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Title: Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6)
Author: Havelock Ellis
Release Date: October 8, 2004 [eBook #13615]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX,
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STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX, VOLUME VI
Sex in Relation to Society
by
HAVELOCK ELLIS
1927
PREFACE.
In the previous five volumes of these _Studies_, I have dealt mainly with
the sexual impulse in relation to its object, leaving out of account the
external persons and the environmental influences which yet may powerfully
affect that impulse and its gratification. We cannot afford, however, to
pass unnoticed this relationship of the sexual impulse to third persons
and to the community at large with all its anciently established
traditions. We have to consider sex in relation to society.
In so doing, it will be possible to discuss more summarily than in
preceding volumes the manifold and important problems that are presented
to us. In considering the more special questions of sexual psychology we
entered a neglected field and it was necessary to expend an analytic care
and precision which at many points had never been expended before on these
questions. But when we reach the relationships of sex to society we have
for the most part no such neglect to encounter. The subject of every
chapter in the present volume could easily form, and often has formed, the
topic of a volume, and the literature of many of these subjects is already
extremely voluminous. It must therefore be our main object here not to
accumulate details but to place each subject by turn, as clearly and
succinctly as may be, in relation to those fundamental principles of
sexual psychology which--so far as the data at present admit--have been
set forth in the preceding volumes.
It may seem to some, indeed, that in this exposition I should have
confined myself to the present, and not included so wide a sweep of the
course of human history and the traditions of the race. It may especially
seem that I have laid too great a stress on the influence of Christianity
in moulding sexual ideals and establishing sexual institutions. That, I am
convinced, is an error. It is because it is so frequently made that the
movements of progress among us--movements that can never at any period of
social history cease--are by many so seriously misunderstood. We cannot
escape from our traditions. There never has been, and never can be, any
"age of reason." The most ardent co-called "free-thinker," who casts aside
as he imagines the authority of the Christian past, is still held by that
past. If its traditions are not absolutely in his blood, they are
ingrained in the texture of all the social institutions into which he was
born and they affect even his modes of thinking. The latest modifications
of our institutions are inevitably influenced by the past form of those
institutions. We cannot realize where we are, nor whither we are moving,
unless we know whence we came. We cannot understand the significance of
the changes around us, nor face them with cheerful confidence, unless we
are acquainted with the drift of the great movements that stir all
civilization in never-ending cycles.
In discussing sexual questions which are very largely matters of social
hygiene we shall thus still be preserving the psychological point of view.
Such a point of view in relation to these matters is not only legitimate
but necessary. Discussions of social hygiene that are purely medical or
purely juridical or purely moral or purely theological not only lead to
conclusions that are often entirely opposed to each other but they
obviously fail to possess complete applicability to the complex human
personality. The main task before us must be to ascertain what best
expresses, and what best satisfies, the totality of the impulses and ideas
of civilized men and women. So that while we must constantly bear in mind
medical, legal, and moral demands--which all correspond in some respects
to some individual or social need--the main thing is to satisfy the
demands of the whole human person.
It is necessary to emphasize this point of view because it would seem
that no error is more common among writers on the hygienic and moral
problems of sex than the neglect of the psychological standpoint. They may
take, for instance, the side of sexual restraint, or the side of sexual
unrestraint, but they fail to realize that so narrow a basis is inadequate
for the needs of complex human beings. From the wider psychological
standpoint we recognize that we have to conciliate opposing impulses that
are both alike founded on the human psychic organism.
In the preceding volumes of these _Studies_ I have sought to refrain from
the expression of any personal opinion and to maintain, so far as
possible, a strictly objective attitude. In this endeavor, I trust, I have
been successful if I may judge from the fact that I have received the
sympathy and approval of all kinds of people, not less of the
rationalistic free-thinker than of the orthodox believer, of those who
accept, as well as of those who reject, our most current standards of
morality. This is as it should be, for whatever our criteria of the worth
of feelings and of conduct, it must always be of use to us to know what
exactly are the feelings of people and how those feelings tend to affect
their conduct. In the present volume, however, where social traditions
necessarily come in for consideration and where we have to discuss the
growth of those traditions in the past and their probable evolution in the
future, I am not sanguine that the objectivity of my attitude will be
equally clear to the reader. I have here to set down not only what people
actually feel and do but what I think they are tending to feel and do.
That is a matter of estimation only, however widely and however cautiously
it is approached; it cannot be a matter of absolute demonstration. I trust
that those who have followed me in the past will bear with me still, even
if it is impossible for them always to accept the conclusions I have
myself reached.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
Carbis Bay, Cornwall, England.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE MOTHER AND HER CHILD.
The Child's Right to Choose Its Ancestry--How This is Effected--The Mother
the Child's Supreme Parent--Motherhood and the Woman Movement--The Immense
Importance of Motherhood--Infant Mortality and Its Causes--The Chief Cause
in the Mother--The Need of Rest During Pregnancy--Frequency of Premature
Birth--The Function of the State--Recent Advance in Puericulture--The
Question of Coitus During Pregnancy--The Need of Rest During
Lactation--The Mother's Duty to Suckle Her Child--The Economic
Question--The Duty of the State--Recent Progress in the Protection of the
Mother--The Fallacy of State Nurseries.
CHAPTER II.
SEXUAL EDUCATION.
Nurture Necessary as Well as Breed--Precocious Manifestations of the
Sexual Impulse--Are they to be Regarded as Normal?--The Sexual Play of
Children--The Emotion of Love in Childhood--Are Town Children More
Precocious Sexually Than Country Children?--Children's Ideas Concerning
the Origin of Babies--Need for Beginning the Sexual Education of Children
in Early Years--The Importance of Early Training in Responsibility--Evil
of the Old Doctrine of Silence in Matters of Sex--The Evil Magnified When
Applied to Girls--The Mother the Natural and Best Teacher--The Morbid
Influence of Artificial Mystery in Sex Matters--Books on Sexual
Enlightenment of the Young--Nature of the Mother's Task--Sexual Education
in the School--The Value of Botany--Zoölogy--Sexual Education After
Puberty--The Necessity of Counteracting Quack Literature--Danger of
Neglecting to Prepare for the First Onset of Menstruation--The Right
Attitude Towards Woman's Sexual Life--The Vital Necessity of the Hygiene
of Menstruation During Adolescence--Such Hygiene Compatible with the
Educational and Social Equality of the Sexes--The Invalidism of Women
Mainly Due to Hygienic Neglect--Good Influence of Physical Training on
Women and Bad Influence of Athletics--The Evils of Emotional
Suppression--Need of Teaching the Dignity of Sex--Influence of These
Factors on a Woman's Fate in Marriage--Lectures and Addresses on Sexual
Hygiene--The Doctor's Part in Sexual Education--Pubertal Initiation Into
the Ideal World--The Place of the Religious and Ethical Teacher--The
Initiation Rites of Savages Into Manhood and Womanhood--The Sexual
Influence of Literature--The Sexual Influence of Art.
CHAPTER III.
SEXUAL EDUCATION AND NAKEDNESS.
The Greek Attitude Towards Nakedness--How the Romans Modified That
Attitude--The Influence of Christianity--Nakedness in Mediæval
Times--Evolution of the Horror of Nakedness--Concomitant Change in the
Conception of Nakedness--Prudery--The Romantic Movement--Rise of a New
Feeling in Regard to Nakedness--The Hygienic Aspect of Nakedness--How
Children May Be Accustomed to Nakedness--Nakedness Not Inimical to
Modesty--The Instinct of Physical Pride--The Value of Nakedness in
Education--The Æsthetic Value of Nakedness--The Human Body as One of the
Prime Tonics of Life--How Nakedness May Be Cultivated--The Moral Value of
Nakedness.
CHAPTER IV.
THE VALUATION OF SEXUAL LOVE.
The Conception of Sexual Love--The Attitude of Mediæval Asceticism--St.
Bernard and St. Odo of Cluny--The Ascetic Insistence on the Proximity of
the Sexual and Excretory Centres--Love as a Sacrament of Nature--The Idea
of the Impurity of Sex in Primitive Religions Generally--Theories of the
Origin of This Idea--The Anti-Ascetic Element in the Bible and Early
Christianity--Clement of Alexandria--St. Augustine's Attitude--The
Recognition of the Sacredness of the Body by Tertullian, Rufinus and
Athanasius--The Reformation--The Sexual Instinct Regarded as Beastly--The
Human Sexual Instinct Not Animal-like--Lust and Love--The Definition of
Love--Love and Names for Love Unknown in Some Parts of the World--Romantic
Love of Late Development in the White Race--The Mystery of Sexual
Desire--Whether Love is a Delusion--The Spiritual as Well as the Physical
Structure of the World in Part Built up on Sexual Love The Testimony of
Men of Intellect to the Supremacy of Love.
CHAPTER V.
THE FUNCTION OF CHASTITY.
Chastity Essential to the Dignity of Love--The Eighteenth Century Revolt
Against the Ideal of Chastity--Unnatural Forms of Chastity--The
Psychological Basis of Asceticism--Asceticism and Chastity as Savage
Virtues--The Significance of Tahiti--Chastity Among Barbarous
Peoples--Chastity Among the Early Christians--Struggles of the Saints with
the Flesh--The Romance of Christian Chastity--Its Decay in Mediæval
Times--_Aucassin et Nicolette_ and the New Romance of Chaste Love--The
Unchastity of the Northern Barbarians--The Penitentials--Influence of the
Renaissance and the Reformation--The Revolt Against Virginity as a
Virtue--The Modern Conception of Chastity as a Virtue--The Influences That
Favor the Virtue of Chastity--Chastity as a Discipline--The Value of
Chastity for the Artist--Potency and Impotence in Popular Estimation--The
Correct Definitions of Asceticism and Chastity.
CHAPTER VI.
THE PROBLEM OF SEXUAL ABSTINENCE.
The Influence of Tradition--The Theological Conception of Lust--Tendency
of These Influences to Degrade Sexual Morality--Their Result in Creating
the Problem of Sexual Abstinence--The Protests Against Sexual
Abstinence--Sexual Abstinence and Genius--Sexual Abstinence in Women--The
Advocates of Sexual Abstinence--Intermediate Attitude--Unsatisfactory
Nature of the Whole Discussion--Criticism of the Conception of Sexual
Abstinence--Sexual Abstinence as Compared to Abstinence from Food--No
Complete Analogy--The Morality of Sexual Abstinence Entirely Negative--Is
It the Physician's Duty to Advise Extra-Conjugal Sexual
Intercourse?--Opinions of Those Who Affirm or Deny This Duty--The
Conclusion Against Such Advice--The Physician Bound by the Social and
Moral Ideas of His Age--The Physician as Reformer--Sexual Abstinence and
Sexual Hygiene--Alcohol--The Influence of Physical and Mental
Exercise--The Inadequacy of Sexual Hygiene in This Field--The Unreal
Nature of the Conception of Sexual Abstinence--The Necessity of Replacing
It by a More Positive Ideal.
CHAPTER VII.
PROSTITUTION.
I. _The Orgy:_--The Religious Origin of the Orgy--The Feast of
Fools--Recognition of the Orgy by the Greeks and Romans--The Orgy Among
Savages--The Drama--The Object Subserved by the Orgy.
II. _The Origin and Development of Prostitution:_--The Definition of
Prostitution--Prostitution Among Savages--The Conditions Under Which
Professional Prostitution Arises--Sacred Prostitution--The Rite of
Mylitta--The Practice of Prostitution to Obtain a Marriage Portion--The
Rise of Secular Prostitution in Greece--Prostitution in the East--India,
China, Japan, etc.--Prostitution in Rome--The Influence of Christianity on
Prostitution--The Effort to Combat Prostitution--The Mediæval Brothel--The
Appearance of the Courtesan--Tullia D'Aragona--Veronica Franco--Ninon de
Lenclos--Later Attempts to Eradicate Prostitution--The Regulation of
Prostitution--Its Futility Becoming Recognized.
III. _The Causes of Prostitution:_--Prostitution as a Part of the Marriage
System--The Complex Causation of Prostitution--The Motives Assigned by
Prostitutes--(1) Economic Factor of Prostitution--Poverty Seldom the Chief
Motive for Prostitution--But Economic Pressure Exerts a Real
Influence--The Large Proportion of Prostitutes Recruited from Domestic
Service--Significance of This Fact--(2) The Biological Factor of
Prostitution--The So-called Born-Prostitute--Alleged Identity with the
Born-Criminal--The Sexual Instinct in Prostitutes--The Physical and
Psychic Characters of Prostitutes--(3) Moral Necessity as a Factor in the
Existence of Prostitution--The Moral Advocates of Prostitution--The Moral
Attitude of Christianity Towards Prostitution--The Attitude of
Protestantism--Recent Advocates of the Moral Necessity of
Prostitution--(4) Civilizational Value as a Factor of Prostitution--The
Influence of Urban Life--The Craving for Excitement--Why Servant-girls so
Often Turn to Prostitution--The Small Part Played by Seduction--Prostitutes
Come Largely from the Country--The Appeal of Civilization Attracts Women
to Prostitution--The Corresponding Attraction Felt by Men--The Prostitute
as Artist and Leader of Fashion--The Charm of Vulgarity.
IV. _The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution:_--The Decay of the
Brothel--The Tendency to the Humanization of Prostitution--The Monetary
Aspects of Prostitution--The Geisha--The Hetaira--The Moral Revolt Against
Prostitution--Squalid Vice Based on Luxurious Virtue--The Ordinary
Attitude Towards Prostitutes--Its Cruelty Absurd--The Need of Reforming
Prostitution--The Need of Reforming Marriage--These Two Needs Closely
Correlated--The Dynamic Relationships Involved.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE CONQUEST OF THE VENEREAL DISEASES.
The Significance of the Venereal Diseases--The History of Syphilis--The
Problem of Its Origin--The Social Gravity of Syphilis--The Social Dangers
of Gonorrhoea--The Modern Change in the Methods of Combating Venereal
Diseases--Causes of the Decay of the System of Police Regulation--Necessity
of Facing the Facts--The Innocent Victims of Venereal Diseases--Diseases
Not Crimes--The Principle of Notification--The Scandinavian
System--Gratuitous Treatment--Punishment For Transmitting
Venereal Diseases--Sexual Education in Relation to Venereal
Diseases--Lectures, Etc.--Discussion in Novels and on the Stage--The
"Disgusting" Not the "Immoral".
CHAPTER IX.
SEXUAL MORALITY.
Prostitution in Relation to Our Marriage System--Marriage and
Morality--The Definition of the Term "Morality"--Theoretical Morality--Its
Division Into Traditional Morality and Ideal Morality--Practical
Morality--Practical Morality Based on Custom--The Only Subject of
Scientific Ethics--The Reaction Between Theoretical and Practical
Morality--Sexual Morality in the Past an Application of Economic
Morality--The Combined Rigidity and Laxity of This Morality--The
Growth of a Specific Sexual Morality and the Evolution of Moral
Ideals--Manifestations of Sexual Morality--Disregard of the Forms of
Marriage--Trial Marriage--Marriage After Conception of Child--Phenomena in
Germany, Anglo-Saxon Countries, Russia, etc.--The Status of Woman--The
Historical Tendency Favoring Moral Equality of Women with Men--The Theory
of the Matriarchate--Mother-Descent--Women in Babylonia--Egypt--Rome--The
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries--The Historical Tendency
Favoring Moral Inequality of Woman--The Ambiguous Influence of
Christianity--Influence of Teutonic Custom and Feudalism--Chivalry--Woman
in England--The Sale of Wives--The Vanishing Subjection of
Woman--Inaptitude of the Modern Man to Domineer--The Growth of Moral
Responsibility in Women--The Concomitant Development of Economic
Independence--The Increase of Women Who Work--Invasion of the Modern
Industrial Field by Women--In How Far This Is Socially Justifiable--The
Sexual Responsibility of Women and Its Consequences--The Alleged Moral
Inferiority of Women--The "Self-Sacrifice" of Women--Society Not
Concerned with Sexual Relationships--Procreation the Sole Sexual Concern
of the State--The Supreme Importance of Maternity.
CHAPTER X.
MARRIAGE.
The Definition of Marriage--Marriage Among Animals--The Predominance of
Monogamy--The Question of Group Marriage--Monogamy a Natural Fact, Not
Based on Human Law--The Tendency to Place the Form of Marriage Above the
Fact of Marriage--The History of Marriage--Marriage in Ancient
Rome--Germanic Influence on Marriage--Bride-Sale--The Ring--The Influence
of Christianity on Marriage--The Great Extent of this Influence--The
Sacrament of Matrimony--Origin and Growth of the Sacramental
Conception--The Church Made Marriage a Public Act--Canon Law--Its Sound
Core--Its Development--Its Confusions and Absurdities--Peculiarities of
English Marriage Law--Influence of the Reformation on Marriage--The
Protestant Conception of Marriage as a Secular Contract--The Puritan
Reform of Marriage--Milton as the Pioneer of Marriage Reform--His Views on
Divorce--The Backward Position of England in Marriage Reform--Criticism of
the English Divorce Law--Traditions of the Canon Law Still Persistent--The
Question of Damages for Adultery--Collusion as a Bar to
Divorce--Divorce in France, Germany, Austria, Russia, etc.--The United
States--Impossibility of Deciding by Statute the Causes for
Divorce--Divorce by Mutual Consent--Its Origin and Development--Impeded by
the Traditions of Canon Law--Wilhelm von Humboldt--Modern Pioneer
Advocates of Divorce by Mutual Consent--The Arguments Against Facility of
Divorce--The Interests of the Children--The Protection of Women--The
Present Tendency of the Divorce Movement--Marriage Not a Contract--The
Proposal of Marriage for a Term of Years--Legal Disabilities and
Disadvantages in the Position of the Husband and the Wife--Marriage Not a
Contract But a Fact--Only the Non-Essentials of Marriage, Not the
Essentials, a Proper Matter for Contract--The Legal Recognition of
Marriage as a Fact Without Any Ceremony--Contracts of the Person Opposed
to Modern Tendencies--The Factor of Moral Responsibility--Marriage as an
Ethical Sacrament--Personal Responsibility Involves Freedom--Freedom the
Best Guarantee of Stability--False Ideas of Individualism--Modern Tendency
of Marriage--With the Birth of a Child Marriage Ceases to be a Private
Concern--Every Child Must Have a Legal Father and Mother--How This Can be
Effected--The Firm Basis of Monogamy--The Question of Marriage
Variations--Such Variations Not Inimical to Monogamy--The Most Common
Variations--The Flexibility of Marriage Holds Variations in
Check--Marriage Variations _versus_ Prostitution--Marriage on a Reasonable
and Humane Basis--Summary and Conclusion.
CHAPTER XI.
THE ART OF LOVE.
Marriage Not Only for Procreation--Theologians on the _Sacramentum
Solationis_--Importance of the _Art of Love_--The Basis of Stability in
Marriage and the Condition for Right Procreation--The Art of Love the
Bulwark Against Divorce--The Unity of Love and Marriage a Principle of
Modern Morality--Christianity and the Art of Love--Ovid--The Art of Love
Among Primitive Peoples--Sexual Initiation in Africa and Elsewhere--The
Tendency to Spontaneous Development of the Art of Love in Early
Life--Flirtation--Sexual Ignorance in Women--The Husband's Place in Sexual
Initiation--Sexual Ignorance in Men--The Husband's Education for
Marriage--The Injury Done by the Ignorance of Husbands--The Physical and
Mental Results of Unskilful Coitus--Women Understand the Art of Love
Better Than Men--Ancient and Modern Opinions Concerning Frequency of
Coitus--Variation in Sexual Capacity--The Sexual Appetite--The Art of Love
Based on the Biological Facts of Courtship--The Art of Pleasing Women--The
Lover Compared to the Musician--The Proposal as a Part of
Courtship--Divination in the Art of Love--The Importance of the
Preliminaries in Courtship--The Unskilful Husband Frequently the Cause of
the Frigid Wife--The Difficulty of Courtship--Simultaneous Orgasm--The
Evils of Incomplete Gratification in Women--Coitus Interruptus--Coitus
Reservatus--The Human Method of Coitus--Variations in Coitus--Posture in
Coitus--The Best Time for Coitus--The Influence of Coitus in Marriage--The
Advantages of Absence in Marriage--The Risks of Absence--Jealousy--The
Primitive Function of Jealousy--Its Predominance Among Animals, Savages,
etc, and in Pathological States--An Anti-Social Emotion--Jealousy
Incompatible With the Progress of Civilization--The Possibility of Loving
More Than One Person at a Time--Platonic Friendship--The Conditions Which
Make It Possible--The Maternal Element in Woman's Love--The Final
Development of Conjugal Love--The Problem of Love One of the Greatest Of
Social Questions.
CHAPTER XII.
THE SCIENCE OF PROCREATION.
The Relationship of the Science of Procreation to the Art of Love--Sexual
Desire and Sexual Pleasure as the Conditions of Conception--Reproduction
Formerly Left to Caprice and Lust--The Question of Procreation as a
Religious Question--The Creed of Eugenics--Ellen Key and Sir Francis
Galton--Our Debt to Posterity--The Problem of Replacing Natural
Selection--The Origin and Development of Eugenics--The General Acceptance
of Eugenical Principles To-day--The Two Channels by Which Eugenical
Principles are Becoming Embodied in Practice--The Sense of Sexual
Responsibility in Women--The Rejection of Compulsory Motherhood--The
Privilege of Voluntary Motherhood--Causes of the Degradation of
Motherhood--The Control of Conception--Now Practiced by the Majority of
the Population in Civilized Countries--The Fallacy of "Racial
Suicide"--Are Large Families a Stigma of Degeneration?--Procreative
Control the Outcome of Natural and Civilized Progress--The Growth of
Neo-Malthusian Beliefs and Practices--Facultative Sterility as Distinct
from Neo-Malthusianism--The Medical and Hygienic Necessity of Control of
Conception--Preventive Methods--Abortion--The New Doctrine of the Duty to
Practice Abortion--How Far is this Justifiable?--Castration as a Method of
Controlling Procreation--Negative Eugenics and Positive Eugenics--The
Question of Certificates for Marriage--The Inadequacy of Eugenics by Act
of Parliament--The Quickening of the Social Conscience in Regard to
Heredity--Limitations to the Endowment of Motherhood--The Conditions
Favorable to Procreation--Sterility--The Question of Artificial
Fecundation--The Best Age of Procreation--The Question of Early
Motherhood--The Best Time for Procreation--The Completion of the Divine
Cycle of Life.
CHAPTER I.
THE MOTHER AND HER CHILD.
The Child's Right to Choose Its Ancestry--How This is Effected--The Mother
the Child's Supreme Parent--Motherhood and the Woman Movement--The Immense
Importance of Motherhood--Infant Mortality and Its Causes--The Chief Cause
in the Mother--The Need of Rest During Pregnancy--Frequency of Premature
Birth--The Function of the State--Recent Advance in Puericulture--The
Question of Coitus During Pregnancy--The Need of Rest During
Lactation--The Mother's Duty to Suckle Her Child--The Economic
Question--The Duty of the State--Recent Progress in the Protection of the
Mother--The Fallacy of State Nurseries.
A man's sexual nature, like all else that is most essential in him, is
rooted in a soil that was formed very long before his birth. In this, as
in every other respect, he draws the elements of his life from his
ancestors, however new the recombination may be and however greatly it may
be modified by subsequent conditions. A man's destiny stands not in the
future but in the past. That, rightly considered, is the most vital of all
vital facts. Every child thus has a right to choose his own ancestors.
Naturally he can only do this vicariously, through his parents. It is the
most serious and sacred duty of the future father to choose one half of
the ancestral and hereditary character of his future child; it is the most
serious and sacred duty of the future mother to make a similar choice.[1]
In choosing each other they have between them chosen the whole ancestry of
their child. They have determined the stars that will rule his fate.
In the past that fateful determination has usually been made helplessly,
ignorantly, almost unconsciously. It has either been guided by an
instinct which, on the whole, has worked out fairly well, or controlled by
economic interests of the results of which so much cannot be said, or left
to the risks of lower than bestial chances which can produce nothing but
evil. In the future we cannot but have faith--for all the hope of humanity
must rest on that faith--that a new guiding impulse, reinforcing natural
instinct and becoming in time an inseparable accompaniment of it, will
lead civilized man on his racial course. Just as in the past the race has,
on the whole, been moulded by a natural, and in part sexual, selection,
that was unconscious of itself and ignorant of the ends it made towards,
so in the future the race will be moulded by deliberate selection, the
creative energy of Nature becoming self-conscious in the civilized brain
of man. This is not a faith which has its source in a vague hope. The
problems of the individual life are linked on to the fate of the racial
life, and again and again we shall find as we ponder the individual
questions we are here concerned with, that at all points they ultimately
converge towards this same racial end.
Since we have here, therefore, to follow out the sexual relationships of
the individual as they bear on society, it will be convenient at this
point to put aside the questions of ancestry and to accept the individual
as, with hereditary constitution already determined, he lies in his
mother's womb.
It is the mother who is the child's supreme parent. At various points in
zoölogical evolution it has seemed possible that the functions that we now
know as those of maternity would be largely and even equally shared by the
male parent. Nature has tried various experiments in this direction, among
the fishes, for instance, and even among birds. But reasonable and
excellent as these experiments were, and though they were sufficiently
sound to secure their perpetuation unto this day, it remains true that it
was not along these lines that Man was destined to emerge. Among all the
mammal predecessors of Man, the male is an imposing and important figure
in the early days of courtship, but after conception has once been secured
the mother plays the chief part in the racial life. The male must be
content to forage abroad and stand on guard when at home in the
ante-chamber of the family. When she has once been impregnated the female
animal angrily rejects the caresses she had welcomed so coquettishly
before, and even in Man the place of the father at the birth of his child
is not a notably dignified or comfortable one. Nature accords the male but
a secondary and comparatively humble place in the home, the breeding-place
of the race; he may compensate himself if he will, by seeking adventure
and renown in the world outside. The mother is the child's supreme parent,
and during the period from conception to birth the hygiene of the future
man can only be affected by influences which work through her.
Fundamental and elementary as is the fact of the predominant position of
the mother in relation to the life of the race, incontestable as it must
seem to all those who have traversed the volumes of these _Studies_ up to
the present point, it must be admitted that it has sometimes been
forgotten or ignored. In the great ages of humanity it has indeed been
accepted as a central and sacred fact. In classic Rome at one period the
house of the pregnant woman was adorned with garlands, and in Athens it
was an inviolable sanctuary where even the criminal might find shelter.
Even amid the mixed influences of the exuberantly vital times which
preceded the outburst of the Renaissance, the ideally beautiful woman, as
pictures still show, was the pregnant woman. But it has not always been
so. At the present time, for instance, there can be no doubt that we are
but beginning to emerge from a period during which this fact was often
disputed and denied, both in theory and in practice, even by women
themselves. This was notably the case both in England and America, and it
is probably owing in large part to the unfortunate infatuation which led
women in these lands to follow after masculine ideals that at the present
moment the inspirations of progress in women's movements come mainly
to-day from the women of other lands. Motherhood and the future of the
race were systematically belittled. Paternity is but a mere incident, it
was argued, in man's life: why should maternity be more than a mere
incident in woman's life? In England, by a curiously perverted form of
sexual attraction, women were so fascinated by the glamour that surrounded
men that they desired to suppress or forget all the facts of organic
constitution which made them unlike men, counting their glory as their
shame, and sought the same education as men, the same occupations as men,
even the same sports. As we know, there was at the origin an element of
rightness in this impulse.[2] It was absolutely right in so far as it was
a claim for freedom from artificial restriction, and a demand for economic
independence. But it became mischievous and absurd when it developed into
a passion for doing, in all respects, the same things as men do; how
mischievous and how absurd we may realize if we imagine men developing a
passion to imitate the ways and avocations of women. Freedom is only good
when it is a freedom to follow the laws of one's own nature; it ceases to
be freedom when it becomes a slavish attempt to imitate others, and would
be disastrous if it could be successful.[3]
At the present day this movement on the theoretical side has ceased to
possess any representatives who exert serious influence. Yet its practical
results are still prominently exhibited in England and the other countries
in which it has been felt. Infantile mortality is enormous, and in England
at all events is only beginning to show a tendency to diminish; motherhood
is without dignity, and the vitality of mothers is speedily crushed, so
that often they cannot so much as suckle their infants; ignorant
girl-mothers give their infants potatoes and gin; on every hand we are
told of the evidence of degeneracy in the race, or if not in the race, at
all events, in the young individuals of to-day.
It would be out of place, and would lead us too far, to discuss
here these various practical outcomes of the foolish attempt to
belittle the immense racial importance of motherhood. It is
enough here to touch on the one point of the excess of infantile
mortality.
In England--which is not from the social point of view in a very
much worse condition than most countries, for in Austria and
Russia the infant mortality is higher still, though in Australia
and New Zealand much lower, but still excessive--more than
one-fourth of the total number of deaths every year is of infants
under one year of age. In the opinion of medical officers of
health who are in the best position to form an opinion, about
one-half of this mortality, roughly speaking, is absolutely
preventable. Moreover, it is doubtful whether there is any real
movement of decrease in this mortality; during the past half
century it has sometimes slightly risen and sometimes slightly
fallen, and though during the past few years the general movement
of mortality for children under five in England and Wales has
shown a tendency to decrease, in London (according to J.F.J.
Sykes, although Sir Shirley Murphy has attempted to minimize the
significance of these figures) the infantile mortality rate for
the first three months of life actually rose from 69 per 1,000 in
the period 1888-1892 to 75 per 1,000 in the period 1898-1901.
(This refers, it must be remembered, to the period before the
introduction of the Notification of Births Act.) In any case,
although the general mortality shows a marked tendency to
improvement there is certainly no adequately corresponding
improvement in the infantile mortality. This is scarcely
surprising, when we realize that there has been no change for the
better, but rather for the worse, in the conditions under which
our infants are born and reared. Thus William Hall, who has had
an intimate knowledge extending over fifty-six years of the slums
of Leeds, and has weighed and measured many thousands of slum
children, besides examining over 120,000 boys and girls as to
their fitness for factory labor, states (_British Medical
Journal_, October 14, 1905) that "fifty years ago the slum mother
was much more sober, cleanly, domestic, and motherly than she is
to-day; she was herself better nourished and she almost always
suckled her children, and after weaning they received more
nutritious bone-making food, and she was able to prepare more
wholesome food at home." The system of compulsory education has
had an unfortunate influence in exerting a strain on the parents
and worsening the conditions of the home. For, excellent as
education is in itself, it is not the primary need of life, and
has been made compulsory before the more essential things of life
have been made equally compulsory. How absolutely unnecessary
this great mortality is may be shown, without evoking the good
example of Australia and New Zealand, by merely comparing small
English towns; thus while in Guildford the infantile death rate
is 65 per thousand, in Burslem it is 205 per thousand.
It is sometimes said that infantile mortality is an economic
question, and that with improvement in wages it would cease. This
is only true to a limited extent and under certain conditions. In
Australia there is no grinding poverty, but the deaths of infants
under one year of age are still between 80 and 90 per thousand,
and one-third of this mortality, according to Hooper (_British
Medical Journal_, 1908, vol. ii, p. 289), being due to the
ignorance of mothers and the dislike to suckling, is easily
preventable. The employment of married women greatly diminishes
the poverty of a family, but nothing can be worse for the welfare
of the woman as mother, or for the welfare of her child. Reid,
the medical officer of health for Staffordshire, where there are
two large centres of artisan population with identical health
conditions, has shown that in the northern centre, where a very
large number of women are engaged in factories, still-births are
three times as frequent as in the southern centre, where there
are practically no trade employments for women; the frequency of
abnormalities is also in the same ratio. The superiority of
Jewish over Christian children, again, and their lower infantile
mortality, seem to be entirely due to the fact that Jewesses are
better mothers. "The Jewish children in the slums," says William
Hall (_British Medical Journal_, October 14, 1905), speaking from
wide and accurate knowledge, "were superior in weight, in teeth,
and in general bodily development, and they seemed less
susceptible to infectious disease. Yet these Jews were
overcrowded, they took little exercise, and their unsanitary
environment was obvious. The fact was, their children were much
better nourished. The pregnant Jewess was more cared for, and no
doubt supplied better nutriment to the foetus. After the children
were born 90 per cent. received breast-milk, and during later
childhood they were abundantly fed on bone-making material; eggs
and oil, fish, fresh vegetables, and fruit entered largely into
their diet." G. Newman, in his important and comprehensive book
on _Infant Mortality_, emphasizes the conclusion that "first of
all we need a higher standard of physical motherhood." The
problem of infantile mortality, he declares (page 259), is not
one of sanitation alone, or housing, or indeed of poverty as
such, "_but is mainly a question of motherhood_."
The fundamental need of the pregnant woman is _rest_. Without a large
degree of maternal rest there can be no puericulture.[4] The task of
creating a man needs the whole of a woman's best energies, more especially
during the three months before birth. It cannot be subordinated to the tax
on strength involved by manual or mental labor, or even strenuous social
duties and amusements. The numerous experiments and observations which
have been made during recent years in Maternity Hospitals, more especially
in France, have shown conclusively that not only the present and future
well-being of the mother and the ease of her confinement, but the fate of
the child, are immensely influenced by rest during the last month of
pregnancy. "Every working woman is entitled to rest during the last three
months of her pregnancy." This formula was adopted by the International
Congress of Hygiene in 1900, but it cannot be practically carried out
except by the coöperation of the whole community. For it is not enough to
say that a woman ought to rest during pregnancy; it is the business of the
community to ensure that that rest is duly secured. The woman herself, and
her employer, we may be certain, will do their best to cheat the
community, but it is the community which suffers, both economically and
morally, when a woman casts her inferior children into the world, and in
its own interests the community is forced to control both employer and
employed. We can no longer allow it to be said, in Bouchacourt's words,
that "to-day the dregs of the human species--the blind, the deaf-mute, the
degenerate, the nervous, the vicious, the idiotic, the imbecile, the
cretins and epileptics--are better protected than pregnant women."[5]
Pinard, who must always be honored as one of the founders of
eugenics, has, together with his pupils, done much to prepare the
way for the acceptance of this simple but important principle by
making clear the grounds on which it is based. From prolonged
observations on the pregnant women of all classes Pinard has
shown conclusively that women who rest during pregnancy have
finer children than women who do not rest. Apart from the more
general evils of work during pregnancy, Pinard found that during
the later months it had a tendency to press the uterus down into
the pelvis, and so cause the premature birth of undeveloped
children, while labor was rendered more difficult and dangerous
(see, e.g., Pinard, _Gazette des Hôpitaux_, Nov. 28, 1895, Id.,
_Annales de Gynécologie_, Aug., 1898).
Letourneux has studied the question whether repose during
pregnancy is necessary for women whose professional work is only
slightly fatiguing. He investigated 732 successive confinements
at the Clinique Baudelocque in Paris. He found that 137 women
engaged in fatiguing occupations (servants, cooks, etc.) and not
resting during pregnancy, produced children with an average
weight of 3,081 grammes; 115 women engaged in only slightly
fatiguing occupations (dressmakers, milliners, etc.) and also not
resting during pregnancy, had children with an average weight of
3,130 grammes, a slight but significant difference, in view of
the fact that the women of the first group were large and robust,
while those of the second group were of slight and elegant build.
Again, comparing groups of women who rested during pregnancy, it
was found that the women accustomed to fatiguing work had
children with an average weight of 3,319 grammes, while those
accustomed to less fatiguing work had children with an average
weight of 3,318 grammes. The difference between repose and
non-repose is thus considerable, while it also enables robust
women exercising a fatiguing occupation to catch up, though not
to surpass, the frailer women exercising a less fatiguing
occupation. We see, too, that even in the comparatively
unfatiguing occupations of milliners, etc., rest during pregnancy
still remains important, and cannot safely be dispensed with.
"Society," Letourneux concludes, "must guarantee rest to women
not well off during a part of pregnancy. It will be repaid the
cost of doing so by the increased vigor of the children thus
produced" (Letourneux, _De l'Influence de la Profession de la
Mère sur le Poids de l'Enfant_, Thèse de Paris, 1897).
Dr. Dweira-Bernson (_Revue Pratique d'Obstétrique et de
Pédiatrie_, 1903, p. 370), compared four groups of pregnant women
(servants with light work, servants with heavy work, farm girls,
dressmakers) who rested for three months before confinement with
four groups similarly composed who took no rest before
confinement. In every group he found that the difference in the
average weight of the child was markedly in favor of the women
who rested, and it was notable that the greatest difference was
found in the case of the farm girls who were probably the most
robust and also the hardest worked.
The usual time of gestation ranges between 274 and 280 days (or
280 to 290 days from the last menstrual period), and occasionally
a few days longer, though there is dispute as to the length of
the extreme limit, which some authorities would extend to 300
days, or even to 320 days (Pinard, in Richet's _Dictionnaire de
Physiologie_, vol. vii, pp. 150-162; Taylor, _Medical
Jurisprudence_, fifth edition, pp. 44, 98 et seq.; L.M. Allen,
"Prolonged Gestation," _American Journal Obstetrics_, April,
1907). It is possible, as Müller suggested in 1898 in a Thèse de
Nancy, that civilization tends to shorten the period of
gestation, and that in earlier ages it was longer than it is now.
Such a tendency to premature birth under the exciting nervous
influences of civilization would thus correspond, as Bouchacourt
has pointed out (_La Grossesse_, p. 113), to the similar effect
of domestication in animals. The robust countrywoman becomes
transformed into the more graceful, but also more fragile, town
woman who needs a degree of care and hygiene which the
countrywoman with her more resistant nervous system can to some
extent dispense with, although even she, as we see, suffers in
the person of her child, and probably in her own person, from the
effects of work during pregnancy. The serious nature of this
civilized tendency to premature birth--of which lack of rest in
pregnancy is, however, only one of several important causes--is
shown by the fact that Séropian (_Fréquence Comparée des Causes
de l'Accouchement Prémature_, Thèse de Paris, 1907) found that
about one-third of French births (32.28 per cent.) are to a
greater or less extent premature. Pregnancy is not a morbid
condition; on the contrary, a pregnant woman is at the climax of
her most normal physiological life, but owing to the tension thus
involved she is specially liable to suffer from any slight shock
or strain.
It must be remarked that the increased tendency to premature
birth, while in part it may be due to general tendencies of
civilization, is also in part due to very definite and
preventable causes. Syphilis, alcoholism, and attempts to produce
abortion are among the not uncommon causes of premature birth
(see, e.g., G.F. McCleary, "The Influence of Antenatal Conditions
on Infantile Mortality," _British Medical Journal_, Aug. 13,
1904).
Premature birth ought to be avoided, because the child born too
early is insufficiently equipped for the task before him.
Astengo, dealing with nearly 19,000 cases at the Lariboisière
Hospital in Paris and the Maternité, found, that reckoning from
the date of the last menstruation, there is a direct relation
between the weight of the infant at birth and the length of the
pregnancy. The longer the pregnancy, the finer the child
(Astengo, _Rapport du Poids des Enfants à la Durée de la
Grossesse_, Thèse de Paris, 1905).
The frequency of premature birth is probably as great in England
as in France. Ballantyne states (_Manual of Antenatal Pathology;
The Foetus_, p. 456) that for practical purposes the frequency
of premature labors in maternity hospitals may be put at 20 per
cent., but that if all infants weighing less than 3,000 grammes
are to be regarded as premature, it rises to 41.5 per cent. That
premature birth is increasing in England seems to be indicated by
the fact that during the past twenty-five years there has been a
steady rise in the mortality rate from premature birth. McCleary,
who discusses this point and considers the increase real,
concludes that "it would appear that there has been a diminution
in the quality as well as in the quantity of our output of
babies" (see also a discussion, introduced by Dawson Williams, on
"Physical Deterioration," _British Medical Journal_, Oct. 14,
1905).
It need scarcely be pointed out that not only is immaturity a
cause of deterioration in the infants that survive, but that it
alone serves enormously to decrease the number of infants that
are able to survive. Thus G. Newman states (loc. cit.) that in
most large English urban districts immaturity is the chief cause
of infant mortality, furnishing about 30 per cent. of the infant
deaths; even in London (Islington) Alfred Harris (_British
Medical Journal_, Dec. 14, 1907) finds that it is responsible for
nearly 17 per cent. of the infantile deaths. It is estimated by
Newman that about half of the mothers of infants dying of
immaturity suffer from marked ill-health and poor physique; they
are not, therefore, fitted to be mothers.
Rest during pregnancy is a very powerful agent in preventing
premature birth. Thus Dr. Sarraute-Lourié has compared 1,550
pregnant women at the Asile Michelet who rested before
confinement with 1,550 women confined at the Hôpital Lariboisière
who had enjoyed no such period of rest. She found that the
average duration of pregnancy was at least twenty days shorter in
the latter group (Mme. Sarraute-Lourié, _De l'Influence du Repos
sur la Durée de la Gestation_, Thèse de Paris, 1899).
Leyboff has insisted on the absolute necessity of rest during
pregnancy, as well for the sake of the woman herself as the
burden she carries, and shows the evil results which follow when
rest is neglected. Railway traveling, horse-riding, bicycling,
and sea-voyages are also, Leyboff believes, liable to be
injurious to the course of pregnancy. Leyboff recognizes the
difficulties which procreating women are placed under by present
industrial conditions, and concludes that "it is urgently
necessary to prevent women, by law, from working during the last
three months of pregnancy; that in every district there should be
a maternity fund; that during this enforced rest a woman should
receive the same salary as during work." He adds that the
children of unmarried mothers should be cared for by the State,
that there should be an eight-hours' day for all workers, and
that no children under sixteen should be allowed to work (E.
Leyboff, _L'Hygiène de la Grossesse_, Thèse de Paris, 1905).
Perruc states that at least two months' rest before confinement
should be made compulsory, and that during this period the woman
should receive an indemnity regulated by the State. He is of
opinion that it should take the form of compulsory assurance, to
which the worker, the employer, and the State alike contributed
(Perruc, _Assistance aux Femmes Enceintes_, Thèse de Paris,
1905).
It is probable that during the earlier months of pregnancy, work,
if not excessively heavy and exhausting, has little or no bad
effect; thus Bacchimont (_Documents pour servir a l'Histoire de
la Puériculture Intra-utérine_, Thèse de Paris, 1898) found that,
while there was a great gain in the weight of children of mothers
who had rested for three months, there was no corresponding gain
in the children of those mothers who had rested for longer
periods. It is during the last three months that freedom, repose,
the cessation of the obligatory routine of employment become
necessary. This is the opinion of Pinard, the chief authority on
this matter. Many, however, fearing that economic and industrial
conditions render so long a period of rest too difficult of
practical attainment, are, with Clappier and G. Newman, content
to demand two months as a minimum; Salvat only asks for one
month's rest before confinement, the woman, whether married or
not, receiving a pecuniary indemnity during this period, with
medical care and drugs free. Ballantyne (_Manual of Antenatal
Pathology: The Foetus_, p. 475), as well as Niven, also asks only
for one month's compulsory rest during pregnancy, with indemnity.
Arthur Helme, however, taking a more comprehensive view of all
the factors involved, concludes in a valuable paper on "The
Unborn Child: Its Care and Its Rights" (_British Medical
Journal_, Aug. 24, 1907), "The important thing would be to
prohibit pregnant women from going to work at all, and it is as
important from the standpoint of the child that this prohibition
should include the early as the late months of pregnancy."
In England little progress has yet been made as regards this
question of rest during pregnancy, even as regards the education
of public opinion. Sir William Sinclair, Professor of Obstetrics
at the Victoria University of Manchester, has published (1907) _A
Plea for Establishing Municipal Maternity Homes_. Ballantyne, a
great British authority on the embryology of the child, has
published a "Plea for a Pre-Maternity Hospital" (_British Medical
Journal_, April 6, 1901), has since given an important lecture on
the subject (_British Medical Journal_, Jan. 11, 1908), and has
further discussed the matter in his _Manual of Ante-Natal
Pathology: The Foetus_ (Ch. XXVII); he is, however, more
interested in the establishment of hospitals for the diseases of
pregnancy than in the wider and more fundamental question of rest
for all pregnant women. In England there are, indeed, a few
institutions which receive unmarried women, with a record of good
conduct, who are pregnant for the first time, for, as
Bouchacourt remarks, ancient British prejudices are opposed to
any mercy being shown to women who are recidivists in committing
the crime of conception.
At present, indeed, it is only in France that the urgent need of
rest during the latter months of pregnancy has been clearly
realized, and any serious and official attempts made to provide
for it. In an interesting Paris thesis (_De la Puériculture avant
le Naissance_, 1907) Clappier has brought together much
information bearing on the efforts now being made to deal
practically with this question. There are many _Asiles_ in Paris
for pregnant women. One of the best is the Asile Michelet,
founded in 1893 by the Assistance Publique de Paris. This is a
sanatorium for pregnant women who have reached a period of seven
and a half months. It is nominally restricted to the admission of
French women who have been domiciled for a year in Paris, but, in
practice, it appears that women from all parts of France are
received. They are employed in light and occasional work for the
institution, being paid for this work, and are also occupied in
making clothes for the expected baby. Married and unmarried women
are admitted alike, all women being equal from the point of view
of motherhood, and indeed the majority of the women who come to
the Asile Michelet are unmarried, some being girls who have even
trudged on foot from Brittany and other remote parts of France,
to seek concealment from their friends in the hospitable
seclusion of these refuges in the great city. It is not the least
advantage of these institutions that they shield unmarried
mothers and their offspring from the manifold evils to which they
are exposed, and thus tend to decrease crime and suffering. In
addition to the maternity refuges, there are institutions in
France for assisting with help and advice those pregnant women
who prefer to remain at home, but are thus enabled to avoid the
necessity for undue domestic labor.
There ought to be no manner of doubt that when, as is the case
to-day in our own and some other supposedly civilized countries,
motherhood outside marriage is accounted as almost a crime, there
is the very greatest need for adequate provision for unmarried
women who are about to become mothers, enabling them to receive
shelter and care in secrecy, and to preserve their self-respect
and social position. This is necessary not only in the interests
of humanity and public economy, but also, as is too often
forgotten, in the interests of morality, for it is certain that
by the neglect to furnish adequate provision of this nature women
are driven to infanticide and prostitution. In earlier, more
humane days, the general provision for the secret reception and
care of illegitimate infants was undoubtedly most beneficial. The
suppression of the mediæval method, which in France took place
gradually between 1833 and 1862, led to a great increase in
infanticide and abortion, and was a direct encouragement to crime
and immorality. In 1887 the Conseil Général of the Seine sought
to replace the prevailing neglect of this matter by the adoption
of more enlightened ideas and founded a _bureau secret
d'admission_ for pregnant women. Since then both the abandonment
of infants and infanticide have greatly diminished, though they
are increasing in those parts of France which possess no
facilities of this kind. It is widely held that the State should
unify the arrangements for assuring secret maternity, and should,
in its own interests, undertake the expense. In 1904 French law
ensured the protection of unmarried mothers by guaranteeing their
secret, but it failed to organize the general establishment of
secret maternities, and has left to doctors the pioneering part
in this great and humane public work (A. Maillard-Brune,
_Refuges, Maternités, Bureaux d'Admission Secrets, comme Moyens
Préservatives des Infanticide_, Thèse de Paris, 1908). It is not
among the least benefits of the falling birth rate that it has
helped to stimulate this beneficent movement.
The development of an industrial system which subordinates the human body
and the human soul to the thirst for gold, has, for a time, dismissed from
social consideration the interests of the race and even of the individual,
but it must be remembered that this has not been always and everywhere so.
Although in some parts of the world the women of savage peoples work up to
the time of confinement, it must be remarked that the conditions of work
in savage life do not resemble the strenuous and continuous labor of
modern factories. In many parts of the world, however, women are not
allowed to work hard during pregnancy and every consideration is shown to
them. This is so, for instance, among the Pueblo Indians, and among the
Indians of Mexico. Similar care is taken in the Carolines and the Gilbert
Islands and in many other regions all over the world. In some places,
women are secluded during pregnancy, and in others are compelled to
observe many more or less excellent rules. It is true that the assigned
cause for these rules is frequently the fear of evil spirits, but they
nevertheless often preserve a hygienic value. In many parts of the world
the discovery of pregnancy is the sign for a festival of more or less
ritual character, and much good advice is given to the expectant mother.
The modern Musselmans are careful to guard the health of their women when
pregnant, and so are the Chinese.[6] Even in Europe, in the thirteenth
century, as Clappier notes, industrial corporations sometimes had regard
to this matter, and would not allow women to work during pregnancy. In
Iceland, where much of the primitive life of Scandinavian Europe is still
preserved, great precautions are taken with pregnant women. They must lead
a quiet life, avoid tight garments, be moderate in eating and drinking,
take no alcohol, be safeguarded from all shocks, while their husbands and
all others who surround them must treat them with consideration, save them
from worry and always bear with them patiently.[7]
It is necessary to emphasize this point because we have to realize that
the modern movement for surrounding the pregnant woman with tenderness and
care, so far from being the mere outcome of civilized softness and
degeneracy, is, in all probability, the return on a higher plane to the
sane practice of those races which laid the foundations of human
greatness.
While rest is the cardinal virtue imposed on a woman during the later
months of pregnancy, there are other points in her regimen that are far
from unimportant in their bearing on the fate of the child. One of these
is the question of the mother's use of alcohol. Undoubtedly alcohol has
been a cause of much fanaticism. But the declamatory extravagance of
anti-alcoholists must not blind us to the fact that the evils of alcohol
are real. On the reproductive process especially, on the mammary glands,
and on the child, alcohol has an arresting and degenerative influence
without any compensatory advantages. It has been proved by experiments on
animals and observations on the human subject that alcohol taken by the
pregnant woman passes freely from the maternal circulation to the foetal
circulation. Féré has further shown that, by injecting alcohol and
aldehydes into hen's eggs during incubation, it is possible to cause
arrest of development and malformation in the chick.[8] The woman who is
bearing her child in her womb or suckling it at her breast would do well
to remember that the alcohol which may be harmless to herself is little
better than poison to the immature being who derives nourishment from her
blood. She should confine herself to the very lightest of alcoholic
beverages in very moderate amounts and would do better still to abandon
these entirely and drink milk instead. She is now the sole source of the
child's life and she cannot be too scrupulous in creating around it an
atmosphere of purity and health. No after-influence can ever compensate
for mistakes made at this time.[9]
What is true of alcohol is equally true of other potent drugs and poisons,
which should all be avoided so far as possible during pregnancy because of
the harmful influence they may directly exert on the embryo. Hygiene is
better than drugs, and care should be exercised in diet, which should by
no means be excessive. It is a mistake to suppose that the pregnant woman
needs considerably more food than usual, and there is much reason to
believe not only that a rich meat diet tends to cause sterility but that
it is also unfavorable to the development of the child in the womb.[10]
How far, if at all, it is often asked, should sexual intercourse be
continued after fecundation has been clearly ascertained? This has not
always been found an easy question to answer, for in the human couple many
considerations combine to complicate the answer. Even the Catholic
theologians have not been entirely in agreement on this point. Clement of
Alexandria said that when the seed had been sown the field must be left
till harvest. But it may be concluded that, as a rule, the Church was
inclined to regard intercourse during pregnancy as at most a venial sin,
provided there was no danger of abortion. Augustine, Gregory the Great,
Aquinas, Dens, for instance, seem to be of this mind; for a few, indeed,
it is no sin at all.[11] Among animals the rule is simple and uniform; as
soon as the female is impregnated at the period of oestrus she absolutely
rejects all advance of the male until, after birth and lactation are over,
another period of oestrus occurs. Among savages the tendency is less
uniform, and sexual abstinence, when it occurs during pregnancy, tends to
become less a natural instinct than a ritual observance, or a custom now
chiefly supported by superstitions. Among many primitive peoples
abstinence during the whole of pregnancy is enjoined because it is
believed that the semen would kill the foetus.[12]
The Talmud is unfavorable to coitus during pregnancy, and the
Koran prohibits it during the whole of the period, as well as
during suckling. Among the Hindus, on the other hand, intercourse
is continued up to the last fortnight of pregnancy, and it is
even believed that the injected semen helps to nourish the embryo
(W.D. Sutherland, "Ueber das Alltagsleben und die Volksmedizin
unter den Bauern Britischostindiens," _Münchener Medizinische
Wochenschrift_, Nos. 12 and 13, 1906). The great Indian physician
Susruta, however, was opposed to coitus during pregnancy, and the
Chinese are emphatically on the same side.
As men have emerged from barbarism in the direction of civilization, the
animal instinct of refusal after impregnation has been completely lost in
women, while at the same time both sexes tend to become indifferent to
those ritual restraints which at an earlier period were almost as binding
as instinct. Sexual intercourse thus came to be practiced after
impregnation, much the same as before, as part of ordinary "marital
rights," though sometimes there has remained a faint suspicion, reflected
in the hesitating attitude of the Catholic Church already alluded to, that
such intercourse may be a sinful indulgence. Morality is, however, called
in to fortify this indulgence. If the husband is shut out from marital
intercourse at this time, it is argued, he will seek extra-marital
intercourse, as indeed in some parts of the world it is recognized that he
legitimately may; therefore the interests of the wife, anxious to retain
her husband's fidelity, and the interests of Christian morality, anxious
to uphold the institution of monogamy, combine to permit the continuation
of coitus during pregnancy. The custom has been furthered by the fact
that, in civilized women at all events, coitus during pregnancy is usually
not less agreeable than at other times and by some women is felt indeed to
be even more agreeable.[13] There is also the further consideration, for
those couples who have sought to prevent conception, that now intercourse
may be enjoyed with impunity. From a higher point of view such intercourse
may also be justified, for if, as all the finer moralists of the sexual
impulse now believe, love has its value not only in so far as it induces
procreation but also in so far as it aids individual development and the
mutual good and harmony of the united couple, it becomes morally right
during pregnancy.
From an early period, however, great authorities have declared themselves
in opposition to the custom of practicing coitus during pregnancy. At the
end of the first century, Soranus, the first of great gynæcologists,
stated, in his treatise on the diseases of women, that sexual intercourse
is injurious throughout pregnancy, because of the movement imparted to the
uterus, and especially injurious during the latter months. For more than
sixteen hundred years the question, having fallen into the hands of the
theologians, seems to have been neglected on the medical side until in
1721 a distinguished French obstetrician, Mauriceau, stated that no
pregnant woman should have intercourse during the last two months and that
no woman subject to miscarriage should have intercourse at all during
pregnancy. For more than a century, however, Mauriceau remained a pioneer
with few or no followers. It would be inconvenient, the opinion went, even
if it were necessary, to forbid intercourse during pregnancy.[14]
During recent years, nevertheless, there has been an increasingly strong
tendency among obstetricians to speak decisively concerning intercourse
during pregnancy, either by condemning it altogether or by enjoining great
prudence. It is highly probable that, in accordance with the classical
experiments of Dareste on chicken embryos, shocks and disturbances to the
human embryo may also produce injurious effects on growth. The disturbance
due to coitus in the early stages of pregnancy may thus tend to produce
malformation. When such conditions are found in the children of perfectly
healthy, vigorous, and generally temperate parents who have indulged
recklessly in coitus during the early stages of pregnancy it is possible
that such coitus has acted on the embryo in the same way as shocks and
intoxications are known to act on the embryo of lower organisms. However
this may be, it is quite certain that in predisposed women, coitus during
pregnancy causes premature birth; it sometimes happens that labor pains
begin a few minutes after the act.[15] The natural instinct of animals
refuses to allow intercourse during pregnancy; the ritual observance of
primitive peoples very frequently points in the same direction; the voice
of medical science, so far as it speaks at all, is beginning to utter the
same warning, and before long will probably be in a position to do so on
the basis of more solid and coherent evidence.
Pinard, the greatest of authorities on puericulture, asserts that
there must be complete cessation of sexual intercourse during the
whole of pregnancy, and in his consulting room at the Clinique
Baudelocque he has placed a large placard with an "Important
Notice" to this effect. Féré was strongly of opinion that sexual
relations during pregnancy, especially when recklessly carried
out, play an important part in the causation of nervous troubles
in children who are of sound heredity and otherwise free from all
morbid infection during gestation and development; he recorded in
detail a case which he considered conclusive ("L'Influence de
l'Incontinence Sexuelle pendant la Gestation sur la Descendance,"
_Archives de Neurologie_, April, 1905). Bouchacourt discusses the
subject fully (_La Grossesse_, pp. 177-214), and thinks that
sexual intercourse during pregnancy should be avoided as much as
possible. Fürbringer (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in
Relation to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 226) recommends abstinence from
the sixth or seventh month, and throughout the whole of pregnancy
where there is any tendency to miscarriage, while in all cases
much care and gentleness should be exercised.
The whole subject has been investigated in a Paris Thesis by H.
Brénot (_De L'Influence de la Copulation pendant la Grossesse_,
1903); he concludes that sexual relations are dangerous
throughout pregnancy, frequently provoking premature confinement
or abortion, and that they are more dangerous in primiparæ than
in multiparæ.
Nearly everything that has been said of the hygiene of pregnancy, and the
need for rest, applies also to the period immediately following the birth
of the child. Rest and hygiene on the mother's part continue to be
necessary alike in her own interests and in the child's. This need has
indeed been more generally and more practically recognized than the need
for rest during pregnancy. The laws of several countries make compulsory a
period of rest from employment after confinement, and in some countries
they seek to provide for the remuneration of the mother during this
enforced rest. In no country, indeed, is the principle carried out so
thoroughly and for so long a period as is desirable. But it is the right
principle, and embodies the germ which, in the future, will be developed.
There can be little doubt that whatever are the matters, and they are
certainly many, which may be safely left to the discretion of the
individual, the care of the mother and her child is not among them. That
is a matter which, more than any other, concerns the community as a whole,
and the community cannot afford to be slack in asserting its authority
over it. The State needs healthy men and women, and by any negligence in
attending to this need it inflicts serious charges of all sorts upon
itself, and at the same time dangerously impairs its efficiency in the
world. Nations have begun to recognize the desirability of education, but
they have scarcely yet begun to realize that the nationalization of health
is even more important than the nationalization of education. If it were
necessary to choose between the task of getting children educated and the
task of getting them well-born and healthy it would be better to abandon
education. There have been many great peoples who never dreamed of
national systems of education; there has been no great people without the
art of producing healthy and vigorous children.
This matter becomes of peculiar importance in great industrial states like
England, the United States, and Germany, because in such states a tacit
conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual
ends, and practically to work for the deterioration of the race. In
England, for instance, this tendency has become peculiarly well marked
with disastrous results. The interest of the employed woman tends to
become one with that of her employer; between them they combine to crush
the interests of the child who represents the race, and to defeat the laws
made in the interests of the race which are those of the community as a
whole. The employed woman wishes to earn as much wages as she can and with
as little interruption as she can; in gratifying that wish she is, at the
same time, acting in the interests of the employer, who carefully avoids
thwarting her.
This impulse on the employed woman's part is by no means always and
entirely the result of poverty, and would not, therefore, be removed by
raising her wages. Long before marriage, when little more than a child,
she has usually gone out to work, and work has become a second nature. She
has mastered her work, she enjoys a certain position and what to her are
high wages; she is among her friends and companions; the noise and bustle
and excitement of the work-room or the factory have become an agreeable
stimulant which she can no longer do without. On the other hand, her home
means nothing to her; she only returns there to sleep, leaving it next
morning at day-break or earlier; she is ignorant even of the simplest
domestic arts; she moves about in her own home like a strange and awkward
child. The mere act of marriage cannot change this state of things;
however willing she may be at marriage to become a domesticated wife, she
is destitute alike of the inclination or the skill for domesticity. Even
in spite of herself she is driven back to the work-shop, to the one place
where she feels really at home.
In Germany women are not allowed to work for four weeks after
confinement, nor during the following two weeks except by medical
certificate. The obligatory insurance against disease which
covers women at confinement assures them an indemnity at this
time equivalent to a large part of their wages. Married and
unmarried mothers benefit alike. The Austrian law is founded on
the same model. This measure has led to a very great decrease in
infantile mortality, and, therefore, a great increase in health
among those who survive. It is, however, regarded as very
inadequate, and there is a movement in Germany for extending the
time, for applying the system to a larger number of women, and
for making it still more definitely compulsory.
In Switzerland it has been illegal since 1877 for any woman to be
received into a factory after confinement, unless she has rested
in all for eight weeks, six weeks at least of this period being
after confinement. Since 1898 Swiss working women have been
protected by law from exercising hard work during pregnancy, and
from various other influences likely to be injurious. But this
law is evaded in practice, because it provides no compensatory
indemnity for the woman. An attempt, in 1899, to amend the law by
providing for such indemnity was rejected by the people.
In Belgium and Holland there are laws against women working
immediately after confinement, but no indemnity is provided, so
that employers and employed combine to evade the law. In France
there is no such law, although its necessity has often been
emphatically asserted (see, e.g., Salvat, _La Dépopulation de la
France_, Thèse de Lyon, 1903).
In England it is illegal to employ a woman "knowingly" in a
work-shop within four weeks of the birth of her child, but no
provision is made by the law for the compensation of the woman
who is thus required to sacrifice herself to the interests of the
State. The woman evades the law in tacit collusion with her
employers, who can always avoid "knowing" that a birth has taken
place, and so escape all responsibility for the mother's
employment. Thus the factory inspectors are unable to take
action, and the law becomes a dead letter; in 1906 only one
prosecution for this offense could be brought into court. By the
insertion of this "knowingly" a premium is placed on ignorance.
The unwisdom of thus beforehand placing a premium on ignorance
has always been more or less clearly recognized by the framers of
legal codes even as far back as the days of the Ten Commandments
and the laws of Hamurabi. It is the business of the Court, of
those who administer the law, to make allowance for ignorance
where such allowance is fairly called for; it is not for the
law-maker to make smooth the path of the law-breaker. There are
evidently law-makers nowadays so scrupulous, or so simple-minded,
that they would be prepared to exact that no pickpocket should be
prosecuted if he was able to declare on oath that he had no
"knowledge" that the purse he had taken belonged to the person he
extracted it from.
The annual reports of the English factory inspectors serve to
bring ridicule on this law, which looks so wisely humane and yet
means nothing, but have so far been powerless to effect any
change. These reports show, moreover, that the difficulty is
increasing in magnitude. Thus Miss Martindale, a factory
inspector, states that in all the towns she visits, from a quiet
cathedral city to a large manufacturing town, the employment of
married women is rapidly increasing; they have worked in mills or
factories all their lives and are quite unaccustomed to cooking,
housework and the rearing of children, so that after marriage,
even when not compelled by poverty, they prefer to go on working
as before. Miss Vines, another factory inspector, repeats the
remark of a woman worker in a factory. "I do not need to work,
but I do not like staying at home," while another woman said, "I
would rather be at work a hundred times than at home. I get lost
at home" (_Annual Report Chief Inspector of Factories and
Workshops for 1906_, pp. 325, etc.).
It may be added that not only is the English law enjoining four
weeks' rest on the mother after childbirth practically
inoperative, but the period itself is absurdly inadequate. As a
rest for the mother it is indeed sufficient, but the State is
still more interested in the child than in its mother, and the
child needs the mother's chief care for a much longer period than
four weeks. Helme advocates the State prohibition of women's work
for at least six months after confinement. Where nurseries are
attached to factories, enabling the mother to suckle her infant
in intervals of work, the period may doubtless be shortened.
It is important to remember that it is by no means only the women
in factories who are induced to work as usual during the whole
period of pregnancy, and to return to work immediately after the
brief rest of confinement. The Research Committee of the
Christian Social Union (London Branch) undertook, in 1905, an
inquiry into the employment of women after childbirth. Women in
factories and workshops were excluded from the inquiry which only
had reference to women engaged in household duties, in home
industries, and in casual work. It was found that the majority
carry on their employment right up to the time of confinement and
resume it from ten to fourteen days later. The infantile death
rate for the children of women engaged only in household duties
was greatly lower than that for the children of the other women,
while, as ever, the hand-fed infants had a vastly higher death
rate than the breast-fed infants (_British Medical Journal_, Oct.
24, 1908, p. 1297).
In the great French gun and armour-plate works at Creuzot (Saône
et Loire) the salaries of expectant mothers among the employees
are raised; arrangements are made for giving them proper advice
and medical attendance; they are not allowed to work after the
middle of pregnancy or to return to work after confinement
without a medical certificate of fitness. The results are said to
be excellent, not only on the health of the mothers, but in the
diminution of premature births, the decrease of infantile deaths,
and the general prevalence of breast-feeding. It would probably
be hopeless to expect many employers in Anglo-Saxon lands to
adopt this policy. They are too "practical," they know how small
is the money-value of human lives. With us it is necessary for
the State to intervene.
There can be no doubt that, on the whole, modern civilized
communities are beginning to realize that under the social and
economic conditions now tending more and more to prevail, they
must in their own interests insure that the mother's best energy
and vitality are devoted to the child, both before and after its
birth. They are also realizing that they cannot carry out their
duty in this respect unless they make adequate provision for the
mothers who are thus compelled to renounce their employment in
order to devote themselves to their children. We here reach a
point at which Individualism is at one with Socialism. The
individualist cannot fail to see that it is at all cost necessary
to remove social conditions which crush out all individuality;
the Socialist cannot fail to see that a society which neglects to
introduce order at this central and vital point, the production
of the individual, must speedily perish.
It is involved in the proper fulfilment of a mother's relationship to her
infant child that, provided she is healthy, she should suckle it. Of
recent years this question has become a matter of serious gravity. In the
middle of the eighteenth century, when the upper-class women of France had
grown disinclined to suckle their own children, Rousseau raised so loud
and eloquent a protest that it became once more the fashion for a woman to
fulfil her natural duties. At the present time, when the same evil is
found once more, and in a far more serious form, for now it is not the
small upper-class but the great lower-class that is concerned, the
eloquence of a Rousseau would be powerless, for it is not fashion so much
as convenience, and especially an intractable economic factor, that is
chiefly concerned. Not the least urgent reason for putting women, and
especially mothers, upon a sounder economic basis, is the necessity of
enabling them to suckle their children.
No woman is sound, healthy, and complete unless she possesses
breasts that are beautiful enough to hold the promise of being
functional when the time for their exercise arrives, and nipples
that can give suck. The gravity of this question to-day is shown
by the frequency with which women are lacking in this essential
element of womanhood, and the young man of to-day, it has been
said, often in taking a wife, "actually marries but part of a
woman, the other part being exhibited in the chemist's shop
window, in the shape of a glass feeding-bottle." Blacker found
among a thousand patients from the maternity department of
University College Hospital that thirty-nine had never suckled at
all, seven hundred and forty-seven had suckled all their
children, and two hundred and fourteen had suckled only some.
The chief reason given for not suckling was absence or
insufficiency of milk; other reasons being inability or
disinclination to suckle, and refusal of the child to take the
breast (Blacker, _Medical Chronicle_, Feb., 1900). These results
among the London poor are certainly very much better than could
be found in many manufacturing towns where women work after
marriage. In the other large countries of Europe equally
unsatisfactory results are found. In Paris Madame Dluska has
shown that of 209 women who came for their confinement to the
Clinique Baudelocque, only 74 suckled their children; of the 135
who did not suckle, 35 were prevented by pathological causes or
absence of milk, 100 by the necessities of their work. Even those
who suckled could seldom continue more than seven months on
account of the physiological strain of work (Dluska,
_Contribution à l'Etude de l'Allaitement Maternel_, Thèse de
Paris, 1894). Many statistics have been gathered in the German
countries. Thus Wiedow (_Centralblatt für Gynäkologie_, No. 29,
1895) found that of 525 women at the Freiburg Maternity only half
could suckle thoroughly during the first two weeks; imperfect
nipples were noted in 49 cases, and it was found that the
development of the nipple bore a direct relation to the value of
the breast as a secretory organ. At Munich Escherich and Büller
found that nearly 60 per cent. of women of the lower class were
unable to suckle their children, and at Stuttgart three-quarters
of the child-bearing women were in this condition.
The reasons why children should be suckled at their mothers' breasts are
larger than some may be inclined to believe. In the first place the
psychological reason is one of no mean importance. The breast with its
exquisitely sensitive nipple, vibrating in harmony with the sexual organs,
furnishes the normal mechanism by which maternal love is developed. No
doubt the woman who never suckles her child may love it, but such love is
liable to remain defective on the fundamental and instinctive side. In
some women, indeed, whom we may hesitate to call abnormal, maternal love
fails to awaken at all until brought into action through this mechanism by
the act of suckling.
A more generally recognized and certainly fundamental reason for suckling
the child is that the milk of the mother, provided she is reasonably
healthy, is the infant's only ideally fit food. There are some people
whose confidence in science leads them to believe that it is possible to
manufacture foods that are as good or better than mother's milk; they
fancy that the milk which is best for the calf is equally best for so
different an animal as the baby. These are delusions. The infant's best
food is that elaborated in his own mother's body. All other foods are more
or less possible substitutes, which require trouble to prepare properly
and are, moreover, exposed to various risks from which the mother's milk
is free.
A further reason, especially among the poor, against the use of any
artificial foods is that it accustoms those around the child to try
experiments with its feeding and to fancy that any kind of food they eat
themselves may be good for the infant. It thus happens that bread and
potatoes, brandy and gin, are thrust into infants' mouths. With the infant
that is given the breast it is easier to make plain that, except by the
doctor's orders, nothing else must be given.
