man who eats a good dinner may be said to "sacrifice" his hunger. Even within the sphere of traditional morality a woman who sacrifices her "honor" for the sake of her love to a man has, by her "sacrifice," gained something that she values more. "What a triumph it is to a woman," a woman has said, "to give pleasure to a man she loves!" And in a morality on a sound biological basis no "sacrifice" is here called for. It may rather be said that the biological laws of courtship fundamentally demand self-sacrifice of the male rather than of the female. Thus the lioness, according to Gerard the lion-hunter, gives herself to the most vigorous of her lion wooers; she encourages them to fight among themselves for superiority, lying on her belly to gaze at the combat and lashing her tail with delight. Every female is wooed by many males, but she only accepts one; it is not the female who is called upon for erotic self-sacrifice, but the male. That is indeed part of the divine compensation of Nature, for since the heavier part of the burden of s.e.x rests on the female, it is fitting that she should be less called upon for renunciation.
It thus seems probable that the increase of moral responsibility may tend to make a woman"s conduct more intelligible to others;[310] it will in any case certainly tend to make it less the concern of others. This is emphatically the case as regards the relations of s.e.x. In the past men have been invited to excel in many forms of virtue; only one virtue has been open to women. That is no longer possible. To place upon a woman the main responsibility for her own s.e.xual conduct is to deprive that conduct of its conspicuously public character as a virtue or a vice. s.e.xual union, for a woman as much as for a man, is a physiological fact; it may also be a spiritual fact; but it is not a social act. It is, on the contrary, an act which, beyond all other acts, demands retirement and mystery for its accomplishment. That indeed is a general human, almost zoological, fact. Moreover, this demand of mystery is more especially made by woman in virtue of her greater modesty which, we have found reason to believe, has a biological basis. It is not until a child is born or conceived that the community has any right to interest itself in the s.e.xual acts of its members. The s.e.xual act is of no more concern to the community than any other private physiological act. It is an impertinence, if not an outrage, to seek to inquire into it. But the birth of a child is a social act. Not what goes into the womb but what comes out of it concerns society. The community is invited to receive a new citizen. It is ent.i.tled to demand that that citizen shall be worthy of a place in its midst and that he shall be properly introduced by a responsible father and a responsible mother. The whole of s.e.xual morality, as Ellen Key has said, revolves round the child.
At this final point in our discussion of s.e.xual morality we may perhaps be able to realize the immensity of the change which has been involved by the development in women of moral responsibility. So long as responsibility was denied to women, so long as a father or a husband, backed up by the community, held himself responsible for a woman"s s.e.xual behavior, for her "virtue," it was necessary that the whole of s.e.xual morality should revolve around the entrance to the v.a.g.i.n.a. It became absolutely essential to the maintenance of morality that all eyes in the community should be constantly directed on to that point, and the whole marriage law had to be adjusted accordingly. That is no longer possible. When a woman a.s.sumes her own moral responsibility, in s.e.xual as in other matters, it becomes not only intolerable but meaningless for the community to pry into her most intimate physiological or spiritual acts. She is herself directly responsible to society as soon as she performs a social act, and not before.
In relation to the fact of maternity the realization of all that is involved in the new moral responsibility of women is especially significant. Under a system of morality by which a man is left free to accept the responsibility for his s.e.xual acts while a woman is not equally free to do the like, a premium is placed on s.e.xual acts which have no end in procreation, and a penalty is placed on the acts which lead to procreation. The reason is that it is the former cla.s.s of acts in which men find chief gratification; it is the latter cla.s.s in which women find chief gratification. For the tragic part of the old s.e.xual morality in its bearing on women was that while it made men alone morally responsible for s.e.xual acts in which both a man and a woman took part, women were rendered both socially and legally incapable of availing themselves of the fact of masculine responsibility unless they had fulfilled conditions which men had laid down for them, and yet refrained from imposing upon themselves. The act of s.e.xual intercourse, being the s.e.xual act in which men found chief pleasure, was under all circ.u.mstances an act of little social gravity; the act of bringing a child into the world, which is for women the most ma.s.sively gratifying of all s.e.xual acts, was counted a crime unless the mother had before fulfilled the conditions demanded by man. That was perhaps the most unfortunate and certainly the most unnatural of the results of the patriarchal regulation of society. It has never existed in any great State where women have possessed some degree of regulative power.
It has, of course, been said by abstract theorists that women have the matter in their own hands. They must never love a man until they have safely locked him up in the legal bonds of matrimony. Such an argument is absolutely futile, for it ignores the fact that, while love and even monogamy are natural, legal marriage is merely an external form, with a very feeble power of subjugating natural impulses, except when those impulses are weak, and no power at all of subjugating them permanently. Civilization involves the growth of foresight, and of self-control in both s.e.xes; but it is foolish to attempt to place on these fine and ultimate outgrowths of civilization a strain which they could never bear. How foolish it is has been shown, once and for all, by Lea in his admirable History of Sacerdotal Celibacy.
Moreover, when we compare the respective apt.i.tudes of men and women in this particular region, it must be remembered that men possess a greater power of forethought and self-control than women, notwithstanding the modesty and reserve of women. The s.e.xual sphere is immensely larger in women, so that when its activity is once aroused it is much more difficult to master or control. (The reasons were set out in detail in the discussion of "The s.e.xual Impulse in Women" in volume iii of these Studies.) It is, therefore, unfair to women, and unduly favors men, when too heavy a premium is placed on forethought and self-restraint in s.e.xual matters. Since women play the predominant part in the s.e.xual field their natural demands, rather than those of men, must furnish the standard.
With the realization of the moral responsibility of women the natural relations of life spring back to their due biological adjustment. Motherhood is restored to its natural sacredness. It becomes the concern of the woman herself, and not of society nor of any individual, to determine the conditions under which the child shall be conceived. Society is ent.i.tled to require that the father shall in every case acknowledge the fact of his paternity, but it must leave the chief responsibility for all the circ.u.mstances of child-production to the mother. That is the point of view which is now gaining ground in all civilized lands both in theory and in practice.[311]
[257]
E.g., E. Belfort Bax, Outspoken Essays, p. 6.
[258]
Such reasons are connected with communal welfare. "All immoral acts result in communal unhappiness, all moral acts in communal happiness," as Prof. A. Mathews remarks, "Science and Morality," Popular Science Monthly, March, 1909.
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