An additional reason why the mother should suckle her child is the close
and frequent association with the child thus involved. Not only is the
child better cared for in all respects, but the mother is not deprived of
the discipline of such care, and is also enabled from the outset to learn
and to understand the child's nature.
The inability to suckle acquires great significance if we realize
that it is associated, probably in a large measure as a direct
cause, with infantile mortality. The mortality of
artificially-fed infants during the first year of life is seldom
less than double that of the breast-fed, sometimes it is as much
as three times that of the breast-fed, or even more; thus at
Derby 51.7 per cent. of hand-fed infants die under the age of
twelve months, but only 8.6 per cent. of breast-fed infants.
Those who survive are by no means free from suffering. At the end
of the first year they are found to weigh about 25 per cent. less
than the breast-fed, and to be much shorter; they are more liable
to tuberculosis and rickets, with all the evil results that flow
from these diseases; and there is some reason to believe that the
development of their teeth is injuriously affected. The
degenerate character of the artificially-fed is well indicated by
the fact that of 40,000 children who were brought for treatment
to the Children's Hospital in Munich, 86 per cent. had been
brought up by hand, and the few who had been suckled had usually
only had the breast for a short time. The evil influence persists
even up to adult life. In some parts of France where the
wet-nurse industry flourishes so greatly that nearly all the
children are brought up by hand, it has been found that the
percentage of rejected conscripts is nearly double that for
France generally. Corresponding results have been found by
Friedjung in a large German athletic association. Among 155
members, 65 per cent. were found on inquiry to have been
breast-fed as infants (for an average of six months); but among
the best athletes the percentage of breast-fed rose to 72 per
cent. (for an average period of nine or ten months), while for
the group of 56 who stood lowest in athletic power the percentage
of breast-fed fell to 57 (for an average of only three months).
The advantages for an infant of being suckled by its mother are
greater than can be accounted for by the mere fact of being
suckled rather than hand-fed. This has been shown by Vitrey (_De
la Mortalité Infantile_, Thèse de Lyon, 1907), who found from the
statistics of the Hôtel-Dieu at Lyons, that infants suckled by
their mothers have a mortality of only 12 per cent., but if
suckled by strangers, the mortality rises to 33 per cent. It may
be added that, while suckling is essential to the complete
well-being of the child, it is highly desirable for the sake of
the mother's health also. (Some important statistics are
summarized in a paper on "Infantile Mortality" in _British
Medical Journal_, Nov. 2, 1907), while the various aspects of
suckling have been thoroughly discussed by Bollinger, "Ueber
Säuglings-Sterblichkeit und die Erbliche functionelle Atrophie
der menschlichen Milchdrüse" (_Correspondenzblatt Deutschen
Gesellschaft Anthropologie_, Oct., 1899).
It appears that in Sweden, in the middle of the eighteenth
century, it was a punishable offense for a woman to give her baby
the bottle when she was able to suckle it. In recent years Prof.
Anton von Menger, of Vienna, has argued (in his _Burgerliche
Recht und die Besitzlosen Klassen_) that the future generation
has the right to make this claim, and he proposes that every
mother shall be legally bound to suckle her child unless her
inability to do so has been certified by a physician. E.A.
Schroeder (_Das Recht in der Geschlechtlichen Ordnung_, 1893, p.
346) also argued that a mother should be legally bound to suckle
her infant for at least nine months, unless solid grounds could
be shown to the contrary, and this demand, which seems reasonable
and natural, since it is a mother's privilege as well as her duty
to suckle her infant when able to do so, has been insistently
made by others also. It has been supported from the legal side by
Weinberg (_Mutterschutz_, Sept., 1907). In France the Loi Roussel
forbids a woman to act as a wet-nurse until her child is seven
months old, and this has had an excellent effect in lowering
infantile mortality (A. Allée, _Puériculture et la Loi Roussel_,
Thèse de Paris, 1908). In some parts of Germany manufacturers are
compelled to set up a suckling-room in the factory, where mothers
can give the breast to the child in the intervals of work. The
control and upkeep of these rooms, with provision of doctors and
nurses, is undertaken by the municipality (_Sexual-Probleme_,
Sept., 1908, p. 573).
As things are to-day in modern industrial countries the righting of these
wrongs cannot be left to Nature, that is, to the ignorant and untrained
impulses of persons who live in a whirl of artificial life where the voice
of instinct is drowned. The mother, we are accustomed to think, may be
trusted to see to the welfare of her child, and it is unnecessary, or even
"immoral," to come to her assistance. Yet there are few things, I think,
more pathetic than the sight of a young Lancashire mother who works in the
mills, when she has to stay at home to nurse her sick child. She is used
to rise before day-break to go to the mill; she has scarcely seen her
child by the light of the sun, she knows nothing of its necessities, the
hands that are so skilful to catch the loom cannot soothe the child. The
mother gazes down at it in vague, awkward, speechless misery. It is not a
sight one can ever forget.
It is France that is taking the lead in the initiation of the scientific
and practical movements for the care of the young child before and after
birth, and it is in France that we may find the germs of nearly all the
methods now becoming adopted for arresting infantile mortality. The
village system of Villiers-le-Duc, near Dijon in the Côte d'Or, has proved
a germ of this fruitful kind. Here every pregnant woman not able to secure
the right conditions for her own life and that of the child she is
bearing, is able to claim the assistance of the village authorities; she
is entitled, without payment, to the attendance of a doctor and midwife
and to one franc a day during her confinement. The measures adopted in
this village have practically abolished both maternal and infantile
mortality. A few years ago Dr. Samson Moore, the medical officer of health
for Huddersfield, heard of this village, and Mr. Benjamin Broadbent, the
Mayor of Huddersfield, visited Villiers-le-Duc. It was resolved to
initiate in Huddersfield a movement for combating infant mortality.
Henceforth arose what is known as the Huddersfield scheme, a scheme which
has been fruitful in splendid results. The points of the Huddersfield
scheme are: (1) compulsory notification of births within forty-eight
hours; (2) the appointment of lady assistant medical officers of help to
visit the home, inquire, advise, and assist; (3) the organized aid of
voluntary lady workers in subordination to the municipal part of the
scheme; (4) appeal to the medical officer of help when the baby, not being
under medical care, fails to thrive. The infantile mortality of
Huddersfield has been very greatly reduced by this scheme.[16]
The Huddersfield scheme may be said to be the origin of the
English Notification of Births Act, which came into operation in
1908. This Act represents, in England, the national inauguration
of a scheme for the betterment of the race, the ultimate results
of which it is impossible to foresee. When this Act comes into
universal action every baby of the land will be entitled--legally
and not by individual caprice or philanthropic condescension--to
medical attention from the day of birth, and every mother will
have at hand the counsel of an educated woman in touch with the
municipal authorities. There could be no greater triumph for
medical science, for national efficiency, and the cause of
humanity generally. Even on the lower financial plane, it is easy
to see that an enormous saving of public and private money will
thus be effected. The Act is adoptive, and not compulsory. This
was a wise precaution, for an Act of this kind cannot be
effectual unless it is carried out thoroughly by the community
adopting it, and it will not be adopted until a community has
clearly realized its advantages and the methods of attaining
them.
An important adjunct of this organization is the School for
Mothers. Such schools, which are now beginning to spring up
everywhere, may be said to have their origins in the
_Consultations de Nourrissons_ (with their offshoot the _Goutte
de Lait_), established by Professor Budin in 1892, which have
spread all over France and been widely influential for good. At
the _Consultations_ infants are examined and weighed weekly, and
the mothers advised and encouraged to suckle their children. The
_Gouttes_ are practically milk dispensaries where infants for
whom breast-feeding is impossible are fed with milk under medical
supervision. Schools for Mothers represent an enlargement of the
same scheme, covering a variety of subjects which it is necessary
for a mother to know. Some of the first of these schools were
established at Bonn, at the Bavarian town of Weissenberg, and in
Ghent. At some of the Schools for Mothers, and notably at Ghent
(described by Mrs. Bertrand Russell in the _Nineteenth Century_,
1906), the important step has been taken of giving training to
young girls from fourteen to eighteen; they receive instruction
in infant anatomy and physiology, in the preparation of
sterilized milk, in weighing children, in taking temperatures and
making charts, in managing crêches, and after two years are able
to earn a salary. In various parts of England, schools for young
mothers and girls on these lines are now being established, first
in London, under the auspices of Dr. F.J. Sykes, Medical Officer
of Health for St. Pancreas (see, e.g., _A School For Mothers_,
1908, describing an establishment of this kind at Somers Town,
with a preface by Sir Thomas Barlow; an account of recent
attempts to improve the care of infants in London will also be
found in the _Lancet_, Sept. 26, 1908). It may be added that some
English municipalities have established depôts for supplying
mothers cheaply with good milk. Such depôts are, however, likely
to be more mischievous than beneficial if they promote the
substitution of hand-feeding for suckling. They should never be
established except in connection with Schools for Mothers, where
an educational influence may be exerted, and no mother should be
supplied with milk unless she presents a medical certificate
showing that she is unable to nourish her child (Byers, "Medical
Women and Public Health Questions," _British Medical Journal_,
Oct. 6, 1906). It is noteworthy that in England the local
authorities will shortly be empowered by law to establish Schools
for Mothers.
The great benefits produced by these institutions in France, both
in diminishing the infant mortality and in promoting the
education of mothers and their pride and interest in their
children, have been set forth in two Paris theses by G. Chaignon
(_Organisation des Consultations de Nourrissons à la Campagne_,
1908), and Alcide Alexandre (_Consultation de Nourrissons et
Goutte de Lait d'Arques_, 1908).
The movement is now spreading throughout Europe, and an
International Union has been formed, including all the
institutions specially founded for the protection of child life
and the promotion of puericulture. The permanent committee is in
Brussels, and a Congress of Infant Protection (_Goutte de Lait_)
is held every two years.
It will be seen that all the movements now being set in action for the
improvement of the race through the child and the child's mother,
recognize the intimacy of the relation between the mother and her child
and are designed to aid her, even if necessary by the exercise of some
pressure, in performing her natural functions in relation to her child. To
the theoretical philanthropist, eager to reform the world on paper,
nothing seems simpler than to cure the present evils of child-rearing by
setting up State nurseries which are at once to relieve mothers of
everything connected with the production of the men of the future beyond
the pleasure--if such it happens to be--of conceiving them and the trouble
of bearing them, and at the same time to rear them up independently of the
home, in a wholesome, economical, and scientific manner.[17] Nothing seems
simpler, but from the fundamental psychological standpoint nothing is
falser. The idea of a State which is outside the community is but a
survival in another form of that antiquated notion which compelled Louis
XIV to declare "L'Etat c'est moi!" A State which admits that the
individuals composing it are incompetent to perform their own most sacred
and intimate functions, and takes upon itself to perform them instead,
attempts a task which would be undesirable, even if it were possible of
achievement. It must always be remembered that a State which proposes to
relieve its constituent members of their natural functions and
responsibilities attempts something quite different from the State which
seeks to aid its members to fulfil their own biological and social
functions more adequately. A State which enables its mothers to rest when
they are child-bearing is engaged in a reasonable task; a State which
takes over its mothers' children is reducing philanthropy to absurdity. It
is easy to realize this if we consider the inevitable course of
circumstances under a system of "State-nurseries." The child would be
removed from its natural mother at the earliest age, but some one has to
perform the mother's duties; the substitute must therefore be properly
trained for such duties; and in exercising them under favorable
circumstances a maternal relationship is developed between the child and
the "mother," who doubtless possesses natural maternal instincts but has
no natural maternal bond to the child she is mothering. Such a
relationship tends to become on both sides practically and emotionally the
real relationship. We very often have opportunity of seeing how
unsatisfactory such a relationship becomes. The artificial mother is
deprived of a child she had begun to feel her own; the child's emotional
relationships are upset, split and distorted; the real mother has the
bitterness of feeling that for her child she is not the real mother. Would
it not have been much better for all if the State had encouraged the vast
army of women it had trained for the position of mothering other women's
children, to have, instead, children of their own? The women who are
incapable of mothering their own children could then be trained to refrain
from bearing them.
Ellen Key (in her _Century of the Child_, and elsewhere) has
advocated for all young women a year of compulsory "service,"
analogous to the compulsory military service imposed in most
countries on young men. During this period the girl would be
trained in rational housekeeping, in the principles of hygiene,
in the care of the sick, and especially in the care of infants
and all that concerns the physical and psychic development of
children. The principle of this proposal has since been widely
accepted. Marie von Schmid (in her _Mutterdienst_, 1907) goes so
far as to advocate a general training of young women in such
duties, carried on in a kind of enlarged and improved midwifery
school. The service would last a year, and the young woman would
then be for three years in the reserves, and liable to be called
up for duty. There is certainly much to be said for such a
proposal, considerably more than is to be said for compulsory
military service. For while it is very doubtful whether a man
will ever be called on to fight, most women are liable to be
called on to exercise household duties or to look after children,
whether for themselves or for other people.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It is not, of course, always literally true that each parent supplies
exactly half the heredity, for, as we see among animals generally, the
offspring may sometimes approach more nearly to one parent, sometimes to
the other, while among plants, as De Vries and others have shown, the
heredity may be still more unequally divided.
[2] It should scarcely be necessary to say that to assert that motherhood
is a woman's supreme function is by no means to assert that her activities
should be confined to the home. That is an opinion which may now be
regarded as almost extinct even among those who most glorify the function
of woman as mother. As Friedrich Naumann and others have very truly
pointed out, a woman is not adequately equipped to fulfil her functions as
mother and trainer of children unless she has lived in the world and
exercised a vocation.
[3] "Were the capacities of the brain and the heart equal in the sexes,"
Lily Braun (_Die Frauenfrage_, page 207) well says, "the entry of women
into public life would be of no value to humanity, and would even lead to
a still wilder competition. Only the recognition that the entire nature of
woman is different from that of man, that it signifies a new vivifying
principle in human life, makes the women's movement, in spite of the
misconception of its enemies and its friends, a social revolution" (see
also Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth edition, 1904, especially Ch.
XVIII).
[4] The word "puericulture" was invented by Dr. Caron in 1866 to signify
the culture of children after birth. It was Pinard, the distinguished
French obstetrician, who, in 1895, gave it a larger and truer significance
by applying it to include the culture of children before birth. It is now
defined as "the science which has for its end the search for the knowledge
relative to the reproduction, the preservation, and the amelioration of
the human race" (Péchin, _La Puériculture avant la Naissance_, Thèse de
Paris, 1908).
[5] In _La Grossesse_ (pp. 450 et seq.) Bouchacourt has discussed the
problems of puericulture at some length.
[6] The importance of antenatal puericulture was fully recognized in China
a thousand years ago. Thus Madame Cheng wrote at that time concerning the
education of the child: "Even before birth his education may begin; and,
therefore, the prospective mother of old, when lying down, lay straight;
when sitting down, sat upright; and when standing, stood erect. She would
not taste strange flavors, nor have anything to do with spiritualism; if
her food were not cut straight she would not eat it, and if her mat were
not set straight, she would not sit upon it. She would not look at any
objectionable sight, nor listen to any objectionable sound, nor utter any
rude word, nor handle any impure thing. At night she studied some
canonical work, by day she occupied herself with ceremonies and music.
Therefore, her sons were upright and eminent for their talents and
virtues; such was the result of antenatal training" (H.A. Giles, "Woman in
Chinese Literature," _Nineteenth Century_, Nov., 1904).
[7] Max Bartels, "Isländischer Brauch," etc., _Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie_, 1900, p. 65. A summary of the customs of various peoples in
regard to pregnancy is given by Ploss and Bartels, _Das Weib_, Sect. XXIX.
[8] On the influence of alcohol during pregnancy on the embryo, see, e.g.,
G. Newman, _Infant Mortality_, pp. 72-77. W.C. Sullivan (_Alcoholism_,
1906, Ch. XI), summarizes the evidence showing that alcohol is a factor in
human degeneration.
[9] There is even reason to believe that the alcoholism of the mother's
father may impair her ability as a mother. Bunge (_Die Zunehmende
Unfähigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu Stillen_, fifth edition, 1907), from
an investigation extending over 2,000 families, finds that chronic
alcoholic poisoning in the father is the chief cause of the daughter's
inability to suckle, this inability not usually being recovered in
subsequent generations. Bunge has, however, been opposed by Dr. Agnes
Bluhm, "Die Stillungsnot," _Zeitschrift für Soziale Medizin_, 1908 (fully
summarized by herself in _Sexual-Probleme_, Jan., 1909).
[10] See, e.g., T. Arthur Helme, "The Unborn Child," _British Medical
Journal_, Aug. 24, 1907. Nutrition should, of course, be adequate. Noel
Paton has shown (_Lancet_, July 4, 1903) that defective nutrition of the
pregnant woman diminishes the weight of the offspring.
[11] Debreyne, _Moechialogie_, p. 277. And from the Protestant side see
Northcote (_Christianity and Sex Problems_, Ch. IX), who permits sexual
intercourse during pregnancy.
[12] See Appendix A to the third volume of these _Studies_; also Ploss and
Bartels, loc. cit.
[13] Thus one lady writes: "I have only had one child, but I may say that
during pregnancy the desire for union was much stronger, for the whole
time, than at any other period." Bouchacourt (_La Grossesse_, pp. 180-183)
states that, as a rule, sexual desire is not diminished by pregnancy, and
is occasionally increased.
[14] This "inconvenience" remains to-day a stumbling-block with many
excellent authorities. "Except when there is a tendency to miscarriage,"
says Kossmann (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation to
Marriage_, vol. i, p. 257), "we must be very guarded in ordering
abstinence from intercourse during pregnancy," and Ballantyne (_The
Foetus_, p. 475) cautiously remarks that the question is difficult to
decide. Forel also (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, fourth edition, p. 81), who is
not prepared to advocate complete sexual abstinence during a normal
pregnancy, admits that it is a rather difficult question.
[15] This point is discussed, for instance, by Séropian in a Paris Thesis
(_Fréquence comparée des Causes de l'Accouchement Prémature_, 1907); he
concludes that coitus during pregnancy is a more frequent cause of
premature confinement than is commonly supposed, especially in primiparæ,
and markedly so by the ninth month.
[16] "Infantile Mortality: The Huddersfield Scheme," _British Medical
Journal_, Dec., 1907; Samson Moore, "Infant Mortality," ib., August 29,
1908.
[17] Ellen Key has admirably dealt with proposals of this kind (as put
forth by C.P. Stetson) in her Essays "On Love and Marriage." In opposition
to such proposals Ellen Key suggests that such women as have been properly
trained for maternal duties and are unable entirely to support themselves
while exercising them should be subsidized by the State during the child's
first three years of life. It may be added that in Leipzig the plan of
subsidizing mothers who (under proper medical and other supervision)
suckle their infants has already been introduced.
CHAPTER II.
SEXUAL EDUCATION.
Nurture Necessary as Well as Breed--Precocious Manifestations of the
Sexual Impulse--Are They to be Regarded as Normal?--The Sexual Play of
Children--The Emotion of Love in Childhood--Are Town Children More
Precocious Sexually Than Country Children?--Children's Ideas Concerning
the Origin of Babies--Need for Beginning the Sexual Education of Children
in Early Years--The Importance of Early Training in Responsibility--Evil
of the Old Doctrine of Silence in Matters of Sex--The Evil Magnified When
Applied to Girls--The Mother the Natural and Best Teacher--The Morbid
Influence of Artificial Mystery in Sex Matters--Books on Sexual
Enlightenment of the Young--Nature of the Mother's Task--Sexual Education
in the School--The Value of Botany--Zoölogy--Sexual Education After
Puberty--The Necessity of Counteracting Quack Literature--Danger of
Neglecting to Prepare for the First Onset of Menstruation--The Right
Attitude Towards Woman's Sexual Life--The Vital Necessity of the Hygiene
of Menstruation During Adolescence--Such Hygiene Compatible with the
Educational and Social Equality of the Sexes--The Invalidism of Women
Mainly Due to Hygienic Neglect--Good Influence of Physical Training on
Women and Bad Influence of Athletics--The Evils of Emotional
Suppression--Need of Teaching the Dignity of Sex--Influence of These
Factors on a Woman's Fate in Marriage--Lectures and Addresses on Sexual
Hygiene--The Doctor's Part in Sexual Education--Pubertal Initiation Into
the Ideal World--The Place of the Religious and Ethical Teacher--The
Initiation Rites of Savages Into Manhood and Womanhood--The Sexual
Influence of Literature--The Sexual Influence of Art.
It may seem to some that in attaching weight to the ancestry, the
parentage, the conception, the gestation, even the first infancy, of the
child we are wandering away from the sphere of the psychology of sex. That
is far from being the case. We are, on the contrary, going to the root of
sex. All our growing knowledge tends to show that, equally with his
physical nature, the child's psychic nature is based on breed and nurture,
on the quality of the stocks he belongs to, and on the care taken at the
early moments when care counts for most, to preserve the fine quality of
those stocks.
It must, of course, be remembered that the influences of both
breed and nurture are alike influential on the fate of the
individual. The influence of nurture is so obvious that few are
likely to under-rate it. The influence of breed, however, is less
obvious, and we may still meet with persons so ill informed, and
perhaps so prejudiced, as to deny it altogether. The growth of
our knowledge in this matter, by showing how subtle and
penetrative is the influence of heredity, cannot fail to dispel
this mischievous notion. No sound civilization is possible except
in a community which in the mass is not only well-nurtured but
well-bred. And in no part of life so much as in the sexual
relationships is the influence of good breeding more decisive. An
instructive illustration may be gleaned from the minute and
precise history of his early life furnished to me by a highly
cultured Russian gentleman. He was brought up in childhood with
his own brothers and sisters and a little girl of the same age
who had been adopted from infancy, the child of a prostitute who
had died soon after the infant's birth. The adopted child was
treated as one of the family, and all the children supposed that
she was a real sister. Yet from early years she developed
instincts unlike those of the children with whom she was
nurtured; she lied, she was cruel, she loved to make mischief,
and she developed precociously vicious sexual impulses; though
carefully educated, she adopted the occupation of her mother, and
at the age of twenty-two was exiled to Siberia for robbery and
attempt to murder. The child of a chance father and a prostitute
mother is not fatally devoted to ruin; but such a child is
ill-bred, and that fact, in some cases, may neutralize all the
influences of good nurture.
When we reach the period of infancy we have already passed beyond the
foundations and potentialities of the sexual life; we are in some cases
witnessing its actual beginnings. It is a well-established fact that
auto-erotic manifestations may sometimes be observed even in infants of
less than twelve months. We are not now called upon to discuss the
disputable point as to how far such manifestations at this age can be
called normal.[18] A slight degree of menstrual and mammary activity
sometimes occurs at birth.[19] It seems clear that nervous and psychic
sexual activity has its first springs at this early period, and as the
years go by an increasing number of individuals join the stream until at
puberty practically all are carried along in the great current.
While, therefore, it is possibly, even probably, true that the soundest
and healthiest individuals show no definite signs of nervous and psychic
sexuality in childhood, such manifestations are still sufficiently
frequent to make it impossible to say that sexual hygiene may be
completely ignored until puberty is approaching.
Precocious physical development occurs as a somewhat rare
variation. W. Roger Williams ("Precocious Sexual Development with
Abstracts of over One Hundred Cases," _British Gynæcological
Journal_, May, 1902) has furnished an important contribution to
the knowledge of this anomaly which is much commoner in girls
than in boys. Roger Williams's cases include only twenty boys to
eighty girls, and precocity is not only more frequent but more
pronounced in girls, who have been known to conceive at eight,
while thirteen is stated to be the earliest age at which boys
have proved able to beget children. This, it may be remarked, is
also the earliest age at which spermatozoa are found in the
seminal fluid of boys; before that age the ejaculations contain
no spermatozoa, and, as Fürbringer and Moll have found, they may
even be absent at sixteen, or later. In female children
precocious sexual development is less commonly associated with
general increase of bodily development than in boys. (An
individual case of early sexual development in a girl of five has
been completely described and figured in the _Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie_, 1896, Heft 4, p. 262.)
Precocious sexual impulses are generally vague, occasional, and
more or less innocent. A case of rare and pronounced character,
in which a child, a boy, from the age of two had been sexually
attracted to girls and women, and directed all his thoughts and
actions to sexual attempts on them, has been described by Herbert
Rich, of Detroit (_Alienist and Neurologist_, Nov., 1905).
General evidence from the literature of the subject as to sexual
precocity, its frequency and significance, has been brought
together by L.M. Terman ("A Study in Precocity," _American
Journal Psychology_, April, 1905).
The erections that are liable to occur in male infants have
usually no sexual significance, though, as Moll remarks, they may
acquire it by attracting the child's attention; they are merely
reflex. It is believed by some, however, and notably by Freud,
that certain manifestations of infant activity, especially
thumb-sucking, are of sexual causation, and that the sexual
impulse constantly manifests itself at a very early age. The
belief that the sexual instinct is absent in childhood, Freud
regards as a serious error, so easy to correct by observation
that he wonders how it can have arisen. "In reality," he remarks,
"the new-born infant brings sexuality with it into the world,
sexual sensations accompany it through the days of lactation and
childhood, and very few children can fail to experience sexual
activities and feelings before the period of puberty" (Freud,
"Zur Sexuellen Aufklärung der Kinder," _Soziale Medizin und
Hygiene_, Bd. ii, 1907; cf., for details, the same author's _Drei
Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie_, 1905). Moll, on the other hand,
considers that Freud's views on sexuality in infancy are
exaggerations which must be decisively rejected, though he admits
that it is difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate the
feelings in childhood (Moll, _Das Sexualleben des Kindes_, p.
154). Moll believes also that psycho-sexual manifestations
appearing after the age of eight are not pathological; children
who are weakly or of bad heredity are not seldom sexually
precocious, but, on the other hand, Moll has known children of
eight or nine with strongly developed sexual impulses, who yet
become finely developed men.
Rudimentary sexual activities in childhood, accompanied by sexual
feelings, must indeed--when they are not too pronounced or too
premature--be regarded as coming within the normal sphere, though
when they occur in children of bad heredity they are not without
serious risks. But in healthy children, after the age of seven or
eight, they tend to produce no evil results, and are strictly of
the nature of play. Play, both in animals and men, as Groos has
shown with marvelous wealth of illustration, is a beneficent
process of education; the young creature is thereby preparing
itself for the exercise of those functions which in later life it
must carry out more completely and more seriously. In his _Spiele
der Menschen_, Groos applies this idea to the sexual play of
children, and brings forward quotations from literature in
evidence. Keller, in his "Romeo und Juliet auf dem Dorfe," has
given an admirably truthful picture of these childish
love-relationships. Emil Schultze-Malkowsky (_Geschlecht und
Gesellschaft_, Bd. ii, p. 370) reproduces some scenes from the
life of a little girl of seven clearly illustrating the exact
nature of the sexual manifestation at this age.
A kind of rudimentary sexual intercourse between children, as
Bloch has remarked (_Beiträge_, etc., Bd. ii, p. 254), occurs in
many parts of the world, and is recognized by their elders as
play. This is, for instance, the case among the Bawenda of the
Transvaal (_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1896, Heft 4, p. 364),
and among the Papuans of Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land, with the approval
of the parents, although much reticence is observed (id., 1889,
Heft 1, p. 16). Godard (_Egypte et Palestine_, 1867, p. 105)
noted the sexual play of the boys and girls in Cairo. In New
Mexico W.A. Hammond (_Sexual Impotence_, p. 107) has seen boys
and girls attempting a playful sexual conjunction with the
encouragement of men and women, and in New York he has seen boys
and girls of three and four doing the same in the presence of
their parents, with only a laughing rebuke. "Playing at pa and
ma" is indeed extremely common among children in genuine
innocence, and with a complete absence of viciousness; and is by
no means confined to children of low social class. Moll remarks
on its frequency (_Libido Sexualis_, Bd. i, p. 277), and the
committee of evangelical pastors, in their investigation of
German rural morality (_Die Geschlechtliche-sittliche
Verhältnisse_, Bd. i, p. 102) found that children who are not yet
of school age make attempts at coitus. The sexual play of
children is by no means confined to father and mother games;
frequently there are games of school with the climax in exposure
and smackings, and occasionally there are games of being doctors
and making examinations. Thus a young English woman says: "Of
course, when we were at school [at the age of twelve and earlier]
we used to play with one another, several of us girls; we used to
go into a field and pretend we were doctors and had to examine
one another, and then we used to pull up one another's clothes
and feel each other."
These games do not necessarily involve the coöperation of the
sexual impulse, and still less have they any element of love. But
emotions of love, scarcely if at all distinguishable from adult
sexual love, frequently appear at equally early ages. They are of
the nature of play, in so far as play is a preparation for the
activities of later life, though, unlike the games, they are not
felt as play. Ramdohr, more than a century ago (_Venus Urania_,
1798), referred to the frequent love of little boys for women.
More usually the love is felt towards individuals of the opposite
or the same sex who are not widely different in age, though
usually older. The most comprehensive study of the matter has
been made by Sanford Bell in America on a basis of as many as
2,300 cases (S. Bell, "A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love
Between the Sexes," _American Journal Psychology_, July, 1902).
Bell finds that the presence of the emotion between three and
eight years of age is shown by such actions as hugging, kissing,
lifting each other, scuffling, sitting close to each other,
confessions to each other and to others, talking about each other
when apart, seeking each other and excluding the rest, grief at
separation, giving gifts, showing special courtesies to each
other, making sacrifices for each other, exhibiting jealousy. The
girls are, on the whole, more aggressive than the boys, and less
anxious to keep the matter secret. After the age of eight, the
girls increase in modesty and the boys become still more
secretive. The physical sensations are not usually located in the
sexual organs; erection of the penis and hyperæmia of the female
sexual parts Bell regards as marking undue precocity. But there
is diffused vascular and nervous tumescence and a state of
exaltation comparable, though not equal, to that experienced in
adolescent and adult age. On the whole, as Bell soundly
concludes, "love between children of opposite sex bears much the
same relation to that between adults as the flower does to the
fruit, and has about as little of physical sexuality in it as an
apple-blossom has of the apple that develops from it." Moll also
(op. cit. p. 76) considers that kissing and other similar
superficial contacts, which he denominates the phenomena of
contrectation, constitute most frequently the first and sole
manifestation of the sexual impulse in childhood.
It is often stated that it is easier for children to preserve
their sexual innocence in the country than in the town, and that
only in cities is sexuality rampant and conspicuous. This is by
no means true, and in some respects it is the reverse of the
truth. Certainly, hard work, a natural and simple life, and a
lack of alert intelligence often combine to keep the rural lad
chaste in thought and act until the period of adolescence is
completed. Ammon, for instance, states, though without giving
definite evidence, that this is common among the Baden
conscripts. Certainly, also, all the multiple sensory excitements
of urban life tend to arouse the nervous and cerebral
excitability of the young at a comparatively early age in the
sexual as in other fields, and promote premature desires and
curiosities. But, on the other hand, urban life offers the young
no gratification for their desires and curiosities. The publicity
of a city, the universal surveillance, the studied decorum of a
population conscious that it is continually exposed to the gaze
of strangers, combine to spread a veil over the esoteric side of
life, which, even when at last it fails to conceal from the young
the urban stimuli of that life, effectually conceals, for the
most part, the gratifications of those stimuli. In the country,
however, these restraints do not exist in any corresponding
degree; animals render the elemental facts of sexual life clear
to all; there is less need or regard for decorum; speech is
plainer; supervision is impossible, and the amplest opportunities
for sexual intimacy are at hand. If the city may perhaps be said
to favor unchastity of thought in the young, the country may
certainly be said to favor unchastity of act.
The elaborate investigations of the Committee of Lutheran pastors
into sexual morality (_Die Geschlechtich-sittliche Verhältnisse
im Deutschen Reiche_), published a few years ago, demonstrate
amply the sexual freedom in rural Germany, and Moll, who is
decidedly of opinion that the country enjoys no relative freedom
from sexuality, states (op. cit., pp. 137-139, 239) that even the
circulation of obscene books and pictures among school-children
seems to be more frequent in small towns and the country than in
large cities. In Russia, where it might be thought that urban and
rural conditions offered less contrast than in many countries,
the same difference has been observed. "I do not know," a Russian
correspondent writes, "whether Zola in _La Terre_ correctly
describes the life of French villages. But the ways of a Russian
village, where I passed part of my childhood, fairly resemble
those described by Zola. In the life of the rural population into
which I was plunged everything was impregnated with erotism. One
was surrounded by animal lubricity in all its immodesty. Contrary
to the generally received opinion, I believe that a child may
preserve his sexual innocence more easily in a town than in the
country. There are, no doubt, many exceptions to this rule. But
the functions of the sexual life are generally more concealed in
the towns than in the fields. Modesty (whether or not of the
merely superficial and exterior kind) is more developed among
urban populations. In speaking of sexual things in the towns
people veil their thought more; even the lower class in towns
employ more restraint, more euphemisms, than peasants. Thus in
the towns a child may easily fail to comprehend when risky
subjects are talked of in his presence. It may be said that the
corruption of towns, though more concealed, is all the deeper.
Maybe, but that concealment preserves children from it. The town
child sees prostitutes in the street every day without
distinguishing them from other people. In the country he would
every day hear it stated in the crudest terms that such and such
a girl has been found at night in a barn or a ditch making love
with such and such a youth, or that the servant girl slips every
night into the coachman's bed, the facts of sexual intercourse,
pregnancy, and childbirth being spoken of in the plainest terms.
In towns the child's attention is solicited by a thousand
different objects; in the country, except fieldwork, which fails
to interest him, he hears only of the reproduction of animals and
the erotic exploits of girls and youths. When we say that the
urban environment is more exciting we are thinking of adults, but
the things which excite the adult have usually no erotic effect
on the child, who cannot, however, long remain asexual when he
sees the great peasant girls, as ardent as mares in heat,
abandoning themselves to the arms of robust youths. He cannot
fail to remark these frank manifestations of sexuality, though
the subtle and perverse refinements of the town would escape his
notice. I know that in the countries of exaggerated prudery there
is much hidden corruption, more, one is sometimes inclined to
think, than in less hypocritical countries. But I believe that
that is a false impression, and am persuaded that precisely
because of all these little concealments which excite the
malicious amusement of foreigners, there are really many more
young people in England who remain chaste than in the countries
which treat sexual relations more frankly. At all events, if I
have known Englishmen who were very debauched and very refined in
vice, I have also known young men of the same nation, over
twenty, who were as innocent as children, but never a young
Frenchman, Italian, or Spaniard of whom this could be said."
There is undoubtedly truth in this statement, though it must be
remembered that, excellent as chastity is, if it is based on mere
ignorance, its possessor is exposed to terrible dangers.
The question of sexual hygiene, more especially in its special aspect of
sexual enlightenment, is not, however, dependent on the fact that in some
children the psychic and nervous manifestation of sex appears at an
earlier age than in others. It rests upon the larger general fact that in
all children the activity of intelligence begins to work at a very early
age, and that this activity tends to manifest itself in an inquisitive
desire to know many elementary facts of life which are really dependent on
sex. The primary and most universal of these desires is the desire to know
where children come from. No question could be more natural; the question
of origins is necessarily a fundamental one in childish philosophies as,
in more ultimate shapes, it is in adult philosophies. Most children,
either guided by the statements, usually the misstatements, of their
elders, or by their own intelligence working amid such indications as are
open to them, are in possession of a theory of the origin of babies.
Stanley Hall ("Contents of Children's Minds on Entering School,"
_Pedagogical Seminary_, June, 1891) has collected some of the
beliefs of young children as to the origin of babies. "God makes
babies in heaven, though the Holy Mother and even Santa Claus
make some. He lets them down and drops them, and the women or
doctors catch them, or He leaves them on the sidewalk, or brings
them down a wooden ladder backwards and pulls it up again, or
mamma or the doctor or the nurse go up and fetch them, sometimes
in a balloon, or they fly down and lose off their wings in some
place or other and forget it, and jump down to Jesus, who gives
them around. They were also often said to be found in
flour-barrels, and the flour sticks ever so long, you know, or
they grew in cabbages, or God puts them in water, perhaps in the
sewer, and the doctor gets them out and takes them to sick folks
that want them, or the milkman brings them early in the morning;
they are dug out of the ground, or bought at the baby store."
In England and America the inquisitive child is often told that
the baby was found in the garden, under a gooseberry bush or
elsewhere; or more commonly it is said, with what is doubtless
felt to be a nearer approach to the truth, that the doctor
brought it. In Germany the common story told to children is that
the stork brings the baby. Various theories, mostly based on
folk-lore, have been put forward to explain this story, but none
of them seem quite convincing (see, e.g., G. Herman,
"Sexual-Mythen," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. i, Heft 5,
1906, p. 176, and P. Näcke, _Neurologische Centralblatt_, No. 17,
1907). Näcke thinks there is some plausibility in Professor
Petermann's suggestion that a frog writhing in a stork's bill
resembles a tiny human creature.
In Iceland, according to Max Bartels ("Isländischer Brauch und
Volksglaube," etc., _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1900, Heft 2
and 3) we find a transition between the natural and the fanciful
in the stories told to children of the origin of babies (the
stork is here precluded, for it only extends to the southern
border of Scandinavian lands). In North Iceland it is said that
God made the baby and the mother bore it, and on that account is
now ill. In the northwest it is said that God made the baby and
gave it to the mother. Elsewhere it is said that God sent the
baby and the midwife brought it, the mother only being in bed to
be near the baby (which is seldom placed in a cradle). It is also
sometimes said that a lamb or a bird brought the baby. Again it
is said to have entered during the night through the window.
Sometimes, however, the child is told that the baby came out of
the mother's breasts, or from below her breasts, and that is why
she is not well.
Even when children learn that babies come out of the mother's
body this knowledge often remains very vague and inaccurate. It
very commonly happens, for instance, in all civilized countries
that the navel is regarded as the baby's point of exit from the
body. This is a natural conclusion, since the navel is seemingly
a channel into the body, and a channel for which there is no
obvious use, while the pudendal cleft would not suggest itself to
girls (and still less to boys) as the gate of birth, since it
already appears to be monopolized by the urinary excretion. This
belief concerning the navel is sometimes preserved through the
whole period of adolescence, especially in girls of the so-called
educated class, who are too well-bred to discuss the matter with
their married friends, and believe indeed that they are already
sufficiently well informed. At this age the belief may not be
altogether harmless, in so far as it leads to the real gate of
sex being left unguarded. In Elsass where girls commonly believe,
and are taught, that babies come through the navel, popular
folk-tales are current (_Anthropophyteia_, vol. iii, p. 89)
which represent the mistakes resulting from this belief as
leading to the loss of virginity.
Freud, who believes that children give little credit to the stork
fable and similar stories invented for their mystification, has
made an interesting psychological investigation into the real
theories which children themselves, as the result of observation
and thought, reach concerning the sexual facts of life (S. Freud,
"Ueber Infantile Sexualtheorien," _Sexual-Probleme_, Dec., 1908).
Such theories, he remarks, correspond to the brilliant, but
defective hypotheses which primitive peoples arrive at concerning
the nature and origin of the world. There are three theories,
which, as Freud quite truly concludes, are very commonly formed
by children. The first, and the most widely disseminated, is that
there is no real anatomical difference between boys and girls; if
the boy notices that his little sister has no obvious penis he
even concludes that it is because she is too young, and the
little girl herself takes the same view. The fact that in early
life the clitoris is relatively larger and more penis-like helps
to confirm this view which Freud connects with the tendency in
later life to erotic dream of women furnished with a penis. This
theory, as Freud also remarks, favors the growth of homosexuality
when its germs are present. The second theory is the fæcal theory
of the origin of babies. The child, who perhaps thinks his mother
has a penis, and is in any case ignorant of the vagina, concludes
that the baby is brought into the world by an action analogous to
the action of the bowels. The third theory, which is perhaps less
prevalent than the others, Freud terms the sadistic theory of
coitus. The child realizes that his father must have taken some
sort of part in his production. The theory that sexual
intercourse consists in violence has in it a trace of truth, but
seems to be arrived at rather obscurely. The child's own sexual
feelings are often aroused for the first time when wrestling or
struggling with a companion; he may see his mother, also,
resisting more or less playfully a sudden caress from his father,
and if a real quarrel takes place, the impression may be
fortified. As to what the state of marriage consists in, Freud
finds that it is usually regarded as a state which abolishes
modesty; the most prevalent theory being that marriage means that
people can make water before each other, while another common
childish theory is that marriage is when people can show each
other their private parts.
Thus it is that at a very early stage of the child's life we are brought
face to face with the question how we may most wisely begin his initiation
into the knowledge of the great central facts of sex. It is perhaps a
little late in the day to regard it as a question, but so it is among us,
although three thousand five hundred years ago, the Egyptian father spoke
to his child: "I have given you a mother who has carried you within her, a
heavy burden, for your sake, and without resting on me. When at last you
were born, she indeed submitted herself to the yoke, for during three
years were her nipples in your mouth. Your excrements never turned her
stomach, nor made her say, 'What am I doing?' When you were sent to school
she went regularly every day to carry the household bread and beer to your
master. When in your turn you marry and have a child, bring up your child
as your mother brought you up."[20]
I take it for granted, however, that--whatever doubt there may be as to
the how or the when--no doubt is any longer possible as to the absolute
necessity of taking deliberate and active part in this sexual initiation,
instead of leaving it to the chance revelation of ignorant and perhaps
vicious companions or servants. It is becoming more and more widely felt
that the risks of ignorant innocence are too great.
"All the love and solicitude parental yearning can bestow,"
writes Dr. G.F. Butler, of Chicago (_Love and its Affinities_,
1899, p. 83), "all that the most refined religious influence can
offer, all that the most cultivated associations can accomplish,
in one fatal moment may be obliterated. There is no room for
ethical reasoning, indeed oftentimes no consciousness of wrong,
but only Margaret's 'Es war so süss'." The same writer adds (as
had been previously remarked by Mrs. Craik and others) that among
church members it is the finer and more sensitive organizations
that are the most susceptible to sexual emotions. So far as boys
are concerned, we leave instruction in matters of sex, the most
sacred and central fact in the world, as Canon Lyttelton remarks,
to "dirty-minded school-boys, grooms, garden-boys, anyone, in
short, who at an early age may be sufficiently defiled and
sufficiently reckless to talk of them." And, so far as girls are
concerned, as Balzac long ago remarked, "a mother may bring up
her daughter severely, and cover her beneath her wings for
seventeen years; but a servant-girl can destroy that long work by
a word, even by a gesture."
The great part played by servant-girls of the lower class in the
sexual initiation of the children of the middle class has been
illustrated in dealing with "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in vol.
iii, of these _Studies_, and need not now be further discussed.
I would only here say a word, in passing, on the other side.
Often as servant-girls take this part, we must not go so far as
to say that it is the case with the majority. As regards Germany,
Dr. Alfred Kind has lately put on record his experience: "I have
_never_, in youth, heard a bad or improper word on
sex-relationships from a servant-girl, although servant-girls
followed one another in our house like sunshine and showers in
April, and there was always a relation of comradeship between us
children and the servants." As regards England, I can add that my
own youthful experiences correspond to Dr. Kind's. This is not
surprising, for one may say that in the ordinary well-conditioned
girl, though her virtue may not be developed to heroic
proportions, there is yet usually a natural respect for the
innocence of children, a natural sexual indifference to them, and
a natural expectation that the male should take the active part
when a sexual situation arises.
It is also beginning to be felt that, especially as regards women,
ignorant innocence is not merely too fragile a possession to be worth
preservation, but that it is positively mischievous, since it involves the
lack of necessary knowledge. "It is little short of criminal," writes Dr.
F.M. Goodchild,[21] "to send our young people into the midst of the
excitements and temptations of a great city with no more preparation than
if they were going to live in Paradise." In the case of women, ignorance
has the further disadvantage that it deprives them of the knowledge
necessary for intelligent sympathy with other women. The unsympathetic
attitude of women towards women is often largely due to sheer ignorance of
the facts of life. "Why," writes in a private letter a married lady who
keenly realizes this, "are women brought up with such a profound ignorance
of their own and especially other women's natures? They do not know half
as much about other women as a man of the most average capacity learns in
his day's march." We try to make up for our failure to educate women in
the essential matters of sex by imposing upon the police and other
guardians of public order the duty of protecting women and morals. But, as
Moll insists, the real problem of chastity lies, not in the multiplication
of laws and policemen, but largely in women's knowledge of the dangers of
sex and in the cultivation of their sense of responsibility.[22] We are
always making laws for the protection of children and setting the police
on guard. But laws and the police, whether their activities are good or
bad, are in either case alike ineffectual. They can for the most part only
be invoked when the damage is already done. We have to learn to go to the
root of the matter. We have to teach children to be a law to themselves.
We have to give them that knowledge which will enable them to guard their
own personalities.[23] There is an authentic story of a lady who had
learned to swim, much to the horror of her clergyman, who thought that
swimming was unfeminine. "But," she said, "suppose I was drowning." "In
that case," he replied, "you ought to wait until a man comes along and
saves you." There we have the two methods of salvation which have been
preached to women, the old method and the new. In no sea have women been
more often in danger of drowning than that of sex. There ought to be no
question as to which is the better method of salvation.
It is difficult nowadays to find any serious arguments against
the desirability of early sexual enlightenment, and it is almost
with amusement that we read how the novelist Alphonse Daudet,
when asked his opinion of such enlightenment, protested--in a
spirit certainly common among the men of his time--that it was
unnecessary, because boys could learn everything from the streets
and the newspapers, while "as to young girls--no! I would teach
them none of the truths of physiology. I can only see
disadvantages in such a proceeding. These truths are ugly,
disillusioning, sure to shock, to frighten, to disgust the mind,
the nature, of a girl." It is as much as to say that there is no
need to supply sources of pure water when there are puddles in
the street that anyone can drink of. A contemporary of Daudet's,
who possessed a far finer spiritual insight, Coventry Patmore,
the poet, in the essay on "Ancient and Modern Ideas of Purity" in
his beautiful book, _Religio Poetæ_, had already finely protested
against that "disease of impurity" which comes of "our modern
undivine silences" for which Daudet pleaded. And Metchnikoff,
more recently, from the scientific side, speaking especially as
regards women, declares that knowledge is so indispensable for
moral conduct that "ignorance must be counted the most immoral of
acts" (_Essais Optimistes_, p. 420).
The distinguished Belgian novelist, Camille Lemonnier, in his
_L'Homme en Amour_, deals with the question of the sexual
education of the young by presenting the history of a young man,
brought up under the influence of the conventional and
hypocritical views which teach that nudity and sex are shameful
and disgusting things. In this way he passes by the opportunities
of innocent and natural love, to become hopelessly enslaved at
last to a sensual woman who treats him merely as the instrument
of her pleasure, the last of a long succession of lovers. The
book is a powerful plea for a sane, wholesome, and natural
education in matters of sex. It was, however, prosecuted at
Bruges, in 1901, though the trial finally ended in acquittal.
Such a verdict is in harmony with the general tendency of feeling
at the present time.
The old ideas, expressed by Daudet, that the facts of sex are
ugly and disillusioning, and that they shock the mind of the
young, are both alike entirely false. As Canon Lyttelton remarks,
in urging that the laws of the transmission of life should be
taught to children by the mother: "The way they receive it with
native reverence, truthfulness of understanding and guileless
delicacy, is nothing short of a revelation of the never-ceasing
beauty of nature. People sometimes speak of the indescribable
beauty of children's innocence. But I venture to say that no one
quite knows what it is who has foregone the privilege of being
the first to set before them the true meaning of life and birth
and the mystery of their own being. Not only do we fail to build
up sound knowledge in them, but we put away from ourselves the
chance of learning something that must be divine." In the same
way, Edward Carpenter, stating that it is easy and natural for
the child to learn from the first its physical relation to its
mother, remarks (_Love's Coming of Age_, p. 9): "A child at the
age of puberty, with the unfolding of its far-down emotional and
sexual nature, is eminently capable of the most sensitive,
affectional and serene appreciation of what _sex_ means
(generally more so as things are to-day, than its worldling
parent or guardian); and can absorb the teaching, if
sympathetically given, without any shock or disturbance to its
sense of shame--that sense which is so natural and valuable a
safeguard of early youth."
How widespread, even some years ago, had become the conviction
that the sexual facts of life should be taught to girls as well
as boys, was shown when the opinions of a very miscellaneous
assortment of more or less prominent persons were sought on the
question ("The Tree of Knowledge," _New Review_, June, 1894). A
small minority of two only (Rabbi Adler and Mrs. Lynn Lynton)
were against such knowledge, while among the majority in favor of
it were Mme. Adam, Thomas Hardy, Sir Walter Besant, Björnson,
Hall Caine, Sarah Grand, Nordau, Lady Henry Somerset, Baroness
von Suttner, and Miss Willard. The leaders of the woman's
movement are, of course, in favor of such knowledge. Thus a
meeting of the Bund für Mutterschutz at Berlin, in 1905, almost
unanimously passed a resolution declaring that the early sexual
enlightenment of children in the facts of the sexual life is
urgently necessary (_Mutterschutz_, 1905, Heft 2, p. 91). It may
be added that medical opinion has long approved of this
enlightenment. Thus in England it was editorially stated in the
_British Medical Journal_ some years ago (June 9, 1894): "Most
medical men of an age to beget confidence in such affairs will be
able to recall instances in which an ignorance, which would have
been ludicrous if it had not been so sad, has been displayed on
matters regarding which every woman entering on married life
ought to have been accurately informed. There can, we think, be
little doubt that much unhappiness and a great deal of illness
would be prevented if young people of both sexes possessed a
little accurate knowledge regarding the sexual relations, and
were well impressed with the profound importance of selecting
healthy mates. Knowledge need not necessarily be nasty, but even
if it were, it certainly is not comparable in that respect with
the imaginings of ignorance." In America, also, where at an
annual meeting of the American Medical Association, Dr. Denslow
Lewis, of Chicago, eloquently urged the need of teaching sexual
hygiene to youths and girls, all the subsequent nine speakers,
some of them physicians of worldwide fame, expressed their
essential agreement (_Medico-Legal Journal_, June-Sept., 1903).
Howard, again, at the end of his elaborate _History of
Matrimonial Institutions_ (vol. iii, p. 257) asserts the
necessity for education in matters of sex, as going to the root
of the marriage problem. "In the future educational programme,"
he remarks, "sex questions must hold an honorable place."
While, however, it is now widely recognized that children are entitled to
sexual enlightenment, it cannot be said that this belief is widely put
into practice. Many persons, who are fully persuaded that children should
sooner or later be enlightened concerning the sexual sources of life, are
somewhat nervously anxious as to the precise age at which this
enlightenment should begin. Their latent feeling seems to be that sex is
an evil, and enlightenment concerning sex also an evil, however necessary,
and that the chief point is to ascertain the latest moment to which we can
safely postpone this necessary evil. Such an attitude is, however,
altogether wrong-headed. The child's desire for knowledge concerning the
origin of himself is a perfectly natural, honest, and harmless desire, so
long as it is not perverted by being thwarted. A child of four may ask
questions on this matter, simply and spontaneously. As soon as the
questions are put, certainly as soon as they become at all insistent, they
should be answered, in the same simple and spontaneous spirit, truthfully,
though according to the measure of the child's intelligence and his
capacity and desire for knowledge. This period should not, and, if these
indications are followed, naturally would not, in any case, be delayed
beyond the sixth year. After that age even the most carefully guarded
child is liable to contaminating communications from outside. Moll points
out that the sexual enlightenment of girls in its various stages ought to
be always a little ahead of that of boys, and as the development of girls
up to the pubertal age is more precocious than that of boys, this demand
is reasonable.
If the elements of sexual education are to be imparted in early childhood,
it is quite clear who ought to be the teacher. There should be no question
that this privilege belongs by every right to the mother. Except where a
child is artificially separated from his chief parent it is indeed only
the mother who has any natural opportunity of receiving and responding to
these questions. It is unnecessary for her to take any initiative in the
matter. The inevitable awakening of the child's intelligence and the
evolution of his boundless curiosity furnish her love and skill with all
opportunities for guiding her child's thoughts and knowledge. Nor is it
necessary for her to possess the slightest technical information at this
stage. It is only essential that she should have the most absolute faith
in the purity and dignity of her physical relationship to her child, and
be able to speak of it with frankness and tenderness. When that essential
condition is fulfilled every mother has all the knowledge that her young
child needs.
Among the best authorities, both men and women, in all the
countries where this matter is attracting attention, there seems
now to be unanimity of opinion in favor of the elementary facts
of the baby's relationship to its mother being explained to the
child by the mother as soon as the child begins to ask questions.
Thus in Germany Moll has repeatedly argued in this sense; he
insists that sexual enlightenment should be mainly a private and
individual matter; that in schools there should be no general and
personal warnings about masturbation, etc. (though at a later age
he approves of instruction in regard to venereal diseases), but
that the mother is the proper person to impart intimate knowledge
to the child, and that any age is suitable for the commencement
of such enlightenment, provided it is put into a form fitted for
the age (Moll, op. cit., p. 264).
At the Mannheim meeting of the Congress of the German Society for
Combating Venereal Disease, when the question of sexual
enlightenment formed the sole subject of discussion, the opinion
in favor of early teaching by the mother prevailed. "It is the
mother who must, in the first place, be made responsible for the
child's clear understanding of sexual things, so often lacking,"
said Frau Krukenberg ("Die Aufgabe der Mutter,"
_Sexualpädagogik_, p. 13), while Max Enderlin, a teacher, said on
the same occasion ("Die Sexuelle Frage in die Volksschule," id.,
p. 35): "It is the mother who has to give the child his first
explanations, for it is to his mother that he first naturally
comes with his questions." In England, Canon Lyttelton, who is
distinguished among the heads of public schools not least by his
clear and admirable statements on these questions, states
(_Mothers and Sons_, p. 99) that the mother's part in the sexual
enlightenment and sexual guardianship of her son is of paramount
importance, and should begin at the earliest years. J.H. Badley,
another schoolmaster ("The Sex Difficulty," _Broad Views_, June,
1904), also states that the mother's part comes first. Northcote
(_Christianity and Sex Problems_, p. 25) believes that the duty
of the parents is primary in this matter, the family doctor and
the schoolmaster coming in at a later stage. In America, Dr. Mary
Wood Allen, who occupies a prominent and influential position in
women's social movements, urges (in _Child-Confidence Rewarded_,
and other pamphlets) that a mother should begin to tell her child
these things as soon as he begins to ask questions, the age of
four not being too young, and explains how this may be done,
giving examples of its happy results in promoting a sweet
confidence between the child and his mother.
If, as a few believe should be the case, the first initiation is delayed
to the tenth year or even later, there is the difficulty that it is no
longer so easy to talk simply and naturally about such things; the mother
is beginning to feel too shy to speak for the first time about these
difficult subjects to a son or a daughter who is nearly as big as herself.
She feels that she can only do it awkwardly and ineffectively, and she
probably decides not to do it at all. Thus an atmosphere of mystery is
created with all the embarrassing and perverting influences which mystery
encourages.
There can be no doubt that, more especially in highly intelligent
children with vague and unspecialized yet insistent sexual
impulses, the artificial mystery with which sex is too often
clothed not only accentuates the natural curiosity but also tends
to favor the morbid intensity and even prurience of the sexual
impulse. This has long been recognized. Dr. Beddoes wrote at the
beginning of the nineteenth century: "It is in vain that we
dissemble to ourselves the eagerness with which children of
either sex seek to satisfy themselves concerning the conformation
of the other. No degree of reserve in the heads of families, no
contrivances, no care to put books of one description out of
sight and to garble others, has perhaps, with any one set of
children, succeeded in preventing or stifling this kind of
curiosity. No part of the history of human thought would perhaps
be more singular than the stratagems devised by young people in
different situations to make themselves masters or witnesses of
the secret. And every discovery, due to their own inquiries, can
but be so much oil poured upon an imagination in flames" (T.
Beddoes, _Hygeia_, 1802, vol. iii, p. 59). Kaan, again, in one of
the earliest books on morbid sexuality, sets down mystery as one
of the causes of _psychopathia sexualis_. Marro (_La Pubertà_, p.
299) points out how the veil of mystery thrown over sexual
matters merely serves to concentrate attention on them. The
distinguished Dutch writer Multatuli, in one of his letters
(quoted with approval by Freud), remarks on the dangers of hiding
things from boys and girls in a veil of mystery, pointing out
that this must only heighten the curiosity of children, and so
far from keeping them pure, which mere ignorance can never do,
heats and perverts their imaginations. Mrs. Mary Wood Allen,
also, warns the mother (op. cit., p. 5) against the danger of
allowing any air of embarrassing mystery to creep over these
things. "If the instructor feels any embarrassment in answering
the queries of the child, he is not fitted to be the teacher, for
the feeling of embarrassment will, in some subtle way,
communicate itself to the child, and he will experience an
indefinable sense of offended delicacy which is both unnecessary
and undesirable. Purification of one's own thought is, then, the
first step towards teaching the truth purely. Why," she adds, "is
death, the gateway out of life, any more dignified or pathetic
than birth, the gateway into life? Or why is the taking of
earthly life a more awful fact than the giving of life?" Mrs.
Ennis Richmond, in a book of advice to mothers which contains
many wise and true things, says: "I want to insist, more strongly
than upon anything else, that it is the _secrecy_ that surrounds
certain parts of the body and their functions that gives them
their danger in the child's thought. Little children, from
earliest years, are taught to think of these parts of their body
as mysterious, and not only so, but that they are mysterious
because they are unclean. Children have not even a name for them.
If you have to speak to your child, you allude to them
mysteriously and in a half-whisper as 'that little part of you
that you don't speak of,' or words to that effect. Before
everything it is important that your child should have a good
working name for these parts of his body, and for their
functions, and that he should be taught to use and to hear the
names, and that as naturally and openly as though he or you were
speaking of his head or his foot. Convention has, for various
reasons, made it impossible to speak in this way in public. But
you can, at any rate, break through this in the nursery. There
this rule of convention has no advantage, and many a serious
disadvantage. It is easy to say to a child, the first time he
makes an 'awkward' remark in public: 'Look here, laddie, you may
say what you like to me or to daddy, but, for some reason or
other, one does not talk about these' (only say _what_ things)
'in public.' Only let your child make the remark in public
_before_ you speak (never mind the shock to your caller's
feelings), don't warn him against doing so" (Ennis Richmond,
_Boyhood_, p. 60). Sex must always be a mystery, but, as Mrs.
Richmond rightly says, "the real and true mysteries of generation
and birth are very different from the vulgar secretiveness with
which custom surrounds them."
The question as to the precise names to be given to the more
private bodily parts and functions is sometimes a little
difficult to solve. Every mother will naturally follow her own
instincts, and probably her own traditions, in this matter. I
have elsewhere pointed out (in the study of "The Evolution of
Modesty") how widespread and instinctive is the tendency to adopt
constantly new euphemisms in this field. The ancient and simple
words, which in England a great poet like Chaucer could still use
rightly and naturally, are so often dropped in the mud by the
vulgar that there is an instinctive hesitation nowadays in
applying them to beautiful uses. They are, however,
unquestionably the best, and, in their origin, the most dignified
and expressive words. Many persons are of opinion that on this
account they should be rescued from the mud, and their sacredness
taught to children. A medical friend writes that he always taught
his son that the vulgar sex names are really beautiful words of
ancient origin, and that when we understand them aright we cannot
possibly see in them any motive for low jesting. They are simple,
serious and solemn words, connoting the most central facts of
life, and only to ignorant and plebeian vulgarity can they cause
obscene mirth. An American man of science, who has privately and
anonymously printed some pamphlets on sex questions, also takes
this view, and consistently and methodically uses the ancient
and simple words. I am of opinion that this is the ideal to be
sought, but that there are obvious difficulties at present in the
way of attaining it. In any case, however, the mother should be
in possession of a very precise vocabulary for all the bodily
parts and acts which it concerns her children to know.
It is sometimes said that at this early age children should not be told,
even in a simple and elementary form, the real facts of their origin but
should, instead, hear a fairy-tale having in it perhaps some kind of
symbolic truth. This contention may be absolutely rejected, without
thereby, in any degree, denying the important place which fairy-tales hold
in the imagination of young children. Fairy-tales have a real value to the
child; they are a mental food he needs, if he is not to be spiritually
starved; to deprive him of fairy-tales at this age is to do him a wrong
which can never be made up at any subsequent age. But not only are sex
matters too vital even in childhood to be safely made matter for a
fairy-tale, but the real facts are themselves as wonderful as any
fairy-tale, and appeal to the child's imagination with as much force as a
fairy-tale.
Even, however, if there were no other reasons against telling children
fairy-tales of sex instead of the real facts, there is one reason which
ought to be decisive with every mother who values her influence over her
child. He will very quickly discover, either by information from others or
by his own natural intelligence, that the fairy-tale, that was told him in
reply to a question about a simple matter of fact, was a lie. With that
discovery his mother's influence over him in all such matters vanishes for
ever, for not only has a child a horror of being duped, but he is
extremely sensitive about any rebuff of this kind, and never repeats what
he has been made to feel was a mistake to be ashamed of. He will not
trouble his mother with any more questions on this matter; he will not
confide in her; he will himself learn the art of telling "fairy-tales"
about sex matters. He had turned to his mother in trust; she had not
responded with equal trust, and she must suffer the punishment, as
Henriette Fürth puts it, of seeing "the love and trust of her son stolen
from her by the first boy he makes friends with in the street." When, as
sometimes happens (Moll mentions a case), a mother goes on repeating these
silly stories to a girl or boy of seven who is secretly well-informed, she
only degrades herself in her child's eyes. It is this fatal mistake, so
often made by mothers, which at first leads them to imagine that their
children are so innocent, and in later years causes them many hours of
bitterness because they realize they do not possess their children's
trust. In the matter of trust it is for the mother to take the first step;
the children who do not trust their mothers are, for the most part, merely
remembering the lesson they learned at their mother's knee.
The number of little books and pamphlets dealing with the
question of the sexual enlightenment of the young--whether
intended to be read by the young or offering guidance to mothers
and teachers in the task of imparting knowledge--has become very
large indeed during recent years in America, England, and
especially Germany, where there has been of late an enormous
production of such literature. The late Ben Elmy, writing under
the pseudonym of "Ellis Ethelmer," published two booklets, _Baby
Buds_, and _The Human Flower_ (issued by Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy,
Buxton House, Congleton), which state the facts in a simple and
delicate manner, though the author was not a notably reliable
guide on the scientific aspects of these questions. A charming
conversation between a mother and child, from a French source, is
reprinted by Edward Carpenter at the end of his _Love's Coming of
Age. How We Are Born_, by Mrs. N.J. (apparently a Russian lady
writing in English), prefaced by J.H. Badley, is satisfactory.
Mention may also be made of _The Wonder of Life_, by Mary Tudor
Pole. Margaret Morley's _Song of Life_, an American book, which I
have not seen, has been highly praised. Most of these books are
intended for quite young children, and while they explain more or
less clearly the origin of babies, nearly always starting with
the facts of plant life, they touch very slightly, if at all, on
the relations of the sexes.
Mrs. Ennis Richmond's books, largely addressed to mothers, deal
with these questions in a very sane, direct, and admirable
manner, and Canon Lyttelton's books, discussing such questions
generally, are also excellent. Most of the books now to be
mentioned are intended to be read by boys and girls who have
reached the age of puberty. They refer more or less precisely to
sexual relationships, and they usually touch on masturbation.
_The Story of Life_, written by a very accomplished woman, the
late Ellice Hopkins, is somewhat vague, and introduces too many
exalted religious ideas. Arthur Trewby's _Healthy Boyhood_ is a
little book of wholesome tendency; it deals specially with
masturbation. _A Talk with Boys About Themselves_ and _A Talk
with Girls About Themselves_, both by Edward Bruce Kirk (the
latter book written in conjunction with a lady) deal with general
as well as sexual hygiene. There could be no better book to put
into the hands of a boy or girl at puberty than M.A. Warren's
_Almost Fourteen_, written by an American school teacher in 1892.
It was a most charming and delicately written book, which could
not have offended the innocence of the most sensitive maiden.
Nothing, however, is sacred to prurience, and it was easy for the
prurient to capture the law and obtain (in 1897) legal
condemnation of this book as "obscene." Anything which sexually
excites a prurient mind is, it is true, "obscene" for that mind,
for, as Mr. Theodore Schroeder remarks, obscenity is "the
contribution of the reading mind," but we need such books as this
in order to diminish the number of prurient minds, and the
condemnation of so entirely admirable a book makes, not for
morality, but for immorality. I am told that the book was
subsequently issued anew with most of its best portions omitted,
and it is stated by Schroeder (_Liberty of Speech and Press
Essential to Purity Propaganda_, p. 34) that the author was
compelled to resign his position as a public school principal.
Maria Lischnewska's _Geschlechtliche Belehrung der Kinder_
(reprinted from _Mutterschutz_, 1905, Heft 4 and 5) is a most
admirable and thorough discussion of the whole question of sexual
education, though the writer is more interested in the teacher's
share in this question than in the mother's. Suggestions to
mothers are contained in Hugo Salus, _Wo kommen die Kinder her?_,
E. Stiehl, _Eine Mutterpflicht_, and many other books. Dr. Alfred
Kind strongly recommends Ludwig Gurlitt's _Der Verkehr mit meinem
Kindern_, more especially in its combination of sexual education
with artistic education. Many similar books are referred to by
Bloch, in his _Sexual Life of Our Time_, Ch. xxvi.
I have enumerated the names of these little books because they
are frequently issued in a semi-private manner, and are seldom
easy to procure or to hear of. The propagation of such books
seems to be felt to be almost a disgraceful action, only to be
performed by stealth. And such a feeling seems not unnatural when
we see, as in the case of the author of _Almost Fourteen_, that a
nominally civilized country, instead of loading with honors a man
who has worked for its moral and physical welfare, seeks so far
as it can to ruin him.
I may add that while it would usually be very helpful to a mother
to be acquainted with a few of the booklets I have named, she
would do well, in actually talking to her children, to rely
mainly on her own knowledge and inspiration.
The sexual education which it is the mother's duty and privilege to
initiate during her child's early years cannot and ought not to be
technical. It is not of the nature of formal instruction but is a private
and intimate initiation. No doubt the mother must herself be taught.[24]
But the education she needs is mainly an education in love and insight.
The actual facts which she requires to use at this early stage are very
simple. Her main task is to make clear the child's own intimate relations
to herself and to show that all young things have a similar intimate
relation to their mothers; in generalizing on this point the egg is the
simplest and most fundamental type to explain the origin of the individual
life, for the idea of the egg--in its widest sense as the seed--not only
has its truth for the human creature but may be applied throughout the
animal and vegetable world. In this explanation the child's physical
relationship to his father is not necessarily at first involved; it may be
left to a further stage or until the child's questions lead up to it.
Apart from his interest in his origin, the child is also interested in his
sexual, or as they seem to him exclusively, his excretory organs, and in
those of other people, his sisters and parents. On these points, at this
age, his mother may simply and naturally satisfy his simple and natural
curiosity, calling things by precise names, whether the names used are
common or uncommon being a matter in regard to which she may exercise her
judgment and taste. In this manner the mother will, indirectly, be able to
safeguard her child at the outset against the prudish and prurient notions
alike which he will encounter later. She will also without unnatural
stress be able to lead the child into a reverential attitude towards his
own organs and so exert an influence against any undesirable tampering
with them. In talking with him about the origin of life and about his own
body and functions, in however elementary a fashion, she will have
initiated him both in sexual knowledge and in sexual hygiene.
The mother who establishes a relationship of confidence with her child
during these first years will probably, if she possesses any measure of
wisdom and tact, be able to preserve it even after the epoch of puberty
into the difficult years of adolescence. But as an educator in the
narrower sense her functions will, in most cases, end at or before
puberty. A somewhat more technical and completely impersonal acquaintance
with the essential facts of sex then becomes desirable, and this would
usually be supplied by the school.
The great though capricious educator, Basedow, to some extent a
pupil of Rousseau, was an early pioneer in both the theory and
the practice of giving school children instruction in the facts
of the sexual life, from the age of ten onwards. He insists much
on this subject in his great treatise, the _Elementarwerk_
(1770-1774). The questions of children are to be answered
truthfully, he states, and they must be taught never to jest at
anything so sacred and serious as the sexual relations. They are
to be shown pictures of childbirth, and the dangers of sexual
irregularities are to be clearly expounded to them at the outset.
Boys are to be taken to hospitals to see the results of venereal
disease. Basedow is aware that many parents and teachers will be
shocked at his insistence on these things in his books and in his
practical pedagogic work, but such people, he declares, ought to
be shocked at the Bible (see, e.g., Pinloche, _La Rèforme de
l'Education en Allemagne au dixhuitième siècle: Basedow et le
Philanthropinisme_, pp. 125, 256, 260, 272). Basedow was too far
ahead of his own time, and even of ours, to exert much influence
in this matter, and he had few immediate imitators.
Somewhat later than Basedow, a distinguished English physician,
Thomas Beddoes, worked on somewhat the same lines, seeking to
promote sexual knowledge by lectures and demonstrations. In his
remarkable book, _Hygeia_, published in 1802 (vol. i, Essay IV)
he sets forth the absurdity of the conventional requirement that
"discretion and ignorance should lodge in the same bosom," and
deals at length with the question of masturbation and the need of
sexual education. He insists on the great importance of lectures
on natural history which, he had found, could be given with
perfect propriety to a mixed audience. His experiences had shown
that botany, the amphibia, the hen and her eggs, human anatomy,
even disease and sometimes the sight of it, are salutary from
this point of view. He thinks it is a happy thing for a child to
gain his first knowledge of sexual difference from anatomical
subjects, the dignity of death being a noble prelude to the
knowledge of sex and depriving it forever of morbid prurience.
It is scarcely necessary to remark that this method of teaching
children the elements of sexual anatomy in the _post-mortem_ room
has not found many advocates or followers; it is undesirable, for
it fails to take into account the sensitiveness of children to
such impressions, and it is unnecessary, for it is just as easy
to teach the dignity of life as the dignity of death.
The duty of the school to impart education in matters of sex to
children has in recent years been vigorously and ably advocated
by Maria Lischnewska (op. cit.), who speaks with thirty years'
experience as a teacher and an intimate acquaintance with
children and their home life. She argues that among the mass of
the population to-day, while in the home-life there is every
opportunity for coarse familiarity with sexual matters, there is
no opportunity for a pure and enlightened introduction to them,
parents being for the most part both morally and intellectually
incapable of aiding their children here. That the school should
assume the leading part in this task is, she believes, in
accordance with the whole tendency of modern civilized life. She
would have the instruction graduated in such a manner that during
the fifth or sixth year of school life the pupil would receive
instruction, with the aid of diagrams, concerning the sexual
organs and functions of the higher mammals, the bull and cow
being selected by preference. The facts of gestation would of
course be included. When this stage was reached it would be easy
to pass on to the human species with the statement: "Just in the
same way as the calf develops in the cow so the child develops in
the mother's body."
It is difficult not to recognize the force of Maria Lischnewska's
argument, and it seems highly probable that, as she asserts, the
instruction proposed lies in the course of our present path of
progress. Such instruction would be formal, unemotional, and
impersonal; it would be given not as specific instruction in
matters of sex, but simply as a part of natural history. It would
supplement, so far as mere knowledge is concerned, the
information the child had already received from its mother. But
it would by no means supplant or replace the personal and
intimate relationship of confidence between mother and child.
That is always to be aimed at, and though it may not be possible
among the ill-educated masses of to-day, nothing else will
adequately take its place.
There can be no doubt, however, that while in the future the school will
most probably be regarded as the proper place in which to teach the
elements of physiology--and not as at present a merely emasculated and
effeminated physiology--the introduction of such reformed teaching is as
yet impracticable in many communities. A coarse and ill-bred community
moves in a vicious circle. Its members are brought up to believe that sex
matters are filthy, and when they become adults they protest violently
against their children being taught this filthy knowledge. The teacher's
task is thus rendered at the best difficult, and under democratic
conditions impossible. We cannot, therefore, hope for any immediate
introduction of sexual physiology into schools, even in the unobtrusive
form in which alone it could properly be introduced, that is to say as a
natural and inevitable part of general physiology.
This objection to animal physiology by no means applies, however, to
botany. There can be little doubt that botany is of all the natural
sciences that which best admits of this incidental instruction in the
fundamental facts of sex, when we are concerned with children below the
age of puberty. There are at least two reasons why this should be so. In
the first place botany really presents the beginnings of sex, in their
most naked and essential forms; it makes clear the nature, origin, and
significance of sex. In the second place, in dealing with plants the facts
of sex can be stated to children of either sex or any age quite plainly
and nakedly without any reserve, for no one nowadays regards the botanical
facts of sex as in any way offensive. The expounder of sex in plants also
has on his side the advantage of being able to assert, without question,
the entire beauty of the sexual process. He is not confronted by the
ignorance, bad education, and false associations which have made it so
difficult either to see or to show the beauty of sex in animals. From the
sex-life of plants to the sex-life of the lower animals there is, however,
but a step which the teacher, according to his discretion, may take.
An early educational authority, Salzmann, in 1785 advocated the
sexual enlightenment of children by first teaching them botany,
to be followed by zoölogy. In modern times the method of
imparting sex knowledge to children by means, in the first place,
of botany, has been generally advocated, and from the most
various quarters. Thus Marro (_La Pubertà_, p. 300) recommends
this plan. J. Hudrey-Menos ("La Question du Sexe dans
l'Education," _Revue Socialiste_, June, 1895), gives the same
advice. Rudolf Sommer, in a paper entitled "Mädchenerziehung oder
Menschenbildung?" (_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Jahrgang I,
Heft 3) recommends that the first introduction of sex knowledge
to children should be made by talking to them on simple natural
history subjects; "there are endless opportunities," he remarks,
"over a fairy-tale, or a walk, or a fruit, or an egg, the sowing
of seed or the nest-building of birds." Canon Lyttelton
(_Training of the Young in Laws of Sex_, pp. 74 et seq.) advises
a somewhat similar method, though laying chief stress on personal
confidence between the child and his mother; "reference is made
to the animal world just so far as the child's knowledge extends,
so as to prevent the new facts from being viewed in isolation,
but the main emphasis is laid on his feeling for his mother and
the instinct which exists in nearly all children of reverence due
to the maternal relation;" he adds that, however difficult the
subject may seem, the essential facts of paternity must also be
explained to boys and girls alike. Keyes, again (_New York
Medical Journal_, Feb. 10, 1906), advocates teaching children
from an early age the sexual facts of plant life and also
concerning insects and other lower animals, and so gradually
leading up to human beings, the matter being thus robbed of its
unwholesome mystery. Mrs. Ennis Richmond (_Boyhood_, p. 62)
recommends that children should be sent to spend some of their
time upon a farm, so that they may not only become acquainted
with the general facts of the natural world, but also with the
sexual lives of animals, learning things which it is difficult to
teach verbally. Karina Karin ("Wie erzieht man ein Kind zür
wissenden Keuschheit?" _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Jahrgang I,
Heft 4), reproducing some of her talks with her nine-year old
son, from the time that he first asked her where children came
from, shows how she began with telling him about flowers, to pass
on to fish and birds, and finally to the facts of human
pregnancy, showing him pictures from an obstetrical manual of the
child in its mother's body. It may be added that the advisability
of beginning the sex teaching of children with the facts of
botany was repeatedly emphasized by various speakers at the
special meeting of the German Congress for Combating Venereal
Disease devoted to the subject of sexual instruction
(_Sexualpädagogik_, especially pp. 36, 47, 76).
The transition from botany to the elementary zoölogy of the lower animals,
to human anatomy and physiology, and to the science of anthropology based
on these, is simple and natural. It is not likely to be taken in detail
until the age of puberty. Sex enters into all these subjects and should
not be artificially excluded from them in the education of either boys or
girls. The text-books from which the sexual system is entirely omitted
ought no longer to be tolerated. The nature and secretion of the
testicles, the meaning of the ovaries and of menstruation, as well as the
significance of metabolism and the urinary excretion, should be clear in
their main lines to all boys and girls who have reached the age of
puberty.
At puberty there arises a new and powerful reason why boys and girls
should receive definite instruction in matters of sex. Before that age it
is possible for the foolish parent to imagine that a child may be
preserved in ignorant innocence.[25] At puberty that belief is obviously
no longer possible. The efflorescence of puberty with the development of
the sexual organs, the appearance of hair in unfamiliar places, the
general related organic changes, the spontaneous and perhaps alarming
occurrence in boys of seminal emissions, and in girls of menstruation, the
unaccustomed and sometimes acute recognition of sexual desire accompanied
by new sensations in the sexual organs and leading perhaps to
masturbation; all these arouse, as we cannot fail to realize, a new
anxiety in the boy's or girl's mind, and a new curiosity, all the more
acute in many cases because it is carefully concealed as too private, and
even too shameful, to speak of to anyone. In boys, especially if of
sensitive temperament, the suffering thus caused may be keen and
prolonged.
A doctor of philosophy, prominent in his profession, wrote to
Stanley Hall (_Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 452): "My entire youth,
from six to eighteen, was made miserable from lack of knowledge
that any one who knew anything of the nature of puberty might
have given; this long sense of defect, dread of operation, shame
and worry, has left an indelible mark." There are certainly many
men who could say the same. Lancaster ("Psychology and Pedagogy
of Adolescence," _Pedagogical Seminary_, July, 1897, pp. 123-5)
speaks strongly regarding the evils of ignorance of sexual
hygiene, and the terrible fact that millions of youths are always
in the hands of quacks who dupe them into the belief that they
are on the road to an awful destiny merely because they have
occasional emissions during sleep. "This is not a light matter,"
Lancaster declares. "It strikes at the very foundation of our
inmost life. It deals with the reproductory part of our natures,
and must have a deep hereditary influence. It is a natural result
of the foolish false modesty shown regarding all sex instruction.
Every boy should be taught the simple physiological facts before
his life is forever blighted by this cause." Lancaster has had in
his hands one thousand letters, mostly written by young people,
who were usually normal, and addressed to quacks who were duping
them. From time to time the suicides of youths from this cause
are reported, and in many mysterious suicides this has
undoubtedly been the real cause. "Week after week," writes the
_British Medical Journal_ in an editorial ("Dangerous Quack
Literature: The Moral of a Recent Suicide," Oct. 1, 1892), "we
receive despairing letters from those victims of foul birds of
prey who have obtained their first hold on those they rob,
torture and often ruin, by advertisements inserted by newspapers
of a respectable, nay, even of a valuable and respected,
character." It is added that the wealthy proprietors of such
newspapers, often enjoying a reputation for benevolence, even
when the matter is brought before them, refuse to interfere as
they would thereby lose a source of income, and a censorship of
advertisements is proposed. This, however, is difficult, and
would be quite unnecessary if youths received proper
enlightenment from their natural guardians.
Masturbation, and the fear that by an occasional and perhaps
outgrown practice of masturbation they have sometimes done
themselves irreparable injury, is a common source of anxiety to
boys. It has long been a question whether a boy should be warned
against masturbation. At a meeting of the Section of Psychology
of the British Medical Association some years ago, four speakers,
including the President (Dr. Blandford), were decidedly in favor
of parents warning their children against masturbation, while
three speakers were decidedly against that course, mainly on the
ground that it was possible to pass through even a public school
life without hearing of masturbation, and also that the warning
against masturbation might encourage the practice. It is,
however, becoming more and more clearly realized that ignorance,
even if it can be maintained, is a perilous possession, while the
teaching that consists, as it should, in a loving mother's
counsel to the child from his earliest years to treat his sexual
parts with care and respect, can only lead to masturbation in the
child who is already irresistibly impelled to it. Most of the sex
manuals for boys touch on masturbation, sometimes exaggerating
its dangers; such exaggeration should be avoided, for it leads to
far worse evils than those it attempts to prevent. It seems
undesirable that any warnings about masturbation should form part
of school instruction, unless under very special circumstances.
The sexual instruction imparted in the school on sexual as on
other subjects should be absolutely impersonal and objective.
At this point we approach one of the difficulties in the way of
sexual enlightenment: the ignorance or unwisdom of the would-be
teachers. This difficulty at present exists both in the home and
the school, while it destroys the value of many manuals written
for the sexual instruction of the young. The mother, who ought to
be the child's confidant and guide in matters of sexual
education, and could naturally be so if left to her own healthy
instincts, has usually been brought up in false traditions which
it requires a high degree of intelligence and character to escape
from; the school-teacher, even if only called upon to give
instruction in natural history, is oppressed by the same
traditions, and by false shame concerning the whole subject of
sex; the writer of manuals on sex has often only freed himself
from these bonds in order to advocate dogmatic, unscientific, and
sometimes mischievous opinions which have been evolved in entire
ignorance of the real facts. As Moll says (Das _Sexualleben des
Kindes_, p. 276), necessary as sexual enlightenment is, we cannot
help feeling a little skeptical as to its results so long as
those who ought to enlighten are themselves often in need of
enlightenment. He refers also to the fact that even among
competent authorities there is difference of opinion concerning
important matters, as, for instance, whether masturbation is
physiological at the first development of the sexual impulse and
how far sexual abstinence is beneficial. But it is evident that
the difficulties due to false tradition and ignorance will
diminish as sound traditions and better knowledge become more
widely diffused.
The girl at puberty is usually less keenly and definitely conscious of her
sexual nature than the boy. But the risks she runs from sexual ignorance,
though for the most part different, are more subtle and less easy to
repair. She is often extremely inquisitive concerning these matters; the
thoughts of adolescent girls, and often their conversation among
themselves, revolve much around sexual and allied mysteries. Even in the
matter of conscious sexual impulse the girl is often not so widely
different from her brother, nor so much less likely to escape the
contamination of evil communications, so that the scruples of foolish and
ignorant persons who dread to "sully her purity" by proper instruction are
exceedingly misplaced.
Conversations dealing with the important mysteries of human
nature, Obici and Marchesini were told by ladies who had formerly
been pupils in Italian Normal Schools, are the order of the day
in schools and colleges, and specially circle around procreation,
the most difficult mystery of all. In England, even in the best
and most modern colleges, in which games and physical exercise
are much cultivated, I am told that "the majority of the girls
are entirely ignorant of all sexual matters, and understand
nothing whatever about them. But they do wonder about them, and
talk about them constantly" (see Appendix D, "The School
Friendships of Girls," in the second volume of these _Studies_).
"The restricted life and fettered mind of girls," wrote a
well-known physician some years ago (J. Milner Fothergill,
_Adolescence_, 1880, pp. 20, 22) "leave them with less to
actively occupy their thoughts than is the case with boys. They
are studiously taught concealment, and a girl may be a perfect
model of outward decorum and yet have a very filthy mind. The
prudishness with which she is brought up leaves her no
alternative but to view her passions from the nasty side of human
nature. All healthy thought on the subject is vigorously
repressed. Everything is done to darken her mind and foul her
imagination by throwing her back on her own thoughts and a
literature with which she is ashamed to own acquaintance. It is
opposed to a girl's best interests to prevent her from having
fair and just conceptions about herself and her nature. Many a
fair young girl is irredeemably ruined on the very threshold of
life, herself and her family disgraced, from ignorance as much as
from vice. When the moment of temptation comes she falls without
any palpable resistance; she has no trained educated power of
resistance within herself; her whole future hangs, not upon
herself, but upon the perfection of the social safeguards by
which she is hedged and surrounded." Under the free social order
of America to-day much the same results are found. In an
instructive article ("Why Girls Go Wrong," _Ladies' Home
Journal_, Jan., 1907) B.B. Lindsey, who, as Judge of the Juvenile
Court of Denver, is able to speak with authority, brings forward
ample evidence on this head. Both girls and boys, he has found,
sometimes possess manuscript books in which they had written down
the crudest sexual things. These children were often sweet-faced,
pleasant, refined and intelligent, and they had respectable
parents; but no one had ever spoken to them of sex matters,
except the worst of their school-fellows or some coarse-minded
and reckless adult. By careful inquiry Lindsey found that only in
one in twenty cases had the parents ever spoken to the children
of sexual subjects. In nearly every case the children
acknowledged that it was not from their parents, but in the
street or from older companions, that they learnt the facts of
sex. The parents usually imagined that their children were
absolutely ignorant of these matters, and were astonished to
realize their mistake; "parents do not know their children, nor
have they the least idea of what their children know, or what
their children talk about and do when away from them." The
parents guilty of this neglect to instruct their children, are,
Lindsey declares, traitors to their children. From his own
experience he judges that nine-tenths of the girls who "go
wrong," whether or not they sink in the world, do so owing to the
inattention of their parents, and that in the case of most
prostitutes the mischief is really done before the age of twelve;
"every wayward girl I have talked to has assured me of this
truth." He considers that nine-tenths of school-boys and
school-girls, in town or country, are very inquisitive regarding
matters of sex, and, to his own amazement, he has found that in
the girls this is as marked as in the boys.
It is the business of the girl's mother, at least as much as of the boy's,
to watch over her child from the earliest years and to win her confidence
in all the intimate and personal matters of sex. With these aspects the
school cannot properly meddle. But in matters of physical sexual hygiene,
notably menstruation, in regard to which all girls stand on the same
level, it is certainly the duty of the teacher to take an actively
watchful part, and, moreover, to direct the general work of education
accordingly, and to ensure that the pupil shall rest whenever that may
seem to be desirable. This is part of the very elements of the education
of girls. To disregard it should disqualify a teacher from taking further
share in educational work. Yet it is constantly and persistently
neglected. A large number of girls have not even been prepared by their
mothers or teachers for the first onset of the menstrual flow, sometimes
with disastrous results both to their bodily and mental health.[26]
"I know of no large girl's school," wrote a distinguished
gynæcologist, Sir W.S. Playfair ("Education and Training of Girls
at Puberty," _British Medical Journal_, Dec. 7, 1895), "in which
the absolute distinction which exists between boys and girls as
regards the dominant menstrual function is systematically cared
for and attended to. Indeed, the feeling of all schoolmistresses
is distinctly antagonistic to such an admission. The contention
is that there is no real difference between an adolescent male
and female, that what is good for one is good for the other, and
that such as there is is due to the evil customs of the past
which have denied to women the ambitions and advantages open to
men, and that this will disappear when a happier era is
inaugurated. If this be so, how comes it that while every
practical physician of experience has seen many cases of anæmia
and chlorosis in girls, accompanied by amenorrhæa or menorrhagia,
headaches, palpitations, emaciation, and all the familiar
accompaniments of breakdown, an analogous condition in a
school-boy is so rare that it may well be doubted if it is ever
seen at all?"
It is, however, only the excuses for this almost criminal
negligence, as it ought to be considered, which are new; the
negligence itself is ancient. Half a century earlier, before the
new era of feminine education, another distinguished
gynæcologist, Tilt (_Elements of Health and Principles of Female
Hygiene_, 1852, p. 18) stated that from a statistical inquiry
regarding the onset of menstruation in nearly one thousand women
he found that "25 per cent. were totally unprepared for its
appearance; that thirteen out of the twenty-five were much
frightened, screamed, or went into hysterical fits; and that six
out of the thirteen thought themselves wounded and washed with
cold water. Of those frightened ... the general health was
seriously impaired."
Engelmann, after stating that his experience in America was
similar to Tilt's in England, continues ("The Health of the
American Girl," _Transactions of the Southern Surgical and
Gynæcological Society_, 1890): "To innumerable women has fright,
nervous and emotional excitement, exposure to cold, brought
injury at puberty. What more natural than that the anxious girl,
surprised by the sudden and unexpected loss of the precious
life-fluid, should seek to check the bleeding wound--as she
supposes? For this purpose the use of cold washes and
applications is common, some even seek to stop the flow by a cold
bath, as was done by a now careful mother, who long lay at the
point of death from the result of such indiscretion, and but
slowly, by years of care, regained her health. The terrible
warning has not been lost, and mindful of her own experience she
has taught her children a lesson which but few are fortunate
enough to learn--the individual care during periods of functional
activity which is needful for the preservation of woman's
health."
In a study of one hundred and twenty-five American high school
girls Dr. Helen Kennedy refers to the "modesty" which makes it
impossible even for mothers and daughters to speak to each other
concerning the menstrual functions. "Thirty-six girls in this
high school passed into womanhood with no knowledge whatever,
from a proper source, of all that makes them women. Thirty-nine
were probably not much wiser, for they stated that they had
received some instruction, but had not talked freely on the
matter. From the fact that the curious girl did not talk freely
on what naturally interested her, it is possible she was put off
with a few words as to personal care, and a reprimand for her
curiosity. Less than half of the girls felt free to talk with
their mothers of this most important matter!" (Helen Kennedy,
"Effects of High School Work upon Girls During Adolescence,"
_Pedagogical Seminary_, June, 1896.)
The same state of things probably also prevails in other
countries. Thus, as regards France, Edmond de Goncourt in
_Chérie_ (pp. 137-139) described the terror of his young heroine
at the appearance of the first menstrual period for which she
had never been prepared. He adds: "It is very seldom, indeed,
that women speak of this eventuality. Mothers fear to warn their
daughters, elder sisters dislike confidences with their younger
sisters, governesses are generally mute with girls who have no
mothers or sisters."
Sometimes this leads to suicide or to attempts at suicide. Thus a
few years ago the case was reported in the French newspapers of a
young girl of fifteen, who threw herself into the Seine at
Saint-Ouen. She was rescued, and on being brought before the
police commissioner said that she had been attacked by an
"unknown disease" which had driven her to despair. Discreet
inquiry revealed that the mysterious malady was one common to all
women, and the girl was restored to her insufficiently punished
parents.
Half a century ago the sexual life of girls was ignored by their parents
and teachers from reasons of prudishness; at the present time, when quite
different ideas prevail regarding feminine education, it is ignored on the
ground that girls should be as independent of their physiological sexual
life as boys are. The fact that this mischievous neglect has prevailed
equally under such different conditions indicates clearly that the varying
reasons assigned for it are merely the cloaks of ignorance. With the
growth of knowledge we may reasonably hope that one of the chief evils
which at present undermine in early life not only healthy motherhood but
healthy womanhood generally, may be gradually eliminated. The data now
being accumulated show not only the extreme prevalence of painful,
disordered, and absent menstruation in adolescent girls and young women,
but also the great and sometimes permanent evils inflicted upon even
healthy girls when at the beginning of sexual life they are subjected to
severe strain of any kind. Medical authorities, whichever sex they belong
to, may now be said to be almost or quite unanimous on this point. Some
years ago, indeed, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, in a very able book, _The
Question of Rest for Women_, concluded that "ordinarily healthy" women may
disregard the menstrual period, but she admitted that forty-six per cent,
of women are not "ordinarily healthy," and a minority which comes so near
to being a majority can by no means be dismissed as a negligible quantity.
Girls themselves, indeed, carried away by the ardor of their pursuit of
work or amusement, are usually recklessly and ignorantly indifferent to
the serious risks they run. But the opinions of teachers are now tending
to agree with medical opinion in recognizing the importance of care and
rest during the years of adolescence, and teachers are even prepared to
admit that a year's rest from hard work during the period that a girl's
sexual life is becoming established, while it may ensure her health and
vigor, is not even a disadvantage from the educational point of view. With
the growth of knowledge and the decay of ancient prejudices, we may
reasonably hope that women will be emancipated from the traditions of a
false civilization, which have forced her to regard her glory as her
shame,--though it has never been so among robust primitive peoples,--and
it is encouraging to find that so distinguished an educator as Principal
Stanley Hall looks forward with confidence to such a time. In his
exhaustive work on _Adolescence_ he writes: "Instead of shame of this
function girls should be taught the greatest reverence for it, and should
help it to normality by regularly stepping aside at stated times for a few
years till it is well established and normal. To higher beings that looked
down upon human life as we do upon flowers, these would be the most
interesting and beautiful hours of blossoming. With more self-knowledge
women will have more self-respect at this time. Savagery reveres this
state and it gives to women a mystic awe. The time may come when we must
even change the divisions of the year for women, leaving to man his week
and giving to her the same number of Sabbaths per year, but in groups of
four successive days per month. When woman asserts her true physiological
rights she will begin here, and will glory in what, in an age of
ignorance, man made her think to be her shame. The pathos about the
leaders of woman's so-called emancipation, is that they, even more than
those they would persuade, accept man's estimate of this state."[27]
These wise words cannot be too deeply pondered. The pathos of the
situation has indeed been--at all events in the past for to-day a more
enlightened generation is growing up--that the very leaders of the woman's
movement have often betrayed the cause of women. They have adopted the
ideals of men, they have urged women to become second-rate men, they have
declared that the healthy natural woman disregards the presence of her
menstrual functions. This is the very reverse of the truth. "They claim,"
remarks Engelmann, "that woman in her natural state is the physical equal
of man, and constantly point to the primitive woman, the female of savage
peoples, as an example of this supposed axiom. Do they know how well this
same savage is aware of the weakness of woman and her susceptibility at
certain periods of her life? And with what care he protects her from harm
at these periods? I believe not. The importance of surrounding women with
certain precautions during the height of these great functional waves of
her existence was appreciated by all peoples living in an approximately
natural state, by all races at all times; and among their comparatively
few religious customs this one, affording rest to women, was most
persistently adhered to." It is among the white races alone that the
sexual invalidism of women prevails, and it is the white races alone,
which, outgrowing the religious ideas with which the menstrual seclusion
of women was associated, have flung away that beneficent seclusion itself,
throwing away the baby with the bath in an almost literal sense.[28]
In Germany Tobler has investigated the menstrual histories of
over one thousand women (_Monatsschrift für Geburtshülfe und
Gynäkologie_, July, 1905). He finds that in the great majority of
women at the present day menstruation is associated with
distinct deterioration of the general health, and diminution of
functional energy. In 26 per cent. local pain, general malaise,
and mental and nervous anomalies coexisted; in larger proportion
come the cases in which local pain, general weak health or
psychic abnormality was experienced alone at this period. In 16
per cent. only none of these symptoms were experienced. In a very
small separate group the physical and mental functions were
stronger during this period, but in half of these cases there was
distinct disturbance during the intermenstrual period. Tobler
concludes that, while menstruation itself is physiological, all
these disturbances are pathological.
As far as England is concerned, at a discussion of normal and
painful menstruation at a meeting of the British Association of
Registered Medical Women on the 7th of July, 1908, it was stated
by Miss Bentham that 50 per cent. of girls in good position
suffered from painful menstruation. Mrs. Dunnett said it usually
occurred between the ages of twenty-four and thirty, being
frequently due to neglect to rest during menstruation in the
earlier years, and Mrs. Grainger Evans had found that this
condition was very common among elementary school teachers who
had worked hard for examinations during early girlhood.
In America various investigations have been carried out, showing
the prevalence of disturbance in the sexual health of school
girls and young women. Thus Dr. Helen P. Kennedy obtained
elaborate data concerning the menstrual life of one hundred and
twenty-five high school girls of the average age of eighteen
("Effect of High School Work upon Girls During Adolescence,"
_Pedagogical Seminary_, June, 1896). Only twenty-eight felt no
pain during the period; half the total number experienced
disagreeable symptoms before the period (such as headache,
malaise, irritability of temper), while forty-four complained of
other symptoms besides pain during the period (especially
headache and great weakness). Jane Kelley Sabine (quoted in
_Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, Sept. 15, 1904) found in
New England schools among two thousand girls that 75 per cent.
had menstrual troubles, 90 per cent. had leucorrhoea and ovarian
neuralgia, and 60 per cent. had to give up work for two days
during each month. These results seem more than usually
unfavorable, but are significant, as they cover a large number of
cases. The conditions in the Pacific States are not much better.
Dr. Mary Ritter (in a paper read before the California State
Medical Society in 1903) stated that of 660 Freshmen girls at the
University of California, 67 per cent. were subject to menstrual
disorders, 27 per cent. to headaches, 30 per cent. to backaches,
29 per cent. were habitually constipated, 16 per cent. had
abnormal heart sounds; only 23 per cent. were free from
functional disturbances. Dr. Helen MacMurchey, in an interesting
paper on "Physiological Phenomena Preceding or Accompanying
Menstruation" (_Lancet_, Oct. 5, 1901), by inquiries among one
hundred medical women, nurses, and women teachers in Toronto
concerning the presence or absence of twenty-one different
abnormal menstrual phenomena, found that between 50 and 60 per
cent. admitted that they were liable at this time to disturbed
sleep, to headache, to mental depression, to digestive
disturbance, or to disturbance of the special senses, while about
25 to 50 per cent. were liable to neuralgia, to vertigo, to
excessive nervous energy, to defective nervous and muscular
power, to cutaneous hyperæsthesia, to vasomotor disturbances, to
constipation, to diarrhoea, to increased urination, to cutaneous
eruption, to increased liability to take cold, or to irritating
watery discharges before or after the menstrual discharge. This
inquiry is of much interest, because it clearly brings out the
marked prevalence at menstruation of conditions which, though not
necessarily of any gravity, yet definitely indicate decreased
power of resistance to morbid influences and diminished
efficiency for work.
How serious an impediment menstrual troubles are to a woman is
indicated by the fact that the women who achieve success and fame
seem seldom to be greatly affected by them. To that we may, in
part, attribute the frequency with which leaders of the women's
movement have treated menstruation as a thing of no importance in
a woman's life. Adele Gerhard, and Helene Simon, also, in their
valuable and impartial work, _Mutterschaft und Geistige Arbeit_
(p. 312), failed to find, in their inquiries among women of
distinguished ability, that menstruation was regarded as
seriously disturbing to work.
Of late the suggestion that adolescent girls shall not only rest
from work during two days of the menstrual period, but have an
entire holiday from school during the first year of sexual life,
has frequently been put forward, both from the medical and the
educational side. At the meeting of the Association of Registered
Medical Women, already referred to, Miss Sturge spoke of the good
results obtained in a school where, during the first two years
after puberty, the girls were kept in bed for the first two days
of each menstrual period. Some years ago Dr. G.W. Cook ("Some
Disorders of Menstruation," _American Journal of Obstetrics_,
April, 1896), after giving cases in point, wrote: "It is my
deliberate conviction that no girl should be confined at study
during the year of her puberty, but she should live an outdoor
life." In an article on "Alumna's Children," by "An Alumna"
(_Popular Science Monthly_, May, 1904), dealing with the sexual
invalidism of American women and the severe strain of motherhood
upon them, the author, though she is by no means hostile to
education, which is not, she declares, at fault, pleads for rest
for the pubertal girl. "If the brain claims her whole vitality,
how can there be any proper development? Just as very young
children should give all their strength for some years solely to
physical growth before the brain is allowed to make any
considerable demands, so at this critical period in the life of
the woman nothing should obstruct the right of way of this
important system. A year at the least should be made especially
easy for her, with neither mental nor nervous strain; and
throughout the rest of her school days she should have her
periodical day of rest, free from any study or overexertion." In
another article on the same subject in the same journal ("The
Health of American Girls," Sept., 1907), Nellie Comins Whitaker
advocates a similar course. "I am coming to be convinced,
somewhat against my wish, that there are many cases when the girl
ought to be taken out of school entirely for some months or for a
year _at the period of puberty_." She adds that the chief
obstacle in the way is the girl's own likes and dislikes, and the
ignorance of her mother who has been accustomed to think that
pain is a woman's natural lot.
Such a period of rest from mental strain, while it would fortify
the organism in its resistance to any reasonable strain later,
need by no means be lost for education in the wider sense of the
word, for the education required in classrooms is but a small
part of the education required for life. Nor should it by any
means be reserved merely for the sickly and delicate girl. The
tragic part of the present neglect to give girls a really sound
and fitting education is that the best and finest girls are
thereby so often ruined. Even the English policeman, who
admittedly belongs in physical vigor and nervous balance to the
flower of the population, is unable to bear the strain of his
life, and is said to be worn out in twenty-five years. It is
equally foolish to submit the finest flowers of girlhood to a
strain which is admittedly too severe.
It seems to be clear that the main factor in the common sexual and general
invalidism of girls and young women is bad hygiene, in the first place
consisting in neglect of the menstrual functions and in the second place
in faulty habits generally. In all the more essential matters that concern
the hygiene of the body the traditions of girls--and this seems to be more
especially the case in the Anglo-Saxon countries--are inferior to those of
youths. Women are much more inclined than men to subordinate these things
to what seems to them some more urgent interest or fancy of the moment;
they are trained to wear awkward and constricting garments, they are
indifferent to regular and substantial meals, preferring innutritious and
indigestible foods and drinks; they are apt to disregard the demands of
the bowels and the bladder out of laziness or modesty; they are even
indifferent to physical cleanliness.[29] In a great number of minor ways,
which separately may seem to be of little importance, they play into the
hands of an environment which, not always having been adequately adjusted
to their special needs, would exert a considerable stress and strain even
if they carefully sought to guard themselves against it. It has been found
in an American Women's College in which about half the scholars wore
corsets and half not, that nearly all the honors and prizes went to the
non-corset-wearers. McBride, in bringing forward this fact, pertinently
remarks, "If the wearing of a single style of dress will make this
difference in the lives of young women, and that, too, in their most
vigorous and resistive period, how much difference will a score of
unhealthy habits make, if persisted in for a life-time?"[30]
"It seems evident," A.E. Giles concludes ("Some Points of
Preventive Treatment in the Diseases of Women," _The Hospital_,
April 10, 1897) "that dysmenorrhoea might be to a large extent
prevented by attention to general health and education. Short
hours of work, especially of standing; plenty of outdoor
exercise--tennis, boating, cycling, gymnastics, and walking for
those who cannot afford these; regularity of meals and food of
the proper quality--not the incessant tea and bread and butter
with variation of pastry; the avoidance of overexertion and
prolonged fatigue; these are some of the principal things which
require attention. Let girls pursue their study, but more
leisurely; they will arrive at the same goal, but a little
later." The benefit of allowing free movement and exercise to the
whole body is undoubtedly very great, both as regards the sexual
and general physical health and the mental balance; in order to
insure this it is necessary to avoid heavy and constricting
garments, more especially around the chest, for it is in
respiratory power and chest expansion more than in any other
respect that girls fall behind boys (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis,
_Man and Woman_, Ch. IX). In old days the great obstacle to the
free exercise of girls lay in an ideal of feminine behavior which
involved a prim restraint on every natural movement of the body.
At the present day that ideal is not so fervently preached as of
old, but its traditional influence still to some extent persists,
while there is the further difficulty that adequate time and
opportunity and encouragement are by no means generally afforded
to girls for the cultivation and training of the romping
instincts which are really a serious part of education, for it is
by such free exercise of the whole body that the neuro-muscular
system, the basis of all vital activity, is built up. The neglect
of such education is to-day clearly visible in the structure of
our women. Dr. F. May Dickinson Berry, Medical Examiner to the
Technical Education Board of the London County Council, found
(_British Medical Journal_, May 28, 1904) among over 1,500 girls,
who represent the flower of the schools, since they had obtained
scholarships enabling them to proceed to higher grade schools,
that 22 per cent, presented some degree, not always pronounced,
of lateral curvature of the spine, though such cases were very
rare among the boys. In the same way among a very similar class
of select girls at the Chicago Normal School, Miss Lura Sanborn
(_Doctors' Magazine_, Dec., 1900) found 17 per cent, with spinal
curvature, in some cases of a very pronounced degree. There is no
reason why a girl should not have as straight a back as a boy,
and the cause can only lie in the defective muscular development
which was found in most of the cases, sometimes accompanied by
anæmia. Here and there nowadays, among the better social classes,
there is ample provision for the development of muscular power in
girls, but in any generalized way there is no adequate
opportunity for such exercise, and among the working class, above
all, in the section of it which touches the lower middle class,
although their lives are destined to be filled with a constant
strain on the neuro-muscular system from work at home or in
shops, etc., there is usually a minimum of healthy exercise and
physical development. Dr. W.A.B. Sellman, of Baltimore ("Causes
of Painful Menstruation in Unmarried Women," _American Journal
Obstetrics_, Nov., 1907), emphasizes the admirable results
obtained by moderate physical exercise for young women, and in
training them to care for their bodies and to rest their nervous
systems, while Dr. Charlotte Brown, of San Francisco, rightly
insists on the establishment in all towns and villages alike of
outdoor gymnastic fields for women and girls, and of a building,
in connection with every large school, for training in physical,
manual, and domestic science. The provision of special
playgrounds is necessary where the exercising of girls is so
unfamiliar as to cause an embarrassing amount of attention from
the opposite sex, though when it is an immemorial custom it can
be carried out on the village green without attracting the
slightest attention, as I have seen in Spain, where one cannot
fail to connect it with the physical vigor of the women. In boys'
schools games are not only encouraged, but made compulsory; but
this is by no means a universal rule in girls' schools. It is not
necessary, and is indeed highly undesirable, that the games
adopted should be those of boys. In England especially, where the
movements of women are so often marked by awkwardness, angularity
and lack of grace, it is essential that nothing should be done to
emphasize these characteristics, for where vigor involves
violence we are in the presence of a lack of due neuro-muscular
coördination. Swimming, when possible, and especially some forms
of dancing, are admirably adapted to develop the bodily movements
of women both vigorously and harmoniously (see, e.g., Havelock
Ellis, _Man and Woman_, Ch. VII). At the International Congress
of School Hygiene in 1907 (see, e.g., _British Medical Journal_,
Aug. 24, 1907) Dr. L.H. Gulick, formerly Director of Physical
Training in the Public Schools of New York City, stated that
after many experiments it had been found in the New York
elementary and high schools that folk-dancing constituted the
very best exercise for girls. "The dances selected involved many
contractions of the large muscular masses of the body and had
therefore a great effect on respiration, circulation and
nutrition. Such movements, moreover, when done as dances, could
be carried on three or four times as long without producing
fatigue as formal gymnastics. Many folk-dances were imitative,
sowing and reaping dance, dances expressing trade movements (the
shoemaker's dance), others illustrating attack and defense, or
the pursuit of game. Such neuro-muscular movements were racially
old and fitted in with man's expressive life, and if it were
accepted that the folk-dances really expressed an epitome of
man's neuro-muscular history, as distinguished from mere
permutation of movements, the folk-dance combinations should be
preferred on these biological grounds to the unselected, or even
the physiologically selected. From the æsthetic point of view the
sense of beauty as shown in dancing was far commoner than the
power to sing, paint or model."
It must always be remembered that in realizing the especial demands of
woman's nature, we do not commit ourselves to the belief that higher
education is unfitted for a woman. That question may now be regarded as
settled. There is therefore no longer any need for the feverish anxiety of
the early leaders of feminine education to prove that girls can be
educated exactly as if they were boys, and yield at least as good
educational results. At the present time, indeed, that anxiety is not only
unnecessary but mischievous. It is now more necessary to show that women
have special needs just as men have special needs, and that it is as bad
for women, and therefore, for the world, to force them to accept the
special laws and limitations of men as it would be bad for men, and
therefore, for the world, to force men to accept the special laws and
limitations of women. Each sex must seek to reach the goal by following
the laws of its own nature, even although it remains desirable that, both
in the school and in the world, they should work so far as possible side
by side. The great fact to be remembered always is that, not only are
women, in physical size and physical texture, slighter and finer than men,
but that to an extent altogether unknown among men, their centre of
gravity is apt to be deflected by the series of rhythmic sexual curves on
which they are always living. They are thus more delicately poised and any
kind of stress or strain--cerebral, nervous, or muscular--is more likely
to produce serious disturbance and requires an accurate adjustment to
their special needs.
The fact that it is stress and strain in general, and not
necessarily educational studies, that are injurious to adolescent
women, is sufficiently proved, if proof is necessary, by the fact
that sexual arrest, and physical or nervous breakdown, occur with
extreme frequency in girls who work in shops or mills, even in
girls who have never been to school at all. Even excesses in
athletics--which now not infrequently occur as a reaction against
woman's indifference to physical exercise--are bad. Cycling is
beneficial for women who can ride without pain or discomfort,
and, according to Watkins, it is even beneficial in many diseased
and disordered pelvic conditions, but excessive cycling is evil
in its results on women, more especially by inducing rigidity of
the perineum to an extent which may even prevent childbirth and
necessitate operation. I may add that the same objection applies
to much horse-riding. In the same way everything which causes
shocks to the body is apt to be dangerous to women, since in the
womb they possess a delicately poised organ which varies in
weight at different times, and it would, for instance, be
impossible to commend football as a game for girls. "I do not
believe," wrote Miss H. Ballantine, Director of Vassar College
Gymnasium, to Prof. W. Thomas (_Sex and Society_, p. 22) "women
can ever, no matter what the training, approach men in their
physical achievements; and," she wisely adds, "I see no reason
why they should." There seem, indeed, as has already been
indicated, to be reasons why they should not, especially if they
look forward to becoming mothers. I have noticed that women who
have lived a very robust and athletic outdoor life, so far from
always having the easy confinements which we might anticipate,
sometimes have very seriously difficult times, imperilling the
life of the child. On making this observation to a distinguished
obstetrician, the late Dr. Engelmann, who was an ardent advocate
of physical exercise for women (in e.g. his presidential address,
"The Health of the American Girl," _Transactions Southern
Surgical and Gynæcological Association_, 1890), he replied that
he had himself made the same observation, and that instructors in
physical training, both in America and England, had also told him
of such cases among their pupils. "I hold," he wrote, "precisely
the opinion you express [as to the unfavorable influence of
muscular development in women]. _Athletics_, i.e., overdone
physical training, causes the girl's system to approximate to the
masculine; this is so whether due to sport or necessity. The
woman who indulges in it approximates to the male in her
attributes; this is marked in diminished sexual intensity, and in
increased difficulty of childbirth, with, in time, lessened
fecundity. Healthy habits improve, but masculine muscular
development diminishes, womanly qualities, although it is true
that the peasant and the laboring woman have easy labor. I have
never advocated muscular development for girls, only physical
training, but have perhaps said too much for it and praised it
too unguardedly. In schools and colleges, so far, however, it is
insufficient rather than too much; only the wealthy have too much
golf and athletic sports. I am collecting new material, but from
what I already have seen I am impressed with the truth of what
you say. I am studying the point, and shall elaborate the
explanation." Any publication on this subject was, however,
prevented by Engelmann's death a few years later.
A proper recognition of the special nature of woman, of her peculiar needs
and her dignity, has a significance beyond its importance in education and
hygiene. The traditions and training to which she is subjected in this
matter have a subtle and far-reaching significance, according as they are
good or evil. If she is taught, implicitly or explicitly, contempt for the
characteristics of her own sex, she naturally develops masculine ideals
which may permanently discolor her vision of life and distort her
practical activities; it has been found that as many as fifty per cent. of
American school girls have masculine ideals, while fifteen per cent.
American and no fewer than thirty-four per cent. English school girls
wished to be men, though scarcely any boys wished to be women.[31] With
the same tendency may be connected that neglect to cultivate the emotions,
which, by a mischievously extravagant but inevitable reaction from the
opposite extreme, has sometimes marked the modern training of women. In
the finely developed woman, intelligence is interpenetrated with emotion.
If there is an exaggerated and isolated culture of intelligence a tendency
shows itself to disharmony which breaks up the character or impairs its
completeness. In this connection Reibmayr has remarked that the American
woman may serve as a warning.[32] Within the emotional sphere itself, it
may be added, there is a tendency to disharmony in women owing to the
contradictory nature of the feelings which are traditionally impressed
upon her, a contradiction which dates back indeed to the identification of
sacredness and impurity at the dawn of civilization. "Every girl and
woman," wrote Hellmann, in a pioneering book which pushed a sound
principle to eccentric extremes, "is taught to regard her sexual parts as
a precious and sacred spot, only to be approached by a husband or in
special circumstances a doctor. She is, at the same time, taught to regard
this spot as a kind of water-closet which she ought to be extremely
ashamed to possess, and the mere mention of which should cause a painful
blush."[33] The average unthinking woman accepts the incongruity of this
opposition without question, and grows accustomed to adapt herself to each
of the incompatibles according to circumstances. The more thoughtful woman
works out a private theory of her own. But in very many cases this
mischievous opposition exerts a subtly perverting influence on the whole
outlook towards Nature and life. In a few cases, also, in women of
sensitive temperament, it even undermines and ruins the psychic
personality.
Thus Boris Sidis has recorded a case illustrating the disastrous
results of inculcating on a morbidly sensitive girl the doctrine
of the impurity of women. She was educated in a convent. "While
there she was impressed with the belief that woman is a vessel of
vice and impurity. This seemed to have been imbued in her by one
of the nuns who was very holy and practiced self-mortification.
With the onset of her periods, and with the observation of the
same in the other girls, this doctrine of female impurity was all
the stronger impressed on her sensitive mind." It lapsed,
however, from conscious memory and only came to the foreground in
subsequent years with the exhaustion and fatigue of prolonged
office work. Then she married. Now "she has an extreme abhorrence
of women. Woman, to the patient, is impurity, filth, the very
incarnation of degradation and vice. The house wash must not be
given to a laundry where women work. Nothing must be picked up in
the street, not even the most valuable object, perchance it might
have been dropped by a woman" (Boris Sidis, "Studies in
Psychopathology," _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, April 4,
1907). That is the logical outcome of much of the traditional
teaching which is given to girls. Fortunately, the healthy mind
offers a natural resistance to its complete acceptation, yet it
usually, in some degree, persists and exerts a mischievous
influence.
It is, however, not only in her relations to herself and to her sex that a
girl's thoughts and feelings tend to be distorted by the ignorance or the
false traditions by which she is so often carefully surrounded. Her
happiness in marriage, her whole future career, is put in peril. The
innocent young woman must always risk much in entering the door of
indissoluble marriage; she knows nothing truly of her husband, she knows
nothing of the great laws of love, she knows nothing of her own
possibilities, and, worse still, she is even ignorant of her ignorance.
She runs the risk of losing the game while she is still only beginning to
learn it. To some extent that is quite inevitable if we are to insist
that a woman should bind herself to marry a man before she has experienced
the nature of the forces that marriage may unloose in her. A young girl
believes she possesses a certain character; she arranges her future in
accordance with that character; she marries. Then, in a considerable
proportion of cases (five out of six, according to the novelist Bourget),
within a year or even a week, she finds she was completely mistaken in
herself and in the man she has married; she discovers within her another
self, and that self detests the man to whom she is bound. That is a
possible fate against which only the woman who has already been aroused to
love is entitled to regard herself as fairly protected.
There is, however, a certain kind of protection which it is possible to
afford the bride, even without departing from our most conventional
conceptions of marriage. We can at least insist that she shall be
accurately informed as to the exact nature of her physical relations to
her future husband and be safeguarded from the shocks or the disillusions
which marriage might otherwise bring. Notwithstanding the decay of
prejudices, it is probable that even to-day the majority of women of the
so-called educated class marry with only the vaguest and most inaccurate
notions, picked up more or less clandestinely, concerning the nature of
the sexual relationships. So highly intelligent a woman as Madame Adam has
stated that she believed herself bound to marry a man who had kissed her
on the mouth, imagining that to be the supreme act of sexual union,[34]
and it has frequently happened that women have married sexually inverted
persons of their own sex, not always knowingly, but believing them to be
men, and never discovering their mistake; it is not long indeed since in
America three women were thus successively married to the same woman, none
of them apparently ever finding out the real sex of the "husband." "The
civilized girl," as Edward Carpenter remarks, "is led to the 'altar'
often in uttermost ignorance and misunderstanding of the sacrificial rites
about to be consummated." Certainly more rapes have been effected in
marriage than outside it.[35] The girl is full of vague and romantic faith
in the promises of love, often heightened by the ecstasies depicted in
sentimental novels from which every touch of wholesome reality has been
carefully omitted. "All the candor of faith is there," as Sénancour puts
it in his book _De l'Amour_, "the desires of inexperience, the needs of a
new life, the hopes of an upright heart. She has all the faculties of
love, she must love; she has all the means of pleasure, she must be loved.
Everything expresses love and demands love: this hand formed for sweet
caresses, an eye whose resources are unknown if it must not say that it
consents to be loved, a bosom which is motionless and useless without
love, and will fade without having been worshipped; these feelings that
are so vast, so tender, so voluptuous, the ambition of the heart, the
heroism of passion! She needs must follow the delicious rule which the law
of the world has dictated. That intoxicating part, which she knows so
well, which everything recalls, which the day inspires and the night
commands, what young, sensitive, loving woman can imagine that she shall
not play it?" But when the actual drama of love begins to unroll before
her, and she realizes the true nature of the "intoxicating part" she has
to play, then, it has often happened, the case is altered; she finds
herself altogether unprepared, and is overcome with terror and alarm. All
the felicity of her married life may then hang on a few chances, her
husband's skill and consideration, her own presence of mind. Hirschfeld
records the case of an innocent young girl of seventeen--in this case, it
eventually proved, an invert--who was persuaded to marry but on
discovering what marriage meant energetically resisted her husband's
sexual approaches. He appealed to her mother to explain to her daughter
the nature of "wifely duties." But the young wife replied to her mother's
expostulations, "If that is my wifely duty then it was your parental duty
to have told me beforehand, for, if I had known, I should never have
married." The husband in this case, much in love with his wife, sought for
eight years to over-persuade her, but in vain, and a separation finally
took place.[36] That, no doubt, is an extreme case, but how many innocent
young inverted girls never realize their true nature until after marriage,
and how many perfectly normal girls are so shocked by the too sudden
initiation of marriage that their beautiful early dreams of love never
develop slowly and wholesomely into the acceptance of its still more
beautiful realities?
Before the age of puberty it would seem that the sexual initiation of the
child--apart from such scientific information as would form part of school
courses in botany and zoölogy--should be the exclusive privilege of the
mother, or whomever it may be to whom the mother's duties are delegated.
At puberty more authoritative and precise advice is desirable than the
mother may be able or willing to give. It is at this age that she should
put into her son's or daughter's hands some one or other of the very
numerous manuals to which reference has already been made (page 53),
expounding the physical and moral aspects of the sexual life and the
principles of sexual hygiene. The boy or girl is already, we may take it,
acquainted with the facts of motherhood, and the origin of babies, as well
as, more or less precisely, with the father's part in their procreation.
Whatever manual is now placed in his or her hands should at least deal
summarily, but definitely, with the sexual relationship, and should also
comment, warningly but in no alarmist spirit, with the chief auto-erotic
phenomena, and by no means exclusively with masturbation. Nothing but good
can come of the use of such a manual, if it has been wisely selected; it
will supplant what the mother has already done, what the teacher may still
be doing, and what later may be done by private interview with a doctor.
It has indeed been argued that the boy or girl to whom such literature is
presented will merely make it an opportunity for morbid revelry and
sensual enjoyment. It can well be believed that this may sometimes happen
with boys or girls from whom all sexual facts have always been
mysteriously veiled, and that when at last they find the opportunity of
gratifying their long-repressed and perfectly natural curiosity they are
overcome by the excitement of the event. It could not happen to children
who have been naturally and wholesomely brought up. At a later age, during
adolescence, there is doubtless great advantage in the plan, now
frequently adopted, especially in Germany, of giving lectures, addresses,
or quiet talks to young people of each sex separately. The speaker is
usually a specially selected teacher, a doctor or other qualified person
who may be brought in for this special purpose.
Stanley Hall, after remarking that sexual education should be
chiefly from fathers to sons and from mothers to daughters, adds:
"It may be that in the future this kind of initiation will again
become an art, and experts will tell us with more confidence how
to do our duty to the manifold exigencies, types and stages of
youth, and instead of feeling baffled and defeated, we shall see
that this age and theme is the supreme opening for the highest
pedagogy to do its best and most transforming work, as well as
being the greatest of all opportunities for the teacher of
religion" (Stanley Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 469). "At
Williams College, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Clark," the same
distinguished teacher observes (ib., p. 465), "I have made it a
duty in my departmental teaching to speak very briefly, but
plainly to young men under my instruction, personally if I deemed
it wise, and often, though here only in general terms, before
student bodies, and I believe I have nowhere done more good, but
it is a painful duty. It requires tact and some degree of hard
and strenuous common sense rather than technical knowledge."
It is scarcely necessary to say that the ordinary teacher of
either sex is quite incompetent to speak of sexual hygiene. It is
a task to which all, or some, teachers must be trained. A
beginning in this direction has been made in Germany by the
delivery to teachers of courses of lectures on sexual hygiene in
education. In Prussia the first attempt was made in Breslau when
the central school authorities requested Dr. Martin Chotzen to
deliver such a course to one hundred and fifty teachers who took
the greatest interest in the lectures, which covered the anatomy
of the sexual organs, the development of the sexual instinct, its
chief perversions, venereal diseases, and the importance of the
cultivation of self-control. In _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_
(Bd. i, Heft 7) Dr. Fritz Reuther gives the substance of lectures
which he has delivered to a class of young teachers; they cover
much the same ground as Chotzen's.
There is no evidence that in England the Minister of Education
has yet taken any steps to insure the delivery of lectures on
sexual hygiene to the pupils who are about to leave school. In
Prussia, however, the Ministry of Education has taken an active
interest in this matter, and such lectures are beginning to be
commonly delivered, though attendance at them is not usually
obligatory. Some years ago (in 1900), when it was proposed to
deliver a series of lectures on sexual hygiene to the advanced
pupils in Berlin schools, under the auspices of a society for the
improvement of morals, the municipal authorities withdrew their
permission to use the classrooms, on the ground that "such
lectures would be extremely dangerous to the moral sense of an
audience of the young." The same objection has been made by
municipal officials in France. In Germany, at all events,
however, opinion is rapidly growing more enlightened. In England
little or no progress has yet been made, but in America steps are
being taken in this direction, as by the Chicago Society for
Social Hygiene. It must, indeed, be said that those who oppose
the sexual enlightenment of youth in large cities are directly
allying themselves, whether or not they know it, with the
influences that make for vice and immorality.
Such lectures are also given to girls on leaving school, not only
girls of the well-to-do, but also those of the poor class, who
need them fully as much, and in some respects more. Thus Dr. A.
Heidenhain has published a lecture (_Sexuelle Belehrung der aus
den Volksschule entlassenen Mädchen_, 1907), accompanied by
anatomical tables, which he has delivered to girls about to leave
school, and which is intended to be put into their hands at this
time. Salvat, in a Lyons thesis (_La Dépopulation de la France_,
1903), insists that the hygiene of pregnancy and the care of
infants should form part of the subject of such lectures. These
subjects might well be left, however, to a somewhat later period.
Something is clearly needed beyond lectures on these matters. It should be
the business of the parents or other guardians of every adolescent youth
and girl to arrange that, once at least at this period of life, there
should be a private, personal interview with a medical man to afford an
opportunity for a friendly and confidential talk concerning the main
points of sexual hygiene. The family doctor would be the best for this
duty because he would be familiar with the personal temperament of the
youth and the family tendencies.[37] In the case of girls a woman doctor
would often be preferred. Sex is properly a mystery; and to the unspoilt
youth, it is instinctively so; except in an abstract and technical form it
cannot properly form the subject of lectures. In a private and
individualized conversation between the novice in life and the expert, it
is possible to say many necessary things that could not be said in public,
and it is possible, moreover, for the youth to ask questions which shyness
and reserve make it impossible to put to parents, while the convenient
opportunity of putting them naturally to the expert otherwise seldom or
never occurs. Most youths have their own special ignorances, their own
special difficulties, difficulties and ignorances that could sometimes be
resolved by a word. Yet it by no means infrequently happens that they
carry them far on into adult life because they have lacked the
opportunity, or the skill and assurance to create the opportunity, of
obtaining enlightenment.
It must be clearly understood that these talks are of medical, hygienic,
and physiological character; they are not to be used for retailing moral
platitudes. To make them that would be a fatal mistake. The young are
often very hostile to merely conventional moral maxims, and suspect their
hollowness, not always without reason. The end to be aimed at here is
enlightenment. Certainly knowledge can never be immoral, but nothing is
gained by jumbling up knowledge and morality together.
In emphasizing the nature of the physician's task in this matter as purely
and simply that of wise practical enlightenment, nothing is implied
against the advantages, and indeed the immense value in sexual hygiene, of
the moral, religious, ideal elements of life. It is not the primary
business of the physician to inspire these, but they have a very intimate
relation with the sexual life, and every boy and girl at puberty, and
never before puberty, should be granted the privilege--and not the duty or
the task--of initiation into those elements of the world's life which are,
at the same time, natural functions of the adolescent soul. Here, however,
is the sphere of the religious or ethical teacher. At puberty he has his
great opportunity, the greatest he can ever obtain. The flower of sex that
blossoms in the body at puberty has its spiritual counterpart which at the
same moment blossoms in the soul. The churches from of old have recognized
the religious significance of this moment, for it is this period of life
that they have appointed as the time of confirmation and similar rites.
With the progress of the ages, it is true, such rites become merely formal
and apparently meaningless fossils. But they have a meaning nevertheless,
and are capable of being again vitalized. Nor in their spirit and essence
should they be confined to those who accept supernaturally revealed
religion. They concern all ethical teachers, who must realize that it is
at puberty that they are called upon to inspire or to fortify the great
ideal aspirations which at this period tend spontaneously to arise in the
youth's or maiden's soul.[38]
The age of puberty, I have said, marks the period at which this new kind
of sexual initiation is called for. Before puberty, although the psychic
emotion of love frequently develops, as well as sometimes physical sexual
emotions that are mostly vague and diffused, definite and localized sexual
sensations are rare. For the normal boy or girl love is usually an
unspecialized emotion; it is in Guyau's words "a state in which the body
has but the smallest place." At the first rising of the sun of sex the
boy or girl sees, as Blake said he saw at sunrise, not a round yellow body
emerging above the horizon, or any other physical manifestation, but a
great company of singing angels. With the definite eruption of physical
sexual manifestation and desire, whether at puberty or later in
adolescence, a new turbulent disturbing influence appears. Against the
force of this influence, mere intellectual enlightenment, or even loving
maternal counsel--the agencies we have so far been concerned with--may be
powerless. In gaining control of it we must find our auxiliary in the fact
that puberty is the efflorescence not only of a new physical but a new
psychic force. The ideal world naturally unfolds itself to the boy or girl
at puberty. The magic of beauty, the instinct of modesty, the naturalness
of self-restraint, the idea of unselfish love, the meaning of duty, the
feeling for art and poetry, the craving for religious conceptions and
emotions--all these things awake spontaneously in the unspoiled boy or
girl at puberty. I say "unspoiled," for if these things have been thrust
on the child before puberty when they have yet no meaning for him--as is
unfortunately far too often done, more especially as regards religious
notions--then it is but too likely that he will fail to react properly at
that moment of his development when he would otherwise naturally respond
to them. Under natural conditions this is the period for spiritual
initiation. Now, and not before, is the time for the religious or ethical
teacher as the case may be--for all religions and ethical systems may
equally adapt themselves to this task--to take the boy or girl in hand,
not with any special and obtrusive reference to the sexual impulses but
for the purpose of assisting the development and manifestation of this
psychic puberty, of indirectly aiding the young soul to escape from sexual
dangers by harnessing his chariot to a star that may help to save it from
sticking fast in any miry ruts of the flesh.
Such an initiation, it is important to remark, is more than an
introduction to the sphere of religious sentiment. It is an initiation
into manhood, it must involve a recognition of the masculine even more
than of the feminine virtues. This has been well understood by the finest
primitive races. They constantly give their boys and girls an initiation
at puberty; it is an initiation that involves not merely education in the
ordinary sense, but a stern discipline of the character, feats of
endurance, the trial of character, the testing of the muscles of the soul
as much as of the body.
Ceremonies of initiation into manhood at puberty--involving
physical and mental discipline, as well as instruction, lasting
for weeks or months, and never identical for both sexes--are
common among savages in all parts of the world. They nearly
always involve the endurance of a certain amount of pain and
hardship, a wise measure of training which the softness of
civilization has too foolishly allowed to drop, for the ability
to endure hardness is an essential condition of all real manhood.
It is as a corrective to this tendency to flabbiness in modern
education that the teaching of Nietzsche is so invaluable.
The initiation of boys among the natives of Torres Straits has
been elaborately described by A.C. Haddon (_Reports
Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, Chs. VII
and XII). It lasts a month, involves much severe training and
power of endurance, and includes admirable moral instruction.
Haddon remarks that it formed "a very good discipline," and adds,
"it is not easy to conceive of a more effectual means for a rapid
training."
Among the aborigines of Victoria, Australia, the initiatory
ceremonies, as described by R.H. Mathews ("Some Initiation
Ceremonies," _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1905, Heft 6), last
for seven months, and constitute an admirable discipline. The
boys are taken away by the elders of the tribe, subjected to many
trials of patience and endurance of pain and discomfort,
sometimes involving even the swallowing of urine and excrement,
brought into contact with strange tribes, taught the laws and
folk-lore, and at the end meetings are held at which betrothals
are arranged.
Among the northern tribes of Central Australia the initiation
ceremonies involve circumcision and urethral subincision, as well
as hard manual labor and hardships. The initiation of girls into
womanhood is accompanied by cutting open of the vagina. These
ceremonies have been described by Spencer and Gillen (_Northern
Tribes of Central Australia_, Ch. XI). Among various peoples in
British East Africa (including the Masai) pubertal initiation is
a great ceremonial event extending over a period of many months,
and it includes circumcision in boys, and in girls
clitoridectomy, as well as, among some tribes, removal of the
nymphæ. A girl who winces or cries out during the operation is
disgraced among the women and expelled from the settlement. When
the ceremony has been satisfactorily completed the boy or girl is
marriageable (C. Marsh Beadnell, "Circumcision and Clitoridectomy
as Practiced by the Natives of British East Africa," _British
Medical Journal_, April 29, 1905).
Initiation among the African Bawenda, as described by a
missionary, is in three stages: (1) A stage of instruction and
discipline during which the traditions and sacred things of the
tribe are revealed, the art of warfare taught, self-restraint and
endurance borne; then the youths are counted as full-grown. (2)
In the next stage the art of dancing is practiced, by each sex
separately, during the day. (3) In the final stage, which is that
of complete sexual initiation, the two sexes dance together by
night; the scene, in the opinion of the good missionary, "does
not bear description;" the initiated are now complete adults,
with all the privileges and responsibilities of adults (Rev. E.
Gottschling, "The Bawenda," _Journal Anthropological
Institution_, July to Dec., 1905, p. 372. Cf., an interesting
account of the Bawenda Tondo schools by another missionary,
Wessmann, _The Bawenda_, pp. 60 et seq.).
The initiation of girls in Azimba Land, Central Africa, has been
fully and interestingly described by H. Crawford Angus ("The
Chensamwali' or Initiation Ceremony of Girls," _Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie_, 1898, Heft 6). At the first sign of menstruation the
girl is taken by her mother out of the village to a grass hut
prepared for her where only the women are allowed to visit her.
At the end of menstruation she is taken to a secluded spot and
the women dance round her, no men being present. It was only with
much difficulty that Angus was enabled to witness the ceremony.
The girl is then informed in regard to the hygiene of
menstruation. "Many songs about the relations between men and
women are sung, and the girl is instructed as to all her duties
when she becomes a wife.... The girl is taught to be faithful to
her husband, and to try and bear children. The whole matter is
looked upon as a matter of course, and not as a thing to be
ashamed of or to hide, and being thus openly treated of and no
secrecy made about it, you find in this tribe that the women are
very virtuous, because the subject of married life has no glamour
for them. When a woman is pregnant she is again danced; this time
all the dancers are naked, and she is taught how to behave and
what to do when the time of her delivery arrives."
Among the Yuman Indians of California, as described by Horatio
Rust ("A Puberty Ceremony of the Mission Indians," _American
Anthropologist_, Jan. to March, 1906, p. 28) the girls are at
puberty prepared for marriage by a ceremony. They are wrapped in
blankets and placed in a warm pit, where they lie looking very
happy as they peer out through their covers. For four days and
nights they lie here (occasionally going away for food), while
the old women of the tribe dance and sing round the pit
constantly. At times the old women throw silver coins among the
crowd to teach the girls to be generous. They also give away
cloth and wheat, to teach them to be kind to the old and needy;
and they sow wild seeds broadcast over the girls to cause them to
be prolific. Finally, all strangers are ordered away, garlands
are placed on the girls' heads, and they are led to a hillside
and shown the large and sacred stone, symbolical of the female
organs of generation and resembling them, which is said to
protect women. Then grain is thrown over all present, and the
ceremony is over.
The Thlinkeet Eskimo women were long noted for their fine
qualities. At puberty they were secluded, sometimes for a whole
year, being kept in darkness, suffering, and filth. Yet defective
and unsatisfactory as this initiation was, "Langsdorf suggests,"
says Bancroft (_Native Races of Pacific_, vol. i, p. 110),
referring to the virtues of the Thlinkeet woman, "that it may be
during this period of confinement that the foundation of her
influence is laid; that in modest reserve and meditation her
character is strengthened, and she comes forth cleansed in mind
as well as body."
We have lost these ancient and invaluable rites of initiation into manhood
and womanhood, with their inestimable moral benefits; at the most we have
merely preserved the shells of initiation in which the core has decayed.
In time, we cannot doubt, they will be revived in modern forms. At present
the spiritual initiation of youths and maidens is left to the chances of
some happy accident, and usually it is of a purely cerebral character
which cannot be perfectly wholesome, and is at the best absurdly
incomplete.
This cerebral initiation commonly occurs to the youth through the medium
of literature. The influence of literature in sexual education thus
extends, in an incalculable degree, beyond the narrow sphere of manuals on
sexual hygiene, however admirable and desirable these may be. The greater
part of literature is more or less distinctly penetrated by erotic and
auto-erotic conceptions and impulses; nearly all imaginative literature
proceeds from the root of sex to flower in visions of beauty and ecstasy.
The Divine Comedy of Dante is herein the immortal type of the poet's
evolution. The youth becomes acquainted with the imaginative
representations of love before he becomes acquainted with the reality of
love, so that, as Leo Berg puts it, "the way to love among civilized
peoples passes through imagination." All literature is thus, to the
adolescent soul, a part of sexual education.[39] It depends, to some
extent, though fortunately not entirely, on the judgment of those in
authority over the young soul whether the literature to which the youth or
girl is admitted is or is not of the large and humanizing order.
All great literature touches nakedly and sanely on the central
facts of sex. It is always consoling to remember this in an age
of petty pruderies. And it is a satisfaction to know that it
would not be possible to emasculate the literature of the great
ages, however desirable it might seem to the men of more
degenerate ages, or to close the avenues to that literature
against the young. All our religious and literary traditions
serve to fortify the position of the Bible and of Shakespeare.
"So many men and women," writes a correspondent, a literary man,
"gain sexual ideas in childhood from reading the Old Testament,
that the Bible may be called an erotic text-book. Most persons of
either sex with whom I have conversed on the subject, say that
the Books of Moses, and the stories of Amnon and Tamar, Lot and
his daughters, Potiphar's wife and Joseph, etc., caused
speculation and curiosity, and gave them information of the
sexual relationship. A boy and girl of fifteen, both friends of
the writer, and now over thirty years of age, used to find out
erotic passages in the Bible on Sunday mornings, while in a
Dissenting chapel, and pass their Bibles to one another, with
their fingers on the portions that interested them." In the same
way many a young woman has borrowed Shakespeare in order to read
the glowing erotic poetry of _Venus and Adonis_, which her
friends have told her about.
The Bible, it may be remarked, is not in every respect, a model
introduction for the young mind to the questions of sex. But even
its frank acceptance, as of divine origin, of sexual rules so
unlike those that are nominally our own, such as polygamy and
concubinage, helps to enlarge the vision of the youthful mind by
showing that the rules surrounding the child are not those
everywhere and always valid, while the nakedness and realism of
the Bible cannot but be a wholesome and tonic corrective to
conventional pruderies.
We must, indeed, always protest against the absurd confusion
whereby nakedness of speech is regarded as equivalent to
immorality, and not the less because it is often adopted even in
what are regarded as intellectual quarters. When in the House of
Lords, in the last century, the question of the exclusion of
Byron's statue from Westminster Abbey was under discussion, Lord
Brougham "denied that Shakespeare was more moral than Byron. He
could, on the contrary, point out in a single page of Shakespeare
more grossness than was to be found in all Lord Byron's works."
The conclusion Brougham thus reached, that Byron is an
incomparably more moral writer than Shakespeare, ought to have
been a sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_ of his argument, but it
does not appear that anyone pointed out the vulgar confusion into
which he had fallen.
It may be said that the special attractiveness which the
nakedness of great literature sometimes possesses for young minds
is unwholesome. But it must be remembered that the peculiar
interest of this element is merely due to the fact that elsewhere
there is an inveterate and abnormal concealment. It must also be
said that the statements of the great writers about natural
things are never degrading, nor even erotically exciting to the
young, and what Emilia Pardo Bazan tells of herself and her
delight when a child in the historical books of the Old
Testament, that the crude passages in them failed to send the
faintest cloud of trouble across her young imagination, is
equally true of most children. It is necessary, indeed, that
these naked and serious things should be left standing, even if
only to counterbalance the lewdly comic efforts to besmirch love
and sex, which are visible to all in every low-class bookseller's
shop window.
This point of view was vigorously championed by the speakers on
sexual education at the Third Congress of the German Gesellschaft
zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in 1907. Thus Enderlin,
speaking as a headmaster, protested against the custom of
bowdlerizing poems and folk-songs for the use of children, and
thus robbing them of the finest introduction to purified sexual
impulses and the highest sphere of emotion, while at the same
time they are recklessly exposed to the "psychic infection" of
the vulgar comic papers everywhere exposed for sale. "So long as
children are too young to respond to erotic poetry it cannot hurt
them; when they are old enough to respond it can only benefit
them by opening to them the highest and purest channels of human
emotion" (_Sexualpädagogik_, p. 60). Professor Schäfenacker (id.,
p. 98) expresses himself in the same sense, and remarks that "the
method of removing from school-books all those passages which, in
the opinion of short-sighted and narrow-hearted schoolmasters,
are unsuited for youth, must be decisively condemned." Every
healthy boy and girl who has reached the age of puberty may be
safely allowed to ramble in any good library, however varied its
contents. So far from needing guidance they will usually show a
much more refined taste than their elders. At this age, when the
emotions are still virginal and sensitive, the things that are
realistic, ugly, or morbid, jar on the young spirit and are cast
aside, though in adult life, with the coarsening of mental
texture which comes of years and experience, this repugnance,
doubtless by an equally sound and natural instinct, may become
much less acute.
Ellen Key in Ch. VI of her _Century of the Child_ well summarizes
the reasons against the practice of selecting for children books
that are "suitable" for them, a practice which she considers one
of the follies of modern education. The child should be free to
read all great literature, and will himself instinctively put
aside the things he is not yet ripe for. His cooler senses are
undisturbed by scenes that his elders find too exciting, while
even at a later stage it is not the nakedness of great
literature, but much more the method of the modern novel, which
is likely to stain the imagination, falsify reality and injure
taste. It is concealment which misleads and coarsens, producing a
state of mind in which even the Bible becomes a stimulus to the
senses. The writings of the great masters yield the imaginative
food which the child craves, and the erotic moment in them is too
brief to be overheating. It is the more necessary, Ellen Key
remarks, for children to be introduced to great literature, since
they often have little opportunity to occupy themselves with it
in later life. Many years earlier Ruskin, in _Sesame and Lilies_,
had eloquently urged that even young girls should be allowed to
range freely in libraries.
What has been said about literature applies equally to art. Art, as well
as literature, and in the same indirect way, can be made a valuable aid in
the task of sexual enlightenment and sexual hygiene. Modern art may,
indeed, for the most part, be ignored from this point of view, but
children cannot be too early familiarized with the representations of the
nude in ancient sculpture and in the paintings of the old masters of the
Italian school. In this way they may be immunized, as Enderlin expresses
it, against those representations of the nude which make an appeal to the
baser instincts. Early familiarity with nudity in art is at the same time
an aid to the attainment of a proper attitude towards purity in nature.
"He who has once learnt," as Höller remarks, "to enjoy peacefully
nakedness in art, will be able to look on nakedness in nature as on a work
of art."
Casts of classic nude statues and reproductions of the pictures
of the old Venetian and other Italian masters may fittingly be
used to adorn schoolrooms, not so much as objects of instruction
as things of beauty with which the child cannot too early become
familiarized. In Italy it is said to be usual for school classes
to be taken by their teachers to the art museums with good
results; such visits form part of the official scheme of
education.
There can be no doubt that such early familiarity with the beauty
of nudity in classic art is widely needed among all social
classes and in many countries. It is to this defect of our
education that we must attribute the occasional, and indeed in
America and England frequent, occurrence of such incidents as
petitions and protests against the exhibition of nude statuary in
art museums, the display of pictures so inoffensive as Leighton's
"Bath of Psyche" in shop windows, and the demand for the draping
of the naked personifications of abstract virtues in
architectural street decoration. So imperfect is still the
education of the multitude that in these matters the ill-bred
fanatic of pruriency usually gains his will. Such a state of
things cannot but have an unwholesome reaction on the moral
atmosphere of the community in which it is possible. Even from
the religious point of view, prurient prudery is not justifiable.
Northcote has very temperately and sensibly discussed the
question of the nude in art from the standpoint of Christian
morality. He points out that not only is the nude in art not to
be condemned without qualification, and that the nude is by no
means necessarily the erotic, but he also adds that even erotic
art, in its best and purest manifestations, only arouses emotions
that are the legitimate object of man's aspirations. It would be
impossible even to represent Biblical stories adequately on
canvas or in marble if erotic art were to be tabooed (Rev. H.
Northcote, _Christianity and Sex Problems_, Ch. XIV).
Early familiarity with the nude in classic and early Italian art
should be combined at puberty with an equal familiarity with
photographs of beautiful and naturally developed nude models. In
former years books containing such pictures in a suitable and
attractive manner to place before the young were difficult to
procure. Now this difficulty no longer exists. Dr. C.H. Stratz,
of The Hague, has been the pioneer in this matter, and in a
series of beautiful books (notably in _Der Körper des Kindes, Die
Schönheit des Weiblichen Körpers_ and _Die Rassenschönheit des
Weibes_, all published by Enke in Stuttgart), he has brought
together a large number of admirably selected photographs of nude
but entirely chaste figures. More recently Dr. Shufeldt, of
Washington (who dedicates his work to Stratz), has published his
_Studies of the Human Form_ in which, in the same spirit, he has
brought together the results of his own studies of the naked
human form during many years. It is necessary to correct the
impressions received from classic sources by good photographic
illustrations on account of the false conventions prevailing in
classic works, though those conventions were not necessarily
false for the artists who originated them. The omission of the
pudendal hair, in representations of the nude was, for instance,
quite natural for the people of countries still under Oriental
influence are accustomed to remove the hair from the body. If,
however, under quite different conditions, we perpetuate that
artistic convention to-day, we put ourselves into a perverse
relation to nature. There is ample evidence of this. "There is
one convention so ancient, so necessary, so universal," writes
Mr. Frederic Harrison (_Nineteenth Century and After_, Aug.,
1907), "that its deliberate defiance to-day may arouse the bile
of the least squeamish of men and should make women withdraw at
once." If boys and girls were brought up at their mother's knees
in familiarity with pictures of beautiful and natural nakedness,
it would be impossible for anyone to write such silly and
shameful words as these.
There can be no doubt that among ourselves the simple and direct
attitude of the child towards nakedness is so early crushed out
of him that intelligent education is necessary in order that he
may be enabled to discern what is and what is not obscene. To the
plough-boy and the country servant-girl all nakedness, including
that of Greek statuary, is alike shameful or lustful. "I have a
picture of women like that," said a countryman with a grin, as he
pointed to a photograph of one of Tintoret's most beautiful
groups, "smoking cigarettes." And the mass of people in most
northern countries have still passed little beyond this stage of
discernment; in ability to distinguish between the beautiful and
the obscene they are still on the level of the plough-boy and the
servant-girl.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] These manifestations have been dealt with in the study of Autoerotism
in vol. i of the present _Studies_. It may be added that the sexual life
of the child has been exhaustively investigated by Moll, _Das Sexualleben
des Kindes_, 1909.
[19] This genital efflorescence in the sexual glands and breasts at birth
or in early infancy has been discussed in a Paris thesis, by Camille
Renouf (_La Crise Génital et les Manifestations Connexes chez le Foetus et
le Nouveau-né_, 1905); he is unable to offer a satisfactory explanation of
these phenomena.
[20] Amélineau, _La Morale des Egyptiens_, p. 64.
[21] "The Social Evil in Philadelphia," _Arena_, March, 1896.
[22] Moll, _Konträre Sexualempfindung_, third edition, p. 592.
[23] This powerlessness of the law and the police is well recognized by
lawyers familiar with the matter. Thus F. Werthauer (_Sittlichkeitsdelikte
der Grosstadt_, 1907) insists throughout on the importance of parents and
teachers imparting to children from their early years a progressively
increasing knowledge of sexual matters.
[24] "Parents must be taught how to impart information," remarks E.L.
Keyes ("Education upon Sexual Matters," _New York Medical Journal_, Feb.
10, 1906), "and this teaching of the parent should begin when he is
himself a child."
[25] Moll (op. cit., p. 224) argues well how impossible it is to preserve
children from sights and influence connected with the sexual life.
[26] Girls are not even prepared, in many cases, for the appearance of the
pubic hair. This unexpected growth of hair frequently causes young girls
much secret worry, and often they carefully cut it off.
[27] G.S. Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 511. Many years ago, in 1875,
the late Dr. Clarke, in his _Sex in Education_, advised menstrual rest for
girls, and thereby aroused a violent opposition which would certainly not
be found nowadays, when the special risks of womanhood are becoming more
clearly understood.
[28] For a summary of the physical and mental phenomena of the menstrual
period, see Havelock Ellis: _Man and Woman_, Ch. XI. The primitive
conception of menstruation is briefly discussed in Appendix A to the first
volume of these _Studies_, and more elaborately by J.G. Frazer in _The
Golden Bough_. A large collection of facts with regard to the menstrual
seclusion of women throughout the world will be found in Ploss and
Bartels, _Das Weib_. The pubertal seclusion of girls at Torres Straits has
been especially studied by Seligmann, _Reports Anthropological Expedition
to Torres Straits_, vol. v, Ch. VI.
[29] Thus Miss Lura Sanborn, Director of Physical Training at the Chicago
Normal School, found that a bath once a fortnight was not unusual. At the
menstrual period especially there is still a superstitious dread of water.
Girls should always be taught that at this period, above all, cleanliness
is imperatively necessary. There should be a tepid hip bath night and
morning, and a vaginal douche (which should never be cold) is always
advantageous, both for comfort as well as cleanliness. There is not the
slightest reason to dread water during menstruation. This point was
discussed a few years ago in the _British Medical Journal_ with complete
unanimity of opinion. A distinguished American obstetrician, also, Dr. J.
Clifton Edgar, after a careful study of opinion and practice in this
matter ("Bathing During the Menstrual Period," _American Journal
Obstetrics_, Sept., 1900), concludes that it is possible and beneficial to
take cold baths (though not sea-baths) during the period, provided due
precautions are observed, and that there are no sudden changes of habits.
Such a course should not be indiscriminately adopted, but there can be no
doubt that in sturdy peasant women who are inured to it early in life even
prolonged immersion in the sea in fishing has no evil results, and is even
beneficial. Houzel (_Annales de Gynécologie_, Dec., 1894) has published
statistics of the menstrual life of 123 fisherwomen on the French coast.
They were accustomed to shrimp for hours at a time in the sea, often to
above the waist, and then walk about in their wet clothes selling the
shrimps. They all insisted that their menstruation was easier when they
were actively at work. Their periods are notably regular, and their
fertility is high.
[30] J.H. McBride, "The Life and Health of Our Girls in Relation to Their
Future," _Alienist and Neurologist_, Feb., 1904.
[31] W.G. Chambers, "The Evolution of Ideals," _Pedagogical Seminary_,
March, 1903; Catherine Dodd, "School Children's Ideals," _National
Review_, Feb. and Dec., 1900, and June, 1901. No German girls acknowledged
a wish to be men; they said it would be wicked. Among Flemish girls,
however, Varendonck found at Ghent (_Archives de Psychologie_, July, 1908)
that 26 per cent. had men as their ideals.
[32] A. Reibmayr, _Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies_,
1908, Bd. i, p. 70.
[33] R. Hellmann, _Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit_, p. 14.
[34] This belief seems frequent among young girls in Continental Europe.
It forms the subject of one of Marcel Prevost's _Lettres de Femmes_. In
Austria, according to Freud, it is not uncommon, exclusively among girls.
[35] Yet, according to English law, rape is a crime which it is impossible
for a husband to commit on his wife (see, e.g., Nevill Geary, _The Law of
Marriage_, Ch. XV, Sect. V). The performance of the marriage ceremony,
however, even if it necessarily involved a clear explanation of marital
privileges, cannot be regarded as adequate justification for an act of
sexual intercourse performed with violence or without the wife's consent.
[36] Hirschfeld, _Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, 1903, p. 88. It
may be added that a horror of coitus is not necessarily due to bad
education, and may also occur in hereditarily degenerate women, whose
ancestors have shown similar or allied mental peculiarities. A case of
such "functional impotence" has been reported in a young Italian wife of
twenty-one, who was otherwise healthy, and strongly attached to her
husband. The marriage was annulled on the ground that "rudimentary sexual
or emotional paranoia, which renders a wife invincibly refractory to
sexual union, notwithstanding the integrity of the sexual organs,
constitutes psychic functional impotence" (_Archivio di Psichiatria_,
1906, fasc. vi, p. 806).
[37] The reasonableness of this step is so obvious that it should scarcely
need insistence. "The instruction of school-boys and school-girls is most
adequately effected by an elderly doctor," Näcke remarks, "sometimes
perhaps the school-doctor." "I strongly advocate," says Clouston (_The
Hygiene of Mind_, p. 249), "that the family doctor, guided by the parent
and the teacher, is by far the best instructor and monitor." Moll is of
the same opinion.
[38] I have further developed this argument in "Religion and the Child,"
_Nineteenth Century and After_, 1907.
[39] The intimate relation of art and poetry to the sexual impulse has
been realized in a fragmentary way by many who have not attained to any
wide vision of auto-erotic activity in life. "Poetry is necessarily
related to the sexual function," says Metchnikoff (_Essais Optimistes_, p.
352), who also quotes with approval the statement of Möbius (previously
made by Ferrero and many others) that "artistic aptitudes must probably be
considered as secondary sexual characters."
CHAPTER III.
SEXUAL EDUCATION AND NAKEDNESS.
The Greek Attitude Towards Nakedness--How the Romans Modified That
Attitude--The Influence of Christianity--Nakedness in Mediæval
Times--Evolution of the Horror of Nakedness--Concomitant Change in the
Conception of Nakedness--Prudery--The Romantic Movement--Rise of a New
Feeling in Regard to Nakedness--The Hygienic Aspect of Nakedness--How
Children May Be Accustomed to Nakedness--Nakedness Not Inimical to
Modesty--The Instinct of Physical Pride--The Value of Nakedness in
Education--The Æsthetic Value of Nakedness--The Human Body as One of the
Prime Tonics of Life--How Nakedness May Be Cultivated--The Moral Value of
Nakedness.
The discussion of the value of nakedness in art leads us on to the allied
question of nakedness in nature. What is the psychological influence of
familiarity with nakedness? How far should children be made familiar with
the naked body? This is a question in regard to which different opinions
have been held in different ages, and during recent years a remarkable
change has begun to come over the minds of practical educationalists in
regard to it.
In Sparta, in Chios, and elsewhere in Greece, women at one time practiced
gymnastic feats and dances in nakedness, together with the men, or in
their presence.[40] Plato in his _Republic_ approved of such customs and
said that the ridicule of those who laughed at them was but "unripe fruit
plucked from the tree of knowledge." On many questions Plato's opinions
changed, but not on this. In the _Laws_, which are the last outcome of his
philosophic reflection in old age, he still advocates (Bk. viii) a similar
co-education of the sexes and their coöperation in all the works of life,
in part with a view to blunt the over-keen edge of sexual appetite; with
the same object he advocated the association together of youths and girls
without constraint in costumes which offered no concealment to the form.
It is noteworthy that the Romans, a coarser-grained people than the Greeks
and in our narrow modern sense more "moral," showed no perception of the
moralizing and refining influence of nakedness. Nudity to them was merely
a licentious indulgence, to be treated with contempt even when it was
enjoyed. It was confined to the stage, and clamored for by the populace.
In the Floralia, especially, the crowd seem to have claimed it as their
right that the actors should play naked, probably, it has been thought, as
a survival of a folk-ritual. But the Romans, though they were eager to run
to the theatre, felt nothing but disdain for the performers. "Flagitii
principium est, nudare inter cives corpora." So thought old Ennius, as
reported by Cicero, and that remained the genuine Roman feeling to the
last. "Quanta perversitas!" as Tertullian exclaimed. "Artem magnificant,
artificem notant."[41] In this matter the Romans, although they aroused
the horror of the Christians, were yet in reality laying the foundation of
Christian morality.
Christianity, which found so many of Plato's opinions congenial, would
have nothing to do with his view of nakedness and failed to recognize its
psychological correctness. The reason was simple, and indeed
simple-minded. The Church was passionately eager to fight against what it
called "the flesh," and thus fell into the error of confusing the
subjective question of sexual desire with the objective spectacle of the
naked form. "The flesh" is evil; therefore, "the flesh" must be hidden.
And they hid it, without understanding that in so doing they had not
suppressed the craving for the human form, but, on the contrary, had
heightened it by imparting to it the additional fascination of a forbidden
mystery.
Burton, in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (Part III, Sect II, Mem.
II, Subs. IV), referring to the recommendations of Plato, adds:
"But _Eusebius_ and _Theodoret_ worthily lash him for it; and
well they might: for as one saith, the very sight of naked
parts, _causeth enormous, exceeding concupiscences, and stirs up
both men and women to burning lust_." Yet, as Burton himself adds
further on in the same section of his work (Mem. V, Subs. III),
without protest, "some are of opinion, that to see a woman naked,
is able of itself to alter his affection; and it is worthy of
consideration, saith _Montaigne_, the Frenchman, in his Essays,
that the skilfullest masters of amorous dalliance appoint for a
remedy of venereous passions, a full survey of the body."
There ought to be no question regarding the fact that it is the
adorned, the partially concealed body, and not the absolutely
naked body, which acts as a sexual excitant. I have brought
together some evidence on this point in the study of "The
Evolution of Modesty." "In Madagascar, West Africa, and the
Cape," says G.F. Scott Elliot (_A Naturalist in Mid-Africa_, p.
36), "I have always found the same rule. Chastity varies
inversely as the amount of clothing." It is now indeed generally
held that one of the chief primary objects of ornament and
clothing was the stimulation of sexual desire, and artists'
models are well aware that when they are completely unclothed,
they are most safe from undesired masculine advances. "A favorite
model of mine told me," remarks Dr. Shufeldt (_Medical Brief_,
Oct., 1904), the distinguished author of _Studies of the Human
Form_, "that it was her practice to disrobe as soon after
entering the artist's studio as possible, for, as men are not
always responsible for their emotions, she felt that she was far
less likely to arouse or excite them when entirely nude than when
only semi-draped." This fact is, indeed, quite familiar to
artists' models. If the conquest of sexual desire were the first
and last consideration of life it would be more reasonable to
prohibit clothing than to prohibit nakedness.
When Christianity absorbed the whole of the European world this strict
avoidance of even the sight of "the flesh," although nominally accepted by
all as the desirable ideal, could only be carried out, thoroughly and
completely, in the cloister. In the practice of the world outside,
although the original Christian ideals remained influential, various pagan
and primitive traditions in favor of nakedness still persisted, and were,
to some extent, allowed to manifest themselves, alike in ordinary custom
and on special occasions.
How widespread is the occasional or habitual practice of
nakedness in the world generally, and how entirely concordant it
is with even a most sensitive modesty, has been set forth in "The
Evolution of Modesty," in vol. i of these _Studies_.
Even during the Christian era the impulse to adopt nudity, often
with the feeling that it was an especially sacred practice, has
persisted. The Adamites of the second century, who read and
prayed naked, and celebrated the sacrament naked, according to
the statement quoted by St. Augustine, seem to have caused little
scandal so long as they only practiced nudity in their sacred
ceremonies. The German Brethren of the Free Spirit, in the
thirteenth century, combined so much chastity with promiscuous
nakedness that orthodox Catholics believed they were assisted by
the Devil. The French Picards, at a much later date, insisted on
public nakedness, believing that God had sent their leader into
the world as a new Adam to reestablish the law of Nature; they
were persecuted and were finally exterminated by the Hussites.
In daily life, however, a considerable degree of nakedness was
tolerated during mediæval times. This was notably so in the
public baths, frequented by men and women together. Thus Alwin
Schultz remarks (in his _Höfische Leben zur Zeit der
Minnesänger_), that the women of the aristocratic classes, though
not the men, were often naked in these baths except for a hat and
a necklace.
It is sometimes stated that in the mediæval religious plays Adam
and Eve were absolutely naked. Chambers doubts this, and thinks
they wore flesh-colored tights, or were, as in a later play of
this kind, "apparelled in white leather" (E.K. Chambers, _The
Mediæval Stage_, vol. i, p. 5). It may be so, but the public
exposure even of the sexual organs was permitted, and that in
aristocratic houses, for John of Salisbury (in a passage quoted
by Buckle, _Commonplace Book_, 541) protests against this custom.
The women of the feminist sixteenth century in France, as R. de
Maulde la Clavière remarks (_Revue de l'Art_, Jan., 1898), had no
scruple in recompensing their adorers by admitting them to their
toilette, or even their bath. Late in the century they became
still less prudish, and many well-known ladies allowed themselves
to be painted naked down to the waist, as we see in the portrait
of "Gabrielle d'Estrées au Bain" at Chantilly. Many of these
pictures, however, are certainly not real portraits.
Even in the middle of the seventeenth century in England
nakedness was not prohibited in public, for Pepys tells us that
on July 29, 1667, a Quaker came into Westminster Hall, crying,
"Repent! Repent!" being in a state of nakedness, except that he
was "very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal."
(This was doubtless Solomon Eccles, who was accustomed to go
about in this costume, both before and after the Restoration. He
had been a distinguished musician, and, though eccentric, was
apparently not insane.)
In a chapter, "De la Nudité," and in the appendices of his book,
_De l'Amour_ (vol. i, p. 221), Sénancour gives instances of the
occasional practice of nudity in Europe, and adds some
interesting remarks of his own; so, also, Dulaure (_Des Divinités
Génératrices_, Ch. XV). It would appear, as a rule, that though
complete nudity was allowed in other respects, it was usual to
cover the sexual parts.
The movement of revolt against nakedness never became completely
victorious until the nineteenth century. That century represented the
triumph of all the forces that banned public nakedness everywhere and
altogether. If, as Pudor insists, nakedness is aristocratic and the
slavery of clothes a plebeian characteristic imposed on the lower classes
by an upper class who reserved to themselves the privilege of physical
culture, we may perhaps connect this with the outburst of democratic
plebeianism which, as Nietzsche pointed out, reached its climax in the
nineteenth century. It is in any case certainly interesting to observe
that by this time the movement had entirely changed its character. It had
become general, but at the same time its foundation had been undermined.
It had largely lost its religious and moral character, and instead was
regarded as a matter of convention. The nineteenth century man who
encountered the spectacle of white limbs flashing in the sunlight no
longer felt like the mediæval ascetic that he was risking the salvation of
his immortal soul or even courting the depravation of his morals; he
merely felt that it was "indecent" or, in extreme cases, "disgusting."
That is to say he regarded the matter as simply a question of conventional
etiquette, at the worst, of taste, of æsthetics. In thus bringing down his
repugnance to nakedness to so low a plane he had indeed rendered it
generally acceptable, but at the same time he had deprived it of high
sanction. His profound horror of nakedness was out of relation to the
frivolous grounds on which he based it.
We must not, however, under-rate the tenacity with which this
horror of nakedness was held. Nothing illustrates more vividly
the deeply ingrained hatred which the nineteenth century felt of
nakedness than the ferocity--there is no other word for it--with
which Christian missionaries to savages all over the world, even
in the tropics, insisted on their converts adopting the
conventional clothing of Northern Europe. Travellers' narratives
abound in references to the emphasis placed by missionaries on
this change of custom, which was both injurious to the health of
the people and degrading to their dignity. It is sufficient to
quote one authoritative witness, Lord Stanmore, formerly Governor
of Fiji, who read a long paper to the Anglican Missionary
Conference in 1894 on the subject of "Undue Introduction of
Western Ways." "In the centre of the village," he remarked in
quoting a typical case (and referring not to Fiji but to Tonga),
"is the church, a wooden barn-like building. If the day be
Sunday, we shall find the native minister arrayed in a
greenish-black swallow-tail coat, a neckcloth, once white, and a
pair of spectacles, which he probably does not need, preaching to
a congregation, the male portion of which is dressed in much the
same manner as himself, while the women are dizened out in old
battered hats or bonnets, and shapeless gowns like bathing
dresses, or it may be in crinolines of an early type. Chiefs of
influence and women of high birth, who in their native dress
would look, and do look, the ladies and gentlemen they are, are,
by their Sunday finery, given the appearance of attendants upon
Jack-in-the-Green. If a visit be paid to the houses of the town,
after the morning's work of the people is over, the family will
be found sitting on chairs, listless and uncomfortable, in a room
full of litter. In the houses of the superior native clergy there
will be a yet greater aping of the manners of the West. There
will be chairs covered with hideous antimacassars, tasteless
round worsted-work mats for absent flower jars, and a lot of ugly
cheap and vulgar china chimney ornaments, which, there being no
fireplace, and consequently no chimney-piece, are set out in
order on a rickety deal table. The whole life of these village
folk is one piece of unreal acting. They are continually asking
themselves whether they are incurring any of the penalties
entailed by infraction of the long table of prohibitions, and
whether they are living up to the foreign garments they wear.
Their faces have, for the most part, an expression of sullen
discontent, they move about silently and joylessly, rebels in
heart to the restrictive code on them, but which they fear to
cast off, partly from a vague apprehension of possible secular
results, and partly because they suppose they will cease to be
good Christians if they do so. They have good ground for their
dissatisfaction. At the time when I visited the villages I have
specially in my eye, it was punishable by fine and imprisonment
to wear native clothing, punishable by fine and imprisonment to
wear long hair or a garland of flowers; punishable by fine or
imprisonment to wrestle or to play at ball; punishable by fine
and imprisonment to build a native-fashioned house; punishable
not to wear shirt and trousers, and in certain localities coat
and shoes also; and, in addition to laws enforcing a strictly
puritanical observation of the Sabbath, it was punishable by fine
and imprisonment to bathe on Sundays. In some other places
bathing on Sunday was punishable by flogging; and to my
knowledge women have been flogged for no other offense. Men in
such circumstances are ripe for revolt, and sometimes the revolt
comes."
An obvious result of reducing the feeling about nakedness to an
unreasoning but imperative convention is the tendency to
prudishness. This, as we know, is a form of pseudo-modesty which,
being a convention, and not a natural feeling, is capable of
unlimited extension. It is by no means confined to modern times
or to Christian Europe. The ancient Hebrews were not entirely
free from prudishness, and we find in the Old Testament that by a
curious euphemism the sexual organs are sometimes referred to as
"the feet." The Turks are capable of prudishness. So, indeed,
were even the ancient Greeks. "Dion the philosopher tells us,"
remarks Clement of Alexandria (_Stromates_, Bk. IV, Ch. XIX)
"that a certain woman, Lysidica, through excess of modesty,
bathed in her clothes, and that Philotera, when she was to enter
the bath, gradually drew back her tunic as the water covered her
naked parts; and then rising by degrees, put it on." Mincing
prudes were found among the early Christians, and their ways are
graphically described by St. Jerome in one of his letters to
Eustochium: "These women," he says, "speak between their teeth or
with the edge of the lips, and with a lisping tongue, only half
pronouncing their words, because they regard as gross whatever is
natural. Such as these," declares Jerome, the scholar in him
overcoming the ascetic, "corrupt even language." Whenever a new
and artificial "modesty" is imposed upon savages prudery tends to
arise. Haddon describes this among the natives of Torres Straits,
where even the children now suffer from exaggerated prudishness,
though formerly absolutely naked and unashamed (_Cambridge
Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, p. 271).
The nineteenth century, which witnessed the triumph of timidity and
prudery in this matter, also produced the first fruitful germ of new
conceptions of nakedness. To some extent these were embodied in the great
Romantic movement. Rousseau, indeed, had placed no special insistence on
nakedness as an element of the return to Nature which he preached so
influentially. A new feeling in this matter emerged, however, with
characteristic extravagance, in some of the episodes of the Revolution,
while in Germany in the pioneering _Lucinde_ of Friedrich Schlegel, a
characteristic figure in the Romantic movement, a still unfamiliar
conception of the body was set forth in a serious and earnest spirit.
In England, Blake with his strange and flaming genius, proclaimed a
mystical gospel which involved the spiritual glorification of the body and
contempt for the civilized worship of clothes ("As to a modern man," he
wrote, "stripped from his load of clothing he is like a dead corpse");
while, later, in America, Thoreau and Whitman and Burroughs asserted,
still more definitely, a not dissimilar message concerning the need of
returning to Nature.
We find the importance of the sight of the body--though very
narrowly, for the avoidance of fraud in the preliminaries of
marriage--set forth as early as the sixteenth century by Sir
Thomas More in his _Utopia_, which is so rich in new and fruitful
ideas. In Utopia, according to Sir Thomas More, before marriage,
a staid and honest matron "showeth the woman, be she maid or
widow, naked to the wooer. And likewise a sage and discreet man
exhibiteth the wooer naked to the woman. At this custom we
laughed and disallowed it as foolish. But they, on their part, do
greatly wonder at the folly of all other nations which, in buying
a colt where a little money is in hazard, be so chary and
circumspect that though he be almost all bare, yet they will not
buy him unless the saddle and all the harness be taken off, lest
under these coverings be hid some gall or sore. And yet, in
choosing a wife, which shall be either pleasure or displeasure to
them all their life after, they be so reckless that all the
residue of the woman's body being covered with clothes, they
estimate her scarcely by one handsbreadth (for they can see no
more but her face) and so join her to them, not without great
jeopardy of evil agreeing together, if anything in her body
afterward should chance to offend or mislike them. Verily, so
foul deformity may be hid under these coverings that it may quite
alienate and take away the man's mind from his wife, when it
shall not be lawful for their bodies to be separate again. If
such deformity happen by any chance after the marriage is
consummate and finished, well, there is no remedy but patience.
But it were well done that a law were made whereby all such
deceits were eschewed and avoided beforehand."
The clear conception of what may be called the spiritual value of
nakedness--by no means from More's point of view, but as a part
of natural hygiene in the widest sense, and as a high and special
aspect of the purifying and ennobling function of beauty--is of
much later date. It is not clearly expressed until the time of
the Romantic movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
We have it admirably set forth in Sénancour's _De l'Amour_ (first
edition, 1806; fourth and enlarged edition, 1834), which still
remains one of the best books on the morality of love. After
remarking that nakedness by no means abolishes modesty, he
proceeds to advocate occasional partial or complete nudity. "Let
us suppose," he remarks, somewhat in the spirit of Plato, "a
country in which at certain general festivals the women should be
absolutely free to be nearly or even quite naked. Swimming,
waltzing, walking, those who thought good to do so might remain
unclothed in the presence of men. No doubt the illusions of love
would be little known, and passion would see a diminution of its
transports. But is it passion that in general ennobles human
affairs? We need honest attachments and delicate delights, and
all these we may obtain while still preserving our
common-sense.... Such nakedness would demand corresponding
institutions, strong and simple, and a great respect for those
conventions which belong to all times" (Sénancour, _De l'Amour_,
vol. i, p. 314).
From that time onwards references to the value and desirability
of nakedness become more and more frequent in all civilized
countries, sometimes mingled with sarcastic allusions to the
false conventions we have inherited in this matter. Thus Thoreau
writes in his journal on June 12, 1852, as he looks at boys
bathing in the river: "The color of their bodies in the sun at a
distance is pleasing. I hear the sound of their sport borne over
the water. As yet we have not man in Nature. What a singular fact
for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his
note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under
the severest penalties."
Iwan Bloch, in Chapter VII of his _Sexual Life of Our Time_,
discusses this question of nakedness from the modern point of
view, and concludes: "A natural conception of nakedness: that is
the watchword of the future. All the hygienic, æsthetic, and
moral efforts of our time are pointing in that direction."
Stratz, as befits one who has worked so strenuously in the cause
of human health and beauty, admirably sets forth the stage which
we have now attained in this matter. After pointing out (_Die
Frauenkleidung_, third edition, 1904, p. 30) that, in opposition
to the pagan world which worshipped naked gods, Christianity
developed the idea that nakedness was merely sexual, and
therefore immoral, he proceeds: "But over all glimmered on the
heavenly heights of the Cross, the naked body of the Saviour.
Under that protection there has gradually disengaged itself from
the confusion of ideas a new transfigured form of nakedness made
free after long struggle. I would call this _artistic nakedness_,
for as it was immortalized by the old Greeks through art, so also
among us it has been awakened to new life by art. Artistic
nakedness is, in its nature, much higher than either the natural
or the sensual conception of nakedness. The simple child of
Nature sees in nakedness nothing at all; the clothed man sees in
the uncovered body only a sensual irritation. But at the highest
standpoint man consciously returns to Nature, and recognizes that
under the manifold coverings of human fabrication there is
hidden the most splendid creature that God has created. One may
stand in silent, worshipping wonder before the sight; another may
be impelled to imitate and show to his fellow-man what in that
holy moment he has seen. But both enjoy the spectacle of human
beauty with full consciousness and enlightened purity of
thought."
It was not, however, so much on these more spiritual sides, but on the
side of hygiene, that the nineteenth century furnished its chief practical
contribution to the new attitude towards nakedness.
Lord Monboddo, the Scotch judge, who was a pioneer in regard to
many modern ideas, had already in the eighteenth century realized
the hygienic value of "air-baths," and he invented that now
familiar name. "Lord Monboddo," says Boswell, in 1777 (_Life of
Johnson_, edited by Hill, vol. iii, p. 168) "told me that he
awaked every morning at four, and then for his health got up and
walked in his room naked, with the window open, which he called
taking _an air-bath_." It is said also, I know not on what
authority, that he made his beautiful daughters take an air-bath
naked on the terrace every morning. Another distinguished man of
the same century, Benjamin Franklin, used sometimes to work naked
in his study on hygienic grounds, and, it is recorded, once
affrighted a servant-girl by opening the door in an absent-minded
moment, thus unattired.
Rikli seems to have been the apostle of air-baths and sun-baths
regarded as a systematic method. He established light-and
air-baths over half a century ago at Trieste and elsewhere in
Austria. His motto was: "Light, Truth, and Freedom are the motive
forces towards the highest development of physical and moral
health." Man is not a fish, he declared; light and air are the
first conditions of a highly organized life. Solaria for the
treatment of a number of different disordered conditions are now
commonly established, and most systems of natural therapeutics
attach prime importance to light and air, while in medicine
generally it is beginning to be recognized that such influences
can by no means be neglected. Dr. Fernand Sandoz, in his
_Introduction à la Thérapeutique Naturiste par les agents
Physiques et Dietétiques_ (1907) sets forth such methods
comprehensively. In Germany sun-baths have become widely common;
thus Lenkei (in a paper summarized in _British Medical Journal_,
Oct. 31, 1908) prescribes them with much benefit in tuberculosis,
rheumatic conditions, obesity, anæmia, neurasthenia, etc. He
considers that their peculiar value lies in the action of light.
Professor J.N. Hyde, of Chicago, even believes ("Light-Hunger in
the Production of Psoriasis," _British Medical Journal_, Oct. 6,
1906), that psoriasis is caused by deficiency of sunlight, and
is best cured by the application of light. This belief, which has
not, however, been generally accepted in its unqualified form, he
ingeniously supports by the fact that psoriasis tends to appear
on the most exposed parts of the body, which may be held to
naturally receive and require the maximum of light, and by the
absence of the disease in hot countries and among negroes.
The hygienic value of nakedness is indicated by the robust health
of the savages throughout the world who go naked. The vigor of
the Irish, also, has been connected with the fact that (as Fynes
Moryson's _Itinerary_ shows) both sexes, even among persons of
high social class, were accustomed to go naked except for a
mantle, especially in more remote parts of the country, as late
as the seventeenth century. Where-ever primitive races abandon
nakedness for clothing, at once the tendency to disease,
mortality, and degeneracy notably increases, though it must be
remembered that the use of clothing is commonly accompanied by
the introduction of other bad habits. "Nakedness is the only
condition universal among vigorous and healthy savages; at every
other point perhaps they differ," remarks Frederick Boyle in a
paper ("Savages and Clothes," _Monthly Review_, Sept., 1905) in
which he brings together much evidence concerning the hygienic
advantages of the natural human state in which man is "all face."
It is in Germany that a return towards nakedness has been most
ably and thoroughly advocated, notably by Dr. H. Pudor in his
_Nackt-Cultur_, and by R. Ungewitter in _Die Nacktheit_ (first
published in 1905), a book which has had a very large circulation
in many editions. These writers enthusiastically advocate
nakedness, not only on hygienic, but on moral and artistic
grounds. Pudor insists more especially that "nakedness, both in
gymnastics and in sport, is a method of cure and a method of
regeneration;" he advocates co-education in this culture of
nakedness. Although he makes large claims for
nakedness--believing that all the nations which have disregarded
these claims have rapidly become decadent--Pudor is less hopeful
than Ungewitter of any speedy victory over the prejudices opposed
to the culture of nakedness. He considers that the immediate task
is education, and that a practical commencement may best be made
with the foot which is specially in need of hygiene and exercise;
a large part of the first volume of his book is devoted to the
foot.
As the matter is to-day viewed by those educationalists who are equally
alive to sanitary and sexual considerations, the claims of nakedness, so
far as concerns the young, are regarded as part alike of physical and
moral hygiene. The free contact of the naked body with air and water and
light makes for the health of the body; familiarity with the sight of the
body abolishes petty pruriencies, trains the sense of beauty, and makes
for the health of the soul. This double aspect of the matter has
undoubtedly weighed greatly with those teachers who now approve of customs
which, a few years ago, would have been hastily dismissed as "indecent."
There is still a wide difference of opinion as to the limits to which the
practice of nakedness may be carried, and also as to the age when it
should begin to be restricted. The fact that the adult generation of
to-day grew up under the influence of the old horror of nakedness is an
inevitable check on any revolutionary changes in these matters.
Maria Lischnewska, one of the ablest advocates of the methodical
enlightenment of children in matters of sex (op. cit.), clearly
realizes that a sane attitude towards the body lies at the root
of a sound education for life. She finds that the chief objection
encountered in such education, as applied in the higher classes
of schools, is "the horror of the civilized man at his own body."
She shows that there can be no doubt that those who are engaged
in the difficult task of working towards the abolition of that
superstitious horror have taken up a moral task of the first
importance.
Walter Gerhard, in a thoughtful and sensible paper on the
educational question ("Ein Kapitel zur Erziehungsfrage,"
_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. i, Heft 2), points out that
it is the adult who needs education in this matter--as in so many
other matters of sexual enlightenment--considerably more than the
child. Parents educate their children from the earliest years in
prudery, and vainly flatter themselves that they have thereby
promoted their modesty and morality. He records his own early
life in a tropical land and accustomed to nakedness from the
first. "It was not till I came to Germany when nearly twenty that
I learnt that the human body is indecent, and that it must not be
shown because that 'would arouse bad impulses.' It was not till
the human body was entirely withdrawn from my sight and after I
was constantly told that there was something improper behind
clothes, that I was able to understand this.... Until then I had
not known that a naked body, by the mere fact of being naked,
could arouse erotic feelings. I had known erotic feelings, but
they had not arisen from the sight of the naked body, but
gradually blossomed from the union of our souls." And he draws
the final moral that, if only for the sake of our children, we
must learn to educate ourselves.
Forel (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, p. 140), speaking in entirely the
same sense as Gerhard, remarks that prudery may be either caused
or cured in children. It may be caused by undue anxiety in
covering their bodies and hiding from them the bodies of others.
It may be cured by making them realize that there is nothing in
the body that is unnatural and that we need be ashamed of, and by
encouraging bathing of the sexes in common. He points out (p.
512) the advantages of allowing children to be acquainted with
the adult forms which they will themselves some day assume, and
condemns the conduct of those foolish persons who assume that
children already possess the adult's erotic feelings about the
body. That is so far from being the case that children are
frequently unable to distinguish the sex of other children apart
from their clothes.
At the Mannheim Congress of the German Society for Combating
Venereal Diseases, specially devoted to sexual hygiene, the
speakers constantly referred to the necessity of promoting
familiarity with the naked body. Thus Eulenburg and Julian
Marcuse (_Sexualpädagogik_, p. 264) emphasize the importance of
air-baths, not only for the sake of the physical health of the
young, but in the interests of rational sexual training. Höller,
a teacher, speaking at the same congress (op. cit., p. 85), after
insisting on familiarity with the nude in art and literature, and
protesting against the bowdlerising of poems for the young,
continues: "By bathing-drawers ordinances no soul was ever yet
saved from moral ruin. One who has learnt to enjoy peacefully the
naked in art is only stirred by the naked in nature as by a work
of art." Enderlin, another teacher, speaking in the same sense
(p. 58), points out that nakedness cannot act sexually or
immorally on the child, since the sexual impulse has not yet
become pronounced, and the earlier he is introduced to the naked
in nature and in art, as a matter of course, the less likely are
the sexual feelings to be developed precociously. The child thus,
indeed, becomes immune to impure influences, so that later, when
representations of the nude are brought before him for the object
of provoking his wantonness, they are powerless to injure him. It
is important, Enderlin adds, for familiarity with the nude in art
to be learnt at school, for most of us, as Siebert remarks, have
to learn purity through art.
Nakedness in bathing, remarks Bölsche in his _Liebesleben in der
Natur_ (vol. iii, pp. 139 et seq.), we already in some measure
possess; we need it in physical exercises, at first for the sexes
separately; then, when we have grown accustomed to the idea,
occasionally for both sexes together. We need to acquire the
capacity to see the bodies of individuals of the other sex with
such self-control and such natural instinct that they become
non-erotic to us and can be gazed at without erotic feeling. Art,
he says, shows that this is possible in civilization. Science, he
adds, comes to the aid of the same view.
Ungewitter (_Die Nacktheit_, p. 57) also advocates boys and girls
engaging in play and gymnastics together, entirely naked in
air-baths. "In this way," he believes, "the gymnasium would
become a school of morality, in which young growing things would
be able to retain their purity as long as possible through
becoming naturally accustomed to each other. At the same time
their bodies would be hardened and developed, and the perception
of beautiful and natural forms awakened." To those who have any
"moral" doubts on the matter, he mentions the custom in remote
country districts of boys and girls bathing together quite naked
and without any sexual consciousness. Rudolf Sommer, similarly,
in an excellent article entitled "Mädchenerziehung oder
Menschenbildung?" (_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. i, Heft 3)
advises that children should be made accustomed to each other's
nakedness from an early age in the family life of the house or
the garden, in games, and especially in bathing; he remarks that
parents having children of only one sex should cultivate for
their children's sake intimate relations with a family having
children of like age of the opposite sex, so that they may grow
up together.
It is scarcely necessary to add that the cultivation of nakedness must
always be conciliated with respect for the natural instincts of modesty.
If the practice of nakedness led the young to experience a diminished
reverence for their own or others' personalities the advantages of it
would be too dearly bought. This is, in part, a matter of wholesome
instinct, in part of wise training. We now know that the absence of
clothes has little relation with the absence of modesty, such relation as
there is being of the inverse order, for the savage races which go naked
are usually more modest than those which wear clothes. The saying quoted
by Herodotus in the early Greek world that "A woman takes off her modesty
with her shift" was a favorite text of the Christian Fathers. But
Plutarch, who was also a moralist, had already protested against it at the
close of the Greek world: "By no means," he declared, "she who is modest
clothes herself with modesty when she lays aside her tunic." "A woman may
be naked," as Mrs. Bishop, the traveller, remarked to Dr. Baelz, in Japan,
"and yet behave like a lady."[42]
The question is complicated among ourselves because established
traditions of rigid concealment have fostered a pruriency which is an
offensive insult to naked modesty. In many lands the women who are
accustomed to be almost or quite naked in the presence of their own people
cover themselves as soon as they become conscious of the lustful
inquisitive eyes of Europeans. Stratz refers to the prevalence of this
impulse of offended modesty in Japan, and mentions that he himself failed
to arouse it simply because he was a physician, and, moreover, had long
lived in another land (Java) where also the custom of nakedness
prevails.[43] So long as this unnatural prurience exists a free
unqualified nakedness is rendered difficult.
Modesty is not, however, the only natural impulse which has to be
considered in relation to the custom of nakedness. It seems probable that
in cultivating the practice of nakedness we are not merely carrying out a
moral and hygienic prescription but allowing legitimate scope to an
instinct which at some periods of life, especially in adolescence, is
spontaneous and natural, even, it may be, wholesomely based in the
traditions of the race in sexual selection. Our rigid conventions make it
impossible for us to discover the laws of nature in this matter by
stifling them at the outset. It may well be that there is a rhythmic
harmony and concordance between impulses of modesty and impulses of
ostentation, though we have done our best to disguise the natural law by
our stupid and perverse by-laws.
Stanley Hall, who emphasizes the importance of nakedness, remarks
that at puberty we have much reason to assume that in a state of
nature there is a certain instinctive pride and ostentation that
accompanies the new local development, and quotes the observation
of Dr. Seerley that the impulse to conceal the sexual organs is
especially marked in young men who are underdeveloped, but not
evident in those who are developed beyond the average. Stanley
Hall (_Adolescence_, vol. ii, p. 97), also refers to the
frequency with which not only "virtuous young men, but even
women, rather glory in occasions when they can display the beauty
of their forms without reserve, not only to themselves and to
loved ones, but even to others with proper pretexts."
Many have doubtless noted this tendency, especially in women, and
chiefly in those who are conscious of beautiful physical
development. Madame Céline Renooz believes that the tendency
corresponds to a really deep-rooted instinct in women, little or
not at all manifested in men who have consequently sought to
impose artificially on women their own masculine conceptions of
modesty. "In the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a
moment when, by a secret atavism, she feels the pride of her sex,
the intuition of her moral superiority and cannot understand why
she must hide its cause. At this moment, wavering between the
laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely knows if
nakedness should, or should not, affright her. A sort of confused
atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing was
known, and reveals to her as a paradisaical ideal the customs of
that human epoch" (Céline Renooz, _Psychologie Comparée de
l'Homme et de la Femme_, pp. 85-87). Perhaps this was obscurely
felt by the German girl (mentioned in Kalbeck's _Life of
Brahms_), who said: "One enjoys music twice as much
_décolletée_."
From the point of view with which we are here essentially concerned there
are three ways in which the cultivation of nakedness--so far as it is
permitted by the slow education of public opinion--tends to exert an
influence: (1) It is an important element in the sexual hygiene of the
young, introducing a wholesome knowledge and incuriosity into a sphere
once given up to prudery and pruriency. (2) The effect of nakedness is
beneficial on those of more mature age, also, in so far as it tends to
cultivate the sense of beauty and to furnish the tonic and consoling
influences of natural vigor and grace. (3) The custom of nakedness, in its
inception at all events, has a dynamic psychological influence also on
morals, an influence exerted in the substitution of a strenuous and
positive morality for the merely negative and timid morality which has
ruled in this sphere.
Perhaps there are not many adults who realize the intense and secret
absorption of thought in the minds of many boys and some girls concerning
the problem of the physical conformation of the other sex, and the time,
patience, and intellectual energy which they are willing to expend on the
solution of this problem. This is mostly effected in secret, but not
seldom the secret impulse manifests itself with a sudden violence which in
the blind eyes of the law is reckoned as crime. A German lawyer, Dr.
Werthauer, has lately stated that if there were a due degree of
familiarity with the natural organs and functions of the opposite sex
ninety per cent. of the indecent acts of youths with girl children would
disappear, for in most cases these are not assaults but merely the
innocent, though uncontrollable, outcome of a repressed natural curiosity.
It is quite true that not a few children boldly enlist each others'
coöperation in the settlement of the question and resolve it to their
mutual satisfaction. But even this is not altogether satisfactory, for the
end is not attained openly and wholesomely, with a due subordination of
the specifically sexual, but with a consciousness of wrong-doing and an
exclusive attentiveness to the merely physical fact which tend directly to
develop sexual excitement. When familiarity with the naked body of the
other sex is gained openly and with no consciousness of indecorum, in the
course of work and of play, in exercise or gymnastics, in running or in
bathing, from a child's earliest years, no unwholesome results accompany
the knowledge of the essential facts of physical conformation thus
naturally acquired. The prurience and prudery which have poisoned sexual
life in the past are alike rendered impossible.
Nakedness has, however, a hygienic value, as well as a spiritual
significance, far beyond its influences in allaying the natural
inquisitiveness of the young or acting as a preventative of morbid
emotion. It is an inspiration to adults who have long outgrown any
youthful curiosities. The vision of the essential and eternal human form,
the nearest thing to us in all the world, with its vigor and its beauty
and its grace, is one of the prime tonics of life. "The power of a woman's
body," said James Hinton, "is no more bodily than the power of music is a
power of atmospheric vibrations." It is more than all the beautiful and
stimulating things of the world, than flowers or stars or the sea. History
and legend and myth reveal to us the sacred and awful influence of
nakedness, for, as Stanley Hall says, nakedness has always been "a
talisman of wondrous power with gods and men." How sorely men crave for
the spectacle of the human body--even to-day after generations have
inculcated the notion that it is an indecorous and even disgusting
spectacle--is witnessed by the eagerness with which they seek after the
spectacle of even its imperfect and meretricious forms, although these
certainly possess a heady and stimulating quality which can never be found
in the pathetic simplicity of naked beauty. It was another spectacle when
the queens of ancient Madagascar at the annual Fandroon, or feast of the
bath, laid aside their royal robes and while their subjects crowded the
palace courtyard, descended the marble steps to the bath in complete
nakedness. When we make our conventions of clothing rigid we at once
spread a feast for lust and deny ourselves one of the prime tonics of
life.
"I was feeling in despair and walking despondently along a
Melbourne street," writes the Australian author of a yet
unpublished autobiography, "when three children came running out
of a lane and crossed the road in full daylight. The beauty and
texture of their legs in the open air filled me with joy, so that
I forgot all my troubles whilst looking at them. It was a bright
revelation, an unexpected glimpse of Paradise, and I have never
ceased to thank the happy combination of shape, pure blood, and
fine skin of these poverty-stricken children, for the wind seemed
to quicken their golden beauty, and I retained the rosy vision of
their natural young limbs, so much more divine than those always
under cover. Another occasion when naked young limbs made me
forget all my gloom and despondency was on my first visit to
Adelaide. I came on a naked boy leaning on the railing near the
Baths, and the beauty of his face, torso, fair young limbs and
exquisite feet filled me with joy and renewed hope. The tears
came to my eyes, and I said to myself, 'While there is beauty in
the world I will continue to struggle,'"
We must, as Bölsche declares (loc. cit.), accustom ourselves to
gaze on the naked human body exactly as we gaze at a beautiful
flower, not merely with the pity with which the doctor looks at
the body, but with joy in its strength and health and beauty. For
a flower, as Bölsche truly adds, is not merely "naked body," it
is the most sacred region of the body, the sexual organs of the
plant.
"For girls to dance naked," said Hinton, "is the only truly pure
form of dancing, and in due time it must therefore come about.
This is certain: girls will dance naked and men will be pure
enough to gaze on them." It has already been so in Greece, he
elsewhere remarks, as it is to-day in Japan (as more recently
described by Stratz). It is nearly forty years since these
prophetic words were written, but Hinton himself would probably
have been surprised at the progress which has already been made
slowly (for all true progress must be slow) towards this goal.
Even on the stage new and more natural traditions are beginning
to prevail in Europe. It is not many years since an English
actress regarded as a calumny the statement that she appeared on
the stage bare-foot, and brought an action for libel, winning
substantial damages. Such a result would scarcely be possible
to-day. The movement in which Isadora Duncan was a pioneer has
led to a partial disuse among dancers of the offensive device of
tights, and it is no longer considered indecorous to show many
parts of the body which it was formerly usual to cover.
It should, however, be added at the same time that, while
dancers, in so far as they are genuine artists, are entitled to
determine the conditions most favorable to their art, nothing
whatever is gained for the cause of a wholesome culture of
nakedness by the "living statues" and "living pictures" which
have obtained an international vogue during recent years. These
may be legitimate as variety performances, but they have nothing
whatever to do with either Nature or art. Dr. Pudor, writing as
one of the earliest apostles of the culture of nakedness, has
energetically protested against these performances
(_Sexual-Probleme_, Dec., 1908, p. 828). He rightly points out
that nakedness, to be wholesome, requires the open air, the
meadows, the sunlight, and that nakedness at night, in a music
hall, by artificial light, in the presence of spectators who are
themselves clothed, has no element of morality about it. Attempts
have here and there been quietly made to cultivate a certain
amount of mutual nakedness as between the sexes on remote country
excursions. It is significant to find a record of such an
experiment in Ungewitter's _Die Nacktheit_. In this case a party
of people, men and women, would regularly every Sunday seek
remote spots in woods or meadows where they would settle down,
picnic, and enjoy games. "They made themselves as comfortable as
possible, the men laying aside their coats, waistcoats, boots and
socks; the women their blouses, skirts, shoes and stockings.
Gradually, as the moral conception of nakedness developed in
their minds, more and more clothing fell away, until the men wore
nothing but bathing-drawers and the women only their chemises. In
this 'costume' games were carried out in common, and a regular
camp-life led. The ladies (some of whom were unmarried) would
then lie in hammocks and we men on the grass, and the intercourse
was delightful. We felt as members of one family, and behaved
accordingly. In an entirely natural and unembarrassed way we gave
ourselves up entirely to the liberating feelings aroused by this
light- and air-bath, and passed these splendid hours in joyous
singing and dancing, in wantonly childish fashion, freed from the
burden of a false civilization. It was, of course, necessary to
seek spots as remote as possible from high-roads, for fear of
being disturbed. At the same time we by no means failed in
natural modesty and consideration towards one another. Children,
who can be entirely naked, may be allowed to take part in such
meetings of adults, and will thus be brought up free from morbid
prudery" (R. Ungewitter, _Die Nacktheit_, p. 58).
No doubt it may be said that the ideal in this matter is the
possibility of permitting complete nakedness. This may be
admitted, and it is undoubtedly true that our rigid police
regulations do much to artificially foster a concealment in this
matter which is not based on any natural instinct. Dr. Shufeldt
narrates in his _Studies of the Human Form_ that once in the
course of a photographic expedition in the woods he came upon two
boys, naked except for bathing-drawers, engaged in getting water
lilies from a pond. He found them a good subject for his camera,
but they could not be induced to remove their drawers, by no
means out of either modesty or mock-modesty, but simply because
they feared they might possibly be caught and arrested. We have
to recognize that at the present day the general popular
sentiment is not yet sufficiently educated to allow of public
disregard for the convention of covering the sexual centres, and
all attempts to extend the bounds of nakedness must show a due
regard for this requirement. As concerns women, Valentin Lehr, of
Freiburg, in Breisgau, has invented a costume (figured in
Ungewitter's _Die Nacktheit_) which is suitable for either public
water-baths or air-baths, because it meets the demand of those
whose minimum requirement is that the chief sexual centres of the
body should be covered in public, while it is otherwise fairly
unobjectionable. It consists of two pieces, made of porous
material, one covering the breasts with a band over the
shoulders, and the other covering the abdomen below the navel and
drawn between the legs. This minimal costume, while neither ideal
nor æsthetic, adequately covers the sexual regions of the body,
while leaving the arms, waist, hips, and legs entirely free.
There finally remains the moral aspect of nakedness. Although this has
been emphasized by many during the past half century it is still
unfamiliar to the majority. The human body can never be a little thing.
The wise educator may see to it that boys and girls are brought up in a
natural and wholesome familiarity with each other, but a certain terror
and beauty must always attach to the spectacle of the body, a mixed
attraction and repulsion. Because it has this force it naturally calls out
the virtue of those who take part in the spectacle, and makes impossible
any soft compliance to emotion. Even if we admit that the spectacle of
nakedness is a challenge to passion it is still a challenge that calls
out the ennobling qualities of self-control. It is but a poor sort of
virtue that lies in fleeing into the desert from things that we fear may
have in them a temptation. We have to learn that it is even worse to
attempt to create a desert around us in the midst of civilization. We
cannot dispense with passions if we would; reason, as Holbach said, is the
art of choosing the right passions, and education the art of sowing and
cultivating them in human hearts. The spectacle of nakedness has its moral
value in teaching us to learn to enjoy what we do not possess, a lesson
which is an essential part of the training for any kind of fine social
life. The child has to learn to look at flowers and not pluck them; the
man has to learn to look at a woman's beauty and not desire to possess it.
The joyous conquest over that "erotic kleptomania," as Ellen Key has well
said, reveals the blossoming of a fine civilization. We fancy the conquest
is difficult, even impossibly difficult. But it is not so. This impulse,
like other human impulses, tends under natural conditions to develop
temperately and wholesomely. We artificially press a stupid and brutal
hand on it, and it is driven into the two unnatural extremes of repression
and license, one extreme as foul as the other.
To those who have been bred under bad conditions, it may indeed seem
hopeless to attempt to rise to the level of the Greeks and the other finer
tempered peoples of antiquity in realizing the moral, as well as the
pedagogic, hygienic, and æsthetic advantages[44] of admitting into life
the spectacle of the naked human body. But unless we do we hopelessly
fetter ourselves in our march along the road of civilization, we deprive
ourselves at once of a source of moral strength and of joyous inspiration.
Just as Wesley once asked why the devil should have all the best tunes, so
to-day men are beginning to ask why the human body, the most divine melody
at its finest moments that creation has yielded, should be allowed to
become the perquisite of those who lust for the obscene. And some are,
further, convinced that by enlisting it on the side of purity and strength
they are raising the most powerful of all bulwarks against the invasion of
a vicious conception of life and the consequent degradation of sex. These
are considerations which we cannot longer afford to neglect, however great
the opposition they arouse among the unthinking.
"Folk are afraid of such things rousing the passions," Edward
Carpenter remarks. "No doubt the things may act that way. But
why, we may ask, should people be afraid of rousing passions
which, after all, are the great driving forces of human life?" It
is true, the same writer continues, our conventional moral
formulæ are no longer strong enough to control passion
adequately, and that we are generating steam in a boiler that is
cankered with rust. "The cure is not to cut off the passions, or
to be weakly afraid of them, but to find a new, sound, healthy
engine of general morality and common sense within which they
will work" (Edward Carpenter, _Albany Review_, Sept., 1907).
So far as I am aware, however, it was James Hinton who chiefly
sought to make clear the possibility of a positive morality on
the basis of nakedness, beauty, and sexual influence, regarded as
dynamic forces which, when suppressed, make for corruption and
when wisely used serve to inspire and ennoble life. He worked out
his thoughts on this matter in MSS., written from about 1870 to
his death two years later, which, never having been prepared for
publication, remain in a fragmentary state and have not been
published. I quote a few brief characteristic passages: "Is not,"
he wrote, "the Hindu refusal to see a woman eating strangely like
ours to see one naked? The real sensuality of the thought is
visibly identical.... Suppose, because they are delicious to eat,
pineapples were forbidden to be seen, except in pictures, and
about that there was something dubious. Suppose no one might have
sight of a pineapple unless he were rich enough to purchase one
for his particular eating, the sight and the eating being so
indissolubly joined. What lustfulness would surround them, what
constant pruriency, what stealing!... Miss ---- told us of her
Syrian adventures, and how she went into a wood-carver's shop and
he would not look at her; and how she took up a tool and worked,
till at last he looked, and they both burst out laughing. Will it
not be even so with our looking at women altogether? There will
come a _work_--and at last we shall look up and both burst out
laughing.... When men see truly what is amiss, and act with
reason and forethought in respect to the sexual relations, will
they not insist on the enjoyment of women's beauty by youths, and
from the earliest age, that the first feeling may be of beauty?
Will they not say, 'We must not allow the false purity, we must
have the true.' The false has been tried, and it is not good
enough; the power purely to enjoy beauty must be gained;
attempting to do with less is fatal. Every instructor of youth
shall say: 'This beauty of woman, God's chief work of beauty, it
is good you see it; it is a pleasure that serves good; all beauty
serves it, and above all this, for its office is to make you
pure. Come to it as you come to daily bread, or pure air, or the
cleansing bath: this is pure to you if you be pure, it will aid
you in your effort to be so. But if any of you are impure, and
make of it the feeder of impurity, then you should be ashamed and
pray; it is not for you our life can be ordered; it is for men
and not for beasts.' This must come when men open their eyes, and
act coolly and with reason and forethought, and not in mere panic
in respect to the sexual passion in its moral relations."
FOOTNOTES:
[40] Thus Athenæus (Bk. xiii, Ch. XX) says: "In the Island of Chios it is
a beautiful sight to go to the gymnasia and the race-courses, and to see
the young men wrestling naked with the maidens who are also naked."
[41] Augustine (_De civitate Dei_, lib. ii, cap. XIII) refers to the same
point, contrasting the Romans with the Greeks who honored their actors.
[42] See "The Evolution of Modesty" in the first volume of these
_Studies_, where this question of the relationship of nakedness to modesty
is fully discussed.
[43] C.H. Stratz, _Die Körperformen in Kunst und Leben der Japaner_,
Second edition, Ch. III; id., _Frauenkleidung_, Third edition, pp. 22, 30.
[44] I have not considered it in place here to emphasize the æsthetic
influence of familiarity with nakedness. The most æsthetic nations
(notably the Greeks and the Japanese) have been those that preserved a
certain degree of familiarity with the naked body. "In all arts,"
Maeterlinck remarks, "civilized peoples have approached or departed from
pure beauty according as they approached or departed from the habit of
nakedness." Ungewitter insists on the advantage to the artist of being
able to study the naked body in movement, and it may be worth mentioning
that Fidus (Hugo Höppener), the German artist of to-day who has exerted
great influence by his fresh, powerful and yet reverent delineation of the
naked human form in all its varying aspects, attributes his inspiration
and vision to the fact that, as a pupil of Diefenbach, he was accustomed
with his companions to work naked in the solitudes outside Munich which
they frequented (F. Enzensberger, "Fidus," _Deutsche Kultur_, Aug., 1906).
CHAPTER IV.
THE VALUATION OF SEXUAL LOVE.
The Conception of Sexual Love--The Attitude of Mediæval Asceticism--St.
Bernard and St. Odo of Cluny--The Ascetic Insistence on the Proximity of
the Sexual and Excretory Centres--Love as a Sacrament of Nature--The Idea
of the Impurity of Sex in Primitive Religions Generally--Theories of the
Origin of This Idea--The Anti-Ascetic Element in the Bible and Early
Christianity--Clement of Alexandria--St. Augustine's Attitude--The
Recognition of the Sacredness of the Body by Tertullian, Rufinus and
Athanasius--The Reformation--The Sexual Instinct regarded as Beastly--The
Human Sexual Instinct Not Animal-like--Lust and Love--The Definition of
Love--Love and Names for Love Unknown in Some Parts of the World--Romantic
Love of Late Development in the White Race--The Mystery of Sexual
Desire--Whether Love is a Delusion--The Spiritual as Well as the Physical
Structure of the World in Part Built up on Sexual Love--The Testimony of
Men of Intellect to the Supremacy of Love.
It will be seen that the preceding discussion of nakedness has a
significance beyond what it appeared to possess at the outset. The
hygienic value, physically and mentally, of familiarity with nakedness
during the early years of life, however considerable it may be, is not the
only value which such familiarity possesses. Beyond its æsthetic value,
also, there lies in it a moral value, a source of dynamic energy. And now,
taking a still further step, we may say that it has a spiritual value in
relation to our whole conception of the sexual impulse. Our attitude
towards the naked human body is the test of our attitude towards the
instinct of sex. If our own and our fellows' bodies seem to us
intrinsically shameful or disgusting, nothing will ever really ennoble or
purify our conceptions of sexual love. Love craves the flesh, and if the
flesh is shameful the lover must be shameful. "Se la cosa amata è vile,"
as Leonardo da Vinci profoundly said, "l'amante se fa vile." However
illogical it may have been, there really was a justification for the old
Christian identification of the flesh with the sexual instinct. They stand
or fall together; we cannot degrade the one and exalt the other. As our
feelings towards nakedness are, so will be our feelings towards love.
"Man is nothing else than fetid sperm, a sack of dung, the food of
worms.... You have never seen a viler dung-hill." Such was the outcome of
St. Bernard's cloistered _Meditationes Piissimæ_.[45] Sometimes, indeed,
these mediæval monks would admit that the skin possessed a certain
superficial beauty, but they only made that admission in order to
emphasize the hideousness of the body when deprived of this film of
loveliness, and strained all their perverse intellectual acumen, and their
ferocious irony, as they eagerly pointed the finger of mockery at every
detail of what seemed to them the pitiful figure of man. St. Odo of
Cluny--charming saint as he was and a pioneer in his appreciation of the
wild beauty of the Alps he had often traversed--was yet an adept in this
art of reviling the beauty of the human body. That beauty only lies in the
skin, he insists; if we could see beneath the skin women would arouse
nothing but nausea. Their adornments are but blood and mucus and bile. If
we refuse to touch dung and phlegm even with a fingertip, how can we
desire to embrace a sack of dung?[46] The mediæval monks of the more
contemplative order, indeed, often found here a delectable field of
meditation, and the Christian world generally was content to accept their
opinions in more or less diluted versions, or at all events never made any
definite protest against them.
Even men of science accepted these conceptions and are, indeed, only now
beginning to emancipate themselves from such ancient superstitions. R. de
Graef in the Preface to his famous treatise on the generative organs of
women, _De Mulierum Organis Generatione Inservientibus_, dedicated to
Cosmo III de Medici in 1672, considered it necessary to apologize for the
subject of his work. Even a century later, Linnæus in his great work, _The
System of Nature_, dismissed as "abominable" the exact study of the female
genitals, although he admitted the scientific interest of such
investigations. And if men of science have found it difficult to attain an
objective vision of women we cannot be surprised that medieval and still
more ancient conceptions have often been subtly mingled with the views of
philosophical and semi-philosophical writers.[47]
We may regard as a special variety of the ascetic view of sex,--for the
ascetics, as we see, freely but not quite legitimately, based their
asceticism largely on æsthetic considerations,--that insistence on the
proximity of the sexual to the excretory centres which found expression in
the early Church in Augustine's depreciatory assertion: "Inter fæces et
urinam nascimur," and still persists among many who by no means always
associate it with religious asceticism.[48] "As a result of what
ridiculous economy, and of what Mephistophilian irony," asks Tarde,[49]
"has Nature imagined that a function so lofty, so worthy of the poetic and
philosophical hymns which have celebrated it, only deserved to have its
exclusive organ shared with that of the vilest corporal functions?"
It may, however, be pointed out that this view of the matter, however
unconsciously, is itself the outcome of the ascetic depreciation of the
body. From a scientific point of view, the metabolic processes of the
body from one end to the other, whether regarded chemically or
psychologically, are all interwoven and all of equal dignity. We cannot
separate out any particular chemical or biological process and declare:
This is vile. Even what we call excrement still stores up the stuff of our
lives. Eating has to some persons seemed a disgusting process. But yet it
has been possible to say, with Thoreau, that "the gods have really
intended that men should feed divinely, as themselves, on their own nectar
and ambrosia.... I have felt that eating became a sacrament, a method of
communion, an ecstatic exercise, and a sitting at the communion table of
the world."
The sacraments of Nature are in this way everywhere woven into the texture
of men's and women's bodies. Lips good to kiss with are indeed first of
all chiefly good to eat and drink with. So accumulated and overlapped have
the centres of force become in the long course of development, that the
mucous membranes of the natural orifices, through the sensitiveness gained
in their own offices, all become agents to thrill the soul in the contact
of love; it is idle to discriminate high or low, pure or impure; all alike
are sanctified already by the extreme unction of Nature. The nose receives
the breath of life; the vagina receives the water of life. Ultimately the
worth and loveliness of life must be measured by the worth and loveliness
for us of the instruments of life. The swelling breasts are such divinely
gracious insignia of womanhood because of the potential child that hangs
at them and sucks; the large curves of the hips are so voluptuous because
of the potential child they clasp within them; there can be no division
here, we cannot cut the roots from the tree. The supreme function of
manhood--the handing on of the lamp of life to future races--is carried
on, it is true, by the same instrument that is the daily conduit of the
bladder. It has been said in scorn that we are born between urine and
excrement; it may be said, in reverence, that the passage through this
channel of birth is a sacrament of Nature's more sacred and significant
than men could ever invent.
These relationships have been sometimes perceived and their meaning
realized by a sort of mystical intuition. We catch glimpses of such an
insight now and again, first among the poets and later among the
physicians of the Renaissance. In 1664 Rolfincius, in his _Ordo et Methods
Generationi Partium etc._, at the outset of the second Part devoted to the
sexual organs of women, sets forth what ancient writers have said of the
Eleusinian and other mysteries and the devotion and purity demanded of
those who approached these sacred rites. It is so also with us, he
continues, in the rites of scientific investigation. "We also operate with
sacred things. The organs of sex are to be held among sacred things. They
who approach these altars must come with devout minds. Let the profane
stand without, and the doors be closed." In those days, even for science,
faith and intuition were alone possible. It is only of recent years that
the histologist's microscope and the physiological chemist's test-tube
have furnished them with a rational basis. It is no longer possible to cut
Nature in two and assert that here she is pure and there impure.[50]
There thus appears to be no adequate ground for agreeing with
those who consider that the proximity of the generative and
excretory centres is "a stupid bungle of Nature's." An
association which is so ancient and primitive in Nature can only
seem repulsive to those whose feelings have become morbidly
unnatural. It may further be remarked that the anus, which is the
more æsthetically unattractive of the excretory centres, is
comparatively remote from the sexual centre, and that, as R.
Hellmann remarked many years ago in discussing this question
(_Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit_, p. 82): "In the first place,
freshly voided urine has nothing specially unpleasant about it,
and in the second place, even if it had, we might reflect that a
rosy mouth by no means loses its charm merely because it fails to
invite a kiss at the moment when its possessor is vomiting."
A clergyman writes suggesting that we may go further and find a
positive advantage in this proximity: "I am glad that you do not
agree with the man who considered that Nature had bungled by
using the genitals for urinary purposes; apart from teleological
or theological grounds I could not follow that line of reasoning.
I think there is no need for disgust concerning the urinary
organs, though I feel that the anus can never be attractive to
the normal mind; but the anus is quite separate from the
genitals. I would suggest that the proximity serves a good end in
making the organs more or less secret except at times of sexual
emotion or to those in love. The result is some degree of
repulsion at ordinary times and a strong attraction at times of
sexual activity. Hence, the ordinary guarding of the parts, from
fear of creating disgust, greatly increases their attractiveness
at other times when sexual emotion is paramount. Further, the
feeling of disgust itself is merely the result of habit and
sentiment, however useful it may be, and according to Scripture
everything is clean and good. The ascetic feeling of repulsion,
if we go back to origin, is due to other than Christian
influence. Christianity came out of Judaism which had no sense of
the impurity of marriage, for 'unclean' in the Old Testament
simply means 'sacred.' The ascetic side of the religion of
Christianity is no part of the religion of Christ as it came from
the hands of its Founder, and the modern feeling on this matter
is a lingering remnant of the heresy of the Manichæans." I may
add, however, that, as Northcote points out (_Christianity and
Sex Problems_, p. 14), side by side in the Old Testament with the
frank recognition of sexuality, there is a circle of ideas
revealing the feeling of impurity in sex and of shame in
connection with it. Christianity inherited this mixed feeling. It
has really been a widespread and almost universal feeling among
the ancient and primitive peoples that there is something impure
and sinful in the things of sex, so that those who would lead a
religious life must avoid sexual relationships; even in India
celibacy has commanded respect (see, e.g., Westermarck,
_Marriage_, pp. 150 et seq.). As to the original foundation of
this notion--which it is unnecessary to discuss more fully
here--many theories have been put forward; St. Augustine, in his
_De Civitate Dei_, sets forth the ingenious idea that the penis,
being liable to spontaneous movements and erections that are not
under the control of the will, is a shameful organ and involves
the whole sphere of sex in its shame. Westermarck argues that
among nearly all peoples there is a feeling against sexual
relationship with members of the same family or household, and as
sex was thus banished from the sphere of domestic life a notion
of its general impurity arose; Northcote points out that from the
first it has been necessary to seek concealment for sexual
intercourse, because at that moment the couple would be a prey to
hostile attacks, and that it was by an easy transition that sex
came to be regarded as a thing that ought to be concealed, and,
therefore, a sinful thing. (Diderot, in his _Supplément au Voyage
de Bougainville_, had already referred to this motive for
seclusion as "the only natural element in modesty.") Crawley has
devoted a large part of his suggestive work, _The Mystic Rose_,
to showing that, to savage man, sex is a perilous, dangerous, and
enfeebling element in life, and, therefore, sinful.
It would, however, be a mistake to think that such men as St. Bernard and
St. Odo of Cluny, admirably as they represented the ascetic and even the
general Christian views of their own time, are to be regarded as
altogether typical exponents of the genuine and primitive Christian view.
So far as I have been able to discover, during the first thousand years of
Christianity we do not find this concentrated intellectual and emotional
ferocity of attack on the body; it only developed at the moment when, with
Pope Gregory VII, mediæval Christianity reached the climax of its conquest
over the souls of European men, in the establishment of the celibacy of
the secular clergy, and the growth of the great cloistered communities of
monks in severely regulated and secluded orders.[51] Before that the
teachers of asceticism were more concerned to exhort to chastity and
modesty than to direct a deliberate and systematic attack on the whole
body; they concentrated their attention rather on spiritual virtues than
on physical imperfections. And if we go back to the Gospels we find little
of the mediæval ascetic spirit in the reported sayings and doings of
Jesus, which may rather indeed be said to reveal, on the whole,
notwithstanding their underlying asceticism, a certain tenderness and
indulgence to the body, while even Paul, though not tender towards the
body, exhorts to reverence towards it as a temple of the Holy Spirit.
We cannot expect to find the Fathers of the Church sympathetic towards the
spectacle of the naked human body, for their position was based on a
revolt against paganism, and paganism had cultivated the body. Nakedness
had been more especially associated with the public bath, the gymnasium,
and the theatre; in profoundly disapproving of these pagan institutions
Christianity discouraged nakedness. The fact that familiarity with
nakedness was favorable, rather than opposed, to the chastity to which it
attached so much importance, the Church--though indeed at one moment it
accepted nakedness in the rite of baptism--was for the most part unable to
see if it was indeed a fact which the special conditions of decadent
classic life had tended to disguise. But in their decided preference for
the dressed over the naked human body the early Christians frequently
hesitated to take the further step of asserting that the body is a focus
of impurity and that the physical organs of sex are a device of the devil.
On the contrary, indeed, some of the most distinguished of the Fathers,
especially those of the Eastern Church who had felt the vivifying breath
of Greek thought, occasionally expressed themselves on the subject of
Nature, sex, and the body in a spirit which would have won the approval of
Goethe or Whitman.
Clement of Alexandria, with all the eccentricities of his over-subtle
intellect, was yet the most genuinely Greek of all the Fathers, and it is
not surprising that the dying ray of classic light reflected from his mind
shed some illumination over this question of sex. He protested, for
instance, against that prudery which, as the sun of the classic world set,
had begun to overshadow life. "We should not be ashamed to name," he
declared, "what God has not been ashamed to create."[52] It was a
memorable declaration because, while it accepted the old classic feeling
of no shame in the presence of nature, it put that feeling on a new and
religious basis harmonious to Christianity. Throughout, though not always
quite consistently, Clement defends the body and the functions of sex
against those who treated them with contempt. And as the cause of sex is
the cause of women he always strongly asserts the dignity of women, and
also proclaims the holiness of marriage, a state which he sometimes places
above that of virginity.[53]
Unfortunately, it must be said, St. Augustine--another North African, but
of Roman Carthage and not of Greek Alexandria--thought that he had a
convincing answer to the kind of argument which Clement presented, and so
great was the force of his passionate and potent genius that he was able
in the end to make his answer prevail. For Augustine sin was hereditary,
and sin had its special seat and symbol in the sexual organs; the fact of
sin has modified the original divine act of creation, and we cannot treat
sex and its organs as though there had been no inherited sin. Our sexual
organs, he declares, have become shameful because, through sin, they are
now moved by lust. At the same time Augustine by no means takes up the
mediæval ascetic position of contemptuous hatred towards the body. Nothing
can be further from Odo of Cluny than Augustine's enthusiasm about the
body, even about the exquisite harmony of the parts beneath the skin. "I
believe it may be concluded," he even says, "that in the creation of the
human body beauty was more regarded than necessity. In truth, necessity is
a transitory thing, and the time is coming when we shall be able to enjoy
one another's beauty without any lust."[54] Even in the sphere of sex he
would be willing to admit purity and beauty, apart from the inherited
influence of Adam's sin. In Paradise, he says, had Paradise continued, the
act of generation would have been as simple and free from shame as the act
of the hand in scattering seed on to the earth. "Sexual conjugation would
have been under the control of the will without any sexual desire. The
semen would be injected into the vagina in as simple a manner as the
menstrual fluid is now ejected. There would not have been any words which
could be called obscene, but all that might be said of these members would
have been as pure as what is said of the other parts of the body."[55]
That, however, for Augustine, is what might have been in Paradise where,
as he believed, sexual desire had no existence. As things are, he held, we
are right to be ashamed, we do well to blush. And it was natural that, as
Clement of Alexandria mentions, many heretics should have gone further on
this road and believed that while God made man down to the navel, the rest
was made by another power; such heretics have their descendants among us
even to-day.
Alike in the Eastern and Western Churches, however, both before and after
Augustine, though not so often after, great Fathers and teachers have
uttered opinions which recall those of Clement rather than of Augustine.
We cannot lay very much weight on the utterance of the extravagant and
often contradictory Tertullian, but it is worth noting that, while he
declared that woman is the gate of hell, he also said that we must
approach Nature with reverence and not with blushes. "Natura veneranda
est, non erubescenda." "No Christian author," it has indeed been said,
"has so energetically spoken against the heretical contempt of the body as
Tertullian. Soul and body, according to Tertullian, are in the closest
association. The soul is the life-principle of the body, but there is no
activity of the soul which is not manifested and conditioned by the
flesh."[56] More weight attaches to Rufinus Tyrannius, the friend and
fellow-student of St. Jerome, in the fourth century, who wrote a
commentary on the Apostles' Creed, which was greatly esteemed by the early
and mediæval Church, and is indeed still valued even to-day. Here, in
answer to those who declared that there was obscenity in the fact of
Christ's birth through the sexual organs of a woman, Rufinus replies that
God created the sexual organs, and that "it is not Nature but merely human
opinion which teaches that these parts are obscene. For the rest, all the
parts of the body are made from the same clay, whatever differences there
may be in their uses and functions."[57] He looks at the matter, we see,
piously indeed, but naturally and simply, like Clement, and not, like
Augustine, through the distorting medium of a theological system.
Athanasius, in the Eastern Church, spoke in the same sense as Rufinus in
the Western Church. A certain monk named Amun had been much grieved by the
occurrence of seminal emissions during sleep, and he wrote to Athanasius
to inquire if such emissions are a sin. In the letter he wrote in reply,
Athanasius seeks to reassure Amun. "All things," he tells him, "are pure
to the pure. For what, I ask, dear and pious friend, can there be sinful
or naturally impure in excrement? Man is the handwork of God. There is
certainly nothing in us that is impure."[58] We feel as we read these
utterances that the seeds of prudery and pruriency are already alive in
the popular mind, but yet we see also that some of the most distinguished
thinkers of the early Christian Church, in striking contrast to the more
morbid and narrow-minded mediæval ascetics, clearly stood aside from the
popular movement. On the whole, they were submerged because Christianity,
like Buddhism, had in it from the first a germ that lent itself to ascetic
renunciation, and the sexual life is always the first impulse to be
sacrificed to the passion for renunciation. But there were other germs
also in Christianity, and Luther, who in his own plebeian way asserted the
rights of the body, although he broke with mediæval asceticism, by no
means thereby cast himself off from the traditions of the early Christian
Church.
I have thought it worth while to bring forward this evidence, although I
am perfectly well aware that the facts of Nature gain no additional
support from the authority of the Fathers or even of the Bible. Nature and
humanity existed before the Bible and would continue to exist although the
Bible should be forgotten. But the attitude of Christianity on this point
has so often been unreservedly condemned that it seems as well to point
out that at its finest moments, when it was a young and growing power in
the world, the utterances of Christianity were often at one with those of
Nature and reason. There are many, it may be added, who find it a matter
of consolation that in following the natural and rational path in this
matter they are not thereby altogether breaking with the religious
traditions of their race.
It is scarcely necessary to remark that when we turn from
Christianity to the other great world-religions, we do not
usually meet with so ambiguous an attitude towards sex. The
Mahommedans were as emphatic in asserting the sanctity of sex as
they were in asserting physical cleanliness; they were prepared
to carry the functions of sex into the future life, and were
never worried, as Luther and so many other Christians have been,
concerning the lack of occupation in Heaven. In India, although
India is the home of the most extreme forms of religious
asceticism, sexual love has been sanctified and divinized to a
greater extent than in any other part of the world. "It seems
never to have entered into the heads of the Hindu legislators,"
said Sir William Jones long since (_Works_, vol. ii, p. 311),
"that anything natural could be offensively obscene, a
singularity which pervades all their writings, but is no proof of
the depravity of their morals." The sexual act has often had a
religious significance in India, and the minutest details of the
sexual life and its variations are discussed in Indian erotic
treatises in a spirit of gravity, while nowhere else have the
anatomical and physiological sexual characters of women been
studied with such minute and adoring reverence. "Love in India,
both as regards theory and practice," remarks Richard Schmidt
(_Beiträge zur Indischen Erotik_, p. 2) "possesses an importance
which it is impossible for us even to conceive."
In Protestant countries the influence of the Reformation, by
rehabilitating sex as natural, indirectly tended to substitute in popular
feeling towards sex the opprobrium of sinfulness by the opprobrium of
animality. Henceforth the sexual impulse must be disguised or adorned to
become respectably human. This may be illustrated by a passage in Pepys's
_Diary_ in the seventeenth century. On the morning after the wedding day
it was customary to call up new married couples by music; the absence of
this music on one occasion (in 1667) seemed to Pepys "as if they had
married like dog and bitch." We no longer insist on the music, but the
same feeling still exists in the craving for other disguises and
adornments for the sexual impulse. We do not always realize that love
brings its own sanctity with it.
Nowadays indeed, whenever the repugnance to the sexual side of life
manifests itself, the assertion nearly always made is not so much that it
is "sinful" as that it is "beastly." It is regarded as that part of man
which most closely allies him to the lower animals. It should scarcely be
necessary to point out that this is a mistake. On whichever side, indeed,
we approach it, the implication that sex in man and animals is identical
cannot be borne out. From the point of view of those who accept this
identity it would be much more correct to say that men are inferior,
rather than on a level with animals, for in animals under natural
conditions the sexual instinct is strictly subordinated to reproduction
and very little susceptible to deviation, so that from the standpoint of
those who wish to minimize sex, animals are nearer to the ideal, and such
persons must say with Woods Hutchinson: "Take it altogether, our animal
ancestors have quite as good reason to be ashamed of us as we of them."
But if we look at the matter from a wider biological standpoint of
development, our conclusion must be very different.
So far from being animal-like, the human impulses of sex are among the
least animal-like acquisitions of man. The human sphere of sex differs
from the animal sphere of sex to a singularly great extent.[59] Breathing
is an animal function and here we cannot compete with birds; locomotion is
an animal function and here we cannot equal quadrupeds; we have made no
notable advance in our circulatory, digestive, renal, or hepatic
functions. Even as regards vision and hearing, there are many animals that
are more keen-sighted than man, and many that are capable of hearing
sounds that to him are inaudible. But there are no animals in whom the
sexual instinct is so sensitive, so highly developed, so varied in its
manifestations, so constantly alert, so capable of irradiating the highest
and remotest parts of the organism. The sexual activities of man and woman
belong not to that lower part of our nature which degrades us to the level
of the "brute," but to the higher part which raises us towards all the
finest activities and ideals we are capable of. It is true that it is
chiefly in the mouths of a few ignorant and ill-bred women that we find
sex referred to as "bestial" or "the animal part of our nature."[60] But
since women are the mothers and teachers of the human race this is a piece
of ignorance and ill-breeding which cannot be too swiftly eradicated.
There are some who seem to think that they have held the balance evenly,
and finally stated the matter, if they admit that sexual love may be
either beautiful or disgusting, and that either view is equally normal and
legitimate. "Listen in turn," Tarde remarks, "to two men who, one cold,
the other ardent, one chaste, the other in love, both equally educated and
large-minded, are estimating the same thing: one judges as disgusting,
odious, revolting, and bestial what the other judges to be delicious,
exquisite, ineffable, divine. What, for one, is in Christian phraseology,
an unforgivable sin, is, for the other, the state of true grace. Acts that
for one seem a sad and occasional necessity, stains that must be carefully
effaced by long intervals of continence, are for the other the golden
nails from which all the rest of conduct and existence is suspended, the
things that alone give human life its value."[61] Yet we may well doubt
whether both these persons are "equally well-educated and broad-minded."
The savage feels that sex is perilous, and he is right. But the person who
feels that the sexual impulse is bad, or even low and vulgar, is an
absurdity in the universe, an anomaly. He is like those persons in our
insane asylums, who feel that the instinct of nutrition is evil and so
proceed to starve themselves. They are alike spiritual outcasts in the
universe whose children they are. It is another matter when a man declares
that, personally, in his own case, he cherishes an ascetic ideal which
leads him to restrain, so far as possible, either or both impulses. The
man, who is sanely ascetic seeks a discipline which aids the ideal he has
personally set before himself. He may still remain theoretically in
harmony with the universe to which he belongs. But to pour contempt on
the sexual life, to throw the veil of "impurity" over it, is, as Nietzsche
declared, the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost of Life.
There are many who seek to conciliate prejudice and reason in their
valuation of sex by drawing a sharp distinction between "lust" and "love,"
rejecting the one and accepting the other. It is quite proper to make such
a distinction, but the manner in which it is made will by no means usually
bear examination. We have to define what we mean by "lust" and what we
mean by "love," and this is not easy if they are regarded as mutually
exclusive. It is sometimes said that "lust" must be understood as meaning
a reckless indulgence of the sexual impulse without regard to other
considerations. So understood, we are quite safe in rejecting it. But that
is an entirely arbitrary definition of the word. "Lust" is really a very
ambiguous term; it is a good word that has changed its moral values, and
therefore we need to define it very carefully before we venture to use it.
Properly speaking, "lust" is an entirely colorless word[62] and merely
means desire in general and sexual desire in particular; it corresponds to
"hunger" or "thirst"; to use it in an offensive sense is much the same as
though we should always assume that the word "hungry" had the offensive
meaning of "greedy." The result has been that sensitive minds indignantly
reject the term "lust" in connection with love.[63] In the early use of
our language, "lust," "lusty," and "lustful" conveyed the sense of
wholesome and normal sexual vigor; now, with the partial exception of
"lusty," they have been so completely degraded to a lower sense that
although it would be very convenient to restore them to their original
and proper place, which still remains vacant, the attempt at such a
restoration scarcely seems a hopeful task. We have so deeply poisoned the
springs of feeling in these matters with mediæval ascetic crudities that
all our words of sex tend soon to become bespattered with filth; we may
pick them up from the mud into which they have fallen and seek to purify
them, but to many eyes they will still seem dirty. One result of this
tendency is that we have no simple, precise, natural word for the love of
the sexes, and are compelled to fall back on the general term, which is so
extensive in its range that in English and French and most of the other
leading languages of Europe, it is equally correct to "love" God or to
"love" eating.
Love, in the sexual sense, is, summarily considered, a synthesis of lust
(in the primitive and uncolored sense of sexual emotion) and friendship.
It is incorrect to apply the term "love" in the sexual sense to elementary
and uncomplicated sexual desire; it is equally incorrect to apply it to
any variety or combination of varieties of friendship. There can be no
sexual love without lust; but, on the other hand, until the currents of
lust in the organism have been so irradiated as to affect other parts of
the psychic organism--at the least the affections and the social
feelings--it is not yet sexual love. Lust, the specific sexual impulse, is
indeed the primary and essential element in this synthesis, for it alone
is adequate to the end of reproduction, not only in animals but in men.
But it is not until lust is expanded and irradiated that it develops into
the exquisite and enthralling flower of love. We may call to mind what
happens among plants: on the one hand we have the lower organisms in which
sex is carried on summarily and cryptogamically, never shedding any shower
of gorgeous blossoms on the world, and on the other hand the higher plants
among whom sex has become phanersgamous and expanded enormously into form
and color and fragrance.
While "lust" is, of course, known all over the world, and there
are everywhere words to designate it, "love" is not universally
known, and in many languages there are no words for "love." The
failures to find love are often remarkable and unexpected. We may
find it where we least expect it. Sexual desire became idealized
(as Sergi has pointed out) even by some animals, especially
birds, for when a bird pines to death for the loss of its mate
this cannot be due to the uncomplicated instinct of sex, but must
involve the interweaving of that instinct with the other elements
of life to a degree which is rare even among the most civilized
men. Some savage races seem to have no fundamental notion of
love, and (like the American Nahuas) no primary word for it,
while, on the other hand, in Quichua, the language of the ancient
Peruvians, there are nearly six hundred combinations of the verb
_munay_, to love. Among some peoples love seems to be confined to
the women. Letourneau (_L'Evolution Littéraire_, p. 529) points
out that in various parts of the world women have taken a leading
part in creating erotic poetry. It may be mentioned in this
connection that suicide from erotic motives among primitive
peoples occurs chiefly among women (_Zeitschrift für
Sozialwissenschaft_, 1899, p. 578). Not a few savages possess
love-poems, as, for instance, the Suahali (Velten, in his _Prosa
und Poesie der Suahali_, devotes a section to love-poems
reproduced in the Suahali language). D.G. Brinton, in an
interesting paper on "The Conception of Love in Some American
Languages" (_Proceedings American Philosophical Society_, vol.
xxiii, p. 546, 1886) states that the words for love in these
languages reveal four main ways of expressing the conception: (1)
inarticulate cries of emotion; (2) assertions of sameness or
similarity; (3) assertions of conjunction or union; (4)
assertions of a wish, desire, a longing. Brinton adds that "these
same notions are those which underlie the majority of the words
of love in the great Aryan family of languages." The remarkable
fact emerges, however, that the peoples of Aryan tongue were slow
in developing their conception of sexual love. Brinton remarks
that the American Mayas must be placed above the peoples of early
Aryan culture, in that they possessed a radical word for the joy
of love which was in significance purely psychical, referring
strictly to a mental state, and neither to similarity nor desire.
Even the Greeks were late in developing any ideal of sexual love.
This has been well brought out by E.F.M. Benecke in his
_Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek
Poetry_, a book which contains some hazardous assertions, but is
highly instructive from the present point of view. The Greek
lyric poets wrote practically no love poems at all to women
before Anacreon, and his were only written in old age. True love
for the Greeks was nearly always homosexual. The Ionian lyric
poets of early Greece regarded woman as only an instrument of
pleasure and the founder of the family. Theognis compares
marriage to cattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes to be
complimentary to the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his "female
boy-friends." Æschylus makes even a father assume that his
daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. There is no
sexual love in Sophocles, and in Euripides it is only the women
who fall in love. Benecke concludes (p. 67) that in Greece sexual
love, down to a comparatively later period, was looked down on,
and held to be unworthy of public discussion and representation.
It was in Magna Græcia rather than in Greece itself that men took
interest in women, and it was not until the Alexandrian period,
and notably in Asclepiades, Benecke maintains, that the love of
women was regarded as a matter of life and death. Thereafter the
conception of sexual love, in its romantic aspects, appears in
European life. With the Celtic story of Tristram, as Gaston Paris
remarks, it finally appears in the Christian European world of
poetry as the chief point in human life, the great motive force
of conduct.
Romantic love failed, however, to penetrate the masses in Europe.
In the sixteenth century, or whenever it was that the ballad of
"Glasgerion" was written, we see it is assumed that a churl's
relation to his mistress is confined to the mere act of sexual
intercourse; he fails to kiss her on arriving or departing; it is
only the knight, the man of upper class, who would think of
offering that tender civility. And at the present day in, for
instance, the region between East Friesland and the Alps, Bloch
states (_Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, p. 29), following E.H. Meyer,
that the word "love" is unknown among the masses, and only its
coarse counterpart recognized.
On the other side of the world, in Japan, sexual love seems to be
in as great disrepute as it was in ancient Greece; thus Miss
Tsuda, a Japanese head-mistress, and herself a Christian, remarks
(as quoted by Mrs. Eraser in _World's Work and Play_, Dec.,
1906): "That word 'love' has been hitherto a word unknown among
our girls, in the foreign sense. Duty, submission,
kindness--these were the sentiments which a girl was expected to
bring to the husband who had been chosen for her--and many happy,
harmonious marriages were the result. Now, your dear sentimental
foreign women say to our girls: 'It is wicked to marry without
love; the obedience to parents in such a case is an outrage
against nature and Christianity. If you love a man you must
sacrifice everything to marry him.'"
When, however, love is fully developed it becomes an enormously
extended, highly complex emotion, and lust, even in the best
sense of that word, becomes merely a coördinated element among
many other elements. Herbert Spencer, in an interesting passage
of his _Principles of Psychology_ (Part IV, Ch. VIII), has
analyzed love into as many as nine distinct and important
elements: (1) the physical impulse of sex; (2) the feeling for
beauty; (3) affection; (4) admiration and respect; (5) love of
approbation; (6) self-esteem; (7) proprietary feeling; (8)
extended liberty of action from the absence of personal barriers;
(9) exaltation of the sympathies. "This passion," he concludes,
"fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary
excitations of which we are capable."
It is scarcely necessary to say that to define sexual love, or even to
analyze its components, is by no means to explain its mystery. We seek to
satisfy our intelligence by means of a coherent picture of love, but the
gulf between that picture and the emotional reality must always be
incommensurable and impassable. "There is no word more often pronounced
than that of love," wrote Bonstetten many years ago, "yet there is no
subject more mysterious. Of that which touches us most nearly we know
least. We measure the march of the stars and we do not know how we love."
And however expert we have become in detecting and analyzing the causes,
the concomitants, and the results of love, we must still make the same
confession to-day. We may, as some have done, attempt to explain love as a
form of hunger and thirst, or as a force analogous to electricity, or as a
kind of magnetism, or as a variety of chemical affinity, or as a vital
tropism, but these explanations are nothing more than ways of expressing
to ourselves the magnitude of the phenomenon we are in the presence of.
What has always baffled men in the contemplation of sexual love is the
seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the
necessarily circumscribed region of mucous membrane which is the final
goal of such love and the sea of world-embracing emotions to which it
seems as the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has said, "the mucous
membranes, by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds all the
riches of the infinite." It is a mystery before which the thinker and the
artist are alike overcome. Donnay, in his play _L'Escalade_, makes a cold
and stern man of science, who regards love as a mere mental disorder which
can be cured like other disorders, at last fall desperately in love
himself. He forces his way into the girl's room, by a ladder, at dead of
night, and breaks into a long and passionate speech: "Everything that
touches you becomes to me mysterious and sacred. Ah! to think that a thing
so well known as a woman's body, which sculptors have modelled, which
poets have sung of, which men of science like myself have dissected, that
such a thing should suddenly become an unknown mystery and an infinite joy
merely because it is the body of one particular woman--what insanity! And
yet that is what I feel."[64]
That love is a natural insanity, a temporary delusion which the individual
is compelled to suffer for the sake of the race, is indeed an explanation
that has suggested itself to many who have been baffled by this mystery.
That, as we know, was the explanation offered by Schopenhauer. When a
youth and a girl fall into each other's arms in the ecstacy of love they
imagine that they are seeking their own happiness. But it is not so, said
Schopenhauer; they are deluded by the genius of the race into the belief
that they are seeking a personal end in order that they may be induced to
effect a far greater impersonal end: the creation of the future race. The
intensity of their passion is not the measure of the personal happiness
they will secure but the measure of their aptitude for producing
offspring. In accepting passion and renouncing the counsels of cautious
prudence the youth and the girl are really sacrificing their chances of
selfish happiness and fulfilling the larger ends of Nature. As
Schopenhauer saw the matter, there was here no vulgar illusion. The lovers
thought that they were reaching towards a boundlessly immense personal
happiness; they were probably deceived. But they were deceived not because
the reality was less than their imagination, but because it was more;
instead of pursuing, as they thought, a merely personal end they were
carrying on the creative work of the world, a task better left undone, as
Schopenhauer viewed it, but a task whose magnitude he fully
recognized.[65]
It must be remembered that in the lower sense of deception, love may be,
and frequently is, a delusion. A man may deceive himself, or be deceived
by the object of his attraction, concerning the qualities that she
possesses or fails to possess. In first love, occurring in youth, such
deception is perhaps entirely normal, and in certain suggestible and
inflammable types of people it is peculiarly apt to occur. This kind of
deception, although far more frequent and conspicuous in matters of
love--and more serious because of the tightness of the marriage bond--is
liable to occur in any relation of life. For most people, however, and
those not the least sane or the least wise, the memory of the exaltation
of love, even when the period of that exaltation is over, still remains
as, at the least, the memory of one of the most real and essential facts
of life.[66]
Some writers seem to confuse the liability in matters of love to
deception or disappointment with the larger question of a
metaphysical illusion in Schopenhauer's sense. To some extent
this confusion perhaps exists in the discussion of love by
Renouvier and Prat in _La Nouvelle Monadologie_ (pp. 216 _et
seq._). In considering whether love is or is not a delusion, they
answer that it is or is not according as we are, or are not,
dominated by selfishness and injustice. "It was not an essential
error which presided over the creation of the _idol_, for the
idol is only what in all things the _ideal_ is. But to realize
the ideal in love two persons are needed, and therein is the
great difficulty. We are never justified," they conclude, "in
casting contempt on our love, or even on its object, for if it is
true that we have not gained possession of the sovereign beauty
of the world it is equally true that we have not attained a
degree of perfection that would have entitled us justly to claim
so great a prize." And perhaps most of us, it may be added, must
admit in the end, if we are honest with ourselves, that the
prizes of love we have gained in the world, whatever their flaws,
are far greater than we deserved.
We may well agree that in a certain sense not love alone but all the
passions and desires of men are illusions. In that sense the Gospel of
Buddha is justified, and we may recognize the inspiration of Shakespeare
(in the _Tempest_) and of Calderon (in _La Vida es Sueño_), who felt that
ultimately the whole world is an insubstantial dream. But short of that
large and ultimate vision we cannot accept illusion; we cannot admit that
love is a delusion in some special and peculiar sense that men's other
cravings and aspirations escape. On the contrary, it is the most solid of
realities. All the progressive forms of life are built up on the
attraction of sex. If we admit the action of sexual selection--as we can
scarcely fail to do if we purge it from its unessential
accretions[67]--love has moulded the precise shape and color, the
essential beauty, alike of animal and human life.
If we further reflect that, as many investigators believe, not only the
physical structure of life but also its spiritual structure--our social
feelings, our morality, our religion, our poetry and art--are, in some
degree at least, also built up on the impulse of sex, and would have been,
if not non-existent, certainly altogether different had other than sexual
methods of propagation prevailed in the world, we may easily realize that
we can only fall into confusion by dismissing love as a delusion. The
whole edifice of life topples down, for as the idealist Schiller long
since said, it is entirely built up on hunger and on love. To look upon
love as in any special sense a delusion is merely to fall into the trap of
a shallow cynicism. Love is only a delusion in so far as the whole of life
is a delusion, and if we accept the fact of life it is unphilosophical to
refuse to accept the fact of love.
It is unnecessary here to magnify the functions of love in the
world; it is sufficient to investigate its workings in its own
proper sphere. It may, however, be worth while to quote a few
expressions of thinkers, belonging to various schools, who have
pointed out what seemed to them the far-ranging significance of
the sexual emotions for the moral life. "The passions are the
heavenly fire which gives life to the moral world," wrote
Helvétius long since in _De l'Esprit_. "The activity of the mind
depends on the activity of the passions, and it is at the period
of the passions, from the age of twenty-five to thirty-five or
forty that men are capable of the greatest efforts of virtue or
of genius." "What touches sex," wrote Zola, "touches the centre
of social life." Even our regard for the praise and blame of
others has a sexual origin, Professor Thomas argues
(_Psychological Review_, Jan., 1904, pp. 61-67), and it is love
which is the source of susceptibility generally and of the
altruistic side of life. "The appearance of sex," Professor Woods
Hutchinson attempts to show ("Love as a Factor in Evolution,"
_Monist_, 1898), "the development of maleness and femaleness, was
not only the birthplace of affection, the well-spring of all
morality, but an enormous economic advantage to the race and an
absolute necessity of progress. In it first we find any conscious
longing for or active impulse toward a fellow creature." "Were
man robbed of the instinct of procreation, and of all that
spiritually springs therefrom," exclaimed Maudsley in his
_Physiology of Mind_, "that moment would all poetry, and perhaps
also his whole moral sense, be obliterated from his life." "One
seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete;
one _is_ more complete," says Nietzsche (_Der Wille zur Macht_,
p. 389), "we find here art as an organic function: we find it
inlaid in the most angelic instinct of 'love:' we find it as the
greatest stimulant of life.... It is not merely that it changes
the feeling of values: the lover _is_ worth more, is stronger. In
animals this condition produces new weapons, pigments, colors,
and forms, above all new movements, new rhythms, a new seductive
music. It is not otherwise in man.... Even in art the door is
opened to him. If we subtract from lyrical work in words and
sounds the suggestions of that intestinal fever, what is left
over in poetry and music? _L'Art pour l'art_ perhaps, the
quacking virtuosity of cold frogs who perish in their marsh. All
the rest is created by love."
It would be easy to multiply citations tending to show how many
diverse thinkers have come to the conclusion that sexual love
(including therewith parental and especially maternal love) is
the source of the chief manifestations of life. How far they are
justified in that conclusion, it is not our business now to
inquire.
It is undoubtedly true that, as we have seen when discussing the erratic
and imperfect distribution of the conception of love, and even of words
for love, over the world, by no means all people are equally apt for
experiencing, even at any time in their lives, the emotions of sexual
exaltation. The difference between the knight and the churl still
subsists, and both may sometimes be found in all social strata. Even the
refinements of sexual enjoyment, it is unnecessary to insist, quite
commonly remain on a merely physical basis, and have little effect on the
intellectual and emotional nature.[68] But this is not the case with the
people who have most powerfully influenced the course of the world's
thought and feeling. The personal reality of love, its importance for the
individual life, are facts that have been testified to by some of the
greatest thinkers, after lives devoted to the attainment of intellectual
labor. The experience of Renan, who toward the end of his life set down in
his remarkable drama _L'Abbesse de Jouarre_, his conviction that, even
from the point of view of chastity, love is, after all, the supreme thing
in the world, is far from standing alone. "Love has always appeared as an
inferior mode of human music, ambition as the superior mode," wrote Tarde,
the distinguished sociologist, at the end of his life. "But will it always
be thus? Are there not reasons for thinking that the future perhaps
reserves for us the ineffable surprise of an inversion of that secular
order?" Laplace, half an hour before his death, took up a volume of his
own _Mécanique Celeste_, and said: "All that is only trifles, there is
nothing true but love." Comte, who had spent his life in building up a
Positive Philosophy which should be absolutely real, found (as indeed it
may be said the great English Positivist Mill also found) the culmination
of all his ideals in a woman, who was, he said, Egeria and Beatrice and
Laura in one, and he wrote: "There is nothing real in the world but love.
One grows tired of thinking, and even of acting; one never grows tired of
loving, nor of saying so. In the worst tortures of affection I have never
ceased to feel that the essential of happiness is that the heart should be
worthily filled--even with pain, yes, even with pain, the bitterest pain."
And Sophie Kowalewsky, after intellectual achievements which have placed
her among the most distinguished of her sex, pathetically wrote: "Why can
no one love me? I could give more than most women, and yet the most
insignificant women are loved and I am not." Love, they all seem to say,
is the one thing that is supremely worth while. The greatest and most
brilliant of the world's intellectual giants, in their moments of final
insight, thus reach the habitual level of the humble and almost anonymous
persons, cloistered from the world, who wrote _The Imitation of Christ_ or
_The Letters of a Portuguese Nun_. And how many others!
FOOTNOTES:
[45] _Meditationes Piissimæ de Cognitione Humanæ Conditionis_, Migne's
_Patrologia_, vol. clxxiv, p. 489, cap. III, "De Dignitate Animæ et
Vilitate Corporis." It may be worth while to quote more at length the
vigorous language of the original. "Si diligenter consideres quid per os
et nares cæterosque corporis meatus egrediatur, vilius sterquilinum
numquam vidisti.... Attende, homo, quid fuisti ante ortum, et quid es ab
ortu usque ad occasum, atque quid eris post hanc vitam. Profecto fuit
quand non eras: postea de vili materia factus, et vilissimo panno
involutus, menstruali sanguine in utero materno fuisti nutritus, et tunica
tua fuit pellis secundina. Nihil aliud est homo quam sperma fetidum,
saccus stercorum, cibus vermium.... Quid superbis, pulvis et cinis, cujus
conceptus cula, nasci miseria, vivere poena, mori angustia?"
[46] See (in Mignes' edition) _S. Odonis abbatis Cluniacensis
Collationes_, lib. ii, cap. IX.
[47] Dühren (_Neue Forshungen über die Marquis de Sade_, pp. 432 et seq.)
shows how the ascetic view of woman's body persisted, for instance, in
Schopenhauer and De Sade.
[48] In "The Evolution of Modesty," in the first volume of these
_Studies_, and again in the fifth volume in discussing urolagnia in the
study of "Erotic Symbolism," the mutual reactions of the sexual and
excretory centres were fully dealt with.
[49] "La Morale Sexuelle," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan.,
1907.
[50] The above passage, now slightly modified, originally formed an
unpublished part of an essay on Walt Whitman in _The New Spirit_, first
issued in 1889.
[51] Even in the ninth century, however, when the monastic movement was
rapidly developing, there were some who withstood the tendencies of the
new ascetics. Thus, in 850, Ratramnus, the monk of Corbie, wrote a
treatise (_Liber de eo quod Christus ex Virgine natus est_) to prove that
Mary really gave birth to Jesus through her sexual organs, and not, as
some high-strung persons were beginning to think could alone be possible,
through the more conventionally decent breasts. The sexual organs were
sanctified. "Spiritus sanctus ... et thalamum tanto dignum sponso
sanctificavit et portam" (Achery, _Spicilegium_, vol. i, p. 55).
[52] _Pædagogus_, lib. ii, cap. X. Elsewhere (id., lib. ii, Ch. VI) he
makes a more detailed statement to the same effect.
[53] See, e.g., Wilhelm Capitaine, _Die Moral des Clemens von
Alexandrien_, pp. 112 et seq.
[54] _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xxii, cap. XXIV. "There is no need," he says
again (id., lib. xiv, cap. V) "that in our sins and vices we accuse the
nature of the flesh to the injury of the Creator, for in its own kind and
degree the flesh is good."
[55] St. Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xiv, cap. XXIII-XXVI.
Chrysostom and Gregory, of Nyssa, thought that in Paradise human beings
would have multiplied by special creation, but such is not the accepted
Catholic doctrine.
[56] W. Capitaine, _Die Moral des Clemens von Alexandrien_, pp. 112 et
seq. Without the body, Tertullian declared, there could be no virginity
and no salvation. The soul itself is corporeal. He carries, indeed, his
idea of the omnipresence of the body to the absurd.
[57] Rufinus, _Commentarius in Symbolum Apostolorum_, cap. XII.
[58] Migne, _Patrologia Græca_, vol. xxvi, pp. 1170 et seq.
[59] Even in physical conformation the human sexual organs, when compared
with those of the lower animals, show marked differences (see "The
Mechanism of Detumescence," in the fifth volume of these _Studies_).
[60] It may perhaps be as well to point out, with Forel (_Die Sexuelle
Frage_, p. 208), that the word "bestial" is generally used quite
incorrectly in this connection. Indeed, not only for the higher, but also
for the lower manifestation of the sexual impulse, it would usually be
more correct to use instead the qualification "human."
[61] _Loc. cit._, _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan., 1907.
[62] It has, however, become colored and suspect from an early period in
the history of Christianity. St. Augustine (_De Civitate Dei_, lib. xiv,
cap. XV), while admitting that libido or lust is merely the generic name
for all desire, adds that, as specially applied to the sexual appetite, it
is justly and properly mixed up with ideas of shame.
[63] Hinton well illustrates this feeling. "We call by the name of lust,"
he declares in his MSS., "the most simple and natural desires. We might as
well term hunger and thirst 'lust' as so call sex-passion, when expressing
simply Nature's prompting. We miscall it 'lust,' cruelly libelling those
to whom we ascribe it, and introduce absolute disorder. For, by foolishly
confounding Nature's demands with lust, we insist upon restraint upon
her."
[64] Several centuries earlier another French writer, the distinguished
physician, A. Laurentius (Des Laurens) in his _Historia Anatomica Humani
Corporis_ (lib. viii, Quæstio vii) had likewise puzzled over "the
incredible desire of coitus," and asked how it was that "that divine
animal, full of reason and judgment, which we call Man, should be
attracted to those obscene parts of women, soiled with filth, which are
placed, like a sewer, in the lowest part of the body." It is noteworthy
that, from the first, and equally among men of religion, men of science,
and men of letters, the mystery of this problem has peculiarly appealed to
the French mind.
[65] Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, vol. ii, pp. 608
et seq.
[66] "Perhaps there is scarcely a man," wrote Malthus, a clergyman as well
as one of the profoundest thinkers of his day (_Essay on the Principle of
Population_, 1798, Ch. XI), "who has once experienced the genuine delight
of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been,
that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life,
where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates
with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again.
The superiority of intellectual to sexual pleasures consists rather in
their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their
being less liable to satiate, than in their being more real and
essential."
[67] The whole argument of the fourth volume of these _Studies_, on
"Sexual Selection in Man," points in this direction.
[68] "Perhaps most average men," Forel remarks (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, p.
307), "are but slightly receptive to the intoxication of love; they are at
most on the level of the _gourmet_, which is by no means necessarily an
immoral plane, but is certainly not that of poetry."
CHAPTER V.
THE FUNCTION OF CHASTITY.
Chastity Essential to the Dignity of Love--The Eighteenth Century Revolt
Against the Ideal of Chastity--Unnatural Forms of Chastity--The
Psychological Basis of Asceticism--Asceticism and Chastity as Savage
Virtues--The Significance of Tahiti--Chastity Among Barbarous
Peoples--Chastity Among the Early Christians--Struggles of the Saints with
the Flesh--The Romance of Christian Chastity--Its Decay in Mediæval
Times--_Aucassin et Nicolette_ and the new Romance of Chaste Love--The
Unchastity of the Northern Barbarians--The Penitentials--Influence of the
Renaissance and the Reformation--The Revolt Against Virginity as a
Virtue--The Modern Conception of Chastity as a Virtue--The Influences That
Favor the Virtue of Chastity--Chastity as a Discipline--The Value of
Chastity for the Artist--Potency and Impotence in Popular Estimation--The
Correct Definitions of Asceticism and Chastity.
The supreme importance of chastity, and even of asceticism, has never at
any time, or in any greatly vital human society, altogether failed of
recognition. Sometimes chastity has been exalted in human estimation,
sometimes it has been debased; it has frequently changed the nature of its
manifestations; but it has always been there. It is even a part of the
beautiful vision of all Nature. "The glory of the world is seen only by a
chaste mind," said Thoreau with his fine extravagance. "To whomsoever this
fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery there are no flowers in
Nature." Without chastity it is impossible to maintain the dignity of
sexual love. The society in which its estimation sinks to a minimum is in
the last stages of degeneration. Chastity has for sexual love an
importance which it can never lose, least of all to-day.
It is quite true that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many
men of high moral and intellectual distinction pronounced very decidedly
their condemnation of the ideal of chastity. The great Buffon refused to
recognize chastity as an ideal and referred scornfully to "that kind of
insanity which has turned a girl's virginity into a thing with a real
existence," while William Morris, in his downright manner, once declared
at a meeting of the Fellowship of the New Life, that asceticism is "the
most disgusting vice that afflicted human nature." Blake, though he seems
always to have been a strictly moral man in the most conventional sense,
felt nothing but contempt for chastity, and sometimes confers a kind of
religious solemnity on the idea of unchastity. Shelley, who may have been
unwise in sexual matters but can scarcely be called unchaste, also often
seems to associate religion and morality, not with chastity, but with
unchastity, and much the same may be said of James Hinton.[69]
But all these men--with other men of high character who have pronounced
similar opinions--were reacting against false, decayed, and conventional
forms of chastity. They were not rebelling against an ideal; they were
seeking to set up an ideal in a place where they realized that a
mischievous pretense was masquerading as a moral reality.
We cannot accept an ideal of chastity unless we ruthlessly cast aside all
the unnatural and empty forms of chastity. If chastity is merely a
fatiguing effort to emulate in the sexual sphere the exploits of
professional fasting men, an effort using up all the energies of the
organism and resulting in no achievement greater than the abstinence it
involves, then it is surely an unworthy ideal. If it is a feeble
submission to an external conventional law which there is no courage to
break, then it is not an ideal at all. If it is a rule of morality imposed
by one sex on the opposite sex, then it is an injustice and provocative of
revolt. If it is an abstinence from the usual forms of sexuality, replaced
by more abnormal or more secret forms, then it is simply an unreality
based on misconception. And if it is merely an external acceptance of
conventions without any further acceptance, even in act, then it is a
contemptible farce. These are the forms of chastity which during the past
two centuries many fine-souled men have vigorously rejected.
The fact that chastity, or asceticism, is a real virtue, with fine uses,
becomes evident when we realize that it has flourished at all times, in
connection with all kinds of religions and the most various moral codes.
We find it pronounced among savages, and the special virtues of
savagery--hardness, endurance, and bravery--are intimately connected with
the cultivation of chastity and asceticism.[70] It is true that savages
seldom have any ideal of chastity in the degraded modern sense, as a state
of permanent abstinence from sexual relationships having a merit of its
own apart from any use. They esteem chastity for its values, magical or
real, as a method of self-control which contributes towards the attainment
of important ends. The ability to bear pain and restraint is nearly always
a main element in the initiation of youths at puberty. The custom of
refraining from sexual intercourse before expeditions of war and hunting,
and other serious concerns involving great muscular and mental strain,
whatever the motives assigned, is a sagacious method of economizing
energy. The extremely widespread habit of avoiding intercourse during
pregnancy and suckling, again, is an admirable precaution in sexual
hygiene which it is extremely difficult to obtain the observance of in
civilization. Savages, also, are perfectly well aware how valuable sexual
continence is, in combination with fasting and solitude, to acquire the
aptitude for abnormal spiritual powers.
Thus C. Hill Tout (_Journal Anthropological Institute_,
Jan.-June, 1905, pp. 143-145) gives an interesting account of the
self-discipline undergone by those among the Salish Indians of
British Columbia, who seek to acquire shamanistic powers. The
psychic effects of such training on these men, says Hill Tout,
is undoubted. "It enables them to undertake and accomplish feats
of abnormal strength, agility, and endurance; and gives them at
times, besides a general exaltation of the senses, undoubted
clairvoyant and other supernormal mental and bodily powers." At
the other end of the world, as shown by the _Reports of the
Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_ (vol. v, p. 321),
closely analogous methods of obtaining supernatural powers are
also customary.
There are fundamental psychological reasons for the wide
prevalence of asceticism and for the remarkable manner in which
it involves self-mortification, even acute physical suffering.
Such pain is an actual psychic stimulant, more especially in
slightly neurotic persons. This is well illustrated by a young
woman, a patient of Janet's, who suffered from mental depression
and was accustomed to find relief by slightly burning her hands
and feet. She herself clearly understood the nature of her
actions. "I feel," she said, "that I make an effort when I hold
my hands on the stove, or when I pour boiling water on my feet;
it is a violent act and it awakens me: I feel that it is really
done by myself and not by another.... To make a mental effort by
itself is too difficult for me; I have to supplement it by
physical efforts. I have not succeeded in any other way; that is
all: when I brace myself up to burn myself I make my mind freer,
lighter and more active for several days. Why do you speak of my
desire for mortification? My parents believe that, but it is
absurd. It would be a mortification if it brought any suffering,
but I enjoy this suffering, it gives me back my mind; it prevents
my thoughts from stopping: what would one not do to attain such
happiness?" (P. Janet, "The Pathogenesis of Some Impulsions,"
_Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, April, 1906.) If we understand
this psychological process we may realize how it is that even in
the higher religions, however else they may differ, the practical
value of asceticism and mortification as the necessary door to
the most exalted religious state is almost universally
recognized, and with complete cheerfulness. "Asceticism and
ecstacy are inseparable," as Probst-Biraben remarks at the outset
of an interesting paper on Mahommedan mysticism ("L'Extase dans
le Mysticisme Musulman," _Revue Philosophique_, Nov., 1906).
Asceticism is the necessary ante-chamber to spiritual perfection.
It thus happens that savage peoples largely base their often admirable
enforcement of asceticism not on the practical grounds that would justify
it, but on religious grounds that with the growth of intelligence fall
into discredit.[71] Even, however, when the scrupulous observances of
savages, whether in sexual or in non-sexual matters, are without any
obviously sound basis it cannot be said that they are entirely useless if
they tend to encourage self-control and the sense of reverence.[72] The
would-be intelligent and practical peoples who cast aside primitive
observances because they seem baseless or even ridiculous, need a still
finer practical sense and still greater intelligence in order to realize
that, though the reasons for the observances have been wrong, yet the
observances themselves may have been necessary methods of attaining
personal and social efficiency. It constantly happens in the course of
civilization that we have to revive old observances and furnish them with
new reasons.
In considering the moral quality of chastity among savages, we
must carefully separate that chastity which among semi-primitive
peoples is exclusively imposed upon women. This has no moral
quality whatever, for it is not exercised as a useful discipline,
but merely enforced in order to heighten the economic and erotic
value of the women. Many authorities believe that the regard for
women as property furnishes the true reason for the widespread
insistence on virginity in brides. Thus A.B. Ellis, speaking of
the West Coast of Africa (_Yoruba-Speaking Peoples_, pp. 183 _et
seq._), says that girls of good class are betrothed as mere
children, and are carefully guarded from men, while girls of
lower class are seldom betrothed, and may lead any life they
choose. "In this custom of infant or child betrothals we probably
find the key to that curious regard for ante-nuptial chastity
found not only among the tribes of the Gold and Slave Coasts, but
also among many other uncivilized peoples in different parts of
the world." In a very different part of the world, in Northern
Siberia, "the Yakuts," Sieroshevski states (_Journal
Anthropological Institute_, Jan.-June, 1901, p. 96), "see
nothing immoral in illicit love, providing only that nobody
suffers material loss by it. It is true that parents will scold a
daughter if her conduct threatens to deprive them of their gain
from the bride-price; but if once they have lost hope of marrying
her off, or if the bride-price has been spent, they manifest
complete indifference to her conduct. Maidens who no longer
expect marriage are not restrained at all, if they observe
decorum it is only out of respect to custom." Westermarck
(_History of Human Marriage_, pp. 123 et seq.) also shows the
connection between the high estimates of virginity and the
conception of woman as property, and returning to the question in
his later work, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_
(vol. ii, Ch. XLII), after pointing out that "marriage by
purchase has thus raised the standard of female chastity," he
refers (p. 437) to the significant fact that the seduction of an
unmarried girl "is chiefly, if not exclusively, regarded as an
offense against the parents or family of the girl," and there is
no indication that it is ever held by savages that any wrong has
been done to the woman herself. Westermarck recognizes at the
same time that the preference given to virgins has also a
biological basis in the instinctive masculine feeling of jealousy
in regard to women who have had intercourse with other men, and
especially in the erotic charm for men of the emotional state of
shyness which accompanies virginity. (This point has been dealt
with in the discussion of Modesty in vol. i of these _Studies_.)
It is scarcely necessary to add that the insistence on the
virginity of brides is by no means confined, as A.B. Ellis seems
to imply, to uncivilized peoples, nor is it necessary that
wife-purchase should always accompany it. The preference still
persists, not only by virtue of its natural biological basis, but
as a refinement and extension of the idea of woman as property,
among those civilized peoples who, like ourselves, inherit a form
of marriage to some extent based on wife-purchase. Under such
conditions a woman's chastity has an important social function to
perform, being, as Mrs. Mona Caird has put it (_The Morality of
Marriage_, 1897, p. 88), the watch-dog of man's property. The
fact that no element of ideal morality enters into the question
is shown by the usual absence of any demand for ante-nuptial
chastity in the husband.
It must not be supposed that when, as is most usually the case,
there is no complete and permanent prohibition of extra-nuptial
intercourse, mere unrestrained license prevails. That has
probably never happened anywhere among uncontaminated savages.
The rule probably is that, as among the tribes at Torres Straits
(_Reports Cambridge Anthropological Expedition_, vol. v, p. 275),
there is no complete continence before marriage, but neither is
there any unbridled license.
The example of Tahiti is instructive as regards the prevalence of
chastity among peoples of what we generally consider low grades
of civilization. Tahiti, according to all who have visited it,
from the earliest explorers down to that distinguished American
surgeon, the late Dr. Nicholas Senn, is an island possessing
qualities of natural beauty and climatic excellence, which it is
impossible to rate too highly. "I seemed to be transported into
the garden of Eden," said Bougainville in 1768. But, mainly under
the influence of the early English missionaries who held ideas of
theoretical morality totally alien to those of the inhabitants of
the islands, the Tahitians have become the stock example of a
population given over to licentiousness and all its awful
results. Thus, in his valuable _Polynesian Researches_ (second
edition, 1832, vol. i, Ch. IX) William Ellis says that the
Tahitians practiced "the worst pollutions of which it was
possible for man to be guilty," though not specifying them. When,
however, we carefully examine the narratives of the early
visitors to Tahiti, before the population became contaminated by
contact with Europeans, it becomes clear that this view needs
serious modification. "The great plenty of good and nourishing
food," wrote an early explorer, J.R. Forster (_Observations Made
on a Voyage Round the World_, 1778, pp. 231, 409, 422), "together
with the fine climate, the beauty and unreserved behavior of
their females, invite them powerfully to the enjoyments and
pleasures of love. They begin very early to abandon themselves to
the most libidinous scenes. Their songs, their dances, and
dramatic performances, breathe a spirit of luxury." Yet he is
over and over again impelled to set down facts which bear
testimony to the virtues of these people. Though rather
effeminate in build, they are athletic, he says. Moreover, in
their wars they fight with great bravery and valor. They are, for
the rest, hospitable. He remarks that they treat their married
women with great respect, and that women generally are nearly the
equals of men, both in intelligence and in social position; he
gives a charming description of the women. "In short, their
character," Forster concludes, "is as amiable as that of any
nation that ever came unimproved out of the hands of Nature," and
he remarks that, as was felt by the South Sea peoples generally,
"whenever we came to this happy island we could evidently
perceive the opulence and happiness of its inhabitants." It is
noteworthy also, that, notwithstanding the high importance which
the Tahitians attached to the erotic side of life, they were not
deficient in regard for chastity. When Cook, who visited Tahiti
many times, was among "this benevolent humane" people, he noted
their esteem for chastity, and found that not only were betrothed
girls strictly guarded before marriage, but that men also who had
refrained from sexual intercourse for some time before marriage
were believed to pass at death immediately into the abode of the
blessed. "Their behavior, on all occasions, seems to indicate a
great openness and generosity of disposition. I never saw them,
in any misfortune, labor under the appearance of anxiety, after
the critical moment was past. Neither does care ever seem to
wrinkle their brow. On the contrary, even the approach of death
does not appear to alter their usual vivacity" (_Third Voyage of
Discovery_, 1776-1780). Turnbull visited Tahiti at a later period
(_A Voyage Round the World in 1800_, etc., pp. 374-5), but while
finding all sorts of vices among them, he is yet compelled to
admit their virtues: "Their manner of addressing strangers, from
the king to the meanest subject, is courteous and affable in the
extreme.... They certainly live amongst each other in more
harmony than is usual amongst Europeans. During the whole time I
was amongst them I never saw such a thing as a battle.... I never
remember to have seen an Otaheitean out of temper. They jest upon
each other with greater freedom than the Europeans, but these
jests are never taken in ill part.... With regard to food, it is,
I believe, an invariable law in Otaheite that whatever is
possessed by one is common to all." Thus we see that even among a
people who are commonly referred to as the supreme example of a
nation given up to uncontrolled licentiousness, the claims of
chastity were admitted, and many other virtues vigorously
flourished. The Tahitians were brave, hospitable,
self-controlled, courteous, considerate to the needs of others,
chivalrous to women, even appreciative of the advantages of
sexual restraint, to an extent which has rarely, if ever, been
known among those Christian nations which have looked down upon
them as abandoned to unspeakable vices.
As we turn from savages towards peoples in the barbarous and civilized
stages we find a general tendency for chastity, in so far as it is a
common possession of the common people, to be less regarded, or to be
retained only as a traditional convention no longer strictly observed. The
old grounds for chastity in primitive religions and _tabu_ have decayed
and no new grounds have been generally established. "Although the progress
of civilization," wrote Gibbon long ago, "has undoubtedly contributed to
assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less
favorable to the virtue of chastity," and Westermarck concludes that
"irregular connections between the sexes have, on the whole, exhibited a
tendency to increase along with the progress of civilization."
The main difference in the social function of chastity as we pass from
savagery to higher stages of culture seems to be that it ceases to exist
as a general hygienic measure or a general ceremonial observance, and, for
the most part, becomes confined to special philosophic or religious sects
which cultivate it to an extreme degree in a more or less professional
way. This state of things is well illustrated by the Roman Empire during
the early centuries of the Christian era.[73] Christianity itself was at
first one of these sects enamored of the ideal of chastity; but by its
superior vitality it replaced all the others and finally imposed its
ideals, though by no means its primitive practices, on European society
generally.
Chastity manifested itself in primitive Christianity in two different
though not necessarily opposed ways. On the one hand it took a stern and
practical form in vigorous men and women who, after being brought up in a
society permitting a high degree of sexual indulgence, suddenly found
themselves convinced of the sin of such indulgence. The battle with the
society they had been born into, and with their own old impulses and
habits, became so severe that they often found themselves compelled to
retire from the world altogether. Thus it was that the parched solitudes
of Egypt were peopled with hermits largely occupied with the problem of
subduing their own flesh. Their pre-occupation, and indeed the
pre-occupation of much early Christian literature, with sexual matters,
may be said to be vastly greater than was the case with the pagan society
they had left. Paganism accepted sexual indulgence and was then able to
dismiss it, so that in classic literature we find very little insistence
on sexual details except in writers like Martial, Juvenal and Petronius
who introduce them mainly for satirical ends. But the Christians could not
thus escape from the obsession of sex; it was ever with them. We catch
interesting glimpses of their struggles, for the most part barren
struggles, in the Epistles of St. Jerome, who had himself been an athlete
in these ascetic contests.
"Oh, how many times," wrote St. Jerome to Eustochium, the virgin
to whom he addressed one of the longest and most interesting of
his letters, "when in the desert, in that vast solitude which,
burnt up by the heart of the sun, offers but a horrible dwelling
to monks, I imagined myself among the delights of Rome! I was
alone, for my soul was full of bitterness. My limbs were covered
by a wretched sack and my skin was as black as an Ethiopian's.
Every day I wept and groaned, and if I was unwillingly overcome
by sleep my lean body lay on the bare earth. I say nothing of my
food and drink, for in the desert even invalids have no drink but
cold water, and cooked food is regarded as a luxury. Well, I,
who, out of fear of hell, had condemned myself to this prison,
companion of scorpions and wild beasts, often seemed in
imagination among bands of girls. My face was pale with fasting
and my mind within my frigid body was burning with desire; the
fires of lust would still flare up in a body that already seemed
to be dead. Then, deprived of all help, I threw myself at the
feet of Jesus, washing them with my tears and drying them with my
hair, subjugating my rebellious flesh by long fasts. I remember
that more than once I passed the night uttering cries and
striking my breast until God sent me peace." "Our century," wrote
St. Chrysostom in his _Discourse to Those Who Keep Virgins in
Their Houses_, "has seen many men who have bound their bodies
with chains, clothed themselves in sacks, retired to the summits
of mountains where they have lived in constant vigil and fasting,
giving the example of the most austere discipline and forbidding
all women to cross the thresholds of their humble dwellings; and
yet, in spite of all the severities they have exercised on
themselves, it was with difficulty they could repress the fury of
their passions." Hilarion, says Jerome, saw visions of naked
women when he lay down on his solitary couch and delicious meats
when he sat down to his frugal table. Such experiences rendered
the early saints very scrupulous. "They used to say," we are told
in an interesting history of the Egyptian anchorites, Palladius's
_Paradise of the Holy Fathers_, belonging to the fourth century
(A.W. Budge, _The Paradise_, vol. ii, p. 129), "that Abbâ Isaac
went out and found the footprint of a woman on the road, and he
thought about it in his mind and destroyed it saying, 'If a
brother seeth it he may fall.'" Similarly, according to the rules
of St. Cæsarius of Aries for nuns, no male clothing was to be
taken into the convent for the purpose of washing or mending.
Even in old age, a certain anxiety about chastity still remained.
One of the brothers, we are told in _The Paradise_ (p. 132) said
to Abbâ Zeno, "Behold thou hast grown old, how is the matter of
fornication?" The venerable saint replied, "It knocketh, but it
passeth on."
As the centuries went by the same strenuous anxiety to guard
chastity still remained, and the old struggle constantly
reappeared (see, e.g., Migne's _Dictionnaire d'Ascétisme_, art.
"Démon, Tentation du"). Some saints, it is true, like Luigi di
Gonzaga, were so angelically natured that they never felt the
sting of sexual desire. These seem to have been the exception.
St. Benedict and St. Francis experienced the difficulty of
subduing the flesh. St. Magdalena de Pozzi, in order to dispel
sexual desires, would roll on thorny bushes till the blood came.
Some saints kept a special cask of cold water in their cells to
stand in (Lea, _Sacerdotal Celibacy_, vol. i, p. 124). On the
other hand, the Blessed Angela de Fulginio tells us in her
_Visiones_ (cap. XIX) that, until forbidden by her confessor, she
would place hot coals in her secret parts, hoping by material
fire to extinguish the fire of concupiscence. St. Aldhelm, the
holy Bishop of Sherborne, in the eighth century, also adopted a
homeopathic method of treatment, though of a more literal kind,
for William of Malmsbury states that when tempted by the flesh he
would have women to sit and lie by him until he grew calm again;
the method proved very successful, for the reason, it was
thought, that the Devil felt he had been made a fool of.
In time the Catholic practice and theory of asceticism became
more formalized and elaborated, and its beneficial effects were
held to extend beyond the individual himself. "Asceticism from
the Christian point of view," writes Brénier de Montmorand in an
interesting study ("Ascétisme et Mysticisme," _Revue
Philosophique_, March, 1904) "is nothing else than all the
therapeutic measures making for moral purification. The Christian
ascetic is an athlete struggling to transform his corrupt nature
and make a road to God through the obstacles due to his passions
and the world. He is not working in his own interests alone,
but--by virtue of the reversibility of merit which compensates
that of solidarity in error--for the good and for the salvation
of the whole of society."
This is the aspect of early Christian asceticism most often emphasized.
But there is another aspect which may be less familiar, but has been by no
means less important. Primitive Christian chastity was on one side a
strenuous discipline. On another side it was a romance, and this indeed
was its most specifically Christian side, for athletic asceticism has been
associated with the most various religious and philosophic beliefs. If,
indeed, it had not possessed the charm of a new sensation, of a delicious
freedom, of an unknown adventure, it would never have conquered the
European world. There are only a few in that world who have in them the
stuff of moral athletes; there are many who respond to the attraction of
romance.
The Christians rejected the grosser forms of sexual indulgence, but in
doing so they entered with a more delicate ardor into the more refined
forms of sexual intimacy. They cultivated a relationship of brothers and
sisters to each other, they kissed one another; at one time, in the
spiritual orgy of baptism, they were not ashamed to adopt complete
nakedness.[74]
A very instructive picture of the forms which chastity assumed among the
early Christians is given us in the treatise of Chrysostom _Against Those
who Keep Virgins in their Houses_. Our fathers, Chrysostom begins, only
knew two forms of sexual intimacy, marriage and fornication. Now a third
form has appeared: men introduce young girls into their houses and keep
them there permanently, respecting their virginity. "What," Chrysostom
asks, "is the reason? It seems to me that life in common with a woman is
sweet, even outside conjugal union and fleshly commerce. That is my
feeling; and perhaps it is not my feeling alone; it may also be that of
these men. They would not hold their honor so cheap nor give rise to such
scandals if this pleasure were not violent and tyrannical.... That there
should really be a pleasure in this which produces a love more ardent than
conjugal union may surprise you at first. But when I give you the proofs
you will agree that it is so." The absence of restraint to desire in
marriage, he continues, often leads to speedy disgust, and even apart from
this, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, delivery, lactation, the bringing up
of children, and all the pains and anxieties that accompany these things
soon destroy youth and dull the point of pleasure. The virgin is free from
these burdens. She retains her vigor and youthfulness, and even at the age
of forty may rival the young nubile girl. "A double ardor thus burns in
the heart of him who lives with her, and the gratification of desire never
extinguishes the bright flame which ever continues to increase in
strength." Chrysostom describes minutely all the little cares and
attentions which the modern girls of his time required, and which these
men delighted to expend on their virginal sweethearts whether in public or
in private. He cannot help thinking, however, that the man who lavishes
kisses and caresses on a woman whose virginity he retains is putting
himself somewhat in the position of Tantalus. But this new refinement of
tender chastity, which came as a delicious discovery to the early
Christians who had resolutely thrust away the licentiousness of the pagan
world, was deeply rooted, as we discover from the frequency with which the
grave Fathers of the Church, apprehensive of scandal, felt called upon to
reprove it, though their condemnation is sometimes not without a trace of
secret sympathy.[75]
There was one form in which the new Christian chastity flourished
exuberantly and unchecked: it conquered literature. The most charming,
and, we may be sure, the most popular literature of the early Church lay
in the innumerable romances of erotic chastity--to some extent, it may
well be, founded on fact--which are embodied to-day in the _Acta
Sanctorum_. We can see in even the most simple and non-miraculous early
Christian records of the martyrdom of women that the writers were fully
aware of the delicate charm of the heroine who, like Perpetua at Carthage,
tossed by wild cattle in the arena, rises to gather her torn garment
around her and to put up her disheveled hair.[76] It was an easy step to
the stories of romantic adventure. Among these delightful stories I may
refer especially to the legend of Thekla, which has been placed,
incorrectly it may be, as early as the first century, "The Bride and
Bridegroom of India" in _Judas Thomas's Acts_, "The Virgin of Antioch" as
narrated by St. Ambrose, the history of "Achilleus and Nereus," "Mygdonia
and Karish," and "Two Lovers of Auvergne" as told by Gregory of Tours.
Early Christian literature abounds in the stories of lovers who had indeed
preserved their chastity, and had yet discovered the most exquisite
secrets of love.
Thekla's day is the twenty-third of September. There is a very
good Syriac version (by Lipsius and others regarded as more
primitive than the Greek version) of the _Acts of Paul and
Thekla_ (see, e.g., Wright's _Apocryphal Acts_). These _Acts_
belong to the latter part of the second century. The story is
that Thekla, refusing to yield to the passion of the high priest
of Syria, was put, naked but for a girdle (_subligaculum_) into
the arena on the back of a lioness, which licked her feet and
fought for her against the other beasts, dying in her defense.
The other beasts, however, did her no harm, and she was finally
released. A queen loaded her with money, she modified her dress
to look like a man, travelled to meet Paul, and lived to old age.
Sir W.M. Ramsay has written an interesting study of these _Acts_
(_The Church in the Roman Empire_, Ch. XVI). He is of opinion
that the _Acts_ are based on a first century document, and is
able to disentangle many elements of truth from the story. He
states that it is the only evidence we possess of the ideas and
actions of women during the first century in Asia Minor, where
their position was so high and their influence so great. Thekla
represents the assertion of woman's rights, and she administered
the rite of baptism, though in the existing versions of the
_Acts_ these features are toned down or eliminated.
Some of the most typical of these early Christian romances are
described as Gnostical in origin, with something of the germs of
Manichæan dualism which were held in the rich and complex matrix
of Gnosticism, while the spirit of these romances is also largely
Montanist, with the combined chastity and ardor, the pronounced
feminine tone due to its origin in Asia Minor, which marked
Montanism. It cannot be denied, however, that they largely passed
into the main stream of Christian tradition, and form an
essential and important part of that tradition. (Renan, in his
_Marc-Aurèle_, Chs. IX and XV, insists on the immense debt of
Christianity to Gnostic and Montanist contributions). A
characteristic example is the story of "The Betrothed of India"
in _Judas Thomas's Acts_ (Wright's _Apocryphal Acts_). Judas
Thomas was sold by his master Jesus to an Indian merchant who
required a carpenter to go with him to India. On disembarking at
the city of Sandaruk they heard the sounds of music and singing,
and learnt that it was the wedding-feast of the King's daughter,
which all must attend, rich and poor, slaves and freemen,
strangers and citizens. Judas Thomas went, with his new master,
to the banquet and reclined with a garland of myrtle placed on
his head. When a Hebrew flute-player came and stood over him and
played, he sang the songs of Christ, and it was seen that he was
more beautiful than all that were there and the King sent for him
to bless the young couple in the bridal chamber. And when all
were gone out and the door of the bridal chamber closed, the
bridegroom approached the bride, and saw, as it were, Judas
Thomas still talking with her. But it was our Lord who said to
him, "I am not Judas, but his brother." And our Lord sat down on
the bed beside the young people and began to say to them:
"Remember, my children, what my brother spake with you, and know
to whom he committed you, and know that if ye preserve yourselves
from this filthy intercourse ye become pure temples, and are
saved from afflictions manifest and hidden, and from the heavy
care of children, the end whereof is bitter sorrow. For their
sakes ye will become oppressors and robbers, and ye will be
grievously tortured for their injuries. For children are the
cause of many pains; either the King falls upon them or a demon
lays hold of them, or paralysis befalls them. And if they be
healthy they come to ill, either by adultery, or theft, or
fornication, or covetousness, or vain-glory. But if ye will be
persuaded by me, and keep yourselves purely unto God, ye shall
have living children to whom not one of these blemishes and hurts
cometh nigh; and ye shall be without care and without grief and
without sorrow, and ye shall hope for the time when ye shall see
the true wedding-feast." The young couple were persuaded, and
refrained from lust, and our Lord vanished. And in the morning,
when it was dawn, the King had the table furnished early and
brought in before the bridegroom and bride. And he found them
sitting the one opposite the other, and the face of the bride was
uncovered and the bridegroom was very cheerful. The mother of the
bride saith to her: "Why art thou sitting thus, and art not
ashamed, but art as if, lo, thou wert married a long time, and
for many a day?" And her father, too, said; "Is it thy great love
for thy husband that prevents thee from even veiling thyself?"
And the bride answered and said: "Truly, my father, I am in great
love, and am praying to my Lord that I may continue in this love
which I have experienced this night. I am not veiled, because the
veil of corruption is taken from me, and I am not ashamed,
because the deed of shame has been removed far from me, and I am
cheerful and gay, and despise this deed of corruption and the
joys of this wedding-feast, because I am invited to the true
wedding-feast. I have not had intercourse with a husband, the end
whereof is bitter repentance, because I am betrothed to the true
Husband." The bridegroom answered also in the same spirit, very
naturally to the dismay of the King, who sent for the sorcerer
whom he had asked to bless his unlucky daughter. But Judas Thomas
had already left the city and at his inn the King's stewards
found only the flute-player, sitting and weeping because he had
not taken her with him. She was glad, however, when she heard
what had happened, and hastened to the young couple, and lived
with them ever afterwards. The King also was finally reconciled,
and all ended chastely, but happily.
In these same _Judas Thomas's Acts_, which are not later than the
fourth century, we find (eighth act) the story of Mygdonia and
Karish. Mygdonia, the wife of Karish, is converted by Thomas and
flees from her husband, naked save for the curtain of the chamber
door which she has wrapped around her, to her old nurse. With the
nurse she goes to Thomas, who pours holy oil over her head,
bidding the nurse to anoint her all over with it; then a cloth is
put round her loins and he baptizes her; then she is clothed and
he gives her the sacrament. The young rapture of chastity grows
lyrical at times, and Judas Thomas breaks out: "Purity is the
athlete who is not overcome. Purity is the truth that blencheth
not. Purity is worthy before God of being to Him a familiar
handmaiden. Purity is the messenger of concord which bringeth the
tidings of peace."
Another romance of chastity is furnished by the episode of
Drusiana in _The History of the Apostles_ traditionally
attributed to Abdias, Bishop of Babylon (Bk. v, Ch. IV, _et
seq._). Drusiana is the wife of Andronicus, and is so pious that
she will not have intercourse with him. The youth Callimachus
falls madly in love with her, and his amorous attempts involve
many exciting adventures, but the chastity of Drusiana is finally
triumphant.
A characteristic example of the literature we are here concerned
with is St. Ambrose's story of "The Virgin in the Brothel"
(narrated in his _De Virginibus_, Migne's edition of Ambrose's
Works, vols. iii-iv, p. 211). A certain virgin, St. Ambrose tells
us, who lately lived at Antioch, was condemned either to
sacrifice to the gods or to go to the brothel. She chose the
latter alternative. But the first man who came in to her was a
Christian soldier who called her "sister," and bade her have no
fear. He proposed that they should exchange clothes. This was
done and she escaped, while the soldier was led away to death. At
the place of execution, however, she ran up and exclaimed that it
was not death she feared but shame. He, however, maintained that
he had been condemned to death in her place. Finally the crown of
martyrdom for which they contended was adjudged to both.
We constantly observe in the early documents of this romantic
literature of chastity that chastity is insisted on by no means
chiefly because of its rewards after death, nor even because the
virgin who devotes herself to it secures in Christ an ever-young
lover whose golden-haired beauty is sometimes emphasized. Its
chief charm is represented as lying in its own joy and freedom
and the security it involves from all the troubles,
inconveniences and bondages of matrimony. This early Christian
movement of romantic chastity was clearly, in large measure, a
revolt of women against men and marriage. This is well brought
out in the instructive story, supposed to be of third century
origin, of the eunuchs Achilleus and Nereus, as narrated in the
_Acta Sanctorum_, May 12th. Achilleus and Nereus were Christian
eunuchs of the bedchamber to Domitia, a virgin of noble birth,
related to the Emperor Domitian and betrothed to Aurelian, son
of a Consul. One day, as their mistress was putting on her jewels
and her purple garments embroidered with gold, they began in turn
to talk to her about all the joys and advantages of virginity, as
compared to marriage with a mere man. The conversation is
developed at great length and with much eloquence. Domitia was
finally persuaded. She suffered much from Aurelian in
consequence, and when he obtained her banishment to an island she
went thither with Achilleus and Nereus, who were put to death.
Incidentally, the death of Felicula, another heroine of chastity,
is described. When elevated on the rack because she would not
marry, she constantly refused to deny Jesus, whom she called her
lover. "Ego non nego amatorem meum!"
A special department of this literature is concerned with stories
of the conversions or the penitence of courtesans. St.
Martinianus, for instance (Feb. 13), was tempted by the courtesan
Zoe, but converted her. The story of St. Margaret of Cortona
(Feb. 22), a penitent courtesan, is late, for she belongs to the
thirteenth century. The most delightful document in this
literature is probably the latest, the fourteenth century Italian
devotional romance called _The Life of Saint Mary Magdalen_,
commonly associated with the name of Frate Domenico Cavalca. (It
has been translated into English). It is the delicately and
deliciously told romance of the chaste and passionate love of the
sweet sinner, Mary Magdalene, for her beloved Master.
As time went on the insistence on the joys of chastity in this
life became less marked, and chastity is more and more regarded
as a state only to be fully rewarded in a future life. Even,
however, in Gregory of Tours's charming story of "The Two Lovers
of Auvergne," in which this attitude is clear, the pleasures of
chaste love in this life are brought out as clearly as in any of
the early romances (_Historia Francorum_, lib. i, cap. XLII). Two
senators of Auvergne each had an only child, and they betrothed
them to each other. When the wedding day came and the young
couple were placed in bed, the bride turned to the wall and wept
bitterly. The bridegroom implored her to tell him what was the
matter, and, turning towards him, she said that if she were to
weep all her days she could never wash away her grief for she had
resolved to give her little body immaculate to Christ, untouched
by men, and now instead of immortal roses she had only had on her
brow faded roses, which deformed rather than adorned it, and
instead of the dowry of Paradise which Christ had promised her
she had become the consort of a merely mortal man. She deplored
her sad fate at considerable length and with much gentle
eloquence. At length the bridegroom, overcome by her sweet words,
felt that eternal life had shone before him like a great light,
and declared that if she wished to abstain from carnal desires he
was of the same mind. She was grateful, and with clasped hands
they fell asleep. For many years they thus lived together,
chastely sharing the same bed. At length she died and was buried,
her lover restoring her immaculate to the hands of Christ. Soon
afterwards he died also, and was placed in a separate tomb. Then
a miracle happened which made manifest the magnitude of this
chaste love, for the two bodies were found mysteriously placed
together. To this day, Gregory concludes (writing in the sixth
century), the people of the place call them "The Two Lovers."
Although Renan (_Marc-Aurèle_, Ch. XV) briefly called attention
to the existence of this copious early Christian literature
setting forth the romance of chastity, it seems as yet to have
received little or no study. It is, however, of considerable
importance, not merely for its own sake, but on account of its
psychological significance in making clear the nature of the
motive forces which made chastity easy and charming to the people
of the early Christian world, even when it involved complete
abstinence from sexual intercourse. The early Church
anathematized the eroticism of the Pagan world, and exorcized it
in the most effectual way by setting up a new and more exquisite
eroticism of its own.
During the Middle Ages the primitive freshness of Christian chastity began
to lose its charm. No more romances of chastity were written, and in
actual life men no longer sought daring adventures in the field of
chastity. So far as the old ideals survived at all it was in the secular
field of chivalry. The last notable figure to emulate the achievements of
the early Christians was Robert of Arbrissel in Normandy.
Robert of Arbrissel, who founded, in the eleventh century, the
famous and distinguished Order of Fontevrault for women, was a
Breton. This Celtic origin is doubtless significant, for it may
explain his unfailing ardor and gaiety, and his enthusiastic
veneration for womanhood. Even those of his friends who
deprecated what they considered his scandalous conduct bear
testimony to his unfailing and cheerful temperament, his
alertness in action, his readiness for any deed of humanity, and
his entire freedom from severity. He attracted immense crowds of
people of all conditions, especially women, including
prostitutes, and his influence over women was great. Once he went
into a brothel to warm his feet, and, incidentally, converted all
the women there. "Who are you?" asked one of them, "I have been
here twenty-five years and nobody has ever come here to talk
about God." Robert's relation with his nuns at Fontevrault was
very intimate, and he would often sleep with them. This is set
forth precisely in letters written by friends of his, bishops and
abbots, one of whom remarks that Robert had "discovered a new
but fruitless form of martyrdom." A royal abbess of Fontevrault
in the seventeenth century, pretending that the venerated founder
of the order could not possibly have been guilty of such
scandalous conduct, and that the letters must therefore be
spurious, had the originals destroyed, so far as possible. The
Bollandists, in an unscholarly and incomplete account of the
matter (_Acta Sanctorum_, Feb. 25), adopted this view. J. von
Walter, however, in a recent and thorough study of Robert of
Arbrissel (_Die Ersten Wanderprediger Frankreichs_, Theil I),
shows that there is no reason whatever to doubt the authentic and
reliable character of the impugned letters.
The early Christian legends of chastity had, however, their successors.
_Aucassin et Nicolette_, which was probably written in Northern France
towards the end of the twelfth century, is above all the descendant of the
stories in the _Acta Sanctorum_ and elsewhere. It embodied their spirit
and carried it forward, uniting their delicate feeling for chastity and
purity with the ideal of monogamic love. _Aucassin et Nicolette_ was the
death-knell of the primitive Christian romance of chastity. It was the
discovery that the chaste refinements of delicacy and devotion were
possible within the strictly normal sphere of sexual love.
There were at least two causes which tended to extinguish the primitive
Christian attraction to chastity, even apart from the influence of the
Church authorities in repressing its romantic manifestations. In the first
place, the submergence of the old pagan world, with its practice and, to
some extent, ideal of sexual indulgence, removed the foil which had given
grace and delicacy to the tender freedom of the young Christians. In the
second place, the austerities which the early Christians had gladly
practised for the sake of their soul's health, were robbed of their charm
and spontaneity by being made a formal part of codes of punishment for
sin, first in the Penitentials and afterwards at the discretion of
confessors. This, it may be added, was rendered the more necessary because
the ideal of Christian chastity was no longer largely the possession of
refined people who had been rendered immune to Pagan license by being
brought up in its midst, and even themselves steeped in it. It was clearly
from the first a serious matter for the violent North Africans to maintain
the ideal of chastity, and when Christianity spread to Northern Europe it
seemed almost a hopeless task to acclimatize its ideals among the wild
Germans. Hereafter it became necessary for celibacy to be imposed on the
regular clergy by the stern force of ecclesiastical authority, while
voluntary celibacy was only kept alive by a succession of religious
enthusiasts perpetually founding new Orders. An asceticism thus enforced
could not always be accompanied by the ardent exaltation necessary to
maintain it, and in its artificial efforts at self-preservation it
frequently fell from its insecure heights to the depths of unrestrained
license.[77] This fatality of all hazardous efforts to overpass humanity's
normal limits begun to be realized after the Middle Ages were over by
clear-sighted thinkers. "Qui veut faire l'ange," said Pascal, pungently
summing up this view of the matter, "fait la bête." That had often been
illustrated in the history of the Church.
The Penitentials began to come into use in the seventh century,
and became of wide prevalence and authority during the ninth and
tenth centuries. They were bodies of law, partly spiritual and
partly secular, and were thrown into the form of catalogues of
offences with the exact measure of penance prescribed for each
offence. They represented the introduction of social order among
untamed barbarians, and were codes of criminal law much more than
part of a system of sacramental confession and penance. In France
and Spain, where order on a Christian basis already existed, they
were little needed. They had their origin in Ireland and England,
and especially flourished in Germany; Charlemagne supported them
(see, e.g., Lea, _History of Auricular Confession_, vol. ii, p.
96, also Ch. XVII; Hugh Williams, edition of Gildas, Part II,
Appendix 3; the chief Penitentials are reproduced in
Wasserschleben's _Bussordnungen_).
In 1216 the Lateran Council, under Innocent III, made confession
obligatory. The priestly prerogative of regulating the amount of
penance according to circumstances, with greater flexibility than
the rigid Penitentials admitted, was first absolutely asserted by
Peter of Poitiers. Then Alain de Lille threw aside the
Penitentials as obsolete, and declared that the priest himself
must inquire into the circumstances of each sin and weigh
precisely its guilt (Lea, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 171).
Long before this period, however, the ideals of chastity, so far
as they involved any considerable degree of continence, although
they had become firmly hardened into the conventional traditions
and ideals of the Christian Church, had ceased to have any great
charm or force for the people living in Christendom. Among the
Northern barbarians, with different traditions of a more vigorous
and natural order behind them, the demands of sex were often
frankly exhibited. The monk Ordericus Vitalis, in the eleventh
century, notes what he calls the "lasciviousness" of the wives of
the Norman conquerors of England who, when left alone at home,
sent messages that if their husbands failed to return speedily
they would take new ones. The celibacy of the clergy was only
established with the very greatest difficulty, and when it was
established, priests became unchaste. Archbishop Odo of Rouen, in
the thirteenth century, recorded in the diary of his diocesan
visitations that there was one unchaste priest in every five
parishes, and even as regards the Italy of the same period the
friar Salimbene in his remarkable autobiography shows how little
chastity was regarded in the religious life. Chastity could now
only be maintained by force, usually the moral force of
ecclesiastical authority, which was itself undermined by
unchastity, but sometimes even physical force. It was in the
thirteenth century, in the opinion of some, that the girdle of
chastity (_cingula castitatis_) first begins to appear, but the
chief authority, Caufeynon (_La Ceinture de Chasteté_, 1904)
believes it only dates from the Renaissance (Schultz, _Das
Höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesänger_, vol. i, p. 595; Dufour,
_Histoire de la Prostitution_, vol. v, p. 272; Krauss,
_Anthropophyteia_, vol. iii, p. 247). In the sixteenth century
convents were liable to become almost brothels, as we learn on
the unimpeachable authority of Burchard, a Pope's secretary, in
his _Diarium_, edited by Thuasne who brings together additional
authorities for this statement in a footnote (vol. ii, p. 79);
that they remained so in the eighteenth century we see clearly in
the pages of Casanova's _Mémoires_, and in many other documents
of the period.
The Renaissance and the rise of humanism undoubtedly affected the feeling
towards asceticism and chastity. On the one hand a new and ancient
sanction was found for the disregard of virtues which men began to look
upon as merely monkish, and on the other hand the finer spirits affected
by the new movement began to realize that chastity might be better
cultivated and observed by those who were free to do as they would than by
those who were under the compulsion of priestly authority. That is the
feeling that prevails in Montaigne, and that is the idea of Rabelais when
he made it the only rule of his Abbey of Thelème: "Fay ce que vouldras."
A little later this doctrine was repeated in varying tones by
many writers more or less tinged by the culture brought into
fashion by the Renaissance. "As long as Danae was free," remarks
Ferrand in his sixteenth century treatise, _De la Maladie
d'Amour_, "she was chaste." And Sir Kenelm Digby, the latest
representative of the Renaissance spirit, insists in his _Private
Memoirs_ that the liberty which Lycurgus, "the wisest human
law-maker that ever was," gave to women to communicate their
bodies to men to whom they were drawn by noble affection, and the
hope of generous offspring, was the true cause why "real chastity
flourished in Sparta more than in any other part of the world."
In Protestant countries the ascetic ideal of chastity was still further
discredited by the Reformation movement which was in considerable part a
revolt against compulsory celibacy. Religion was thus no longer placed on
the side of chastity. In the eighteenth century, if not earlier, the
authority of Nature also was commonly invoked against chastity. It has
thus happened that during the past two centuries serious opinion
concerning chastity has only been partially favorable to it. It began to
be felt that an unhappy and injurious mistake had been perpetrated by
attempting to maintain a lofty ideal which encouraged hypocrisy. "The
human race would gain much," as Sénancour wrote early in the nineteenth
century in his remarkable book on love, "if virtue were made less
laborious. The merit would not be so great, but what is the use of an
elevation which can rarely be sustained?"[78]
There can be no doubt that the undue discredit into which the idea of
chastity began to fall from the eighteenth century onwards was largely
due to the existence of that merely external and conventional physical
chastity which was arbitrarily enforced so far as it could be
enforced,--and is indeed in some degree still enforced, nominally or
really,--upon all respectable women outside marriage. The conception of
the physical virtue of virginity had degraded the conception of the
spiritual virtue of chastity. A mere routine, it was felt, prescribed to a
whole sex, whether they would or not, could never possess the beauty and
charm of a virtue. At the same time it began to be realized that, as a
matter of fact, the state of compulsory virginity is not only not a state
especially favorable to the cultivation of real virtues, but that it is
bound up with qualities which are no longer regarded as of high value.[79]
"How arbitrary, artificial, contrary to Nature, is the life now
imposed upon women in this matter of chastity!" wrote James
Hinton forty years ago. "Think of that line: 'A woman who
deliberates is lost.' We _make_ danger, making all womanhood hang
upon a point like this, and surrounding it with unnatural and
preternatural dangers. There is a wanton unreason embodied in the
life of woman now; the present 'virtue' is a morbid unhealthy
plant. Nature and God never poised the life of a woman upon such
a needle's point. The whole modern idea of chastity has in it
sensual exaggeration, surely, in part, remaining to us from other
times, with what was good in it in great part gone."
"The whole grace of virginity," wrote another philosopher,
Guyau, "is ignorance. Virginity, like certain fruits, can only
be preserved by a process of desiccation."
Mérimée pointed out the same desiccating influence of virginity.
In a letter dated 1859 he wrote: "I think that nowadays people
attach far too much importance to chastity. Not that I deny that
chastity is a virtue, but there are degrees in virtues just as
there are in vices. It seems to be absurd that a woman should be
banished from society for having had a lover, while a woman who
is miserly, double-faced and spiteful goes everywhere. The
morality of this age is assuredly not that which is taught in the
Gospel. In my opinion it is better to love too much than not
enough. Nowadays dry hearts are stuck up on a pinnacle" (_Revue
des Deux Mondes_, April, 1896).
Dr. H. Paul has developed an allied point. She writes: "There are
girls who, even as children, have prostituted themselves by
masturbation and lascivious thoughts. The purity of their souls
has long been lost and nothing remains unknown to them, but--they
have preserved their hymens! That is for the sake of the future
husband. Let no one dare to doubt their innocence with that
unimpeachable evidence! And if another girl, who has passed her
childhood in complete purity, now, with awakened senses and warm
impetuous womanliness, gives herself to a man in love or even
only in passion, they all stand up and scream that she is
'dishonored!' And, not least, the prostituted girl with the
hymen. It is she indeed who screams loudest and throws the
biggest stones. Yet the 'dishonored' woman, who is sound and
wholesome, need not fear to tell what she has done to the man who
desires her in marriage, speaking as one human being to another.
She has no need to blush, she has exercised her human rights, and
no reasonable man will on that account esteem her the less" (Dr.
H. Paul, "Die Ueberschätzung der Jungfernschaft," _Geschlecht und
Gesellschaft_, Bd. ii, p. 14, 1907).
In a similar spirit writes F. Erhard (_Geschlecht und
Gesellschaft_, Bd. i, p. 408): "Virginity in one sense has its
worth, but in the ordinary sense it is greatly overestimated.
Apart from the fact that a girl who possesses it may yet be
thoroughly perverted, this over-estimation of virginity leads to
the girl who is without it being despised, and has further
resulted in the development of a special industry for the
preparation, by means of a prudishly cloistral education, of
girls who will bring to their husbands the peculiar dainty of a
bride who knows nothing about anything. Naturally, this can only
be achieved at the expense of any rational education. What the
undeveloped little goose may turn into, no man can foresee."
Freud (_Sexual-Probleme_, March, 1908) also points out the evil
results of the education for marriage which is given to girls on
the basis of this ideal of virginity. "Education undertakes the
task of repressing the girl's sensuality until the time of
betrothal. It not only forbids sexual relations and sets a high
premium on innocence, but it also withdraws the ripening womanly
individuality from temptation, maintaining a state of ignorance
concerning the practical side of the part she is intended to play
in life, and enduring no stirring of love which cannot lead to
marriage. The result is that when she is suddenly permitted to
fall in love by the authority of her elders, the girl cannot
bring her psychic disposition to bear, and goes into marriage
uncertain of her own feelings. As a consequence of this
artificial retardation of the function of love she brings nothing
but deception to the husband who has set all his desires upon
her, and manifests frigidity in her physical relations with him."
Sénancour (_De l'Amour_, vol. i, p. 285) even believes that, when
it is possible to leave out of consideration the question of
offspring, not only will the law of chastity become equal for the
two sexes, but there will be a tendency for the situation of the
sexes to be, to some extent, changed. "Continence becomes a
counsel rather than a precept, and it is in women that the
voluptuous inclination will be regarded with most indulgence. Man
is made for work; he only meets pleasure in passing; he must be
content that women should occupy themselves with it more than he.
It is men whom it exhausts, and men must always, in part,
restrain their desires."
As, however, we liberate ourselves from the bondage of a compulsory
physical chastity, it becomes possible to rehabilitate chastity as a
virtue. At the present day it can no longer be said that there is on the
part of thinkers and moralists any active hostility to the idea of
chastity; there is, on the contrary, a tendency to recognize the value of
chastity. But this recognition has been accompanied by a return to the
older and sounder conception of chastity. The preservation of a rigid
sexual abstinence, an empty virginity, can only be regarded as a
pseudo-chastity. The only positive virtue which Aristotle could have
recognized in this field was a temperance involving restraint of the lower
impulses, a wise exercise and not a non-exercise.[80] The best thinkers of
the Christian Church adopted the same conception; St. Basil in his
important monastic rules laid no weight on self-discipline as an end in
itself, but regarded it as an instrument for enabling the spirit to gain
power over the flesh. St. Augustine declared that continence is only
excellent when practised in the faith of the highest good,[81] and he
regarded chastity as "an orderly movement of the soul subordinating lower
things to higher things, and specially to be manifested in conjugal
relationships"; Thomas Aquinas, defining chastity in much the same way,
defined impurity as the enjoyment of sexual pleasure not according to
right reason, whether as regards the object or the conditions.[82] But for
a time the voices of the great moralists were unheard. The virtue of
chastity was swamped in the popular Christian passion for the annihilation
of the flesh, and that view was, in the sixteenth century, finally
consecrated by the Council of Trent, which formally pronounced an anathema
upon anyone who should declare that the state of virginity and celibacy
was not better than the state of matrimony. Nowadays the pseudo-chastity
that was of value on the simple ground that any kind of continence is of
higher spiritual worth than any kind of sexual relationship belongs to the
past, except for those who adhere to ancient ascetic creeds. The mystic
value of virginity has gone; it seems only to arouse in the modern man's
mind the idea of a piquancy craved by the hardened rake;[83] it is men who
have themselves long passed the age of innocence who attach so much
importance to the innocence of their brides. The conception of life-long
continence as an ideal has also gone; at the best it is regarded as a mere
matter of personal preference. And the conventional simulation of
universal chastity, at the bidding of respectability, is coming to be
regarded as a hindrance rather than a help to the cultivation of any real
chastity.[84]
The chastity that is regarded by the moralist of to-day as a virtue has
its worth by no means in its abstinence. It is not, in St. Theresa's
words, the virtue of the tortoise which withdraws its limbs under its
carapace. It is a virtue because it is a discipline in self-control,
because it helps to fortify the character and will, and because it is
directly favorable to the cultivation of the most beautiful, exalted, and
effective sexual life. So viewed, chastity may be opposed to the demands
of debased mediæval Catholicism, but it is in harmony with the demands of
our civilized life to-day, and by no means at variance with the
requirements of Nature.
There is always an analogy between the instinct of reproduction and the
instinct of nutrition. In the matter of eating it is the influence of
science, of physiology, which has finally put aside an exaggerated
asceticism, and made eating "pure." The same process, as James Hinton well
pointed out, has been made possible in the sexual relationships; "science
has in its hands the key to purity."[85]
Many influences have, however, worked together to favor an insistence on
chastity. There has, in the first place, been an inevitable reaction
against the sexual facility which had come to be regarded as natural. Such
facility was found to have no moral value, for it tended to relaxation of
moral fibre and was unfavorable to the finest sexual satisfaction. It
could not even claim to be natural in any broad sense of the word, for, in
Nature generally, sexual gratification tends to be rare and difficult.[86]
Courtship is arduous and long, the season of love is strictly delimited,
pregnancy interrupts sexual relationships. Even among savages, so long as
they have been untainted by civilization, virility is usually maintained
by a fine asceticism; the endurance of hardship, self-control and
restraint, tempered by rare orgies, constitute a discipline which covers
the sexual as well as every other department of savage life. To preserve
the same virility in civilized life, it may well be felt, we must
deliberately cultivate a virtue which under savage conditions of life is
natural.[87]
The influence of Nietzsche, direct and indirect, has been on the side of
the virtue of chastity in its modern sense. The command: "Be hard," as
Nietzsche used it, was not so much an injunction to an unfeeling
indifference towards others as an appeal for a more strenuous attitude
towards one's self, the cultivation of a self-control able to gather up
and hold in the forces of the soul for expenditure on deliberately
accepted ends. "A relative chastity," he wrote, "a fundamental and wise
foresight in the face of erotic things, even in thought, is part of a fine
reasonableness in life, even in richly endowed and complete natures."[88]
In this matter Nietzsche is a typical representative of the modern
movement for the restoration of chastity to its proper place as a real and
beneficial virtue, and not a mere empty convention. Such a movement could
not fail to make itself felt, for all that favors facility and luxurious
softness in sexual matters is quickly felt to degrade character as well as
to diminish the finest erotic satisfaction. For erotic satisfaction, in
its highest planes, is only possible when we have secured for the sexual
impulse a high degree of what Colin Scott calls "irradiation," that is to
say a wide diffusion through the whole of the psychic organism. And that
can only be attained by placing impediments in the way of the swift and
direct gratification of sexual desire, by compelling it to increase its
force, to take long circuits, to charge the whole organism so highly that
the final climax of gratified love is not the trivial detumescence of a
petty desire but the immense consummation of a longing in which the whole
soul as well as the whole body has its part. "Only the chaste can be
really obscene," said Huysmans. And on a higher plane, only the chaste can
really love.
"Physical purity," remarks Hans Menjago ("Die Ueberschätzung der
Physischen Reinheit," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. ii,
Part VIII) "was originally valued as a sign of greater strength
of will and firmness of character, and it marked a rise above
primitive conditions. This purity was difficult to preserve in
those unsure days; it was rare and unusual. From this rarity rose
the superstition of supernatural power residing in the virgin.
But this has no meaning as soon as such purity becomes general
and a specially conspicuous degree of firmness of character is no
longer needed to maintain it.... Physical purity can only possess
value when it is the result of individual strength of character,
and not when it is the result of compulsory rules of morality."
Konrad Höller, who has given special attention to the sexual
question in schools, remarks in relation to physical exercise:
"The greatest advantage of physical exercises, however, is not
the development of the active and passive strength of the body
and its skill, but the establishment and fortification of the
authority of the will over the body and its needs, so much given
up to indolence. He who has learnt to endure and overcome, for
the sake of a definite aim, hunger and thirst and fatigue, will
be the better able to withstand sexual impulses and the
temptation to gratify them, when better insight and æsthetic
feeling have made clear to him, as one used to maintain authority
over his body, that to yield would be injurious or disgraceful"
(K. Höller, "Die Aufgabe der Volksschule," _Sexualpädagogik_, p.
70). Professor Schäfenacker (id., p. 102), who also emphasizes
the importance of self-control and self-restraint, thinks a youth
must bear in mind his future mission, as citizen and father of a
family.
A subtle and penetrative thinker of to-day, Jules de Gaultier,
writing on morals without reference to this specific question,
has discussed what new internal inhibitory motives we can appeal
to in replacing the old external inhibition of authority and
belief which is now decayed. He answers that the state of feeling
on which old faiths were based still persists. "May not," he
asks, "the desire for a thing that we love and wish for
beneficently replace the belief that a thing is by divine will,
or in the nature of things? Will not the presence of a bridle on
the frenzy of instinct reveal itself as a useful attitude adopted
by instinct itself for its own conservation, as a symptom of the
force and health of instinct? Is not empire over oneself, the
power of regulating one's acts, a mark of superiority and a
motive for self-esteem? Will not this joy of pride have the same
authority in preserving the instincts as was once possessed by
religious fear and the pretended imperatives of reason?" (Jules
de Gaultier, _La Dépendance de la Morale et l'Indépendance des
Moeurs_, p. 153.)
H.G. Wells (in _A Modern Utopia_), pointing out the importance of
chastity, though rejecting celibacy, invokes, like Jules de
Gaultier, the motive of pride. "Civilization has developed far
more rapidly than man has modified. Under the unnatural
perfection of security, liberty, and abundance our civilization
has attained, the normal untrained human being is disposed to
excess in almost every direction; he tends to eat too much and
too elaborately, to drink too much, to become lazy faster than
his work can be reduced, to waste his interest upon displays, and
to make love too much and too elaborately. He gets out of
training, and concentrates upon egoistic or erotic broodings. Our
founders organized motives from all sorts of sources, but I think
the chief force to give men self-control is pride. Pride may not
be the noblest thing in the soul, but it is the best king there,
for all that. They looked to it to keep a man clean and sound and
sane. In this matter, as in all matters of natural desire, they
held no appetite must be glutted, no appetite must have
artificial whets, and also and equally that no appetite should be
starved. A man must come from the table satisfied, but not
replete. And, in the matter of love, a straight and clean desire
for a clean and straight fellow-creature was our founders' ideal.
They enjoined marriage between equals as the duty to the race,
and they framed directions of the precisest sort to prevent that
uxorious inseparableness, that connubiality, that sometimes
reduces a couple of people to something jointly less than
either."
With regard to chastity as an element of erotic satisfaction,
Edward Carpenter writes (_Love's Coming of Age_, p. 11): "There
is a kind of illusion about physical desire similar to that which
a child suffers from when, seeing a beautiful flower, it
instantly snatches the same, and destroys in a few moments the
form and fragrance which attracted it. He only gets the full
glory who holds himself back a little, and truly possesses, who
is willing, if need be, not to possess. He is indeed a master of
life who, accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body,
and not refusing them, knows how to transform them at will into
the most rare and fragrant flowers of human emotion."
Beyond its functions in building up character, in heightening and
ennobling the erotic life, and in subserving the adequate fulfilment of
family and social duties, chastity has a more special value for those who
cultivate the arts. We may not always be inclined to believe the writers
who have declared that their verse alone is wanton, but their lives
chaste. It is certainly true, however, that a relationship of this kind
tends to occur. The stuff of the sexual life, as Nietzsche says, is the
stuff of art; if it is expended in one channel it is lost for the other.
The masters of all the more intensely emotional arts have frequently
cultivated a high degree of chastity. This is notably the case as regards
music; one thinks of Mozart,[89] of Beethoven, of Schubert, and many
lesser men. In the case of poets and novelists chastity may usually seem
to be less prevalent but it is frequently well-marked, and is not seldom
disguised by the resounding reverberations which even the slightest
love-episode often exerts on the poetic organism. Goethe's life seems, at
a first glance, to be a long series of continuous love-episodes. Yet when
we remember that it was the very long life of a man whose vigor remained
until the end, that his attachments long and profoundly affected his
emotional life and his work, and that with most of the women he has
immortalized he never had actual sexual relationships at all, and when we
realize, moreover, that, throughout, he accomplished an almost
inconceivably vast amount of work, we shall probably conclude that sexual
indulgence had a very much smaller part in Goethe's life than in that of
many an average man on whom it leaves no obvious emotional or intellectual
trace whatever. Sterne, again, declared that he must always have a
Dulcinea dancing in his head, yet the amount of his intimate relations
with women appears to have been small. Balzac spent his life toiling at
his desk and carrying on during many years a love correspondence with a
woman he scarcely ever saw and at the end only spent a few months of
married life with. The like experience has befallen many artistic
creators. For, in the words of Landor, "absence is the invisible and
incorporeal mother of ideal beauty."
We do well to remember that, while the auto-erotic manifestations through
the brain are of infinite variety and importance, the brain and the
sexual organs are yet the great rivals in using up bodily energy, and that
there is an antagonism between extreme brain vigor and extreme sexual
vigor, even although they may sometimes both appear at different periods
in the same individual.[90] In this sense there is no paradox in the
saying of Ramon Correa that potency is impotence and impotence potency,
for a high degree of energy, whether in athletics or in intellect or in
sexual activity, is unfavorable to the display of energy in other
directions. Every high degree of potency has its related impotencies.
It may be added that we may find a curiously inconsistent proof
of the excessive importance attached to sexual function by a
society which systematically tries to depreciate sex, in the
disgrace which is attributed to the lack of "virile" potency.
Although civilized life offers immense scope for the activities
of sexually impotent persons, the impotent man is made to feel
that, while he need not be greatly concerned if he suffers from
nervous disturbances of digestion, if he should suffer just as
innocently from nervous disturbances of the sexual impulse, it is
almost a crime. A striking example of this was shown, a few years
ago, when it was plausibly suggested that Carlyle's relations
with his wife might best be explained by supposing that he
suffered from some trouble of sexual potency. At once admirers
rushed forward to "defend" Carlyle from this "disgraceful"
charge; they were more shocked than if it had been alleged that
he was a syphilitic. Yet impotence is, at the most, an infirmity,
whether due to some congenital anatomical defect or to a
disturbance of nervous balance in the delicate sexual mechanism,
such as is apt to occur in men of abnormally sensitive
temperament. It is no more disgraceful to suffer from it than
from dyspepsia, with which, indeed, it may be associated. Many
men of genius and high moral character have been sexually
deformed. This was the case with Cowper (though this significant
fact is suppressed by his biographers); Ruskin was divorced for a
reason of this kind; and J.S. Mill, it is said, was sexually of
little more than infantile development.
Up to this point I have been considering the quality of chastity and the
quality of asceticism in their most general sense and without any attempt
at precise differentiation.[91] But if we are to accept these as modern
virtues, valid to-day, it is necessary that we should be somewhat more
precise in defining them. It seems most convenient, and most strictly
accordant also with etymology, if we agree to mean by asceticism or
_ascesis_, the athlete quality of self-discipline, controlling, by no
means necessarily for indefinitely prolonged periods, the gratification of
the sexual impulse. By chastity, which is primarily the quality of purity,
and secondarily that of holiness, rather than of abstinence, we may best
understand a due proportion between erotic claims and the other claims of
life. "Chastity," as Ellen Key well says, "is harmony between body and
soul in relation to love." Thus comprehended, asceticism is the virtue of
control that leads up to erotic gratification, and chastity is the virtue
which exerts its harmonizing influence in the erotic life itself.
It will be seen that asceticism by no means necessarily involves perpetual
continence. Properly understood, asceticism is a discipline, a training,
which has reference to an end not itself. If it is compulsorily perpetual,
whether at the dictates of a religious dogma, or as a mere fetish, it is
no longer on a natural basis, and it is no longer moral, for the restraint
of a man who has spent his whole life in a prison is of no value for life.
If it is to be natural and to be moral asceticism must have an end outside
itself, it must subserve the ends of vital activity, which cannot be
subserved by a person who is engaged in a perpetual struggle with his own
natural instincts. A man may, indeed, as a matter of taste or preference,
live his whole life in sexual abstinence, freely and easily, but in that
case he is not an ascetic, and his abstinence is neither a subject for
applause nor for criticism.
In the same way chastity, far from involving sexual abstinence, only has
its value when it is brought within the erotic sphere. A purity that is
ignorance, when the age of childish innocence is once passed, is mere
stupidity; it is nearer to vice than to virtue. Nor is purity consonant
with effort and struggle; in that respect it differs from asceticism. "We
conquer the bondage of sex," Rosa Mayreder says, "by acceptance, not by
denials, and men can only do this with the help of women." The would-be
chastity of cold calculation is equally unbeautiful and unreal, and
without any sort of value. A true and worthy chastity can only be
supported by an ardent ideal, whether, as among the early Christians, this
is the erotic ideal of a new romance, or, as among ourselves, a more
humanly erotic ideal. "Only erotic idealism," says Ellen Key, "can arouse
enthusiasm for chastity." Chastity in a healthily developed person can
thus be beautifully exercised only in the actual erotic life; in part it
is the natural instinct of dignity and temperance; in part it is the art
of touching the things of sex with hands that remember their aptness for
all the fine ends of life. Upon the doorway of entrance to the inmost
sanctuary of love there is thus the same inscription as on the doorway to
the Epidaurian Sanctuary of Aesculapius: "None but the pure shall enter
here."
It will be seen that the definition of chastity remains somewhat
lacking in precision. That is inevitable. We cannot grasp purity
tightly, for, like snow, it will merely melt in our hands.
"Purity itself forbids too minute a system of rules for the
observance of purity," well says Sidgwick (_Methods of Ethics_,
Bk. iii, Ch. IX). Elsewhere (op. cit., Bk. iii, Ch. XI) he
attempts to answer the question: What sexual relations are
essentially impure? and concludes that no answer is possible.
"There appears to be no distinct principle, having any claim to
self-evidence, upon which the question can be answered so as to
command general assent." Even what is called "Free Love," he
adds, "in so far as it is earnestly advocated as a means to a
completer harmony of sentiment between men and women, cannot be
condemned as impure, for it seems paradoxical to distinguish
purity from impurity merely by less rapidity of transition."
Moll, from the standpoint of medical psychology, reaches the same
conclusion as Sidgwick from that of ethics. In a report on the
"Value of Chastity for Men," published as an appendix to the
third edition (1899) of his _Konträre Sexualempfindung_, the
distinguished Berlin physician discusses the matter with much
vigorous common sense, insisting that "chaste and unchaste are
_relative ideas_." We must not, he states, as is so often done,
identify "chaste" with "sexually abstinent." He adds that we are
not justified in describing all extra-marital sexual intercourse
as unchaste, for, if we do so, we shall be compelled to regard
nearly all men, and some very estimable women, as unchaste. He
rightly insists that in this matter we must apply the same rule
to women as to men, and he points out that even when it involves
what may be technically adultery sexual intercourse is not
necessarily unchaste. He takes the case of a girl who, at
eighteen, when still mentally immature, is married to a man with
whom she finds it impossible to live and a separation
consequently occurs, although a divorce may be impossible to
obtain. If she now falls passionately in love with a man her love
may be entirely chaste, though it involves what is technically
adultery.
In thus understanding asceticism and chastity, and their beneficial
functions in life, we see that they occupy a place midway between the
artificially exaggerated position they once held and that to which they
were degraded by the inevitable reaction of total indifference or actual
hostility which followed. Asceticism and chastity are not rigid
categorical imperatives; they are useful means to desirable ends; they are
wise and beautiful arts. They demand our estimation, but not our
over-estimation. For in over-estimating them, it is too often forgotten,
we over-estimate the sexual instinct. The instinct of sex is indeed
extremely important. Yet it has not that all-embracing and supereminent
importance which some, even of those who fight against it, are accustomed
to believe. That artificially magnified conception of the sexual impulse
is fortified by the artificial emphasis placed upon asceticism. We may
learn the real place of the sexual impulse in learning how we may
reasonably and naturally view the restraints on that impulse.
FOOTNOTES:
[69] For Blake and for Shelley, as well as, it may be added, for Hinton,
chastity, as Todhunter remarks in his _Study of Shelley_, is "a type of
submission to the actual, a renunciation of the infinite, and is therefore
hated by them. The chaste man, i.e., the man of prudence and self-control,
is the man who has lost the nakedness of his primitive innocence."
[70] For evidence of the practices of savages in this matter, see Appendix
_A_ to the third volume of these _Studies_, "The Sexual Instinct in
Savages." Cf. also Chs. IV and VII of Westermarck's _History of Human
Marriage_, and also Chs. XXXVIII and XLI of the same author's _Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii; Frazer's _Golden Bough_ contains
much bearing on this subject, as also Crawley's _Mystic Rose_.
[71] See, e.g., Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_,
vol. ii, pp. 412 et seq.
[72] Thus an old Maori declared, a few years ago, that the decline of his
race has been entirely due to the loss of the ancient religious faith in
the _tabu_. "For," said he (I quote from an Auckland newspaper), "in the
olden-time our _tapu_ ramified the whole social system. The head, the
hair, spots where apparitions appeared, places which the _tohungas_
proclaimed as sacred, we have forgotten and disregarded. Who nowadays
thinks of the sacredness of the head? See when the kettle boils, the young
man jumps up, whips the cap off his head, and uses it for a kettle-holder.
Who nowadays but looks on with indifference when the barber of the
village, if he be near the fire, shakes the loose hair off his cloth into
it, and the joke and the laughter goes on as if no sacred operation had
just been concluded. Food is consumed on places which, in bygone days, it
dared not even be carried over."
[73] Thus, long before Christian monks arose, the ascetic life of the
cloister on very similar lines existed in Egypt in the worship of Serapis
(Dill, _Roman Society_, p. 79).
[74] At night, in the baptistry, with lamps dimly burning, the women were
stripped even of their tunics, plunged three times in the pool, then
anointed, dressed in white, and kissed.
[75] Thus Jerome, in his letter to Eustochium, refers to those couples who
"share the same room, often even the same bed, and call us suspicious if
we draw any conclusions," while Cyprian (_Epistola_, 86) is unable to
approve of those men he hears of, one a deacon, who live in familiar
intercourse with virgins, even sleeping in the same bed with them, for, he
declares, the feminine sex is weak and youth is wanton.
[76] Perpetua (_Acta Sanctorum_, March 7) is termed by Hort and Mayor
"that fairest flower in the garden of post-Apostolic Christendom." She was
not, however, a virgin, but a young mother with a baby at her breast.
[77] The strength of early Christian asceticism lay in its spontaneous and
voluntary character. When, in the ninth century, the Carlovingians
attempted to enforce monastic and clerical celibacy, the result was a
great outburst of unchastity and crime; nunneries became brothels, nuns
were frequently guilty of infanticide, monks committed unspeakable
abominations, the regular clergy formed incestuous relations with their
nearest female relatives (Lea, _History of Sacerdotal Celibacy_, vol. i,
pp, 155 et seq.).
[78] Sénancour, _De l'Amour_, vol. ii, p. 233. Islam has placed much less
stress on chastity than Christianity, but practically, it would appear,
there is often more regard for chastity under Mohammedan rule than under
Christian rule. Thus it is stated by "Viator" (_Fortnightly Review_, Dec.,
1908) that formerly, under Turkish Moslem rule, it was impossible to buy
the virtue of women in Bosnia, but that now, under the Christian rule of
Austria, it is everywhere possible to buy women near the Austrian
frontier.
[79] The basis of this feeling was strengthened when it was shown by
scholars that the physical virtue of "virginity" had been masquerading
under a false name. To remain a virgin seems to have meant at the first,
among peoples of early Aryan culture, by no means to take a vow of
chastity, but to refuse to submit to the yoke of patriarchal marriage. The
women who preferred to stand outside marriage were "virgins," even though
mothers of large families, and Æschylus speaks of the Amazons as
"virgins," while in Greek the child of an unmarried girl was always "the
virgin's son." The history of Artemis, the most primitive of Greek
deities, is instructive from this point of view. She was originally only
virginal in the sense that she rejected marriage, being the goddess of a
nomadic and matriarchal hunting people who had not yet adopted marriage,
and she was the goddess of childbirth, worshipped with orgiastic dances
and phallic emblems. It was by a late transformation that Artemis became
the goddess of chastity (Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_, vol. ii,
pp. 442 et seq.; Sir W.M. Ramsay, _Cities of Phrygia_, vol. i, p. 96; Paul
Lafargue, "Les Mythes Historiques," _Revue des Idées_, Dec., 1904).
[80] See, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch. XIII.
[81] _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xv, cap. XX. A little further on (lib. xvi,
cap. XXV) he refers to Abraham as a man able to use women as a man should,
his wife temperately, his concubine compliantly, neither immoderately.
[82] _Summa_, Migne's edition, vol. iii, qu. 154, art. I.
[83] See the Study of Modesty in the first volume of these _Studies_.
[84] The majority of chaste youths, remarks an acute critic of modern life
(Hellpach, _Nervosität und Kultur_, p. 175), are merely actuated by
traditional principles, or by shyness, fear of venereal infections, lack
of self-confidence, want of money, very seldom by any consideration for a
future wife, and that indeed would be a tragi-comic error, for a woman
lays no importance on intact masculinity. Moreover, he adds, the chaste
man is unable to choose a wife wisely, and it is among teachers and
clergymen--the chastest class--that most unhappy marriages are made.
Milton had already made this fact an argument for facility of divorce.
[85] "In eating," said Hinton, "we have achieved the task of combining
pleasure with an absence of 'lust.' The problem for man and woman is so to
use and possess the sexual passion as to make it the minister to higher
things, with no restraint on it but that. It is essentially connected with
things of the spiritual order, and would naturally revolve round them. To
think of it as merely bodily is a mistake."
[86] See "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse," and Appendix, "The Sexual
Instinct in Savages," in vol. iii of these _Studies_.
[87] I have elsewhere discussed more at length the need in modern
civilized life of a natural and sincere asceticism (see _Affirmations_,
1898) "St. Francis and Others."
[88] _Der Wille zur Macht_, p. 392.
[89] At the age of twenty-five, when he had already produced much fine
work, Mozart wrote in his letters that he had never touched a woman,
though he longed for love and marriage. He could not afford to marry, he
would not seduce an innocent girl, a venial relation was repulsive to him.
[90] Reibmayr, _Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies._, Bd.
i, p. 437.
[91] We may exclude altogether, it is scarcely necessary to repeat, the
quality of virginity--that is to say, the possession of an intact
hymen--since this is a merely physical quality with no necessary ethical
relationships. The demand for virginity in women is, for the most part,
either the demand for a better marketable article, or for a more powerful
stimulant to masculine desire. Virginity involves no moral qualities in
its possessor. Chastity and asceticism, on the other hand, are meaningless
terms, except as demands made by the spirit on itself or on the body it
controls.
CHAPTER VI.
THE PROBLEM OF SEXUAL ABSTINENCE.
The Influence of Tradition--The Theological Conception of Lust--Tendency
of These Influences to Degrade Sexual Morality--Their Result in Creating
the Problem of Sexual Abstinence--The Protests Against Sexual
Abstinence--Sexual Abstinence and Genius--Sexual Abstinence in Women--The
Advocates of Sexual Abstinence--Intermediate Attitude--Unsatisfactory
Nature of the Whole Discussion--Criticism of the Conception of Sexual
Abstinence--Sexual Abstinence as Compared to Abstinence from Food--No
Complete Analogy--The Morality of Sexual Abstinence Entirely Negative--Is
It the Physician's Duty to Advise Extra-Conjugal Sexual
Intercourse?--Opinions of Those Who Affirm or Deny This Duty--The
Conclusion Against Such Advice--The Physician Bound by the Social and
Moral Ideas of His Age--The Physician as Reformer--Sexual Abstinence and
Sexual Hygiene--Alcohol--The Influence of Physical and Mental
Exercise--The Inadequacy of Sexual Hygiene in This Field--The Unreal
Nature of the Conception of Sexual Abstinence--The Necessity of Replacing
It by a More Positive Ideal.
When we look at the matter from a purely abstract or even purely
biological point of view, it might seem that in deciding that asceticism
and chastity are of high value for the personal life we have said all that
is necessary to say. That, however, is very far from being the case. We
soon realize here, as at every point in the practical application of
sexual psychology, that it is not sufficient to determine the abstractly
right course along biological lines. We have to harmonize our biological
demands with social demands. We are ruled not only by natural instincts
but by inherited traditions, that in the far past were solidly based on
intelligible grounds, and that even still, by the mere fact of their
existence, exert a force which we cannot and ought not to ignore.
In discussing the valuation of the sexual impulse we found that we had
good ground for making a very high estimate of love. In discussing
chastity and asceticism we found that they also are highly to be valued.
And we found that, so far from any contradiction being here involved,
love and chastity are intertwined in all their finest developments, and
that there is thus a perfect harmony in apparent opposition. But when we
come to consider the matter in detail, in its particular personal
applications, we find that a new factor asserts itself. We find that our
inherited social and religious traditions exert a pressure, all on one
side, which makes it impossible to place the relations of love and
chastity simply on the basis of biology and reason. We are confronted at
the outset by our traditions. On the one side these traditions have
weighted the word "lust"--considered as expressing all the manifestations
of the sexual impulse which are outside marriage or which fail to have
marriage as their direct and ostentatious end--with deprecatory and
sinister meanings. And on the other side these traditions have created the
problem of "sexual abstinence," which has nothing to do with either
asceticism or chastity as these have been defined in the previous chapter,
but merely with the purely negative pressure on the sexual impulse,
exerted, independently of the individual's wishes, by his religious and
social environment.
The theological conception of "lust," or "libido," as sin, followed
logically the early Christian conception of "the flesh," and became
inevitable as soon as that conception was firmly established. Not only,
indeed, had early Christian ideals a degrading influence on the estimation
of sexual desire _per se_, but they tended to depreciate generally the
dignity of the sexual relationship. If a man made sexual advances to a
woman outside marriage, and thus brought her within the despised circle of
"lust," he was injuring her because he was impairing her religious and
moral value.[92] The only way he could repair the damage done was by
paying her money or by entering into a forced and therefore probably
unfortunate marriage with her. That is to say that sexual relationships
were, by the ecclesiastical traditions, placed on a pecuniary basis, on
the same level as prostitution. By its well-meant intentions to support
the theological morality which had developed on an ascetic basis, the
Church was thus really undermining even that form of sexual relationship
which it sanctified.
Gregory the Great ordered that the seducer of a virgin shall
marry her, or, in case of refusal, be severely punished
corporally and shut up in a monastery to perform penance.
According to other ecclesiastical rules, the seducer of a virgin,
though held to no responsibility by the civil forum, was required
to marry her, or to find a husband and furnish a dowry for her.
Such rules had their good side, and were especially equitable
when seduction had been accomplished by deceit. But they largely
tended in practice to subordinate all questions of sexual
morality to a money question. The reparation to the woman, also,
largely became necessary because the ecclesiastical conception of
lust caused her value to be depreciated by contact with lust, and
the reparation might be said to constitute a part of penance.
Aquinas held that lust, in however slight a degree, is a mortal
sin, and most of the more influential theologians took a view
nearly or quite as rigid. Some, however, held that a certain
degree of delectation is possible in these matters without mortal
sin, or asserted, for instance, that to feel the touch of a soft
and warm hand is not mortal sin so long as no sexual feeling is
thereby aroused. Others, however, held that such distinctions are
impossible, and that all pleasures of this kind are sinful. Tomás
Sanchez endeavored at much length to establish rules for the
complicated problems of delectation that thus arose, but he was
constrained to admit that no rules are really possible, and that
such matters must be left to the judgment of a prudent man. At
that point casuistry dissolves and the modern point of view
emerges (see, e.g., Lea, _History of Auricular Confession_, vol.
ii, pp. 57, 115, 246, etc.).
Even to-day the influence of the old traditions of the Church still
unconsciously survives among us. That is inevitable as regards religious
teachers, but it is found also in men of science, even in Protestant
countries. The result is that quite contradictory dogmas are found side by
side, even in the same writer. On the one hand, the manifestations of the
sexual impulse are emphatically condemned as both unnecessary and evil; on
the other hand, marriage, which is fundamentally (whatever else it may
also be) a manifestation of the sexual impulse, receives equally emphatic
approval as the only proper and moral form of living.[93] There can be no
reasonable doubt whatever that it is to the surviving and pervading
influence of the ancient traditional theological conception of _libido_
that we must largely attribute the sharp difference of opinions among
physicians on the question of sexual abstinence and the otherwise
unnecessary acrimony with which these opinions have sometimes been stated.
On the one side, we find the emphatic statement that sexual intercourse is
necessary and that health cannot be maintained unless the sexual
activities are regularly exercised.
"All parts of the body which are developed for a definite use are kept in
health, and in the enjoyment of fair growth and of long youth, by the
fulfilment of that use, and by their appropriate exercise in the
employment to which they are accustomed." In that statement, which occurs
in the great Hippocratic treatise "On the Joints," we have the classic
expression of the doctrine which in ever varying forms has been taught by
all those who have protested against sexual abstinence. When we come down
to the sixteenth century outbreak of Protestantism we find that Luther's
revolt against Catholicism was in part a protest against the teaching of
sexual abstinence. "He to whom the gift of continence is not given," he
said in his _Table Talk_, "will not become chaste by fasting and vigils.
For my own part I was not excessively tormented [though elsewhere he
speaks of the great fires of lust by which he had been troubled], but all
the same the more I macerated myself the more I burnt." And three hundred
years later, Bebel, the would-be nineteenth century Luther of a different
Protestantism, took the same attitude towards sexual abstinence, while
Hinton the physician and philosopher, living in a land of rigid sexual
conventionalism and prudery, and moved by keen sympathy for the sufferings
he saw around him, would break into passionate sarcasm when confronted by
the doctrine of sexual abstinence. "There are innumerable ills--terrible
destructions, madness even, the ruin of lives--for which the embrace of
man and woman would be a remedy. No one thinks of questioning it.
Terrible evils and a remedy in a delight and joy! And man has chosen so to
muddle his life that he must say: 'There, that would be a remedy, but I
cannot use it. I _must be virtuous!_'"
If we confine ourselves to modern times and to fairly precise
medical statements, we find in Schurig's _Spermatologia_ (1720,
pp. 274 et seq.), not only a discussion of the advantages of
moderate sexual intercourse in a number of disorders, as
witnessed by famous authorities, but also a list of
results--including anorexia, insanity, impotence, epilepsy, even
death--which were believed to have been due to sexual abstinence.
This extreme view of the possible evils of sexual abstinence
seems to have been part of the Renaissance traditions of medicine
stiffened by a certain opposition between religion and science.
It was still rigorously stated by Lallemand early in the
nineteenth century. Subsequently, the medical statements of the
evil results of sexual abstinence became more temperate and
measured, though still often pronounced. Thus Gyurkovechky
believes that these results may be as serious as those of sexual
excess. Krafft-Ebing showed that sexual abstinence could produce
a state of general nervous excitement (_Jahrbuch für
Psychiatrie_, Bd. viii, Heft 1 and 2). Schrenck-Notzing regards
sexual abstinence as a cause of extreme sexual hyperæsthesia and
of various perversions (in a chapter on sexual abstinence in his
_Kriminalpsychologische und Psychopathologische Studien_, 1902,
pp. 174-178). He records in illustration the case of a man of
thirty-six who had masturbated in moderation as a boy, but
abandoned the practice entirely, on moral grounds, twenty years
ago, and has never had sexual intercourse, feeling proud to enter
marriage a chaste man, but now for years has suffered greatly
from extreme sexual hyperæsthesia and concentration of thought on
sexual subjects, notwithstanding a strong will and the resolve
not to masturbate or indulge in illicit intercourse. In another
case a vigorous and healthy man, not inverted, and with strong
sexual desires, who remained abstinent up to marriage, suffers
from psychic impotence, and his wife remains a virgin
notwithstanding all her affection and caresses. Ord considered
that sexual abstinence might produce many minor evils. "Most of
us," he wrote (_British Medical Journal_, Aug. 2, 1884) "have, no
doubt, been consulted by men, chaste in act, who are tormented by
sexual excitement. They tell one stories of long-continued local
excitement, followed by intense muscular weariness, or by severe
aching pain in the back and legs. In some I have had complaints
of swelling and stiffness in the legs, and of pains in the
joints, particularly in the knees;" he gives the case of a man
who suffered after prolonged chastity from inflammatory
conditions of knees and was only cured by marriage. Pearce
Gould, it may be added, finds that "excessive ungratified sexual
desire" is one of the causes of acute orchitis. Remondino ("Some
Observations on Continence as a Factor in Health and Disease,"
_Pacific Medical Journal_, Jan., 1900) records the case of a
gentleman of nearly seventy who, during the prolonged illness of
his wife, suffered from frequent and extreme priapism, causing
insomnia. He was very certain that his troubles were not due to
his continence, but all treatment failed and there were no
spontaneous emissions. At last Remondino advised him to, as he
expresses it, "imitate Solomon." He did so, and all the symptoms
at once disappeared. This case is of special interest, because
the symptoms were not accompanied by any conscious sexual desire.
It is no longer generally believed that sexual abstinence tends
to produce insanity, and the occasional cases in which prolonged
and intense sexual desire in young women is followed by insanity
will usually be found to occur on a basis of hereditary
degeneration. It is held by many authorities, however, that minor
mental troubles, of a more or less vague character, as well as
neurasthenia and hysteria, are by no means infrequently due to
sexual abstinence. Thus Freud, who has carefully studied
angstneurosis, the obsession of anxiety, finds that it is a
result of sexual abstinence, and may indeed be considered as a
vicarious form of such abstinence (Freud, _Sammlung Kleiner
Schriften zur Neurosenlehre_, 1906, pp. 76 et seq.).
The whole subject of sexual abstinence has been discussed at
length by Nyström, of Stockholm, in _Das Geschlechtsleben und
seine Gesetze_, Ch. III. He concludes that it is desirable that
continence should be preserved as long as possible in order to
strengthen the physical health and to develop the intelligence
and character. The doctrine of permanent sexual abstinence,
however, he regards as entirely false, except in the case of a
small number of religious or philosophic persons. "Complete
abstinence during a long period of years cannot be borne without
producing serious results both on the body and the mind....
Certainly, a young man should repress his sexual impulses as long
as possible and avoid everything that may artificially act as a
sexual stimulant. If, however, he has done so, and still suffers
from unsatisfied normal sexual desires, and if he sees no
possibility of marriage within a reasonable time, no one should
dare to say that he is committing a sin if, with mutual
understanding, he enters into sexual relations with a woman
friend, or forms temporary sexual relationships, provided, that
is, that he takes the honorable precaution of begetting no
children, unless his partner is entirely willing to become a
mother, and he is prepared to accept all the responsibilities of
fatherhood." In an article of later date ("Die Einwirkung der
Sexuellen Abstinenz auf die Gesundheit," _Sexual-Probleme_, July,
1908) Nyström vigorously sums up his views. He includes among the
results of sexual abstinence orchitis, frequent involuntary
seminal emissions, impotence, neurasthenia, depression, and a
great variety of nervous disturbances of vaguer character,
involving diminished power of work, limited enjoyment of life,
sleeplessness, nervousness, and pre-occupation with sexual
desires and imaginations. More especially there is heightened
sexual irritability with erections, or even seminal emissions on
the slightest occasion, as on gazing at an attractive woman or in
social intercourse with her, or in the presence of works of art
representing naked figures. Nyström has had the opportunity of
investigating and recording ninety cases of persons who have
presented these and similar symptoms as the result, he believes,
of sexual abstinence. He has published some of these cases
(_Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, Oct., 1908), but it may be
added that Rohleder ("Die Abstinentia Sexualis," ib., Nov., 1908)
has criticized these cases, and doubts whether any of them are
conclusive. Rohleder believes that the bad results of sexual
abstinence are never permanent, and also that no anatomically
pathological states (such as orchitis) can be thereby produced.
But he considers, nevertheless, that even incomplete and
temporary sexual abstinence may produce fairly serious results,
and especially neurasthenic disturbances of various kinds, such
as nervous irritability, anxiety, depression, disinclination for
work; also diurnal emissions, premature ejaculations, and even a
state approaching satyriasis; and in women hysteria,
hystero-epilepsy, and nymphomaniacal manifestations; all these
symptoms may, however, he believes, be cured when the abstinence
ceases.
Many advocates of sexual abstinence have attached importance to
the fact that men of great genius have apparently been completely
continent throughout life. This is certainly true (see _ante_, p.
173). But this fact can scarcely be invoked as an argument in
favor of the advantages of sexual abstinence among the ordinary
population. J.F. Scott selects Jesus, Newton, Beethoven, and Kant
as "men of vigor and mental acumen who have lived chastely as
bachelors." It cannot, however, be said that Dr. Scott has been
happy in the four figures whom he has been able to select from
the whole history of human genius as examples of life-long sexual
abstinence. We know little with absolute certainty of Jesus, and
even if we reject the diagnosis which Professor Binet-Sanglé (in
his _Folie de Jesus_) has built up from a minute study of the
Gospels, there are many reasons why we should refrain from
emphasizing the example of his sexual abstinence; Newton, apart
from his stupendous genius in a special field, was an incomplete
and unsatisfactory human being who ultimately reached a condition
very like insanity; Beethoven was a thoroughly morbid and
diseased man, who led an intensely unhappy existence; Kant, from
first to last, was a feeble valetudinarian. It would probably be
difficult to find a healthy normal man who would voluntarily
accept the life led by any of these four, even as the price of
their fame. J.A. Godfrey (_Science of Sex_, pp. 139-147)
discusses at length the question whether sexual abstinence is
favorable to ordinary intellectual vigor, deciding that it is
not, and that we cannot argue from the occasional sexual
abstinence of men of genius, who are often abnormally
constituted, and physically below the average, to the normally
developed man. Sexual abstinence, it may be added, is by no means
always a favorable sign, even in men who stand intellectually
above the average. "I have not obtained the impression," remarks
Freud (_Sexual-Probleme_, March, 1908), "that sexual abstinence
is helpful to energetic and independent men of action or original
thinkers, to courageous liberators or reformers. The sexual
conduct of a man is often symbolic of his whole method of
reaction in the world. The man who energetically grasps the
object of his sexual desire may be trusted to show a similarly
relentless energy in the pursuit of other aims."
Many, though not all, who deny that prolonged sexual abstinence is
harmless, include women in this statement. There are some authorities
indeed who believe that, whether or not any conscious sexual desire is
present, sexual abstinence is less easily tolerated by women than by
men.[94]
Cabanis, in his famous and pioneering work, _Rapports du Physique
et du Moral_, said in 1802, that women not only bear sexual
excess more easily than men, but sexual privations with more
difficulty, and a cautious and experienced observer of to-day,
Löwenfeld (_Sexualleben und Nervenleiden_, 1899, p. 53), while
not considering that normal women bear sexual abstinence less
easily than men, adds that this is not the case with women of
neuropathic disposition, who suffer much more from this cause,
and either masturbate when sexual intercourse is impossible or
fall into hystero-neurasthenic states. Busch stated (_Das
Geschlechtsleben des Weibes_, 1839, vol. i, pp. 69, 71) that not
only is the working of the sexual functions in the organism
stronger in women than in men, but that the bad results of sexual
abstinence are more marked in women. Sir Benjamin Brodie said
long ago that the evils of continence to women are perhaps
greater than those of incontinence, and to-day Hammer (_Die
Gesundheitlichen Gefahren der Geschlechtlichen Enthaltsamkeit_,
1904) states that, so far as reasons of health are concerned,
sexual abstinence is no more to be recommended to women than to
men. Nyström is of the same opinion, though he thinks that women
bear sexual abstinence better than men, and has discussed this
special question at length in a section of his _Geschlechtsleben
und seine Gesetze_. He agrees with the experienced Erb that a
large number of completely chaste women of high character, and
possessing distinguished qualities of mind and heart, are more or
less disordered through their sexual abstinence; this is
specially often the case with women married to impotent men,
though it is frequently not until they approach the age of
thirty, Nyström remarks, that women definitely realize their
sexual needs.
A great many women who are healthy, chaste, and modest, feel at
times such powerful sexual desire that they can scarcely resist
the temptation to go into the street and solicit the first man
they meet. Not a few such women, often of good breeding, do
actually offer themselves to men with whom they may have perhaps
only the slightest acquaintance. Routh records such cases
(_British Gynæcological Journal_, Feb., 1887), and most men have
met with them at some time. When a woman of high moral character
and strong passions is subjected for a very long period to the
perpetual strain of such sexual craving, especially if combined
with love for a definite individual, a chain of evil results,
physical and moral, may be set up, and numerous distinguished
physicians have recorded such cases, which terminated at once in
complete recovery as soon as the passion was gratified. Lauvergne
long since described a case. A fairly typical case of this kind
was reported in detail by Brachet (_De l'Hypochondrie_, p. 69)
and embodied by Griesinger in his classic work on "Mental
Pathology." It concerned a healthy married lady, twenty-six years
old, having three children. A visiting acquaintance completely
gained her affections, but she strenuously resisted the seducing
influence, and concealed the violent passion that he had aroused
in her. Various serious symptoms, physical and mental, slowly
began to appear, and she developed what seemed to be signs of
consumption. Six months' stay in the south of France produced no
improvement, either in the bodily or mental symptoms. On
returning home she became still worse. Then she again met the
object of her passion, succumbed, abandoned her husband and
children, and fled with him. Six months later she was scarcely
recognizable; beauty, freshness and plumpness had taken the place
of emaciation; while the symptoms of consumption and all other
troubles had entirely disappeared. A somewhat similar case is
recorded by Camill Lederer, of Vienna (_Monatsschrift für
Harnkrankheiten und Sexuelle Hygiene_, 1906, Heft 3). A widow, a
few months after her husband's death, began to cough, with
symptoms of bronchial catarrh, but no definite signs of lung
disease. Treatment and change of climate proved entirely
unavailing to effect a cure. Two years later, as no signs of
disease had appeared in the lungs, though the symptoms continued,
she married again. Within a very few weeks all symptoms had
disappeared, and she was entirely fresh and well.
Numerous distinguished gynæcologists have recorded their belief
that sexual excitement is a remedy for various disorders of the
sexual system in women, and that abstinence is a cause of such
disorders. Matthews Duncan said that sexual excitement is the
only remedy for amenorrhoea; "the only emmenagogue medicine that
I know of," he wrote (_Medical Times_, Feb. 2, 1884), "is not to
be found in the Pharmacopoeia: it is erotic excitement. Of the
value of erotic excitement there is no doubt." Anstie, in his
work on _Neuralgia_, refers to the beneficial effect of sexual
intercourse on dysmenorrhoea, remarking that the necessity of the
full natural exercise of the sexual function is shown by the
great improvement in such cases after marriage, and especially
after childbirth. (It may be remarked that not all authorities
find dysmenorrhoea benefited by marriage, and some consider that
the disease is often thereby aggravated; see, e.g., Wythe Cook,
_American Journal Obstetrics_, Dec., 1893.) The distinguished
gynæcologist, Tilt, at a somewhat earlier date (_On Uterine and
Ovarian Inflammation_, 1862, p. 309), insisted on the evil
results of sexual abstinence in producing ovarian irritation, and
perhaps subacute ovaritis, remarking that this was specially
pronounced in young widows, and in prostitutes placed in
penitentiaries. Intense desire, he pointed out, determines
organic movements resembling those required for the gratification
of the desire. These burning desires, which can only be quenched
by their legitimate satisfaction, are still further heightened by
the erotic influence of thoughts, books, pictures, music, which
are often even more sexually stimulating than social intercourse
with men, but the excitement thus produced is not relieved by
that natural collapse which should follow a state of vital
turgescence. After referring to the biological facts which show
the effect of psychic influences on the formative powers of the
ovario-uterine organs in animals, Tilt continues: "I may fairly
infer that similar incitements on the mind of females may have a
stimulating effect on the organs of ovulation. I have frequently
known menstruation to be irregular, profuse, or abnormal in type
during courtship in women in whom nothing similar had previously
occurred, and that this protracted the treatment of chronic
ovaritis and of uterine inflammation." Bonnifield, of Cincinnati
(_Medical Standard_, Dec., 1896), considers that unsatisfied
sexual desire is an important cause of catarrhal endometritis. It
is well known that uterine fibroids bear a definite relation to
organic sexual activity, and that sexual abstinence, more
especially the long-continued deprivation of pregnancy, is a very
important cause of the disease. This is well shown by an analysis
by A.E. Giles (_Lancet_, March 2, 1907) of one hundred and fifty
cases. As many as fifty-six of these cases, more than a third,
were unmarried women, though nearly all were over thirty years of
age. Of the ninety-four married women, thirty-four had never been
pregnant; of those who had been pregnant, thirty-six had not been
so for at least ten years. Thus eighty-four per cent, had either
not been pregnant at all, or had had no pregnancy for at least
ten years. It is, therefore, evident that deprivation of sexual
function, whether or not involving abstinence from sexual
intercourse, is an important cause of uterine fibroid tumors.
Balls-Headley, of Victoria (_Evolution of the Diseases of Women_,
1894, and "Etiology of Diseases of Female Genital Organs,"
Allbutt and Playfair, _System of Gynæcology_,) believes that
unsatisfied sexual desire is a factor in very many disorders of
the sexual organs in women. "My views," he writes in a private
letter, "are founded on a really special gynæcological practice
of twenty years, during which I have myself taken about seven
thousand most careful records. The normal woman is sexually
well-formed and her sexual feelings require satisfaction in the
direction of the production of the next generation, but under the
restrictive and now especially abnormal conditions of
civilization some women undergo hereditary atrophy, and the
uterus and sexual feelings are feeble; in others of good average
local development the feeling is in restraint; in others the
feelings, as well as the organs, are strong, and if normal use be
withheld evils ensue. Bearing in mind these varieties of
congenital development in relation to the respective condition of
virginity, or sterile or parous married life, the mode of
occurrence and of progress of disease grows on the physician's
mind, and there is no more occasion for bewilderment than to the
mathematician studying conic sections, when his knowledge has
grown from the basis of the science. The problem is suggested:
Has a crowd of unassociated diseases fallen as through a sieve on
woman, or have these affections almost necessarily ensued from
the circumstances of her unnatural environment?" It may be added
that Kisch (_Sexual Life of Woman_), while protesting against any
exaggerated estimate of the effects of sexual abstinence,
considers that in women it may result, not only in numerous local
disorders, but also in nervous disturbance, hysteria, and even
insanity, while in neurasthenic women "regulated sexual
intercourse has an actively beneficial effect which is often
striking."
It is important to remark that the evil results of sexual
abstinence in women, in the opinion of many of those who insist
upon their importance, are by no means merely due to unsatisfied
sexual desire. They may be pronounced even when the woman herself
has not the slightest consciousness of sexual needs. This was
clearly pointed out forty years ago by the sagacious Anstie (_op.
cit._) In women, especially, he remarks, "a certain restless
hyperactivity of mind, and perhaps of body also, seems to be the
expression of Nature's unconscious resentment of the _neglect of
sexual functions_." Such women, he adds, have kept themselves
free from masturbation "at the expense of a perpetual and almost
fierce activity of mind and muscle." Anstie had found that some
of the worst cases of the form of nervosity and neurasthenia
which he termed "spinal irritation," often accompanied by
irritable stomach and anæmia, get well on marriage. "There can be
no question," he continues, "that a very large proportion of
these cases in single women (who form by far the greater number
of subjects of spinal irritation) are due to this conscious or
unconscious irritation kept up by an unsatisfied sexual want. It
is certain that very many young persons (women more especially)
are tormented by the irritability of the sexual organs without
having the least consciousness of sexual desire, and present the
sad spectacle of a _vie manquée_ without ever knowing the true
source of the misery which incapacitates them for all the active
duties of life. It is a singular fact that in occasional
instances one may even see two sisters, inheriting the same kind
of nervous organization, both tormented with the symptoms of
spinal irritation and both probably suffering from repressed
sexual functions, but of whom one shall be pure-minded and
entirely unconscious of the real source of her troubles, while
the other is a victim to conscious and fruitless sexual
irritation." In this matter Anstie may be regarded as a
forerunner of Freud, who has developed with great subtlety and
analytic power the doctrine of the transformation of repressed
sexual instinct in women into morbid forms. He considers that the
nervosity of to-day is largely due to the injurious action on the
sexual life of that repression of natural instincts on which our
civilization is built up. (Perhaps the clearest brief statement
of Freud's views on the matter is to be found in a very
suggestive article, "Die 'Kulturelle' Sexualmoral und die Moderne
Nervosität," in _Sexual-Probleme_, March, 1908, reprinted in the
second series of Freud's _Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur
Neurosenlehre_, 1909). We possess the aptitude, he says, of
sublimating and transforming our sexual activities into other
activities of a psychically related character, but non-sexual.
This process cannot, however, be carried out to an unlimited
extent any more than can the conversion of heat into mechanical
work in our machines. A certain amount of direct sexual
satisfaction is for most organizations indispensable, and the
renunciation of this individually varying amount is punished by
manifestations which we are compelled to regard as morbid. The
process of sublimation, under the influence of civilization,
leads both to sexual perversions and to psycho-neuroses. These
two conditions are closely related, as Freud views the process of
their development; they stand to each other as positive and
negative, sexual perversions being the positive pole and
psycho-neuroses the negative. It often happens, he remarks, that
a brother may be sexually perverse, while his sister, with a
weaker sexual temperament, is a neurotic whose symptoms are a
transformation of her brother's perversion; while in many
families the men are immoral, the women pure and refined but
highly nervous. In the case of women who have no defect of sexual
impulse there is yet the same pressure of civilized morality
pushing them into neurotic states. It is a terribly serious
injustice, Freud remarks, that the civilized standard of sexual
life is the same for all persons, because though some, by their
organization, may easily accept it, for others it involves the
most difficult psychic sacrifices. The unmarried girl, who has
become nervously weak, cannot be advised to seek relief in
marriage, for she must be strong in order to "bear" marriage,
while we urge a man on no account to marry a girl who is not
strong. The married woman who has experienced the deceptions of
marriage has usually no way of relief left but by abandoning her
virtue. "The more strenuously she has been educated, and the more
completely she has been subjected to the demands of civilization,
the more she fears this way of escape, and in the conflict
between her desires and her sense of duty, she also seeks
refuge--in neurosis. Nothing protects her virtue so surely as
disease." Taking a still wider view of the influence of the
narrow "civilized" conception of sexual morality on women, Freud
finds that it is not limited to the production of neurotic
conditions; it affects the whole intellectual aptitude of women.
Their education denies them any occupation with sexual problems,
although such problems are so full of interest to them, for it
inculcates the ancient prejudice that any curiosity in such
matters is unwomanly and a proof of wicked inclinations. They are
thus terrified from thinking, and knowledge is deprived of worth.
The prohibition to think extends, automatically and inevitably,
far beyond the sexual sphere. "I do not believe," Freud
concludes, "that there is any opposition between intellectual
work and sexual activity such as was supposed by Möbius. I am of
opinion that the unquestionable fact of the intellectual
inferiority of so many women is due to the inhibition of thought
imposed upon them for the purpose of sexual repression."
It is only of recent years that this problem has been realized
and faced, though solitary thinkers, like Hinton, have been
keenly conscious of its existence; for "sorrowing virtue," as
Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox puts it, "is more ashamed of its woes
than unhappy sin, because the world has tears for the latter and
only ridicule for the former." "It is an almost cynical trait of
our age," Hellpach wrote a few years ago, "that it is constantly
discussing the theme of prostitution, of police control, of the
age of consent, of the 'white slavery,' and passes over the moral
struggle of woman's soul without an attempt to answer her burning
questions."
On the other hand we find medical writers not only asserting with much
moral fervor that sexual intercourse outside marriage is always and
altogether unnecessary, but declaring, moreover, the harmlessness or even
the advantages of sexual abstinence.
Ribbing, the Swedish professor, in his _Hygiène Sexuelle_,
advocates sexual abstinence outside marriage, and asserts its
harmlessness. Gilles de la Tourette, Féré, and Augagneur in
France agree. In Germany Fürbringer (Senator and Kaminer, _Health
and Disease in Relation to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 228) asserts
that continence is possible and necessary, though admitting that
it may, however, mean serious mischief in exceptional cases.
Eulenburg (_Sexuale Neuropathie_, p. 14) doubts whether anyone,
who otherwise lived a reasonable life, ever became ill, or more
precisely neurasthenic, through sexual abstinence. Hegar,
replying to the arguments of Bebel in his well-known book on
women, denies that sexual abstinence can ever produce satyriasis
or nymphomania. Näcke, who has frequently discussed the problem
of sexual abstinence (e.g., _Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie_,
1903, Heft 1, and _Sexual-Probleme_, June, 1908), maintains that
sexual abstinence can, at most, produce rare and slight
unfavorable results, and that it is no more likely to produce
insanity, even in predisposed individuals, than are the opposite
extremes of sexual excess and masturbation. He adds that, so far
as his own observations are concerned, the patients in asylums
suffer scarcely at all from their compulsory sexual abstinence.
It is in England, however, that the virtues of sexual abstinence
have been most loudly and emphatically proclaimed, sometimes
indeed with considerable lack of cautious qualification. Acton,
in his _Reproductive Organs_, sets forth the traditional English
view, as well as Beale in his _Morality and the Moral Question_.
A more distinguished representative of the same view was Paget,
who, in his lecture on "Sexual Hypochondriasis," coupled sexual
intercourse with "theft or lying." Sir William Gowers (_Syphilis
and the Nervous System_, 1892, p. 126) also proclaims the
advantages of "unbroken chastity," more especially as a method of
avoiding syphilis. He is not hopeful, however, even as regards
his own remedy, for he adds: "We can trace small ground for hope
that the disease will thus be materially reduced." He would
still, however, preach chastity to the individual, and he does so
with all the ascetic ardor of a mediæval monk. "With all the
force that any knowledge I possess, and any authority I have, can
give, I assert that no man ever yet was in the slightest degree
or way the worse for continence or better for incontinence. From
the latter all are worse morally; a clear majority are worse
physically; and in no small number the result is, and ever will
be, utter physical shipwreck on one of the many rocks, sharp,
jagged-edged, which beset the way, or on one of the many beds of
festering slime which no care can possibly avoid." In America the
same view widely prevails, and Dr. J.F. Scott, in his
_Sexual-Instinct_ (second edition, 1908, Ch. III), argues very
vigorously and at great length in favor of sexual abstinence. He
will not even admit that there are two sides to the question,
though if that were the case, the length and the energy of his
arguments would be unnecessary.
Among medical authorities who have discussed the question of
sexual abstinence at length it is not, indeed, usually possible
to find such unqualified opinions in its favor as those I have
quoted. There can be no doubt, however, that a large proportion
of physicians, not excluding prominent and distinguished
authorities, when casually confronted with the question whether
sexual abstinence is harmless, will at once adopt the obvious
path of least resistance and reply: Yes. In only a few cases will
they even make any qualification of this affirmative answer. This
tendency is very well illustrated by an inquiry made by Dr.
Ludwig Jacobsohn, of St. Petersburgh ("Die Sexuelle
Enthaltsamkeit im Lichte der Medizin," _St. Petersburger
Medicinische Wochenschrift_, March 17, 1907). He wrote to over
two hundred distinguished Russian and German professors of
physiology, neurology, psychiatry, etc., asking them if they
regarded sexual abstinence as harmless. The majority returned no
answer; eleven Russian and twenty-eight Germans replied, but four
of them merely said that "they had no personal experience," etc.;
there thus remained thirty-five. Of these E. Pflüger, of Bonn,
was skeptical of the advantage of any propaganda of abstinence:
"if all the authorities in the world declared the harmlessness of
abstinence that would have no influence on youth. Forces are here
in play that break through all obstacles." The harmlessness of
abstinence was affirmed by Kräpelin, Cramer, Gärtner, Tuczek,
Schottelius, Gaffky, Finkler, Selenew, Lassar, Seifert, Gruber;
the last, however, added that he knew very few abstinent young
men, and himself only considered abstinence good before full
development, and intercourse not dangerous in moderation even
before then. Brieger knew cases of abstinence without harmful
results, but himself thought that no general opinion could be
given. Jürgensen said that abstinence _in itself_ is not harmful,
but that in some cases intercourse exerts a more beneficial
influence. Hoffmann said that abstinence is harmless, adding that
though it certainly leads to masturbation, that is better than
gonorrhoea, to say nothing of syphilis, and is easily kept within
bounds. Strümpell replied that sexual abstinence is harmless, and
indirectly useful as preserving from the risk of venereal
disease, but that sexual intercourse, being normal, is always
more desirable. Hensen said that abstinence is not to be
unconditionally approved. Rumpf replied that abstinence was not
harmful for most before the age of thirty, but after that age
there was a tendency to mental obsessions, and marriage should
take place at twenty-five. Leyden also considered abstinence
harmless until towards thirty, when it leads to psychic
anomalies, especially states of anxiety, and a certain
affectation. Hein replied that abstinence is harmless for most,
but in some leads to hysterical manifestations and indirectly to
bad results from masturbation, while for the normal man
abstinence cannot be directly beneficial, since intercourse is
natural. Grützner thought that abstinence is almost never
harmful. Nescheda said it is harmless in itself, but harmful in
so far as it leads to unnatural modes of gratification. Neisser
believes that more prolonged abstinence than is now usual would
be beneficial, but admitted the sexual excitations of our
civilization; he added that of course he saw no harm for healthy
men in intercourse. Hoche replied that abstinence is quite
harmless in normal persons, but not always so in abnormal
persons. Weber thought it had a useful influence in increasing
will-power. Tarnowsky said it is good in early manhood, but
likely to be unfavorable after twenty-five. Orlow replied that,
especially in youth, it is harmless, and a man should be as
chaste as his wife. Popow said that abstinence is good at all
ages and preserves the energy. Blumenau said that in adult age
abstinence is neither normal nor beneficial, and generally leads
to masturbation, though not generally to nervous disorders; but
that even masturbation is better than syphilis. Tschiriew saw no
harm in abstinence up to thirty, and thought sexual weakness more
likely to follow excess than abstinence. Tschish regarded
abstinence as beneficial rather than harmful up to twenty-five or
twenty-eight, but thought it difficult to decide after that age
when nervous alterations seem to be caused. Darkschewitcz
regarded abstinence as harmless up to twenty-five. Fränkel said
it was harmless for most, but that for a considerable proportion
of people intercourse is a necessity. Erb's opinion is regarded
by Jacobsohn as standing alone; he placed the age below which
abstinence is harmless at twenty; after that age he regarded it
as injurious to health, seriously impeding work and capacity,
while in neurotic persons it leads to still more serious results.
Jacobsohn concludes that the general opinion of those answering
the inquiry may thus be expressed: "Youth should be abstinent.
Abstinence can in no way injure them; on the contrary, it is
beneficial. If our young people will remain abstinent and avoid
extra-conjugal intercourse they will maintain a high ideal of
love and preserve themselves from venereal diseases."
The harmlessness of sexual abstinence was likewise affirmed in
America in a resolution passed by the American Medical
Association in 1906. The proposition thus formally accepted was
thus worded: "Continence is not incompatible with health." It
ought to be generally realized that abstract propositions of this
kind are worthless, because they mean nothing. Every sane person,
when confronted by the demand to boldly affirm or deny the
proposition, "Continence is not incompatible with health," is
bound to affirm it. He might firmly believe that continence is
incompatible with the health of most people, and that prolonged
continence is incompatible with anyone's health, and yet, if he
is to be honest in the use of language, it would be impossible
for him to deny the vague and abstract proposition that
"Continence is not incompatible with health." Such propositions
are therefore not only without value, but actually misleading.
It is obvious that the more extreme and unqualified opinions in
favor of sexual abstinence are based not on medical, but on what
the writers regard as moral considerations. Moreover, as the same
writers are usually equally emphatic in regard to the advantages
of sexual intercourse in marriage, it is clear that they have
committed themselves to a contradiction. The same act, as Näcke
rightly points out, cannot become good or bad according as it is
performed in or out of marriage. There is no magic efficacy in a
few words pronounced by a priest or a government official.
Remondino (loc. cit.) remarks that the authorities who have
committed themselves to declarations in favor of the
unconditional advantages of sexual abstinence tend to fall into
three errors: (1) they generalize unduly, instead of considering
each case individually, on its own merits; (2) they fail to
realize that human nature is influenced by highly mixed and
complex motives and cannot be assumed to be amenable only to
motives of abstract morality; (3) they ignore the great army of
masturbators and sexual perverts who make no complaint of sexual
suffering, but by maintaining a rigid sexual abstinence, so far
as normal relationships are concerned, gradually drift into
currents whence there is no return.
Between those who unconditionally affirm or deny the harmlessness of
sexual abstinence we find an intermediate party of authorities whose
opinions are more qualified. Many of those who occupy this more guarded
position are men whose opinions carry much weight, and it is probable that
with them rather than with the more extreme advocates on either side the
greater measure of reason lies. So complex a question as this cannot be
adequately investigated merely in the abstract, and settled by an
unqualified negative or affirmative. It is a matter in which every case
requires its own special and personal consideration.
"Where there is such a marked opposition of opinion truth is not
exclusively on one side," remarks Löwenfeld (_Sexualleben und
Nervenleiden_, second edition, p. 40). Sexual abstinence is
certainly often injurious to neuropathic persons. (This is now
believed by a large number of authorities, and was perhaps first
decisively stated by Krafft-Ebing, "Ueber Neurosen durch
Abstinenz," _Jahrbuch für Psychiatrie_, 1889, p. 1). Löwenfeld
finds no special proclivity to neurasthenia among the Catholic
clergy, and when it does occur, there is no reason to suppose a
sexual causation. "In healthy and not hereditarily neuropathic
men complete abstinence is possible without injury to the nervous
system." Injurious effects, he continues, when they appear,
seldom occur until between twenty-four and thirty-six years of
age, and even then are not usually serious enough to lead to a
visit to a doctor, consisting mainly in frequency of nocturnal
emissions, pain in testes or rectum, hyperæsthesia in the
presence of women or of sexual ideas. If, however, conditions
arise which specially stimulate the sexual emotions, neurasthenia
may be produced. Löwenfeld agrees with Freud and Gattel that the
neurosis of anxiety tends to occur in the abstinent, careful
examination showing that the abstinence is a factor in its
production in both sexes. It is common among young women married
to much older men, often appearing during the first years of
marriage. Under special circumstances, therefore, abstinence can
be injurious, but on the whole the difficulties due to such
abstinence are not severe, and they only exceptionally call forth
actual disturbance in the nervous or psychic spheres. Moll takes
a similar temperate and discriminating view. He regards sexual
abstinence before marriage as the ideal, but points out that we
must avoid any doctrinal extremes in preaching sexual abstinence,
for such preaching will merely lead to hypocrisy. Intercourse
with prostitutes, and the tendency to change a woman like a
garment, induce loss of sensitiveness to the spiritual and
personal element in woman, while the dangers of sexual abstinence
must no more be exaggerated than the dangers of sexual
intercourse (Moll, _Libido Sexualis_, 1898, vol. i, p. 848; id.,
_Konträre Sexualempfindung_, 1899, p. 588). Bloch also (in a
chapter on the question of sexual abstinence in his _Sexualleben
unserer Zeit_, 1908) takes a similar standpoint. He advocates
abstention during early life and temporary abstention in adult
life, such abstention being valuable, not only for the
conservation and transformation of energy, but also to emphasize
the fact that life contains other matters to strive for beyond
the ends of sex. Redlich (_Medizinische Klinik_, 1908, No. 7)
also, in a careful study of the medical aspects of the question,
takes an intermediate standpoint in relation to the relative
advantages and disadvantages of sexual abstinence. "We may say
that sexual abstinence is not a condition which must, under all
circumstances and at any price, be avoided, though it is true
that for the majority of healthy adult persons regular sexual
intercourse is advantageous, and sometimes is even to be
recommended."
It may be added that from the standpoint of Christian religious
morality this same attitude, between the extremes of either
party, recognizing the advantages of sexual abstinence, but not
insisting that they shall be purchased at any price, has also
found representation. Thus, in England, an Anglican clergyman,
the Rev. H. Northcote (_Christianity and Sex Problems_, pp. 58,
60) deals temperately and sympathetically with the difficulties
of sexual abstinence, and is by no means convinced that such
abstinence is always an unmixed advantage; while in Germany a
Catholic priest, Karl Jentsch (_Sexualethik, Sexualjustiz,
Sexualpolizei_, 1900) sets himself to oppose the rigorous and
unqualified assertions of Ribbing in favor of sexual abstinence.
Jentsch thus expresses what he conceives ought to be the attitude
of fathers, of public opinion, of the State and the Church
towards the young man in this matter: "Endeavor to be abstinent
until marriage. Many succeed in this. If you can succeed, it is
good. But, if you cannot succeed, it is unnecessary to cast
reproaches on yourself and to regard yourself as a scoundrel or a
lost sinner. Provided that you do not abandon yourself to mere
enjoyment or wantonness, but are content with what is necessary
to restore your peace of mind, self-possession, and cheerful
capacity for work, and also that you observe the precautions
which physicians or experienced friends impress upon you."
When we thus analyze and investigate the the three main streams of expert
opinions in regard to this question of sexual abstinence--the opinions in
favor of it, the opinions in opposition to it, and the opinions which take
an intermediate course--we can scarcely fail to conclude how
unsatisfactory the whole discussion is. The state of "sexual abstinence"
is a completely vague and indefinite state. The indefinite and even
meaningless character of the expression "sexual abstinence" is shown by
the frequency with which those who argue about it assume that it can, may,
or even must, involve masturbation. That fact alone largely deprives it of
value as morality and altogether as abstinence. At this point, indeed, we
reach the most fundamental criticism to which the conception of "sexual
abstinence" lies open. Rohleder, an experienced physician and a recognized
authority on questions of sexual pathology, has submitted the current
views on "sexual abstinence" to a searching criticism in a lengthy and
important paper.[95] He denies altogether that strict sexual abstinence
exists at all. "Sexual abstinence," he points out, in any strict scenes of
the term, must involve abstinence not merely from sexual intercourse but
from auto-erotic manifestations, from masturbation, from homosexual acts,
from all sexually perverse practices. It must further involve a permanent
abstention from indulgence in erotic imaginations and voluptuous reverie.
When, however, it is possible thus to render the whole psychic field a
_tabula rasa_ so far as sexual activity is concerned--and if it fails to
be so constantly and consistently there is no strict sexual
abstinence--then, Rohleder points out, we have to consider whether we are
not in presence of a case of sexual anæsthesia, of _anaphrodisia
sexualis_. That is a question which is rarely, if ever, faced by those who
discuss sexual abstinence. It is, however, an extremely pertinent
question, because, as Rohleder insists, if sexual anæsthesia exists the
question of sexual abstinence falls to the ground, for we can only
"abstain" from actions that are in our power. Complete sexual anæsthesia
is, however, so rare a state that it may be practically left out of
consideration, and as the sexual impulse, if it exists, must by
physiological necessity sometimes become active in some shape--even if
only, according to Freud's view, by transformation into some morbid
neurotic condition--we reach the conclusion that "sexual abstinence" is
strictly impossible. Rohleder has met with a few cases in which there
seemed to him no escape from the conclusion that sexual abstinence
existed, but in all of these he subsequently found that he was mistaken,
usually owing to the practice of masturbation, which he believes to be
extremely common and very frequently accompanied by a persistent attempt
to deceive the physician concerning its existence. The only kind of
"sexual abstinence" that exists is a partial and temporary abstinence.
Instead of saying, as some say, "Permanent abstinence is unnatural and
cannot exist without physical and mental injury," we ought to say,
Rohleder believes, "Permanent abstinence is unnatural and has never
existed."
It is impossible not to feel as we contemplate this chaotic mass of
opinions, that the whole discussion is revolving round a purely negative
idea, and that fundamental fact is responsible for what at first seem to
be startling conflicts of statement. If indeed we were to eliminate what
is commonly regarded as the religious and moral aspect of the matter--an
aspect, be it remembered, which has no bearing on the essential natural
facts of the question--we cannot fail to perceive that these ostentatious
differences of conviction would be reduced within very narrow and trifling
limits.
We cannot strictly coordinate the impulse of reproduction with the impulse
of nutrition. There are very important differences between them, more
especially the fundamental difference that while the satisfaction of the
one impulse is absolutely necessary both to the life of the individual and
of the race, the satisfaction of the other is absolutely necessary only to
the life of the race. But when we reduce this question to one of "sexual
abstinence" we are obviously placing it on the same basis as that of
abstinence from food, that is to say at the very opposite pole to which we
place it when (as in the previous chapter) we consider it from the point
of view of asceticism and chastity. It thus comes about that on this
negative basis there really is an interesting analogy between nutritive
abstinence, though necessarily only maintained incompletely and for a
short time, and sexual abstinence, maintained more completely and for a
longer time. A patient of Janet's seems to bring out clearly this
resemblance. Nadia, whom Janet was able to study during five years, was a
young woman of twenty-seven, healthy and intelligent, not suffering from
hysteria nor from anorexia, for she had a normal appetite. But she had an
idea; she was anxious to be slim and to attain this end she cut down her
meals to the smallest size, merely a little soup and a few eggs. She
suffered much from the abstinence she thus imposed on herself, and was
always hungry, though sometimes her hunger was masked by the inevitable
stomach trouble caused by so long a persistence in this _régime_. At
times, indeed, she had been so hungry that she had devoured greedily
whatever she could lay her hands on, and not infrequently she could not
resist the temptation to eat a few biscuits in secret. Such actions caused
her horrible remorse, but, all the same, she would be guilty of them
again. She realized the great efforts demanded by her way of life, and
indeed looked upon herself as a heroine for resisting so long.
"Sometimes," she told Janet, "I passed whole hours in thinking about food,
I was so hungry. I swallowed my saliva, I bit my handkerchief, I rolled
on the ground, I wanted to eat so badly. I searched books for descriptions
of meals and feasts, I tried to deceive my hunger by imagining that I too
was enjoying all these good things. I was really famished, and in spite of
a few weaknesses for biscuits I know that I showed much courage."[96]
Nadia's motive idea, that she wished to be slim, corresponds to the
abstinent man's idea that he wishes to be "moral," and only differs from
it by having the advantage of being somewhat more positive and personal,
for the idea of the person who wishes to avoid sexual indulgence because
it is "not right" is often not merely negative but impersonal and imposed
by the social and religious environment. Nadia's occasional outbursts of
reckless greediness correspond to the sudden impulses to resort to
prostitution, and her secret weaknesses for biscuits, followed by keen
remorse, to lapses into the habit of masturbation. Her fits of struggling
and rolling on the ground are precisely like the outbursts of futile
desire which occasionally occur to young abstinent men and women in health
and strength. The absorption in thoughts about meals and in literary
descriptions of meals is clearly analogous to the abstinent man's
absorption in wanton thoughts and erotic books. Finally, Nadia's
conviction that she is a heroine corresponds exactly to the attitude of
self-righteousness which often marks the sexually abstinent.
If we turn to Freud's penetrating and suggestive study of the problem of
sexual abstinence in relation to "civilized" sexual morality, we find
that, though he makes no reference to the analogy with abstinence from
food, his words would for the most part have an equal application to both
cases. "The task of subduing so powerful an instinct as the sexual
impulse, otherwise than by giving it satisfaction," he writes, "is one
which may employ the whole strength of a man. Subjugation through
sublimation, by guiding the sexual forces into higher civilizational
paths, may succeed with a minority, and even with these only for a time,
least easily during the years of ardent youthful energy. Most others
become neurotic or otherwise come to grief. Experience shows that the
majority of people constituting our society are constitutionally unequal
to the task of abstinence. We say, indeed, that the struggle with this
powerful impulse and the emphasis the struggle involves on the ethical and
æsthetic forces in the soul's life 'steels' the character, and for a few
favorably organized natures this is true; it must also be acknowledged
that the differentiation of individual character so marked in our time
only becomes possible through sexual limitations. But in by far the
majority of cases the struggle with sensuality uses up the available
energy of character, and this at the very time when the young man needs
all his strength in order to win his place in the world."[97]
When we have put the problem on this negative basis of abstinence it is
difficult to see how we can dispute the justice of Freud's conclusions.
They hold good equally for abstinence from food and abstinence from sexual
love. When we have placed the problem on a more positive basis, and are
able to invoke the more active and fruitful motives of asceticism and
chastity this unfortunate fight against a natural impulse is abolished. If
chastity is an ideal of the harmonious play of all the organic impulses of
the soul and body, if asceticism, properly understood, is the athletic
striving for a worthy object which causes, for the time, an indifference
to the gratification of sexual impulses, we are on wholesome and natural
ground, and there is no waste of energy in fruitless striving for a
negative end, whether imposed artificially from without, as it usually is,
or voluntarily chosen by the individual himself.
For there is really no complete analogy between sexual desire and hunger,
between abstinence from sexual relations and abstinence from food. When we
put them both on the basis of abstinence we put them on a basis which
covers the impulse for food but only half covers the impulse for sexual
love. We confer no pleasure and no service on our food when we eat it. But
the half of sexual love, perhaps the most important and ennobling half,
lies in what we give and not in what we take. To reduce this question to
the low level of abstinence, is not only to centre it in a merely negative
denial but to make it a solely self-regarding question. Instead of asking:
How can I bring joy and strength to another? we only ask: How can I
preserve my empty virtue?
Therefore it is that from whatever aspect we consider the
question,--whether in view of the flagrant contradiction between the
authorities who have discussed this question, or of the illegitimate
mingling here of moral and physiological considerations, or of the merely
negative and indeed unnatural character of the "virtue" thus set up, or of
the failure involved to grasp the ennoblingly altruistic and mutual side
of sexual love,--from whatever aspect we approach the problem of "sexual
abstinence" we ought only to agree to do so under protest.
If we thus decide to approach it, and if we have reached the
conviction--which, in view of all the evidence we can scarcely
escape--that, while sexual abstinence in so far as it may be recognized as
possible is not incompatible with health, there are yet many adults for
whom it is harmful, and a very much larger number for whom when prolonged
it is undesirable, we encounter a serious problem. It is a problem which
confronts any person, and especially the physician, who may be called upon
to give professional advice to his fellows on this matter. If sexual
relationships are sometimes desirable for unmarried persons, or for
married persons who, for any reason, are debarred from conjugal union, is
a physician justified in recommending such sexual relationships to his
patient? This is a question that has frequently been debated and decided
in opposing senses.
Various distinguished physicians, especially in Germany, have
proclaimed the duty of the doctor to recommend sexual intercourse
to his patient whenever he considers it desirable. Gyurkovechky,
for instance, has fully discussed this question, and answered it
in the affirmative. Nyström (_Sexual-Probleme_, July, 1908, p.
413) states that it is the physician's duty, in some cases of
sexual weakness, when all other methods of treatment have failed,
to recommend sexual intercourse as the best remedy. Dr. Max
Marcuse stands out as a conspicuous advocate of the unconditional
duty of the physician to advocate sexual intercourse in some
cases, both to men and to women, and has on many occasions argued
in this sense (e.g., _Darf der Arzt zum Ausserehelichen
Geschlechtsverkehr raten?_ 1904). Marcuse is strongly of opinion
that a physician who, allowing himself to be influenced by moral,
sociological, or other considerations, neglects to recommend
sexual intercourse when he considers it desirable for the
patient's health, is unworthy of his profession, and should
either give up medicine or send his patients to other doctors.
This attitude, though not usually so emphatically stated, seems
to be widely accepted. Lederer goes even further when he states
(_Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und Sexuelle Hygiene_, 1906,
Heft 3) that it is the physician's duty in the case of a woman
who is suffering from her husband's impotence, to advise her to
have intercourse with another man, adding that "whether she does
so with her husband's consent is no affair of the physician's,
for he is not the guardian of morality, but the guardian of
health." The physicians who publicly take this attitude are,
however, a small minority. In England, so far as I am aware, no
physician of eminence has openly proclaimed the duty of the
doctor to advise sexual intercourse outside marriage, although,
it is scarcely necessary to add, in England, as elsewhere, it
happens that doctors, including women doctors, from time to time
privately point out to their unmarried and even married patients,
that sexual intercourse would probably be beneficial.
The duty of the physician to recommend sexual intercourse has
been denied as emphatically as it has been affirmed. Thus
Eulenburg (_Sexuale Neuropathie_, p. 43), would by no means
advise extra-conjugal relations to his patient; "such advice is
quite outside the physician's competence." It is, of course,
denied by those who regard sexual abstinence as always harmless,
if not beneficial. But it is also denied by many who consider
that, under some circumstances, sexual intercourse would do good.
Moll has especially, and on many occasions, discussed the duty of
the physician in relation to the question of advising sexual
intercourse outside marriage (e.g., in his comprehensive work,
_Aerztliche Ethik_, 1902; also _Zeitschrift für Aerztliche
Fortbildung_, 1905, Nos. 12-15; _Mutterschutz_, 1905, Heft 3;
_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. ii, Heft 8). At the outset
Moll had been disposed to assert the right of the physician to
recommend sexual intercourse under some circumstances; "so long
as marriage is unduly delayed and sexual intercourse outside
marriage exists," he wrote (_Die Conträre Sexualempfindung_,
second edition, p. 287), "so long, I think, we may use such
intercourse therapeutically, provided that the rights of no third
person (husband or wife) are injured." In all his later writings,
however, Moll ranges himself clearly and decisively on the
opposite side. He considers that the physician has no right to
overlook the possible results of his advice in inflicting
venereal disease, or, in the case of a woman, pregnancy, on his
patient, and he believes that these serious results are far more
likely to happen than is always admitted by those who defend the
legitimacy of such advice. Nor will Moll admit that the physician
is entitled to overlook the moral aspects of the question. A
physician may know that a poor man could obtain many things good
for his health by stealing, but he cannot advise him to steal.
Moll takes the case of a Catholic priest who is suffering from
neurasthenia due to sexual abstinence. Even although the
physician feels certain that the priest may be able to avoid all
the risks of disease as well as of publicity, he is not entitled
to urge him to sexual intercourse. He has to remember that in
thus causing a priest to break his vows of chastity he may induce
a mental conflict and a bitter remorse which may lead to the
worst results, even on his patient's physical health. Similar
results, Moll remarks, may follow such advice when given to a
married man or woman, to say nothing of possible divorce
proceedings and accompanying evils.
Rohleder (_Vorlesungen über Geschlechtstrieb und Gesamtes
Geschlechtsleben der Menschen_) adopts a somewhat qualified
attitude in this matter. As a general rule he is decidedly
against recommending sexual intercourse outside marriage to those
who are suffering from partial or temporary abstinence (the only
form of abstinence he recognizes), partly on the ground that the
evils of abstinence are not serious or permanent, and partly
because the patient is fairly certain to exercise his own
judgment in the matter. But in some classes of cases he
recommends such intercourse, and notably to bisexual persons, on
the ground that he is thus preserving his patient from the
criminal risks of homosexual practices.
It seems to me that there should be no doubt whatever as to the correct
professional attitude of the physician in relation to this question of
advice concerning sexual intercourse. The physician is never entitled to
advise his patient to adopt sexual intercourse outside marriage nor any
method of relief which is commonly regarded as illegitimate. It is said
that the physician has nothing to do with considerations of conventional
morality. If he considers that champagne would be good for a poor patient
he ought to recommend him to take champagne; he is not called upon to
consider whether the patient will beg, borrow, or steal the champagne.
But, after all, even if that be admitted, it must still be said that the
physician knows that the champagne, however obtained, is not likely to be
poisonous. When, however, he prescribes sexual intercourse, with the same
lofty indifference to practical considerations, he has no such knowledge.
In giving such a prescription the physician has in fact not the slightest
knowledge of what he may be prescribing. He may be giving his patient a
venereal disease; he may be giving the anxieties and responsibilities of
an illegitimate child; the prescriber is quite in the dark. He is in the
same position as if he had prescribed a quack medicine of which the
composition was unknown to him, with the added disadvantage that the
medicine may turn out to be far more potently explosive than is the case
with the usually innocuous patent medicine. The utmost that a physician
can properly permit himself to do is to put the case impartially before
his patient and to present to him all the risks. The solution must be for
the patient himself to work out, as best he can, for it involves social
and other considerations which, while they are indeed by no means outside
the sphere of medicine, are certainly entirely outside the control of the
individual private practitioner of medicine.
Moll also is of opinion that this impartial presentation of the
case for and against sexual intercourse corresponds to the
physician's duty in the matter. It is, indeed, a duty which can
scarcely be escaped by the physician in many cases. Moll points
out that it can by no means be assimilated, as some have
supposed, with the recommendation of sexual intercourse. It is,
on the contrary, he remarks, much more analogous to the
physician's duty in reference to operations. He puts before the
patient the nature of the operation, its advantages and its
risks, but he leaves it to the patient's judgment to accept or
reject the operation. Lewitt also (_Geschlechtliche
Enthaltsamkeit und Gesundheitsstörungen_, 1905), after discussing
the various opinions on this question, comes to the conclusion
that the physician, if he thinks that intercourse outside
marriage might be beneficial, should explain the difficulties and
leave the patient himself to decide.
There is another reason why, having regard to the prevailing moral
opinions at all events among the middle classes, a physician should
refrain from advising extra-conjugal intercourse: he places himself in a
false relation to his social environment. He is recommending a remedy the
nature of which he could not publicly avow, and so destroying the public
confidence in himself. The only physician who is morally entitled to
advise his patients to enter into extra-conjugal relationships is one who
openly acknowledges that he is prepared to give such advice. The doctor
who is openly working for social reform has perhaps won the moral right to
give advice in accordance with the tendency of his public activity, but
even then his advice may be very dubiously judicious, and he would be
better advised to confine his efforts at social reform to his public
activities. The voice of the physician, as Professor Max Flesch of
Frankfort observes, is more and more heard in the development and new
growth of social institutions; he is a natural leaders in such movements,
and proposals for reform properly come from him. "But," as Flesch
continues, "publicly to accept the excellence of existing institutions and
in the privacy of the consulting-room to give advice which assumes the
imperfection of those institutions is illogical and confusing. It is the
physician's business to give advice which is in accordance with the
interests of the community as a whole, and those interests require that
sexual relationships should be entered into between healthy men and women
who are able and willing to accept the results of their union. That should
be the physician's rule of conduct. Only so can he become, what to-day he
is often proclaimed to be, the leader of the nation."[98] This view is
not, as we see, entirely in accord with that which assumes that the
physician's duty is solely and entirely to his patient, without regard to
the bearing of his advice on social conduct. The patient's interests are
primary, but they are not entitled to be placed in antagonism to the
interests of society. The advice given by the wise physician must always
be in harmony with the social and moral tone of his age. Thus it is that
the tendency among the younger generation of physicians to-day to take an
active interest in raising that tone and in promoting social reform--a
tendency which exists not only in Germany where such interests have long
been acute, but also in so conservative a land as England--is full of
promise for the future.
The physician is usually content to consider his duty to his patient in
relationship to sexual abstinence as sufficiently fulfilled when he
attempts to allay sexual hyperæsthesia by medical or hygienic treatment.
It can scarcely be claimed, however, that the results of such treatment
are usually satisfactory, and sometimes indeed the treatment has a result
which is the reverse of that intended. The difficulty generally is that in
order to be efficacious the treatment must be carried to an extreme which
exhausts or inhibits not only the genital activities alone but the
activities of the whole organism, and short of that it may prove a
stimulant rather than a sedative. It is difficult and usually impossible
to separate out a man's sexual activities and bring influence to bear on
these activities alone. Sexual activity is so closely intertwined with the
other organic activities, erotic exuberance is so much a flower which is
rooted in the whole organism, that the blow which crushes it may strike
down the whole man. The bromides are universally recognized as powerful
sexual sedatives, but their influence in this respect only makes itself
felt when they have dulled all the finest energies of the organism.
Physical exercise is universally recommended to sexually hyperæsthetic
patients. Yet most people, men and women, find that physical exercise is a
positive stimulus to sexual activity. This is notably so as regards
walking, and exuberantly energetic young women who are troubled by the
irritant activity of their healthy sexual emotions sometimes spend a large
part of their time in the vain attempt to lull their activity by long
walks. Physical exercise only proves efficacious in this respect when it
is carried to an extent which produces general exhaustion. Then indeed the
sexual activity is lulled; but so are all the mental and physical
activities. It is undoubtedly true that exercises and games of all sorts
for young people of both sexes have a sexually hygienic as well as a
generally hygienic influence which is undoubtedly beneficial. They are, on
all grounds, to be preferred to prolonged sedentary occupations. But it is
idle to suppose that games and exercises will suppress the sexual
impulses, for in so far as they favor health, they favor all the impulses
that are the result of health. The most that can be expected is that they
may tend to restrain the manifestations of sex by dispersing the energy
they generate.
There are many physical rules and precautions which are advocated, not
without reason, as tending to inhibit or diminish sexual activity. The
avoidance of heat and the cultivation of cold is one of the most important
of these. Hot climates, a close atmosphere, heavy bed-clothing, hot baths,
all tend powerfully to excite the sexual system, for that system is a
peripheral sensory organ, and whatever stimulates the skin generally,
stimulates the sexual system.[99] Cold, which contracts the skin, also
deadens the sexual feelings, a fact which the ascetics of old knew and
acted upon. The garments and the posture of the body are not without
influence. Constriction or pressure in the neighborhood of the sexual
region, even tight corsets, as well as internal pressure, as from a
distended bladder, are sources of sexual irritation. Sleeping on the back,
which congests the spinal centres, also acts in the same way, as has long
been known by those who attend to sexual hygiene; thus it is stated that
in the Franciscan order it is prohibited to lie on the back. Food and
drink are, further, powerful sexual stimulants. This is true even of the
simplest and most wholesome nourishment, but it is more especially true of
flesh meat, and, above all, of alcohol in its stronger forms such as
spirits, liqueurs, sparkling and heavy wines, and even many English beers.
This has always been clearly realized by those who cultivate asceticism,
and it is one of the powerful reasons why alcohol should not be given in
early youth. As St. Jerome wrote, when telling Eustochium that she must
avoid wine like poison, "wine and youth are the two fires of lust. Why
add oil to the flame?"[100] Idleness, again, especially when combined with
rich living, promotes sexual activity, as Burton sets forth at length in
his _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and constant occupation, on the other hand,
concentrates the wandering activities.
Mental exercise, like physical exercise, has sometimes been advocated as a
method of calming sexual excitement, but it seems to be equally equivocal
in its action. If it is profoundly interesting and exciting it may stir up
rather than lull the sexual emotions. If it arouses little interest it is
unable to exert any kind of influence. This is true even of mathematical
occupations which have been advocated by various authorities, including
Broussais, as aids to sexual hygiene.[101] "I have tried mechanical mental
work," a lady writes, "such as solving arithmetical or algebraic problems,
but it does no good; in fact it seems only to increase the excitement." "I
studied and especially turned my attention to mathematics," a clergyman
writes, "with a view to check my sexual tendencies. To a certain extent I
was successful. But at the approach of an old friend, a voice or a touch,
these tendencies came back again with renewed strength. I found
mathematics, however, the best thing on the whole to take off my attention
from women, better than religious exercises which I tried when younger
(twenty-two to thirty)." At the best, however, such devices are of merely
temporary efficacy.
It is easier to avoid arousing the sexual impulses than to impose silence
on them by hygienic measures when once they are aroused. It is,
therefore, in childhood and youth that all these measures may be most
reasonably observed in order to avoid any premature sexual excitement. In
one group of stolidly normal children influences that might be expected to
act sexually pass away unperceived. At the other extreme, another group of
children are so neurotically and precociously sensitive that no
precautions will preserve them from such influences. But between these
groups there is another, probably much the largest, who resist slight
sexual suggestions but may succumb to stronger or longer influences, and
on these the cares of sexual hygiene may profitably be bestowed.[102]
After puberty, when the spontaneous and inner voice of sex may at any
moment suddenly make itself heard, all hygienic precautions are liable to
be flung to the winds, and even the youth or maiden most anxious to retain
the ideals of chastity can often do little but wait till the storm has
passed. It sometimes happens that a prolonged period of sexual storm and
stress occurs soon after puberty, and then dies away although there has
been little or no sexual gratification, to be succeeded by a period of
comparative calm. It must be remembered that in many, and perhaps most,
individuals, men and women, the sexual appetite, unlike hunger or thirst,
can after a prolonged struggle, be reduced to a more or less quiescent
state which, far from injuring, may even benefit the physical and psychic
vigor generally. This may happen whether or not sexual gratification has
been obtained. If there has never been any such gratification, the
struggle is less severe and sooner over, unless the individual is of
highly erotic temperament. If there has been gratification, if the mind
is filled not merely with desires but with joyous experience to which the
body also has grown accustomed, then the struggle is longer and more
painfully absorbing. The succeeding relief, however, if it comes, is
sometimes more complete and is more likely to be associated with a state
of psychic health. For the fundamental experiences of life, under normal
conditions, bring not only intellectual sanity, but emotional
pacification. A conquest of the sexual appetites which has never at any
period involved a gratification of these appetites seldom produces results
that commend themselves as rich and beautiful.
In these combats there are, however, no permanent conquests. For a very
large number of people, indeed, though there may be emotional changes and
fluctuations dependent on a variety of circumstances, there can scarcely
be said to be any conquest at all. They are either always yielding to the
impulses that assail them, or always resisting those impulses, in the
first case with remorse, in the second with dissatisfaction. In either
case much of their lives, at the time when life is most vigorous, is
wasted. With women, if they happen to be of strong passions and reckless
impulses to abandonment, the results may be highly enervating, if not
disastrous to the general psychic life. It is to this cause, indeed, that
some have been inclined to attribute the frequent mediocrity of women's
work in artistic and intellectual fields. Women of intellectual force are
frequently if not generally women of strong passions, and if they resist
the tendency to merge themselves in the duties of maternity their lives
are often wasted in emotional conflict and their psychic natures
impoverished.[103]
The extent to which sexual abstinence and the struggles it
involves may hamper and absorb the individual throughout life is
well illustrated in the following case. A lady, vigorous, robust,
and generally healthy, of great intelligence and high character,
has reached middle life without marrying, or ever having sexual
relationships. She was an only child, and when between three and
four years of age, a playmate some six years older, initiated her
into the habit of playing with her sexual parts. She was,
however, at this age quite devoid of sexual feelings, and the
habit dropped naturally, without any bad effects, as soon as she
left the neighborhood of this girl a year or so later. Her health
was good and even brilliant, and she developed vigorously at
puberty. At the age of sixteen, however, a mental shock caused
menstruation to diminish in amount during some years, and
simultaneously with this diminution persistent sexual excitement
appeared spontaneously, for the first time. She regarded such
feelings as abnormal and unhealthy, and exerted all her powers of
self-control in resisting them. But will power had no effect in
diminishing the feelings. There was constant and imperious
excitement, with the sense of vibration, tension, pressure,
dilatation and tickling, accompanied, it may be, by some ovarian
congestion, for she felt that on the left side there was a
network of sexual nerves, and retroversion of the uterus was
detected some years later. Her life was strenuous with many
duties, but no occupation could be pursued without this
undercurrent of sexual hyperæsthesia involving perpetual
self-control. This continued more or less acutely for many years,
when menstruation suddenly stopped altogether, much before the
usual period of the climacteric. At the same time the sexual
excitement ceased, and she became calm, peaceful, and happy.
Diminished menstruation was associated with sexual excitement,
but abundant menstruation and its complete absence were both
accompanied by the relief of excitement. This lasted for two
years. Then, for the treatment of a trifling degree of anæmia,
she was subjected to a long, and, in her case, injudicious course
of hypodermic injections of strychnia. From that time, five years
ago, up to the present, there has been constant sexual
excitement, and she has always to be on guard lest she should be
overtaken by a sexual spasm. Her torture is increased by the fact
that her traditions make it impossible for her (except under very
exceptional circumstances) to allude to the cause of her
sufferings. "A woman is handicapped," she writes. "She may never
speak to anyone on such a subject. She must live her tragedy
alone, smiling as much as she can under the strain of her
terrible burden." To add to her trouble, two years ago, she felt
impelled to resort to masturbation, and has done so about once a
month since; this not only brings no real relief, and leaves
irritability, wakefulness, and dark marks under the eyes, but is
a cause of remorse to her, for she regards masturbation as
entirely abnormal and unnatural. She has tried to gain benefit,
not merely by the usual methods of physical hygiene, but by
suggestion, Christian Science, etc., but all in vain. "I may
say," she writes, "that it is the most passionate desire of my
heart to be freed from this bondage, that I may relax the
terrible years-long tension of resistance, and be happy in my own
way. If I had this affliction once a month, once a week, even
twice a week, to stand against it would be child's play. I should
scorn to resort to unnatural means, however moderately. But
self-control itself has its revenges, and I sometimes feel as if
it is no longer to be borne."
Thus while it is an immense benefit in physical and psychic development if
the eruption of the disturbing sexual emotions can be delayed until
puberty or adolescence, and while it is a very great advantage, after that
eruption has occurred, to be able to gain control of these emotions, to
crush altogether the sexual nature would be a barren, if not, indeed, a
perilous victory, bringing with it no satisfaction. "If I had only had
three weeks' happiness," said a woman, "I would not quarrel with Fate, but
to have one's whole life so absolutely empty is horrible." If such vacuous
self-restraint may, by courtesy, be termed a virtue, it is but a negative
virtue. The persons who achieve it, as the result of congenitally feeble
sexual aptitudes, merely (as Gyurkovechky, Fürbringer, and Löwenfeld have
all alike remarked) made a virtue of their weakness. Many others, whose
instincts were less weak, when they disdainfully put to flight the desires
of sex in early life, have found that in later life that foe returns in
tenfold force and perhaps in unnatural shapes.[104]
The conception of "sexual abstinence" is, we see, an entirely false and
artificial conception. It is not only ill-adjusted to the hygienic facts
of the case but it fails even to invoke any genuinely moral motive, for it
is exclusively self-regarding and self-centred. It only becomes genuinely
moral, and truly inspiring, when we transform it into the altruistic
virtue of self-sacrifice. When we have done so we see that the element of
abstinence in it ceases to be essential, "Self-sacrifice," writes the
author of a thoughtful book on the sexual life, "is acknowledged to be the
basis of virtue; the noblest instances of self-sacrifice are those
dictated by sexual affection. Sympathy is the secret of altruism; nowhere
is sympathy more real and complete than in love. Courage, both moral and
physical, the love of truth and honor, the spirit of enterprise, and the
admiration of moral worth, are all inspired by love as by nothing else in
human nature. Celibacy denies itself that inspiration or restricts its
influence, according to the measure of its denial of sexual intimacy. Thus
the deliberate adoption of a consistently celibate life implies the
narrowing down of emotional and moral experience to a degree which is,
from the broad scientific standpoint, unjustified by any of the advantages
piously supposed to accrue from it."[105]
In a sane natural order all the impulses are centred in the fulfilment of
needs and not in their denial. Moreover, in this special matter of sex, it
is inevitable that the needs of others, and not merely the needs of the
individual himself, should determine action. It is more especially the
needs of the female which are the determining factor; for those needs are
more various, complex and elusive, and in his attentiveness to their
gratification the male finds a source of endless erotic satisfaction. It
might be thought that the introduction of an altruistic motive here is
merely the claim of theoretical morality insisting that there shall be a
firm curb on animal instinct. But, as we have again and again seen
throughout the long course of these _Studies_, it is not so. The animal
instinct itself makes this demand. It is a biological law that rules
throughout the zoölogical world and has involved the universality of
courtship. In man it is only modified because in man sexual needs are not
entirely concentrated in reproduction, but more or less penetrate the
whole of life.
While from the point of view of society, as from that of Nature, the end
and object of the sexual impulse is procreation, and nothing beyond
procreation, that is by no means true for the individual, whose main
object it must be to fulfil himself harmoniously with that due regard for
others which the art of living demands. Even if sexual relationships had
no connection with procreation whatever--as some Central Australian tribes
believe--they would still be justifiable, and are, indeed, an
indispensable aid to the best moral development of the individual, for it
is only in so intimate a relationship as that of sex that the finest
graces and aptitudes of life have full scope. Even the saints cannot
forego the sexual side of life. The best and most accomplished saints from
Jerome to Tolstoy--even the exquisite Francis of Assisi--had stored up in
their past all the experiences that go to the complete realization of
life, and if it were not so they would have been the less saints.
The element of positive virtue thus only enters when the control of the
sexual impulse has passed beyond the stage of rigid and sterile abstinence
and has become not merely a deliberate refusal of what is evil in sex, but
a deliberate acceptance of what is good. It is only at that moment that
such control becomes a real part of the great art of living. For the art
of living, like any other art, is not compatible with rigidity, but lies
in the weaving of a perpetual harmony between refusing and accepting,
between giving and taking.[106]
The future, it is clear, belongs ultimately to those who are slowly
building up sounder traditions into the structure of life. The "problem of
sexual abstinence" will more and more sink into insignificance. There
remain the great solid fact of love, the great solid fact of chastity.
Those are eternal. Between them there is nothing but harmony. The
development of one involves the development of the other.
It has been necessary to treat seriously this problem of "sexual
abstinence" because we have behind us the traditions of two thousand years
based on certain ideals of sexual law and sexual license, together with
the long effort to build up practices more or less conditioned by those
ideals. We cannot immediately escape from these traditions even when we
question their validity for ourselves. We have not only to recognize their
existence, but also to accept the fact that for some time to come they
must still to a considerable extent control the thoughts and even in some
degree the actions of existing communities.
It is undoubtedly deplorable. It involves the introduction of an
artificiality into a real natural order. Love is real and positive;
chastity is real and positive. But sexual abstinence is unreal and
negative, in the strict sense perhaps impossible. The underlying feelings
of all those who have emphasized its importance is that a physiological
process can be good or bad according as it is or is not carried out under
certain arbitrary external conditions, which render it licit or illicit.
An act of sexual intercourse under the name of "marriage" is beneficial;
the very same act, under the name of "incontinence," is pernicious. No
physiological process, and still less any spiritual process, can bear such
restriction. It is as much as to say that a meal becomes good or bad,
digestible or indigestible, according as a grace is or is not pronounced
before the eating of it.
It is deplorable because, such a conception being essentially unreal, an
element of unreality is thus introduced into a matter of the gravest
concern alike to the individual and to society. Artificial disputes have
been introduced where no matter of real dispute need exist. A contest has
been carried on marked by all the ferocity which marks contests about
metaphysical or pseudo-metaphysical differences having no concrete basis
in the actual world. As will happen in such cases, there has, after all,
been no real difference between the disputants because the point they
quarreled over was unreal. In truth each side was right and each side was
wrong.
It is necessary, we see, that the balance should be held even. An absolute
license is bad; an absolute abstinence--even though some by nature or
circumstances are urgently called to adopt it--is also bad. They are both
alike away from the gracious equilibrium of Nature. And the force, we see,
which naturally holds this balance even is the biological fact that the
act of sexual union is the satisfaction of the erotic needs, not of one
person, but of two persons.
FOOTNOTES:
[92] This view was an ambiguous improvement on the view, universally
prevalent, as Westermarck has shown, among primitive peoples, that the
sexual act involves indignity to a woman or depreciation of her only in so
far as she is the property of another person who is the really injured
party.
[93] This implicit contradiction has been acutely pointed out from the
religious side by the Rev. H. Northcote, _Christianity and Sex Problems_,
p. 53.
[94] It has already been necessary to discuss this point briefly in "The
Sexual Impulse in Women," vol. iii of these _Studies_.
[95] "Die Abstinentia Sexualis," _Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_,
Nov., 1908.
[96] P. Janet, "La Maladie du Scrupule," _Revue Philosophique_, May, 1901.
[97] S. Freud, _Sexual-Probleme_, March, 1908. As Adele Schreiber also
points out (_Mutterschutz_, Jan., 1907, p. 30), it is not enough to prove
that abstinence is not dangerous; we have to remember that the spiritual
and physical energy used up in repressing this mighty instinct often
reduces a joyous and energetic nature to a weary and faded shadow.
Similarly, Helene Stöcker (_Die Liebe und die Frauen_, p. 105) says: "The
question whether abstinence is harmful is, to say the truth, a ridiculous
question. One needs to be no nervous specialist to know, as a matter of
course, that a life of happy love and marriage is the healthy life, and
its complete absence cannot fail to lead to severe psychic depression,
even if no direct physiological disturbances can be demonstrated."
[98] Max Flesch, "Ehe, Hygine und Sexuelle Moral," _Mutterschutz_, 1905,
Heft 7.
[99] See the Section on Touch in the fourth volume of these _Studies_.
[100] "I have had two years' close experience and connexion with the
Trappists," wrote Dr. Butterfield, of Natal (_British Medical Journal_,
Sept. 15, 1906, p. 668), "both as medical attendant and as being a
Catholic in creed myself. I have studied them and investigated their life,
habits and diet, and though I should be very backward in adopting it
myself, as not suited to me individually, the great bulk of them are in
absolute ideal health and strength, seldom ailing, capable of vast work,
mental and physical. Their life is very simple and very regular. A
healthier body of men and women, with perfect equanimity of temper--this
latter I lay great stress on--it would be difficult to find. Health beams
in their eyes and countenance and actions. Only in sickness or prolonged
journeys are they allowed any strong foods--meats, eggs, etc.--or any
alcohol."
[101] Féré, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, second edition, p. 332.
[102] Rural life, as we have seen when discussing its relation to sexual
precocity, _is_ on one side the reverse of a safeguard against sexual
influences. But, on the other hand, in so far as it involves hard work and
simple living under conditions that are not nervously stimulating, it is
favorable to a considerably delayed sexual activity in youth and to a
relative continence. Ammon, in the course of his anthropological
investigations of Baden conscripts, found that sexual intercourse was rare
in the country before twenty, and even sexual emissions during sleep rare
before nineteen or twenty. It is said, also, he repeats, that no one has a
right to run after girls who does not yet carry a gun, and the elder lads
sometimes brutally ill-treat any younger boy found going about with a
girl. No doubt this is often preliminary to much license later.
[103] The numerical preponderance which celibate women teachers have now
gained in the American school system has caused much misgiving among many
sagacious observers, and is said to be unsatisfactory in its results on
the pupils of both sexes. A distinguished authority, Professor McKeen
Cattell ("The School and the Family," _Popular Science Monthly_, Jan.,
1909), referring to this preponderance of "devitalized and unsexed
spinsters," goes so far as to say that "the ultimate result of letting the
celibate female be the usual teacher has been such as to make it a
question whether it would not be an advantage to the country if the whole
school plant could be scrapped."
[104] Corre (_Les Criminels_, p. 351) mentions that of thirteen priests
convicted of crime, six were guilty of sexual attempts on children, and of
eighty-three convicted lay teachers, forty-eight had committed similar
offenses. This was at a time when lay teachers were in practice almost
compelled to live a celibate life; altered conditions have greatly
diminished this class of offense among them. Without going so far as
crime, many moral and religious men, clergymen and others, who have led
severely abstinent lives in youth, sometimes experience in middle age or
later the eruption of almost uncontrollable sexual impulses, normal or
abnormal. In women such manifestations are apt to take the form of
obsessional thoughts of sexual character, as e.g., the case
(_Comptes-Rendus Congrès International de Médecine_, Moscow, 1897, vol.
iv, p. 27) of a chaste woman who was compelled to think about and look at
the sexual organs of men.
[105] J.A. Godfrey, _The Science of Sex_, p. 138.
[106] See, e.g., Havelock Ellis, "St. Francis and Others," _Affirmations_.
CHAPTER VII.
PROSTITUTION.
I. _The Orgy:_--The Religious Origin of the Orgy--The Feast of
Fools--Recognition of the Orgy by the Greeks and Romans--The Orgy Among
Savages--The Drama--The Object Subserved by the Orgy.
II. _The Origin and Development of Prostitution:_--The Definition of
Prostitution--Prostitution Among Savages--The Conditions Under Which
Professional Prostitution Arises--Sacred Prostitution--The Rite of
Mylitta--The Practice of Prostitution to Obtain a Marriage Portion--The
Rise of Secular Prostitution in Greece--Prostitution in the East--India,
China, Japan, etc.--Prostitution in Rome--The Influence of Christianity on
Prostitution--The Effort to Combat Prostitution--The Mediæval Brothel--The
Appearance of the Courtesan--Tullia D'Aragona--Veronica Franco--Ninon de
Lenclos--Later Attempts to Eradicate Prostitution--The Regulation of
Prostitution--Its Futility Becoming Recognized.
III. _The Causes of Prostitution:_--Prostitution as a Part of the Marriage
System--The Complex Causation of Prostitution--The Motives Assigned by
Prostitutes--(1) Economic Factor of Prostitution--Poverty Seldom the Chief
Motive for Prostitution--But Economic Pressure Exerts a Real
Influence--The Large Proportion of Prostitutes Recruited from Domestic
Service--Significance of This Fact--(2) The Biological Factor of
Prostitution--The So-called Born-Prostitute--Alleged Identity with the
Born-Criminal--The Sexual Instinct in Prostitutes--The Physical and
Psychic Characters of Prostitutes--(3) Moral Necessity as a Factor in the
Existence of Prostitution--The Moral Advocates of Prostitution--The Moral
Attitude of Christianity Towards Prostitution--The Attitude of
Protestantism--Recent Advocates of the Moral Necessity of
Prostitution--(4) Civilizational Value as a Factor of Prostitution--The
Influence of Urban Life--The Craving for Excitement--Why Servant-girls
so Often Turn to Prostitution--The Small Part Played by
Seduction--Prostitutes Come Largely from the Country--The Appeal of
Civilization Attracts Women to Prostitution--The Corresponding Attraction
Felt by Men--The Prostitute as Artist and Leader of Fashion--The Charm of
Vulgarity.
IV. _The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution:_--The Decay of the
Brothel--The Tendency to the Humanization of Prostitution--The Monetary
Aspects of Prostitution--The Geisha--The Hetaira--The Moral Revolt
Against Prostitution--Squalid Vice Based on Luxurious Virtue--The Ordinary
Attitude Towards Prostitutes--Its Cruelty Absurd--The Need of Reforming
Prostitution--The Need of Reforming Marriage--These These Two Needs
Closely Correlated--The Dynamic Relationships Involved.
_I. The Orgy_.
Traditional morality, religion, and established convention combine to
promote not only the extreme of rigid abstinence but also that of reckless
license. They preach and idealize the one extreme; they drive those who
cannot accept it to adopt the opposite extreme. In the great ages of
religion it even happens that the severity of the rule of abstinence is
more or less deliberately tempered by the permission for occasional
outbursts of license. We thus have the orgy, which flourished in mediæval
days and is, indeed, in its largest sense, a universal manifestation,
having a function to fulfil in every orderly and laborious civilization,
built up on natural energies that are bound by more or less inevitable
restraints.
The consideration of the orgy, it may be said, lifts us beyond the merely
sexual sphere, into a higher and wider region which belongs to religion.
The Greek _orgeia_ referred originally to ritual things done with a
religious purpose, though later, when dances of Bacchanals and the like
lost their sacred and inspiring character, the idea was fostered by
Christianity that such things were immoral.[107] Yet Christianity was
itself in its origin an orgy of the higher spiritual activities released
from the uncongenial servitude of classic civilization, a great festival
of the poor and the humble, of the slave and the sinner. And when, with
the necessity for orderly social organization, Christianity had ceased to
be this it still recognized, as Paganism had done, the need for an
occasional orgy. It appears that in 743 at a Synod held in Hainault
reference was made to the February debauch (_de Spurcalibus in februario_)
as a pagan practice; yet it was precisely this pagan festival which was
embodied in the accepted customs of the Christian Church as the chief orgy
of the ecclesiastical year, the great Carnival prefixed to the long fast
of Lent. The celebration on Shrove Tuesday and the previous Sunday
constituted a Christian Bacchanalian festival in which all classes joined.
The greatest freedom and activity of physical movement was encouraged;
"some go about naked without shame, some crawl on all fours, some on
stilts, some imitate animals."[108] As time went on the Carnival lost its
most strongly marked Bacchanalian features, but it still retains its
essential character as a permitted and temporary relaxation of the tension
of customary restraints and conventions. The Mediæval Feast of Fools--a
New Year's Revel well established by the twelfth century, mainly in
France--presented an expressive picture of a Christian orgy in its extreme
form, for here the most sacred ceremonies of the Church became the subject
of fantastic parody. The Church, according to Nietzsche's saying, like all
wise legislators, recognized that where great impulses and habits have to
be cultivated, intercalary days must be appointed in which these impulses
and habits may be denied, and so learn to hunger anew.[109] The clergy
took the leading part in these folk-festivals, for to the men of that age,
as Méray remarks, "the temple offered the complete notes of the human
gamut; they found there the teaching of all duties, the consolation of all
sorrows, the satisfaction of all joys. The sacred festivals of mediæval
Christianity were not a survival from Roman times; they leapt from the
very heart of Christian society."[110] But, as Méray admits, all great and
vigorous peoples, of the East and the West, have found it necessary
sometimes to play with their sacred things.
Among the Greeks and Romans this need is everywhere visible, not only in
their comedy and their literature generally, but in everyday life. As
Nietzsche truly remarks (in his _Geburt der Tragödie_) the Greeks
recognized all natural impulses, even those that are seemingly unworthy,
and safeguarded them from working mischief by providing channels into
which, on special days and in special rites, the surplus of wild energy
might harmlessly flow. Plutarch, the last and most influential of the
Greek moralists, well says, when advocating festivals (in his essay "On
the Training of Children"), that "even in bows and harps we loosen their
strings that we may bend and wind them up again." Seneca, perhaps the most
influential of Roman if not of European moralists, even recommended
occasional drunkenness. "Sometimes," he wrote in his _De Tranquillilate_,
"we ought to come even to the point of intoxication, not for the purpose
of drowning ourselves but of sinking ourselves deep in wine. For it washes
away cares and raises our spirits from the lowest depths. The inventor of
wine is called _Liber_ because he frees the soul from the servitude of
care, releases it from slavery, quickens it, and makes it bolder for all
undertakings." The Romans were a sterner and more serious people than the
Greeks, but on that very account they recognized the necessity of
occasionally relaxing their moral fibres in order to preserve their tone,
and encouraged the prevalence of festivals which were marked by much more
abandonment than those of Greece. When these festivals began to lose
their moral sanction and to fall into decay the decadence of Rome had
begun.
All over the world, and not excepting the most primitive savages--for even
savage life is built up on systematic constraints which sometimes need
relaxation--the principle of the orgy is recognized and accepted. Thus
Spencer and Gillen describe[111] the Nathagura or fire-ceremony of the
Warramunga tribe of Central Australia, a festival taken part in by both
sexes, in which all the ordinary rules of social life are broken, a kind
of Saturnalia in which, however, there is no sexual license, for sexual
license is, it need scarcely be said, no essential part of the orgy, even
when the orgy lightens the burden of sexual constraints. In a widely
different part of the world, in British Columbia, the Salish Indians,
according to Hill Tout,[112] believed that, long before the whites came,
their ancestors observed a Sabbath or seventh day ceremony for dancing and
praying, assembling at sunrise and dancing till noon. The Sabbath, or
periodically recurring orgy,--not a day of tension and constraint but a
festival of joy, a rest from all the duties of everyday life,--has, as we
know, formed an essential part of many of the orderly ancient
civilizations on which our own has been built;[113] it is highly probable
that the stability of these ancient civilizations was intimately
associated with their recognition of the need of a Sabbath orgy. Such
festivals are, indeed, as Crawley observes, processes of purification and
reinvigoration, the effort to put off "the old man" and put on "the new
man," to enter with fresh energy on the path of everyday life.[114]
The orgy is an institution which by no means has its significance only for
the past. On the contrary, the high tension, the rigid routine, the gray
monotony of modern life insistently call for moments of organic relief,
though the precise form that that orgiastic relief takes must necessarily
change with other social changes. As Wilhelm von Humboldt said, "just as
men need suffering in order to become strong so they need joy in order to
become good." Charles Wagner, insisting more recently (in his _Jeunesse_)
on the same need of joy in our modern life, regrets that dancing in the
old, free, and natural manner has gone out of fashion or become
unwholesome. Dancing is indeed the most fundamental and primitive form of
the orgy, and that which most completely and healthfully fulfils its
object. For while it is undoubtedly, as we see even among animals, a
process by which sexual tumescence is accomplished,[115] it by no means
necessarily becomes focused in sexual detumescence but it may itself
become a detumescent discharge of accumulated energy. It was on this
account that, at all events in former days, the clergy in Spain, on moral
grounds, openly encouraged the national passion for dancing. Among
cultured people in modern times, the orgy tends to take on a purely
cerebral form, which is less wholesome because it fails to lead to
harmonious discharge along motor channels. In these comparatively passive
forms, however, the orgy tends to become more and more pronounced under
the conditions of civilization. Aristotle's famous statement concerning
the function of tragedy as "purgation" seems to be a recognition of the
beneficial effects of the orgy.[116] Wagner's music-dramas appeal
powerfully to this need; the theatre, now as ever, fulfils a great
function of the same kind, inherited from the ancient days when it was the
ordered expression of a sexual festival.[117] The theatre, indeed, tends
at the present time to assume a larger importance and to approximate to
the more serious dramatic performances of classic days by being
transferred to the day-time and the open-air. France has especially taken
the initiative in these performances, analogous to the Dionysiac festivals
of antiquity and the Mysteries and Moralities of the Middle Ages. The
movement began some years ago at Orange. In 1907 there were, in France, as
many as thirty open-air theatres ("Théâtres de la Nature," "Théâtres du
Soleil," etc.,) while it is in Marseilles that the first formal open-air
theatre has been erected since classic days.[118] In England, likewise,
there has been a great extension of popular interest in dramatic
performances, and the newly instituted Pageants, carried out and taken
part in by the population of the region commemorated in the Pageant, are
festivals of the same character. In England, however, at the present time,
the real popular orgiastic festivals are the Bank holidays, with which may
be associated the more occasional celebrations, "Maffekings," etc., often
called out by comparatively insignificant national events but still
adequate to arouse orgiastic emotions as genuine as those of antiquity,
though they are lacking in beauty and religious consecration. It is easy
indeed for the narrowly austere person to view such manifestations with a
supercilious smile, but in the eyes of the moralist and the philosopher
these orgiastic festivals exert a salutary and preservative function. In
every age of dull and monotonous routine--and all civilization involves
such routine--many natural impulses and functions tend to become
suppressed, atrophied, or perverted. They need these moments of joyous
exercise and expression, moments in which they may not necessarily attain
their full activity but in which they will at all events be able, as
Cyples expresses it, to rehearse their great possibilities.[119]
_II. The Origin and Development of Prostitution_.
The more refined forms of the orgy flourish in civilization, although on
account of their mainly cerebral character they are not the most
beneficent or the most effective. The more primitive and muscular forms of
the orgy tend, on the other hand, under the influence of civilization, to
fall into discredit and to be so far as possible suppressed altogether. It
is partly in this way that civilization encourages prostitution. For the
orgy in its primitive forms, forbidden to show itself openly and
reputably, seeks the darkness, and allying itself with a fundamental
instinct to which civilized society offers no complete legitimate
satisfaction, it firmly entrenches itself in the very centre of civilized
life, and thereby constitutes a problem of immense difficulty and
importance.[120]
It is commonly said that prostitution has existed always and everywhere.
That statement is far from correct. A kind of amateur prostitution is
occasionally found among savages, but usually it is only when barbarism is
fully developed and is already approaching the stage of civilization that
well developed prostitution is found. It exists in a systematic form in
every civilization.
What is prostitution? There has been considerable discussion as to the
correct definition of prostitution.[121] The Roman Ulpian said that a
prostitute was one who openly abandons her body to a number of men without
choice, for money.[122] Not all modern definitions have been so
satisfactory. It is sometimes said a prostitute is a woman who gives
herself to numerous men. To be sound, however, a definition must be
applicable to both sexes alike and we should certainly hesitate to
describe a man who had sexual intercourse with many women as a prostitute.
The idea of venality, the intention to sell the favors of the body, is
essential to the conception of prostitution. Thus Guyot defines a
prostitute as "any person for whom sexual relationships are subordinated
to gain."[123] It is not, however, adequate to define a prostitute simply
as a woman who sells her body. That is done every day by women who become
wives in order to gain a home and a livelihood, yet, immoral as this
conduct may be from any high ethical standpoint, it would be inconvenient
and even misleading to call it prostitution.[124] It is better, therefore,
to define a prostitute as a woman who temporarily sells her sexual favors
to various persons. Thus, according to Wharton's _Law-lexicon_ a
prostitute is "a woman who indiscriminately consorts with men for hire";
Bonger states that "those women are prostitutes who sell their bodies for
the exercise of sexual acts and make of this a profession";[125] Richard
again states that "a prostitute is a woman who publicly gives herself to
the first comer in return for a pecuniary remuneration."[126] As, finally,
the prevalence of homosexuality has led to the existence of male
prostitutes, the definition must be put in a form irrespective of sex, and
we may, therefore, say that a prostitute is a person who makes it a
profession to gratify the lust of various persons of the opposite sex or
the same sex.
It is essential that the act of prostitution should be habitually
performed with "various persons." A woman who gains her living by
being mistress to a man, to whom she is faithful, is not a
prostitute, although she often becomes one afterwards, and may
have been one before. The exact point at which a woman begins to
be a prostitute is a question of considerable importance in
countries in which prostitutes are subject to registration. Thus
in Berlin, not long ago, a girl who was mistress to a rich
cavalry officer and supported by him, during the illness of the
officer accidentally met a man whom she had formerly known, and
once or twice invited him to see her, receiving from him presents
in money. This somehow came to the knowledge of the police, and
she was arrested and sentenced to one day's imprisonment as an
unregistered prostitute. On appeal, however, the sentence was
annulled. Liszt, in his _Strafrecht_, lays it down that a girl
who obtains whole or part of her income from "fixed
relationships" is not practicing unchastity for gain in the sense
of the German law (_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Jahrgang 1,
Heft 9, p. 345).
It is not altogether easy to explain the origin of the systematized
professional prostitution with the existence of which we are familiar in
civilization. The amateur kind of prostitution which has sometimes been
noted among primitive peoples--the fact, that is, that a man may give a
woman a present in seeking to persuade her to allow him to have
intercourse with her--is really not prostitution as we understand it. The
present in such a case is merely part of a kind of courtship leading to a
temporary relationship. The woman more or less retains her social position
and is not forced to make an avocation of selling herself because
henceforth no other career is possible to her. When Cook came to New
Zealand his men found that the women were not impregnable, "but the terms
and manner of compliance were as decent as those in marriage among us,"
and according "to their notions the agreement was as innocent." The
consent of the woman's friends was necessary, and when the preliminaries
were settled it was also necessary to treat this "Juliet of a night" with
"the same delicacy as is here required with the wife for life, and the
lover who presumed to take any liberties by which this was violated was
sure to be disappointed."[127] In some of the Melanesian Islands, it is
said that women would sometimes become prostitutes, or on account of their
bad conduct be forced to become prostitutes for a time; they were not,
however, particularly despised, and when they had in this way accumulated
a certain amount of property they could marry well, after which it would
not be proper to refer to their former career.[128]
When prostitution first arises among a primitive people it sometimes
happens that little or no stigma is attached to it for the reason that the
community has not yet become accustomed to attach any special value to the
presence of virginity. Schurtz quotes from the old Arabic geographer
Al-Bekri some interesting remarks about the Slavs: "The women of the
Slavs, after they have married, are faithful to their husbands. If,
however, a young girl falls in love with a man she goes to him and
satisfies her passion. And if a man marries and finds his wife a virgin he
says to her: 'If you were worth anything men would have loved you, and you
would have chosen one who would have taken away your virginity.' Then he
drives her away and renounces her." It is a feeling of this kind which,
among some peoples, leads a girl to be proud of the presents she has
received from her lovers and to preserve them as a dowry for her marriage,
knowing that her value will thus be still further heightened. Even among
the Southern Slavs of modern Europe, who have preserved much of the
primitive sexual freedom, this freedom, as Krauss, who has minutely
studied the manners and customs of these peoples, declares, is
fundamentally different from vice, licentiousness, or immodesty.[129]
Prostitution tends to arise, as Schurtz has pointed out, in every society
in which early marriage is difficult and intercourse outside marriage is
socially disapproved. "Venal women everywhere appear as soon as the free
sexual intercourse of young people is repressed, without the necessary
consequences being impeded by unusually early marriages."[130] The
repression of sexual intimacies outside marriage is a phenomenon of
civilization, but it is not itself by any means a measure of a people's
general level, and may, therefore, begin to appear at an early period. But
it is important to remember that the primitive and rudimentary forms of
prostitution, when they occur, are merely temporary, and
frequently--though not invariably--involve no degrading influence on the
woman in public estimation, sometimes indeed increasing her value as a
wife. The woman who sells herself for money purely as a professional
matter, without any thought of love or passion, and who, by virtue of her
profession, belongs to a pariah class definitely and rigidly excluded from
the main body of her sex, is a phenomenon which can seldom be found except
in developed civilization. It is altogether incorrect to speak of
prostitutes as a mere survival from primitive times.
On the whole, while among savages sexual relationships are sometimes free
before marriage, as well as on the occasion of special festivals, they are
rarely truly promiscuous and still more rarely venal. When savage women
nowadays sell themselves, or are sold by their husbands, it has usually
been found that we are concerned with the contamination of European
civilization.
The definite ways in which professional prostitution may arise are no
doubt many.[131] We may assent to the general principle, laid down by
Schurtz, that whenever the free union of young people is impeded under
conditions in which early marriage is also difficult prostitution must
certainly arise. There are, however, different ways in which this
principle may take shape. So far as our western civilization is
concerned--the civilization, that is to say, which has its cradle in the
Mediterranean basin--it would seem that the origin of prostitution is to
be found primarily in a religious custom, religion, the great conserver of
social traditions, preserving in a transformed shape a primitive freedom
that was passing out of general social life.[132] The typical example is
that recorded by Herodotus, in the fifth century before Christ, at the
temple of Mylitta, the Babylonian Venus, where every woman once in her
life had to come and give herself to the first stranger who threw a coin
in her lap, in worship of the goddess. The money could not be refused,
however small the amount, but it was given as an offertory to the temple,
and the woman, having followed the man and thus made oblation to Mylitta,
returned home and lived chastely ever afterwards.[133] Very similar
customs existed in other parts of Western Asia, in North Africa, in Cyprus
and other islands of the Eastern Mediterranean, and also in Greece, where
the Temple of Aphrodite on the fort at Corinth possessed over a thousand
hierodules, dedicated to the service of the goddess, from time to time, as
Strabo states, by those who desired to make thank-offering for mercies
vouchsafed to them. Pindar refers to the hospitable young Corinthian women
ministrants whose thoughts often turn towards Ourania Aphrodite[134] in
whose temple they burned incense; and Athenæus mentions the importance
that was attached to the prayers of the Corinthian prostitutes in any
national calamity.[135]
We seem here to be in the presence, not merely of a religiously preserved
survival of a greater sexual freedom formerly existing,[136] but of a
specialized and ritualized development of that primitive cult of the
generative forces of Nature which involves the belief that all natural
fruitfulness is associated with, and promoted by, acts of human sexual
intercourse which thus acquire a religious significance. At a later stage
acts of sexual intercourse having a religious significance become
specialized and localized in temples, and by a rational transition of
ideas it becomes believed that such acts of sexual intercourse in the
service of the god, or with persons devoted to the god's service, brought
benefits to the individual who performed them, more especially, if a
woman, by insuring her fertility. Among primitive peoples generally this
conception is embodied mainly in seasonal festivals, but among the peoples
of Western Asia who had ceased to be primitive, and among whom traditional
priestly and hieratic influences had acquired very great influence, the
earlier generative cult had thus, it seems probable, naturally changed
its form in becoming attached to the temples.[137]
The theory that religious prostitution developed, as a general
rule, out of the belief that the generative activity of human
beings possessed a mysterious and sacred influence in promoting
the fertility of Nature generally seems to have been first set
forth by Mannhardt in his _Antike Wald- und Feldkulte_ (pp. 283
et seq.). It is supported by Dr. F.S. Krauss ("Beischlafausübung
als Kulthandlung," _Anthropophyteia_, vol. iii, p. 20), who
refers to the significant fact that in Baruch's time, at a period
long anterior to Herodotus, sacred prostitution took place under
the trees. Dr. J.G. Frazer has more especially developed this
conception of the origin of sacred prostitution in his _Adonis,
Attis, Osiris_. He thus summarizes his lengthy discussion: "We
may conclude that a great Mother Goddess, the personification of
all the reproductive energies of nature, was worshipped under
different names, but with a substantial similarity of myth and
ritual by many peoples of western Asia; that associated with her
was a lover, or rather series of lovers, divine yet mortal, with
whom she mated year by year, their commerce being deemed
essential to the propagation of animals and plants, each in their
several kind; and further, that the fabulous union of the divine
pair was simulated, and, as it were, multiplied on earth by the
real, though temporary, union of the human sexes at the sanctuary
of the goddess for the sake of thereby ensuring the fruitfulness
of the ground and the increase of man and beast. In course of
time, as the institution of individual marriage grew in favor,
and the old communism fell more and more into discredit, the
revival of the ancient practice, even for a single occasion in a
woman's life, became ever more repugnant to the moral sense of
the people, and accordingly they resorted to various expedients
for evading in practice the obligation which they still
acknowledged in theory.... But while the majority of women thus
contrived to observe the form of religion without sacrificing
their virtue, it was still thought necessary to the general
welfare that a certain number of them should discharge the old
obligation in the old way. These became prostitutes, either for
life or for a term of years, at one of the temples: dedicated to
the service of religion, they were invested with a sacred
character, and their vocation, far from being deemed infamous,
was probably long regarded by the laity as an exercise of more
than common virtue, and rewarded with a tribute of mixed wonder,
reverence, and pity, not unlike that which in some parts of the
world is still paid to women who seek to honor their Creator in a
different way by renouncing the natural functions of their sex
and the tenderest relations of humanity" (J.G. Frazer, _Adonis,
Attis, Osiris_, 1907, pp. 23 et seq.).
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that this theory
represents the central and primitive idea which led to the
development of sacred prostitution. It seems equally clear,
however, that as time went on, and especially as temple cults
developed and priestly influence increased, this fundamental and
primitive idea tended to become modified, and even transformed.
The primitive conception became specialized in the belief that
religious benefits, and especially the gift of fruitfulness, were
gained _by the worshipper_, who thus sought the goddess's favor
by an act of unchastity which might be presumed to be agreeable
to an unchaste deity. The rite of Mylitta, as described by
Herodotus, was a late development of this kind in an ancient
civilization, and the benefit sought was evidently for the
worshipper herself. This has been pointed out by Dr. Westermarck,
who remarks that the words spoken to the woman by her partner as
he gives her the coin--"May the goddess be auspicious to
thee!"--themselves indicate that the object of the act was to
insure her fertility, and he refers also to the fact that
strangers frequently had a semi-supernatural character, and their
benefits a specially efficacious character (Westermarck, _Origin
and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii, p. 446). It may be
added that the rite of Mylitta thus became analogous with another
Mediterranean rite, in which the act of simulating intercourse
with the representative of a god, or his image, ensured a woman's
fertility. This is the rite practiced by the Egyptians of Mendes,
in which a woman went through the ceremony of simulated
intercourse with the sacred goat, regarded as the representative
of a deity of Pan-like character (Herodotus, Bk. ii, Ch. XLVI;
and see Dulaure, _Des Divinités Génératrices_, Ch. II; cf. vol. v
of these _Studies_, "Erotic Symbolism," Sect. IV). This rite was
maintained by Roman women, in connection with the statues of
Priapus, to a very much later date, and St. Augustine mentions
how Roman matrons placed the young bride on the erect member of
Priapus (_De Civitate Dei_, Bk. iii, Ch. IX). The idea evidently
running through this whole group of phenomena is that the deity,
or the representative or even mere image of the deity, is able,
through a real or simulated act of intercourse, to confer on the
worshipper a portion of its own exalted generative activity.
At a later period, in Corinth, prostitutes were still the priestesses of
Venus, more or less loosely attached to her temples, and so long as that
was the case they enjoyed a considerable degree of esteem. At this stage,
however, we realize that religious prostitution was developing a
utilitarian side. These temples flourished chiefly in sea-coast towns, in
islands, in large cities to which many strangers and sailors came. The
priestesses of Cyprus burnt incense on her altars and invoked her sacred
aid, but at the same time Pindar addresses them as "young girls who
welcome all strangers and give them hospitality." Side by side with the
religious significance of the act of generation the needs of men far from
home were already beginning to be definitely recognized. The Babylonian
woman had gone to the temple of Mylitta to fulfil a personal religious
duty; the Corinthian priestess had begun to act as an avowed minister to
the sexual needs of men in strange cities.
The custom which Herodotus noted in Lydia of young girls prostituting
themselves in order to acquire a marriage portion which they may dispose
of as they think fit (Bk. I, Ch. 93) may very well have developed (as
Frazer also believes) out of religious prostitution; we can indeed trace
its evolution in Cyprus where eventually, at the period when Justinian
visited the island, the money given by strangers to the women was no
longer placed on the altar but put into a chest to form marriage-portions
for them. It is a custom to be found in Japan and various other parts of
the world, notably among the Ouled-Nail of Algeria,[138] and is not
necessarily always based on religious prostitution; but it obviously
cannot exist except among peoples who see nothing very derogatory in free
sexual intercourse for the purpose of obtaining money, so that the custom
of Mylitta furnished a natural basis for it.[139]
As a more spiritual conception of religion developed, and as the growth of
civilization tended to deprive sexual intercourse of its sacred halo,
religious prostitution in Greece was slowly abolished, though on the
coasts of Asia Minor both religious prostitution and prostitution for the
purpose of obtaining a marriage portion persisted to the time of
Constantine, who put an end to these ancient customs.[140] Superstition
was on the side of the old religious prostitution; it was believed that
women who had never sacrificed to Aphrodite became consumed by lust, and
according to the legend recorded by Ovid--a legend which seems to point to
a certain antagonism between sacred and secular prostitution--this was the
case with the women who first became public prostitutes. The decay of
religious prostitution, doubtless combined with the cravings always born
of the growth of civilization, led up to the first establishment,
attributed by legend to Solon, of a public brothel, a purely secular
establishment for a purely secular end: the safeguarding of the virtue of
the general population and the increase of the public revenue. With that
institution the evolution of prostitution, and of the modern marriage
system of which it forms part, was completed. The Athenian _dikterion_ is
the modern brothel; the _dikteriade_ is the modern state-regulated
prostitute. The free _hetairæ_, indeed, subsequently arose, educated women
having no taint of the _dikterion_, but they likewise had no official part
in public worship.[141] The primitive conception of the sanctity of sexual
intercourse in the divine service had been utterly lost.
A fairly typical example of the conditions existing among savages
is to be found in the South Sea Island of Rotuma, where
"prostitution for money or gifts was quite unknown." Adultery
after marriage was also unknown. But there was great freedom in
the formation of sexual relationships before marriage (J. Stanley
Gardiner, _Journal Anthropological Institute_, February, 1898, p.
409). Much the same is said of the Bantu Ba mbola of Africa (_op.
cit._, July-December, 1905, p. 410).
Among the early Cymri of Wales, representing a more advanced
social stage, prostitution appears to have been not absolutely
unknown, but public prostitution was punished by loss of valuable
privileges (R.B. Holt, "Marriage Laws and Customs of the Cymri,"
_Journal Anthropological Institute_, August-November, 1898, pp.
161-163).
Prostitution was practically unknown in Burmah, and regarded as
shameful before the coming of the English and the example of the
modern Hindus. The missionaries have unintentionally, but
inevitably, favored the growth of prostitution by condemning free
unions (_Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, November, 1903, p.
720). The English brought prostitution to India. "That was not
specially the fault of the English," said a Brahmin to Jules
Bois, "it is the crime of your civilization. We have never had
prostitutes. I mean by that horrible word the brutalized servants
of the gross desire of the passerby. We had, and we have, castes
of singers and dancers who are married to trees--yes, to
trees--by touching ceremonies which date from Vedic times; our
priests bless them and receive much money from them. They do not
refuse themselves to those who love them and please them. Kings
have made them rich. They represent all the arts; they are the
visible beauty of the universe" (Jules Bois, _Visions de l'Inde_,
p. 55).
Religious prostitutes, it may be added, "the servants of the
god," are connected with temples in Southern India and the
Deccan. They are devoted to their sacred calling from their
earliest years, and it is their chief business to dance before
the image of the god, to whom they are married (though in Upper
India professional dancing girls are married to inanimate
objects), but they are also trained in arousing and assuaging the
desires of devotees who come on pilgrimage to the shrine. For the
betrothal rites by which, in India, sacred prostitutes are
consecrated, see, e.g., A. Van Gennep, _Rites de Passage_, p.
142.
In many parts of Western Asia, where barbarism had reached a high
stage of development, prostitution was not unknown, though
usually disapproved. The Hebrews knew it, and the historical
Biblical references to prostitutes imply little reprobation.
Jephtha was the son of a prostitute, brought up with the
legitimate children, and the story of Tamar is instructive. But
the legal codes were extremely severe on Jewish maidens who
became prostitutes (the offense was quite tolerable in strange
women), while Hebrew moralists exercised their invectives against
prostitution; it is sufficient to refer to a well-known passage
in the Book of Proverbs (see art. "Harlot," by Cheyne, in the
_Encyclopædia Biblica_). Mahomed also severely condemned
prostitution, though somewhat more tolerant to it in slave
women; according to Haleby, however, prostitution was practically
unknown in Islam during the first centuries after the Prophet's
time.
The Persian adherents of the somewhat ascetic _Zendavesta_ also
knew prostitution, and regarded it with repulsion: "It is the
Gahi [the courtesan, as an incarnation of the female demon,
Gahi], O Spitama Zarathustra! who mixes in her the seed of the
faithful and the unfaithful, of the worshipper of Mazda and the
worshipper of the Dævas, of the wicked and the righteous. Her
look dries up one-third of the mighty floods that run from the
mountains, O Zarathustra; her look withers one-third of the
beautiful, golden-hued, growing plants, O Zarathustra; her look
withers one-third of the strength of Spenta Armaiti [the earth];
and her touch withers in the faithful one-third of his good
thoughts, of his good words, of his good deeds, one-third of his
strength, of his victorious power, of his holiness. Verily I say
unto thee, O Spitama Zarathustra! such creatures ought to be
killed even more than gliding snakes, than howling wolves, than
the she-wolf that falls upon the fold, or than the she-frog that
falls upon the waters with her thousandfold brood" (_Zend-Avesta,
the Vendidad_, translated by James Darmesteter, Farfad XVIII).
In practice, however, prostitution is well established in the
modern East. Thus in the Tartar-Turcoman region houses of
prostitution lying outside the paths frequented by Christians
have been described by a writer who appears to be well informed
("Orientalische Prostitution," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_,
1907, Bd. ii, Heft 1). These houses are not regarded as immoral
or forbidden, but as places in which the visitor will find a
woman who gives him for a few hours the illusion of being in his
own home, with the pleasure of enjoying her songs, dances, and
recitations, and finally her body. Payment is made at the door,
and no subsequent question of money arises; the visitor is
henceforth among friends, almost as if in his own family. He
treats the prostitute almost as if she were his wife, and no
indecorum or coarseness of speech occurs. "There is no obscenity
in the Oriental brothel." At the same time there is no artificial
pretence of innocence.
In Eastern Asia, among the peoples of Mongolian stock, especially
in China, we find prostitution firmly established and organized
on a practical business basis. Prostitution is here accepted and
viewed with no serious disfavor, but the prostitute herself is,
nevertheless, treated with contempt. Young children are
frequently sold to be trained to a life of prostitution, educated
accordingly, and kept shut up from the world. Young widows
(remarriage being disapproved) frequently also slide into a life
of prostitution. Chinese prostitutes often end through opium and
the ravages of syphilis (see, e.g., Coltman's _The Chinese_,
1900, Ch. VII). In ancient China, it is said prostitutes were a
superior class and occupied a position somewhat similar to that
of the _hetairæ_ in Greece. Even in modern China, however, where
they are very numerous, and the flower boats, in which in towns
by the sea they usually live, very luxurious, it is chiefly for
entertainment, according to some writers, that they are resorted
to. Tschang Ki Tong, military attaché in Paris (as quoted by
Ploss and Bartels), describes the flower boat as less analogous
to a European brothel than to a _café chantant_; the young
Chinaman comes here for music, for tea, for agreeable
conversation with the flower-maidens, who are by no means
necessarily called upon to minister to the lust of their
visitors.
In Japan, the prostitute's lot is not so degraded as in China.
The greater refinement of Japanese civilization allows the
prostitute to retain a higher degree of self-respect. She is
sometimes regarded with pity, but less often with contempt. She
may associate openly with men, ultimately be married, even to men
of good social class, and rank as a respectable woman. "In riding
from Tokio to Yokohama, the past winter," Coltman observes (_op.
cit._, p. 113), "I saw a party of four young men and three quite
pretty and gaily-painted prostitutes, in the same car, who were
having a glorious time. They had two or three bottles of various
liquors, oranges, and fancy cakes, and they ate, drank and sang,
besides playing jokes on each other and frolicking like so many
kittens. You may travel the whole length of the Chinese Empire
and never witness such a scene." Yet the history of Japanese
prostitutes (which has been written in an interesting and
well-informed book, _The Nightless City_, by an English student
of sociology who remains anonymous) shows that prostitution in
Japan has not only been severely regulated, but very widely
looked down upon, and that Japanese prostitutes have often had to
suffer greatly; they were at one time practically slaves and
often treated with much hardship. They are free now, and any
condition approaching slavery is strictly prohibited and guarded
against. It would seem, however, that the palmiest days of
Japanese prostitution lay some centuries back. Up to the middle
of the eighteenth century Japanese prostitutes were highly
accomplished in singing, dancing, music, etc. Towards this
period, however, they seem to have declined in social
consideration and to have ceased to be well educated. Yet even
to-day, says Matignon ("La Prostitution au Japon," _Archives
d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, October, 1906), less infamy attaches
to prostitution in Japan than in Europe, while at the same time
there is less immorality in Japan than in Europe. Though
prostitution is organized like the postal or telegraph service,
there is also much clandestine prostitution. The prostitution
quarters are clean, beautiful and well-kept, but the Japanese
prostitutes have lost much of their native good taste in costume
by trying to imitate European fashions. It was when prostitution
began to decline two centuries ago, that the geishas first
appeared and were organized in such a way that they should not,
if possible, compete as prostitutes with the recognized and
licensed inhabitants of the Yoshiwara, as the quarter is called
to which prostitutes are confined. The geishas, of course, are
not prostitutes, though their virtue may not always be
impregnable, and in social position they correspond to actresses
in Europe.
In Korea, at all events before Korea fell into the hands of the
Japanese, it would seem that there was no distinction between the
class of dancing girls and prostitutes. "Among the courtesans,"
Angus Hamilton states, "the mental abilities are trained and
developed with a view to making them brilliant and entertaining
companions. These 'leaves of sunlight' are called _gisaing_, and
correspond to the geishas of Japan. Officially, they are attached
to a department of government, and are controlled by a bureau of
their own, in common with the Court musicians. They are supported
from the national treasury, and they are in evidence at official
dinners and all palace entertainments. They read and recite; they
dance and sing; they become accomplished artists and musicians.
They dress with exceptional taste; they move with exceeding
grace; they are delicate in appearance, very frail and very
human, very tender, sympathetic, and imaginative." But though
they are certainly the prettiest women in Korea, move in the
highest society, and might become concubines of the Emperor, they
are not allowed to marry men of good class (Angus Hamilton,
_Korea_, p. 52).
The history of European prostitution, as of so many other modern
institutions, may properly be said to begin in Rome. Here at the outset we
already find that inconsistently mixed attitude towards prostitution which
to-day is still preserved. In Greece it was in many respects different.
Greece was nearer to the days of religious prostitution, and the sincerity
and refinement of Greek civilization made it possible for the better kind
of prostitute to exert, and often be worthy to exert, an influence in all
departments of life which she has never been able to exercise since,
except perhaps occasionally, in a much slighter degree, in France. The
course, vigorous, practical Roman was quite ready to tolerate the
prostitute, but he was not prepared to carry that toleration to its
logical results; he never felt bound to harmonize inconsistent facts of
life. Cicero, a moralist of no mean order, without expressing approval of
prostitution, yet could not understand how anyone should wish to prohibit
youths from commerce with prostitutes, such severity being out of harmony
with all the customs of the past or the present.[142] But the superior
class of Roman prostitutes, the _bonæ mulieres_, had no such dignified
position as the Greek _hetairæ_. Their influence was indeed immense, but
it was confined, as it is in the case of their European successors to-day,
to fashions, customs, and arts. There was always a certain moral rigidity
in the Roman which prevented him from yielding far in this direction. He
encouraged brothels, but he only entered them with covered head and face
concealed in his cloak. In the same way, while he tolerated the
prostitute, beyond a certain point he sharply curtailed her privileges.
Not only was she deprived of all influence in the higher concerns of life,
but she might not even wear the _vitta_ or the _stola_; she could indeed
go almost naked if she pleased, but she must not ape the emblems of the
respectable Roman matron.[143]
The rise of Christianity to political power produced on the whole less
change of policy than might have been anticipated. The Christian rulers
had to deal practically as best they might with a very mixed, turbulent,
and semi-pagan world. The leading fathers of the Church were inclined to
tolerate prostitution for the avoidance of greater evils, and Christian
emperors, like their pagan predecessors, were willing to derive a tax from
prostitution. The right of prostitution to exist was, however, no longer
so unquestionably recognized as in pagan days, and from time to time some
vigorous ruler sought to repress prostitution by severe enactments. The
younger Theodosius and Valentinian definitely ordained that there should
be no more brothels and that anyone giving shelter to a prostitute should
be punished. Justinian confirmed that measure and ordered that all panders
were to be exiled on pain of death. These enactments were quite vain. But
during a thousand years they were repeated again and again in various
parts of Europe, and invariably with the same fruitless or worse than
fruitless results. Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, punished with death
those who promoted prostitution, and Recared, a Catholic king of the same
people in the sixth century, prohibited prostitution altogether and
ordered that a prostitute, when found, should receive three hundred
strokes of the whip and be driven out of the city. Charlemagne, as well as
Genserich in Carthage, and later Frederick Barbarossa in Germany, made
severe laws against prostitution which were all of no effect, for even if
they seemed to be effective for the time the reaction was all the greater
afterwards.[144]
It is in France that the most persistent efforts have been made to combat
prostitution. Most notable of all were the efforts of the King and Saint,
Louis IX. In 1254 St. Louis ordained that prostitutes should be driven out
altogether and deprived of all their money and goods, even to their
mantles and gowns. In 1256 he repeated this ordinance and in 1269, before
setting out for the Crusades, he ordered the destruction of all places of
prostitution. The repetition of those decrees shows how ineffectual they
were. They even made matters worse, for prostitutes were forced to mingle
with the general population and their influence was thus extended. St.
Louis was unable to put down prostitution even in his own camp in the
East, and it existed outside his own tent. His legislation, however, was
frequently imitated by subsequent rulers of France, even to the middle of
the seventeenth century, always with the same ineffectual and worse
results. In 1560 an edict of Charles IX abolished brothels, but the number
of prostitutes was thereby increased rather than diminished, while many
new kinds of brothels appeared in unsuspected shapes and were more
dangerous than the more recognized brothels which had been
suppressed.[145] In spite of all such legislation, or because of it, there
has been no country in which prostitution has played a more conspicuous
part.[146]
At Mantua, so great was the repulsion aroused by prostitutes that they
were compelled to buy in the markets any fruit or bread that had been
soiled by the mere touch of their hands. It was so also in Avignon in
1243. In Catalonia they could not sit at the same table as a lady or a
knight or kiss any honorable person.[147] Even in Venice, the paradise of
prostitution, numerous and severe regulations were passed against it, and
it was long before the Venetian rulers resigned themselves to its
toleration and regulation.[148]
The last vigorous attempt to uproot prostitution in Europe was that of
Maria Theresa at Vienna in the middle of the eighteenth century. Although
of such recent date it may be mentioned here because it was mediæval alike
in its conception and methods. Its object indeed, was to suppress not only
prostitution, but fornication generally, and the means adopted were fines,
imprisonment, whipping and torture. The supposed causes of fornication
were also dealt with severely; short dresses were prohibited; billiard
rooms and cafés were inspected; no waitresses were allowed, and when
discovered, a waitress was liable to be handcuffed and carried off by the
police. The Chastity Commission, under which these measures were
rigorously carried out, was, apparently, established in 1751 and was
quietly abolished by the Emperor Joseph II, in the early years of his
reign. It was the general opinion that this severe legislation was really
ineffective, and that it caused much more serious evils than it
cured.[149] It is certain in any case that, for a long time past,
illegitimacy has been more prevalent in Vienna than in any other great
European capital.
Yet the attitude towards prostitutes was always mixed and inconsistent at
different places or different times, or even at the same time and place.
Dufour has aptly compared their position to that of the mediæval Jews;
they were continually persecuted, ecclesiastically, civilly, and socially,
yet all classes were glad to have recourse to them and it was impossible
to do without them. In some countries, including England in the fourteenth
century, a special costume was imposed on prostitutes as a mark of
infamy.[150] Yet in many respects no infamy whatever attached to
prostitution. High placed officials could claim payment of their expenses
incurred in visiting prostitutes when traveling on public business.
Prostitution sometimes played an official part in festivities and
receptions accorded by great cities to royal guests, and the brothel might
form an important part of the city's hospitality. When the Emperor
Sigismund came to Ulm in 1434 the streets were illuminated at such times
as he or his suite desired to visit the common brothel. Brothels under
municipal protection are found in the thirteenth century in Augsburg, in
Vienna, in Hamburg.[151] In France the best known _abbayes_ of prostitutes
were those of Toulouse and Montpellier.[152] Durkheim is of opinion that
in the early middle ages, before this period, free love and marriage were
less severely differentiated. It was the rise of the middle class, he
considers, anxious to protect their wives and daughters, which led to a
regulated and publicly recognized attempt to direct debauchery into a
separate channel, brought under control.[153] These brothels constituted a
kind of public service, the directors of them being regarded almost as
public officials, bound to keep a certain number of prostitutes, to charge
according to a fixed tariff, and not to receive into their houses girls
belonging to the neighborhood. The institutions of this kind lasted for
three centuries. It was, in part, perhaps, the impetus of the new
Protestant movement, but mainly the terrible devastation produced by the
introduction of syphilis from America at the end of the fifteenth century
which, as Burckhardt and others have pointed out, led to the decline of
the mediæval brothels.[154]
The superior modern prostitute, the "courtesan" who had no connection with
the brothel, seems to have been the outcome of the Renaissance and made
her appearance in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. "Courtesan"
or "cortegiana" meant a lady following the court, and the term began at
this time to be applied to a superior prostitute observing a certain
degree of decorum and restraint.[155] In the papal court of Alexander
Borgia the courtesan flourished even when her conduct was not altogether
dignified. Burchard, the faithful and unimpeachable chronicler of this
court, describes in his diary how, one evening, in October, 1501, the Pope
sent for fifty courtesans to be brought to his chamber; after supper, in
the presence of Cæsar Borgia and his young sister Lucrezia, they danced
with the servitors and others who were present, at first clothed,
afterwards naked. The candlesticks with lighted candles were then placed
upon the floor and chestnuts thrown among them, to be gathered by the
women crawling between the candlesticks on their hands and feet. Finally a
number of prizes were brought forth to be awarded to those men "qui
pluries dictos meretrices carnaliter agnoscerent," the victor in the
contest being decided according to the judgment of the spectators.[156]
This scene, enacted publicly in the Apostolic palace and serenely set
forth by the impartial secretary, is at once a notable episode in the
history of modern prostitution and one of the most illuminating
illustrations we possess of the paganism of the Renaissance.
Before the term "courtesan" came into repute, prostitutes were
even in Italy commonly called "sinners," _peccatrice_. The
change, Graf remarks in a very interesting study of the
Renaissance prostitute ("Una Cortigiana fra Mille," _Attraverso
il Cinquecento_, pp. 217-351), "reveals a profound alteration in
ideas and in life;" a term that suggested infamy gave place to
one that suggested approval, and even honor, for the courts of
the Renaissance period represented the finest culture of the
time. The best of these courtesans seem to have been not
altogether unworthy of the honor they received. We can detect
this in their letters. There is a chapter on the letters of
Renaissance prostitutes, especially those of Camilla de Pisa
which are marked by genuine passion, in Lothar Schmidt's
_Frauenbriefe der Renaissance_. The famous Imperia, called by a
Pope in the early years of the sixteenth century "nobilissimum
Romæ scortum," knew Latin and could write Italian verse. Other
courtesans knew Italian and Latin poetry by heart, while they
were accomplished in music, dancing, and speech. We are reminded
of ancient Greece, and Graf, discussing how far the Renaissance
courtesans resembled the hetairæ, finds a very considerable
likeness, especially in culture and influence, though with some
differences due to the antagonism between religion and
prostitution at the later period.
The most distinguished figure in every respect among the
courtesans of that time was certainly Tullia D'Aragona. She was
probably the daughter of Cardinal D'Aragona (an illegitimate
scion of the Spanish royal family) by a Ferrarese courtesan who
became his mistress. Tullia has gained a high reputation by her
verse. Her best sonnet is addressed to a youth of twenty, whom
she passionately loved, but who did not return her love. Her
_Guerrino Meschino_, a translation from the Spanish, is a very
pure and chaste work. She was a woman of refined instincts and
aspirations, and once at least she abandoned her life of
prostitution. She was held in high esteem and respect. When, in
1546, Cosimo, Duke of Florence, ordered all prostitutes to wear a
yellow veil or handkerchief as a public badge of their
profession, Tullia appealed to the Duchess, a Spanish lady of
high character, and received permission to dispense with this
badge on account of her "rara scienzia di poesia et filosofia."
She dedicated her _Rime_ to the Duchess. Tullia D'Aragona was
very beautiful, with yellow hair, and remarkably large and bright
eyes, which dominated those who came near her. She was of proud
bearing and inspired unusual respect (G. Biagi, "Un' Etera
Romana," _Nuova Antologia_, vol. iv, 1886, pp. 655-711; S.
Bongi, _Rivista critica della Letteratura Italiana_, 1886, IV, p.
186).
Tullia D'Aragona was clearly not a courtesan at heart. Perhaps
the most typical example of the Renaissance courtesan at her best
is furnished by Veronica Franco, born in 1546 at Venice, of
middle class family and in early life married to a doctor. Of her
also it has been said that, while by profession a prostitute, she
was by inclination a poet. But she appears to have been well
content with her profession, and never ashamed of it. Her life
and character have been studied by Arturo Graf, and more slightly
in a little book by Tassini. She was highly cultured, and knew
several languages; she also sang well and played on many
instruments. In one of her letters she advises a youth who was
madly in love with her that if he wishes to obtain her favors he
must leave off importuning her and devote himself tranquilly to
study. "You know well," she adds, "that all those who claim to be
able to gain my love, and who are extremely dear to me, are
strenuous in studious discipline.... If my fortune allowed it I
would spend all my time quietly in the academies of virtuous
men." The Diotimas and Aspasias of antiquity, as Graf comments,
would not have demanded so much of their lovers. In her poems it
is possible to trace some of her love histories, and she often
shows herself torn by jealousy at the thought that perhaps
another woman may approach her beloved. Once she fell in love
with an ecclesiastic, possibly a bishop, with whom she had no
relationships, and after a long absence, which healed her love,
she and he became sincere friends. Once she was visited by Henry
III of France, who took away her portrait, while on her part she
promised to dedicate a book to him; she so far fulfilled this as
to address some sonnets to him and a letter; "neither did the
King feel ashamed of his intimacy with the courtesan," remarks
Graf, "nor did she suspect that he would feel ashamed of it."
When Montaigne passed through Venice she sent him a little book
of hers, as we learn from his _Journal_, though they do not
appear to have met. Tintoret was one of her many distinguished
friends, and she was a strenuous advocate of the high qualities
of modern, as compared with ancient, art. Her friendships were
affectionate, and she even seems to have had various grand ladies
among her friends. She was, however, so far from being ashamed of
her profession of courtesan that in one of her poems she affirms
she has been taught by Apollo other arts besides those he is
usually regarded as teaching:
"Cosi dolce e gustevole divento,
Quando mi trovo con persona in letto
Da cui amata e gradita mi sento."
In a certain _catalogo_ of the prices of Venetian courtesans
Veronica is assigned only 2 scudi for her favors, while the
courtesan to whom the catalogue is dedicated is set down at 25
scudi. Graf thinks there may be some mistake or malice here, and
an Italian gentleman of the time states that she required not
less than 50 scudi from those to whom she was willing to accord
what Montaigne called the "negotiation entière."
In regard to this matter it may be mentioned that, as stated by
Bandello, it was the custom for a Venetian prostitute to have six
or seven gentlemen at a time as her lovers. Each was entitled to
come to sup and sleep with her on one night of the week, leaving
her days free. They paid her so much per month, but she always
definitely reserved the right to receive a stranger passing
through Venice, if she wished, changing the time of her
appointment with her lover for the night. The high and special
prices which we find recorded are, of course, those demanded from
the casual distinguished stranger who came to Venice as, once in
the sixteenth century, Montaigne came.
In 1580 (when not more than thirty-four) Veronica confessed to
the Holy Office that she had had six children. In the same year
she formed the design of founding a home, which should not be a
monastery, where prostitutes who wished to abandon their mode of
life could find a refuge with their children, if they had any.
This seems to have led to the establishment of a Casa del
Soccorso. In 1591 she died of fever, reconciled with God and
blessed by many unfortunates. She had a good heart and a sound
intellect, and was the last of the great Renaissance courtesans
who revived Greek hetairism (Graf, _Attraverso il Cinquecento_,
pp. 217-351). Even in sixteenth century Venice, however, it will
be seen, Veronica Franco seems to have been not altogether at
peace in the career of a courtesan. She was clearly not adapted
for ordinary marriage, yet under the most favorable conditions
that the modern world has ever offered it may still be doubted
whether a prostitute's career can offer complete satisfaction to
a woman of large heart and brain.
Ninon de Lenclos, who is frequently called "the last of the great
courtesans," may seem an exception to the general rule as to the
inability of a woman of good heart, high character, and fine
intelligence to find satisfaction in a prostitute's life. But it
is a total misconception alike of Ninon de Lenclos's temperament
and her career to regard her as in any true sense a prostitute at
all. A knowledge of even the barest outlines of her life ought to
prevent such a mistake. Born early in the seventeenth century,
she was of good family on both sides; her mother was a woman of
severe life, but her father, a gentleman of Touraine, inspired
her with his own Epicurean philosophy as well as his love of
music. She was extremely well educated. At the age of sixteen or
seventeen she had her first lover, the noble and valiant Gaspard
de Coligny; he was followed for half a century by a long
succession of other lovers, sometimes more than one at a time;
three years was the longest period during which she was faithful
to one lover. Her attractions lasted so long that, it is said,
three generations of Sévignés were among her lovers. Tallemant
des Réaux enables us to study in detail her _liaisons_.
It is not, however, the abundance of lovers which makes a woman a
prostitute, but the nature of her relationships with them.
Sainte-Beuve, in an otherwise admirable study of Ninon de Lenclos
(_Causeries du Lundi_, vol. iv), seems to reckon her among the
courtesans. But no woman is a prostitute unless she uses men as a
source of pecuniary gain. Not only is there no evidence that this
was the case with Ninon, but all the evidence excludes such a
relationship. "It required much skill," said Voltaire, "and a
great deal of love on her part, to induce her to accept
presents." Tallemant, indeed, says that she sometimes took money
from her lovers, but this statement probably involves nothing
beyond what is contained in Voltaire's remark, and, in any case,
Tallemant's gossip, though usually well-informed, was not always
reliable. All are agreed as to her extreme disinterestedness.
When we hear precisely of Ninon de Lenclos in connection with
money, it is not as receiving a gift, but only as repaying a debt
to an old lover, or restoring a large sum left with her for safe
keeping when the owner was exiled. Such incidents are far from
suggesting the professional prostitute of any age; they are
rather the relationships which might exist between men friends.
Ninon de Lenclos's character was in many respects far from
perfect, but she combined many masculine virtues, and especially
probity, with a temperament which, on the whole, was certainly
feminine; she hated hypocrisy, and she was never influenced by
pecuniary considerations. She was, moreover, never reckless, but
always retained a certain self-restraint and temperance, even in
eating and drinking, and, we are told, she never drank wine. She
was, as Sainte-Beuve has remarked, the first to realize that
there must be the same virtues for men and for women, and that it
is absurd to reduce all feminine virtues to one. "Our sex has
been burdened with all the frivolities," she wrote, "and men have
reserved to themselves the essential qualities: I have made
myself a man." She sometimes dressed as a man when riding (see,
e.g., _Correspondence Authentique_ of Ninon de Lenclos, with a
good introduction by Emile Colombey). Consciously or not, she
represented a new feminine idea at a period when--as we may see
in many forgotten novels written by the women of that time--ideas
were beginning to emerge in the feminine sphere. She was the
first, and doubtless, from one point of view, the most extreme
representative of a small and distinguished group of French women
among whom Georges Sand is the finest personality.
Thus it is idle to attempt to adorn the history of prostitution
with the name of Ninon de Lenclos. A debauched old prostitute
would never, like Ninon towards the end of her long life, have
been able to retain or to conquer the affection and the esteem
of many of the best men and women of her time; even to the
austere Saint-Simon it seemed that there reigned in her little
court a decorum which the greatest princesses cannot achieve. She
was not a prostitute, but a woman of unique personality with a
little streak of genius in it. That she was inimitable we need
not perhaps greatly regret. In her old age, in 1699, her old
friend and former lover, Saint-Evremond, wrote to her, with only
a little exaggeration, that there were few princesses and few
saints who would not leave their courts and their cloisters to
change places with her. "If I had known beforehand what my life
would be I would have hanged myself," was her oft-quoted answer.
It is, indeed, a solitary phrase that slips in, perhaps as the
expression of a momentary mood; one may make too much of it. More
truly characteristic is the fine saying in which her Epicurean
philosophy seems to stretch out towards Nietzsche: "La joie de
l'esprit en marque la force."
The frank acceptance of prostitution by the spiritual or even the temporal
power has since the Renaissance become more and more exceptional. The
opposite extreme of attempting to uproot prostitution has also in practice
been altogether abandoned. Sporadic attempts have indeed been made, here
and there, to put down prostitution with a strong hand even in quite
modern times. It is now, however, realized that in such a case the remedy
is worse than the disease.
In 1860 a Mayor of Portsmouth felt it his duty to attempt to
suppress prostitution. "In the early part of his mayoralty,"
according to a witness before the Select Committee on the
Contagious Diseases Acts (p. 393), "there was an order passed
that every beerhouse-keeper and licensed victualer in the borough
known to harbor these women would be dealt with, and probably
lose his license. On a given day about three hundred or four
hundred of these forlorn outcasts were bundled wholesale into the
streets, and they formed up in a large body, many of them with
only a shift and a petticoat on, and with a lot of drunken men
and boys with a fife and fiddle they paraded the streets for
several days. They marched in a body to the workhouse, but for
many reasons they were refused admittance.... These women
wandered about for two or three days shelterless, and it was felt
that the remedy was very much worse than the disease, and the
women were allowed to go back to their former places."
Similar experiments have been made even more recently in America.
"In Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1891, the houses of prostitutes
were closed, the inmates turned out upon the streets, and were
refused lodging and even food by the citizens of that place. A
wave of popular remonstrance, all over the country, at the
outrage on humanity, created a reaction which resulted in a last
condition by no means better than the first." In the same year
also a similar incident occurred in New York with the same
unfortunate results (Isidore Dyer, "The Municipal Control of
Prostitution in the United States," report presented to the
Brussels International Conference in 1899).
There grew up instead the tendency to regulate prostitution, to give it a
semi-official toleration which enabled the authorities to exercise a
control over it, and to guard as far as possible against its evil by
medical and police inspection. The new brothel system differed from the
ancient mediæval houses of prostitution in important respects; it involved
a routine of medical inspection and it endeavored to suppress any rivalry
by unlicensed prostitutes outside. Bernard Mandeville, the author of the
_Fable of the Bees_, and an acute thinker, was a pioneer in the advocacy
of this system. In 1724, in his _Modest Defense of Publick Stews_, he
argues that "the encouraging of public whoring will not only prevent most
of the mischievous effects of this vice, but even lessen the quantity of
whoring in general, and reduce it to the narrowest bounds which it can
possibly be contained in." He proposed to discourage private prostitution
by giving special privileges and immunities to brothels by Act of
Parliament. His scheme involved the erection of one hundred brothels in a
special quarter of the city, to contain two thousand prostitutes and one
hundred matrons of ability and experience with physicians and surgeons, as
well as commissioners to oversee the whole. Mandeville was regarded merely
as a cynic or worse, and his scheme was ignored or treated with contempt.
It was left to the genius of Napoleon, eighty years later, to establish
the system of "maisons de tolérance," which had so great an influence over
modern European practice during a large part of the last century and even
still in its numerous survivals forms the subject of widely divergent
opinions.
On the whole, however, it must be said that the system of registering,
examining, and regularizing prostitutes now belongs to the past. Many
great battles have been fought over this question; the most important is
that which raged for many years in England over the Contagious Diseases
Acts, and is embodied in the 600 pages of a Report by a Select Committee
on these Acts issued in 1882. The majority of the members of the Committee
reported favorably to the Acts which were, notwithstanding, repealed in
1886, since which date no serious attempt has been made in England to
establish them again.
At the present time, although the old system still stands in many
countries with the inert stolidity of established institutions, it no
longer commands general approval. As Paul and Victor Margueritte have
truly stated, in the course of an acute examination of the phenomena of
state-regulated prostitution as found in Paris, the system is "barbarous
to start with and almost inefficacious as well." The expert is every day
more clearly demonstrating its inefficacy while the psychologist and the
sociologist are constantly becoming more convinced that it is barbarous.
It can indeed by no means be said that any unanimity has been attained. It
is obviously so urgently necessary to combat the flood of disease and
misery which proceeds directly from the spread of syphilis and gonorrhoea,
and indirectly from the prostitution which is the chief propagator of
these diseases, that we cannot be surprised that many should eagerly catch
at any system which seems to promise a palliation of the evils. At the
present time, however, it is those best acquainted with the operation of
the system of control who have most clearly realized that the supposed
palliation is for the most part illusory,[157] and in any case attained at
the cost of the artificial production of other evils. In France, where the
system of the registration and control of prostitutes has been
established for over a century,[158] and where consequently its
advantages, if such there are, should be clearly realized, it meets with
almost impassioned opposition from able men belonging to every section of
the community. In Germany the opposition to regularized control has long
been led by well-equipped experts, headed by Blaschko of Berlin. Precisely
the same conclusions are being reached in America. Gottheil, of New York,
finds that the municipal control of prostitution is "neither successful
nor desirable." Heidingsfeld concludes that the regulation and control
system in force in Cincinnati has done little good and much harm; under
the system among the private patients in his own clinic the proportion of
cases of both syphilis and gonorrhoea has increased; "suppression of
prostitutes is impossible and control is impracticable."[159]
It is in Germany that the attempt to regulate prostitution still
remains most persistent, with results that in Germany itself are
regarded as unfortunate. Thus the German law inflicts a penalty
on householders who permit illegitimate sexual intercourse in
their houses. This is meant to strike the unlicensed prostitute,
but it really encourages prostitution, for a decent youth and
girl who decide to form a relationship which later may develop
into marriage, and which is not illegal (for extra-marital sexual
intercourse _per se_ is not in Germany, as it is by the
antiquated laws of several American States, a punishable
offense), are subjected to so much trouble and annoyance by the
suspicious police that it is much easier for the girl to become a
prostitute and put herself under the protection of the police.
The law was largely directed against those who live on the
profits of prostitution. But in practice it works out
differently. The prostitute simply has to pay extravagantly high
rents, so that her landlord really lives on the fruits of her
trade, while she has to carry on her business with increased
activity and on a larger scale in order to cover her heavy
expenses (P. Hausmeister, "Zur Analyse der Prostitution,"
_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. ii, 1907, p. 294).
In Italy, opinion on this matter is much divided. The regulation
of prostitution has been successively adopted, abandoned, and
readopted. In Switzerland, the land of governmental experiments,
various plans are tried in different cantons. In some there is
no attempt to interfere with prostitution, except under special
circumstances; in others all prostitution, and even fornication
generally, is punishable; in Geneva only native prostitutes are
permitted to practice; in Zurich, since 1897, prostitution is
prohibited, but care is taken to put no difficulties in the path
of free sexual relationships which are not for gain. With these
different regulations, morals in Switzerland generally are said
to be much on the same level as elsewhere (Moreau-Christophe, _Du
Problème de la Misère_, vol. iii, p. 259). The same conclusion
holds good of London. A disinterested observer, Félix Remo (_La
Vie Galante en Angleterre_, 1888, p. 237), concluded that,
notwithstanding its free trade in prostitution, its alcoholic
excesses, its vices of all kinds, "London is one of the most
moral capitals in Europe." The movement towards freedom in this
matter has been evidenced in recent years by the abandonment of
the system of regulation by Denmark in 1906.
Even the most ardent advocates of the registration of prostitutes
recognize that not only is the tendency of civilization opposed rather
than favorable to the system, but that in the numerous countries where the
system persists registered prostitutes are losing ground in the struggle
against clandestine prostitutes. Even in France, the classic land of
police-controlled prostitutes, the "maisons de tolérance" have long been
steadily decreasing in number, by no means because prostitution is
decreasing but because low-class _brasseries_ and small _cafés-chantants_,
which are really unlicensed brothels, are taking their place.[160]
The wholesale regularization of prostitution in civilized centres is
nowadays, indeed, advocated by few, if any, of the authorities who belong
to the newer school. It is at most claimed as desirable in certain places
under special circumstances.[161] Even those who would still be glad to
see prostitution thoroughly in the control of the police now recognize
that experience shows this to be impossible. As many girls begin their
career as prostitutes at a very early age, a sound system of regulation
should be prepared to enroll as permanent prostitutes even girls who are
little more than children. That, however, is a logical conclusion against
which the moral sense, and even the common sense, of a community
instinctively revolts. In Paris girls may not be inscribed as prostitutes
until they have reached the age of sixteen and some consider even that age
too low.[162] Moreover, whenever she becomes diseased, or grows tired of
her position, the registered woman may always slip out of the hands of the
police and establish herself elsewhere as a clandestine prostitute. Every
rigid attempt to keep prostitution within the police ring leads to
offensive interference with the actions and the freedom of respectable
women which cannot fail to be intolerable in any free community. Even in a
city like London, where prostitution is relatively free, the supervision
of the police has led to scandalous police charges against women who have
done nothing whatever which should legitimately arouse suspicion of their
behavior. The escape of the infected woman from the police cordon has, it
is obvious, an effect in raising the apparent level of health of
registered women, and the police statistics are still further fallaciously
improved by the fact that the inmates of brothels are older on the average
than clandestine prostitutes and have become immune to disease.[163] These
facts are now becoming fairly obvious and well recognized. The state
regulation of prostitution is undesirable, on moral grounds for the
oft-emphasized reason that it is only applied to one sex, and on practical
grounds because it is ineffective. Society allows the police to harass the
prostitute with petty persecutions under the guise of charges of
"solicitation," "disorderly conduct," etc., but it is no longer convinced
that she ought to be under the absolute control of the police.
The problem of prostitution, when we look at it narrowly, seems to be in
the same position to-day as at any time in the course of the past three
thousand years. In order, however, to comprehend the real significance of
prostitution, and to attain a reasonable attitude towards it, we must look
at it from a broader point of view; we must consider not only its
evolution and history, but its causes and its relation to the wider
aspects of modern social life. When we thus view the problem from a
broader standpoint we shall find that there is no conflict between the
claims of ethics and those of social hygiene, and that the coördinated
activity of both is involved in the progressive refinement and
purification of civilized sexual relationships.
_III. The Causes of Prostitution._
The history of the rise and development of prostitution enables us to see
that prostitution is not an accident of our marriage system, but an
essential constituent which appears concurrently with its other essential
constituents. The gradual development of the family on a patriarchal and
largely monogamic basis rendered it more and more difficult for a woman to
dispose of her own person. She belongs in the first place to her father,
whose interest it was to guard her carefully until a husband appeared who
could afford to purchase her. In the enhancement of her value the new idea
of the market value of virginity gradually developed, and where a "virgin"
had previously meant a woman who was free to do as she would with her own
body its meaning was now reversed and it came to mean a woman who was
precluded from having intercourse with men. When she was transferred from
her father to a husband, she was still guarded with the same care;
husband and father alike found their interest in preserving their women
from unmarried men. The situation thus produced resulted in the existence
of a large body of young men who were not yet rich enough to obtain wives,
and a large number of young women, not yet chosen as wives, and many of
whom could never expect to become wives. At such a point in social
evolution prostitution is clearly inevitable; it is not so much the
indispensable concomitant of marriage as an essential part of the whole
system. Some of the superfluous or neglected women, utilizing their money
value and perhaps at the same time reviving traditions of an earlier
freedom, find their social function in selling their favors to gratify the
temporary desires of the men who have not yet been able to acquire wives.
Thus every link in the chain of the marriage system is firmly welded and
the complete circle formed.
But while the history of the rise and development of prostitution shows us
how indestructible and essential an element prostitution is of the
marriage system which has long prevailed in Europe--under very varied
racial, political, social, and religious conditions--it yet fails to
supply us in every respect with the data necessary to reach a definite
attitude towards prostitution to-day. In order to understand the place of
prostitution in our existing system, it is necessary that we should
analyze the chief factors of prostitution. We may most conveniently learn
to understand these if we consider prostitution, in order, under four
aspects. These are: (1) _economic_ necessity; (2) _biological_
predisposition; (3) _moral_ advantages; and (4) what may be called its
_civilizational_ value.
While these four factors of prostitution seem to me those that here
chiefly concern us, it is scarcely necessary to point out that many other
causes contribute to produce and modify prostitution. Prostitutes
themselves often seek to lead other girls to adopt the same paths;
recruits must be found for brothels, whence we have the "white slave
trade," which is now being energetically combated in many parts of the
world; while all the forms of seduction towards this life are favored and
often predisposed to by alcoholism. It will generally be found that
several causes have combined to push a girl into the career of
prostitution.
The ways in which various factors of environment and suggestion
unite to lead a girl into the paths of prostitution are indicated
in the following statement in which a correspondent has set forth
his own conclusions on this matter as a man of the world: "I have
had a somewhat varied experience among loose women, and can say,
without hesitation, that not more than 1 per cent, of the women I
have known could be regarded as educated. This indicates that
almost invariably they are of humble origin, and the terrible
cases of overcrowding that are daily brought to light suggest
that at very early ages the sense of modesty becomes extinct, and
long before puberty a familiarity with things sexual takes place.
As soon as they are old enough these girls are seduced by their
sweethearts; the familiarity with which they regard sexual
matters removes the restraint which surrounds a girl whose early
life has been spent in decent surroundings. Later they go to work
in factories and shops; if pretty and attractive, they consort
with managers and foremen. Then the love of finery, which forms
so large a part of the feminine character, tempts the girl to
become the 'kept' woman of some man of means. A remarkable thing
in this connection is the fact that they rarely enjoy excitement
with their protectors, preferring rather the coarser embraces of
some man nearer their own station in life, very often a soldier.
I have not known many women who were seduced and deserted, though
this is a fiction much affected by prostitutes. Barmaids supply a
considerable number to the ranks of prostitution, largely on
account of their addiction to drink; drunkenness invariably leads
to laxness of moral restraint in women. Another potent factor in
the production of prostitutes lies in the flare of finery
flaunted by some friend who has adopted the life. A girl, working
hard to live, sees some friend, perhaps making a call in the
street where the hard-working girl lives, clothed in finery,
while she herself can hardly get enough to eat. She has a
conversation with her finely-clad friend who tells her how easily
she can earn money, explaining what a vital asset the sexual
organs are, and soon another one is added to the ranks."
There is some interest in considering the reasons assigned for
prostitutes entering their career. In some countries this has
been estimated by those who come closely into official or other
contact with prostitutes. In other countries, it is the rule for
girls, before they are registered as prostitutes, to state the
reasons for which they desire to enter the career.
Parent-Duchâtelet, whose work on prostitutes in Paris is still an
authority, presented the first estimate of this kind. He found
that of over five thousand prostitutes, 1441 were influenced by
poverty, 1425 by seduction of lovers who had abandoned them,
1255 by the loss of parents from death or other cause. By such an
estimate, nearly the whole number are accounted for by
wretchedness, that is by economic causes, alone
(Parent-Duchâtelet, _De la Prostitution_, 1857, vol. i, p. 107).
In Brussels during a period of twenty years (1865-1884) 3505
women were inscribed as prostitutes. The causes they assigned for
desiring to take to this career present a different picture from
that shown by Parent-Duchâtelet, but perhaps a more reliable one,
although there are some marked and curious discrepancies. Out of
the 3505, 1523 explained that extreme poverty was the cause of
their degradation; 1118 frankly confessed that their sexual
passions were the cause; 420 attributed their fall to evil
company; 316 said they were disgusted and weary of their work,
because the toil was so arduous and the pay so small; 101 had
been abandoned by their lovers; 10 had quarrelled with their
parents; 7 were abandoned by their husbands; 4 did not agree with
their guardians; 3 had family quarrels; 2 were compelled to
prostitute themselves by their husbands, and 1 by her parents
(_Lancet_, June 28, 1890, p. 1442).
In London, Merrick found that of 16,022 prostitutes who passed
through his hands during the years he was chaplain at Millbank
prison, 5061 voluntarily left home or situation for "a life of
pleasure;" 3363 assigned poverty as the cause; 3154 were
"seduced" and drifted on to the street; 1636 were betrayed by
promises of marriage and abandoned by lover and relations. On the
whole, Merrick states, 4790, or nearly one-third of the whole
number, may be said to owe the adoption of their career directly
to men, 11,232 to other causes. He adds that of those pleading
poverty a large number were indolent and incapable (G.P. Merrick,
_Work Among the Fallen_, p. 38).
Logan, an English city missionary with an extensive acquaintance
with prostitutes, divided them into the following groups: (1)
One-fourth of the girls are servants, especially in public
houses, beer shops, etc., and thus led into the life; (2)
one-fourth come from factories, etc.; (3) nearly one-fourth are
recruited by procuresses who visit country towns, markets, etc.;
(4) a final group includes, on the one hand, those who are
induced to become prostitutes by destitution, or indolence, or a
bad temper, which unfits them for ordinary avocations, and, on
the other hand, those who have been seduced by a false promise of
marriage (W. Logan, _The Great Social Evil_, 1871, p. 53).
In America Sanger has reported the results of inquiries made of
two thousand New York prostitutes as to the causes which induced
them to take up their avocation:
Destitution 525
Inclination 513
Seduced and abandoned 258
Drink and desire for drink 181
Ill-treatment by parents, relations, or husbands 164
As an easy life 124
Bad company 84
Persuaded by prostitutes 71
Too idle to work 29
Violated 27
Seduced on emigrant ship 16
Seduced in emigrant boarding homes 8
-----
2,000
(Sanger, _History of Prostitution_, p. 488.)
In America, again, more recently, Professor Woods Hutchinson put
himself into communication with some thirty representative men in
various great metropolitan centres, and thus summarizes the
answers as regards the etiology of prostitution:
Per cent.
Love of display, luxury and idleness 42.1
Bad family surroundings 23.8
Seduction in which they were innocent victims 11.3
Lack of employment 9.4
Heredity 7.8
Primary sexual appetite 5.6
(Woods Hutchinson, "The Economics of Prostitution," _American
Gynæcologic and Obstetric Journal_, September, 1895; _Id., The
Gospel According to Darwin_, p. 194.)
In Italy, in 1881, among 10,422 inscribed prostitutes from the
age of seventeen upwards, the causes of prostitution were
classified as follows:
Vice and depravity 2,752
Death of parents, husband, etc. 2,139
Seduction by lover 1,653
Seduction by employer 927
Abandoned by parents, husband, etc. 794
Love of luxury 698
Incitement by lover or other persons outside
family 666
Incitement by parents or husband 400
To support parents or children 393
(Ferriani, _Minorenni Delinquenti_, p. 193.) The reasons
assigned by Russian prostitutes for taking up their career are
(according to Federow) as follows:
38.5 per cent. insufficient wages.
21. per cent. desire for amusement.
14. per cent. loss of place.
9.5 per cent. persuasion by women friends.
6.5 per cent. loss of habit of work.
5.5 per cent. chagrin, and to punish lover.
.5 per cent. drunkenness.
(Summarized in _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Nov. 15,
1901.)
1. _The Economic Causation of Prostitution_.--Writers on prostitution
frequently assert that economic conditions lie at the root of prostitution
and that its chief cause is poverty, while prostitutes themselves often
declare that the difficulty of earning a livelihood in other ways was a
main cause in inducing them to adopt this career. "Of all the causes of
prostitution," Parent-Duchâtelet wrote a century ago, "particularly in
Paris, and probably in all large cities, none is more active than lack of
work and the misery which is the inevitable result of insufficient wages."
In England, also, to a large extent, Sherwell states, "morals fluctuate
with trade."[164] It is equally so in Berlin where the number of
registered prostitutes increases during bad years.[165] It is so also in
America. It is the same in Japan; "the cause of causes is poverty."[166]
Thus the broad and general statement that prostitution is largely or
mainly an economic phenomenon, due to the low wages of women or to sudden
depressions in trade, is everywhere made by investigators. It must,
however, be added that these general statements are considerably qualified
in the light of the detailed investigations made by careful inquirers.
Thus Ströhmberg, who minutely investigated 462 prostitutes, found that
only one assigned destitution as the reason for adopting her career, and
on investigation this was found to be an impudent lie.[167] Hammer found
that of ninety registered German prostitutes not one had entered on the
career out of want or to support a child, while some went on the street
while in the possession of money, or without wishing to be paid.[168]
Pastor Buschmann, of the Teltow Magdalene Home in Berlin, finds that it is
not want but indifference to moral considerations which leads girls to
become prostitutes. In Germany, before a girl is put on the police
register, due care is always taken to give her a chance of entering a Home
and getting work; in Berlin, in the course of ten years, only two
girls--out of thousands--were willing to take advantage of this
opportunity. The difficulty experienced by English Rescue Homes in finding
girls who are willing to be "rescued" is notorious. The same difficulty is
found in other cities, even where entirely different conditions prevail;
thus it is found in Madrid, according to Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas
Aguilaniedo, that the prostitutes who enter the Homes, notwithstanding all
the devotion of the nuns, on leaving at once return to their old life.
While the economic factor in prostitution undoubtedly exists, the undue
frequency and emphasis with which it is put forward and accepted is
clearly due, in part to ignorance of the real facts, in part to the fact
that such an assumption appeals to those whose weakness it is to explain
all social phenomena by economic causes, and in part to its obvious
plausibility.[169]
Prostitutes are mainly recruited from the ranks of factory girls, domestic
servants, shop girls, and waitresses. In some of these occupations it is
difficult to obtain employment all the year round. In this way many
milliners, dressmakers and tailoresses become prostitutes when business is
slack, and return to business when the season begins. Sometimes the
regular work of the day is supplemented concurrently by prostitution in
the street in the evening. It is said, possibly with some truth, that
amateur prostitution of this kind is extremely prevalent in England, as it
is not checked by the precautions which, in countries where prostitution
is regulated, the clandestine prostitute must adopt in order to avoid
registration. Certain public lavatories and dressing-rooms in central
London are said to be used by the girls for putting on, and finally
washing off before going home, the customary paint.[170] It is certain
that in England a large proportion of parents belonging to the working and
even lower middle class ranks are unacquainted with the nature of the
lives led by their own daughters. It must be added, also, that
occasionally this conduct of the daughter is winked at or encouraged by
the parents; thus a correspondent writes that he "knows some towns in
England where prostitution is not regarded as anything disgraceful, and
can remember many cases where the mother's house has been used by the
daughter with the mother's knowledge."
Acton, in a well-informed book on London prostitution, written in the
middle of the last century, said that prostitution is "a transitory stage,
through which an untold number of British women are ever on their
passage."[171] This statement was strenuously denied at the time by many
earnest moralists who refused to admit that it was possible for a woman
who had sunk into so deep a pit of degradation ever to climb out again,
respectably safe and sound. Yet it is certainly true as regards a
considerable proportion of women, not only in England, but in other
countries also. Thus Parent-Duchâtelet, the greatest authority on French
prostitution, stated that "prostitution is for the majority only a
transitory stage; it is quitted usually during the first year; very few
prostitutes continue until extinction." It is difficult, however, to
ascertain precisely of how large a proportion this is true; there are no
data which would serve as a basis for exact estimation,[172] and it is
impossible to expect that respectable married women would admit that they
had ever been "on the streets"; they would not, perhaps, always admit it
even to themselves.
The following case, though noted down over twenty years ago, is
fairly typical of a certain class, among the lower ranks of
prostitution, in which the economic factor counts for much, but
in which we ought not too hastily to assume that it is the sole
factor.
Widow, aged thirty, with two children. Works in an umbrella
manufactory in the East End of London, earning eighteen shillings
a week by hard work, and increasing her income by occasionally
going out on the streets in the evenings. She haunts a quiet side
street which is one of the approaches to a large city railway
terminus. She is a comfortable, almost matronly-looking woman,
quietly dressed in a way that is only noticeable from the skirts
being rather short. If spoken to she may remark that she is
"waiting for a lady friend," talks in an affected way about the
weather, and parenthetically introduces her offers. She will
either lead a man into one of the silent neighboring lanes filled
with warehouses, or will take him home with her. She is willing
to accept any sum the man may be willing or able to give;
occasionally it is a sovereign, sometimes it is only a sixpence;
on an average she earns a few shillings in an evening. She had
only been in London for ten months; before that she lived in
Newcastle. She did not go on the streets there; "circumstances
alter cases," she sagely remarks. Though not speaking well of
the police, she says they do not interfere with her as they do
with some of the girls. She never gives them money, but hints
that it is sometimes necessary to gratify their desires in order
to keep on good terms with them.
It must always be remembered, for it is sometimes forgotten by socialists
and social reformers, that while the pressure of poverty exerts a markedly
modifying influence on prostitution, in that it increases the ranks of the
women who thereby seek a livelihood and may thus be properly regarded as a
factor of prostitution, no practicable raising of the rate of women's
wages could possibly serve, directly and alone, to abolish prostitution.
De Molinari, an economist, after remarking that "prostitution is an
industry" and that if other competing industries can offer women
sufficiently high pecuniary inducements they will not be so frequently
attracted to prostitution, proceeds to point out that that by no means
settles the question. "Like every other industry prostitution is governed
by the demand of the need to which it responds. As long as that need and
that demand persist, they will provoke an offer. It is the need and the
demand that we must act on, and perhaps science will furnish us the means
to do so."[173] In what way Molinari expects science to diminish the
demand for prostitutes, however, is not clearly brought out.
Not only have we to admit that no practicable rise in the rate of wages
paid to women in ordinary industries can possibly compete with the wages
which fairly attractive women of quite ordinary ability can earn by
prostitution,[174] but we have also to realize that a rise in general
prosperity--which alone can render a rise of women's wages healthy and
normal--involves a rise in the wages of prostitution, and an increase in
the number of prostitutes. So that if good wages is to be regarded as the
antagonist of prostitution, we can only say that it more than gives back
with one hand what it takes with the other. To so marked a degree is this
the case that Després in a detailed moral and demographic study of the
distribution of prostitution in France comes to the conclusion that we
must reverse the ancient doctrine that "poverty engenders prostitution"
since prostitution regularly increases with wealth,[175] and as a
département rises in wealth and prosperity, so the number both of its
inscribed and its free prostitutes rises also. There is indeed a fallacy
here, for while it is true, as Després argues, that wealth demands
prostitution, it is also true that a wealthy community involves the
extreme of poverty as well as of riches and that it is among the poorer
elements that prostitution chiefly finds its recruits. The ancient dictum
that "poverty engenders prostitution" still stands, but it is complicated
and qualified by the complex conditions of civilization. Bonger, in his
able discussion of the economic side of the question, has realized the
wide and deep basis of prostitution when he reaches the conclusion that it
is "on the one hand the inevitable complement of the existing legal
monogamy, and on the other hand the result of the bad conditions in which
many young girls grow up, the result of the physical and psychical
wretchedness in which the women of the people live, and the consequence
also of the inferior position of women in our actual society."[176] A
narrowly economic consideration of prostitution can by no means bring us
to the root of the matter.
One circumstance alone should have sufficed to indicate that the
inability of many women to secure "a living wage," is far from
being the most fundamental cause of prostitution: a large
proportion of prostitutes come from the ranks of domestic
service. Of all the great groups of female workers, domestic
servants are the freest from economic anxieties; they do not pay
for food or for lodging; they often live as well as their
mistresses, and in a large proportion of cases they have fewer
money anxieties than their mistresses. Moreover, they supply an
almost universal demand, so that there is never any need for even
very moderately competent servants to be in want of work. They
constitute, it is true, a very large body which could not fail to
supply a certain contingent of recruits to prostitution. But when
we see that domestic service is the chief reservoir from which
prostitutes are drawn, it should be clear that the craving for
food and shelter is by no means the chief cause of prostitution.
It may be added that, although the significance of this
predominance of servants among prostitutes is seldom realized by
those who fancy that to remove poverty is to abolish
prostitution, it has not been ignored by the more thoughtful
students of social questions. Thus Sherwell, while pointing out
truly that, to a large extent, "morals fluctuate with trade,"
adds that, against the importance of the economic factor, it is a
suggestive and in every way impressive fact that the majority of
the girls who frequent the West End of London (88 per cent.,
according to the Salvation Army's Registers) are drawn from
domestic service where the economic struggle is not severely felt
(Arthur Sherwell, _Life in West London_, Ch. V, "Prostitution").
It is at the same time worthy of note that by the conditions of
their lives servants, more than any other class, resemble
prostitutes (Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo have
pointed this out in _La Mala Vida en Madrid_, p. 240). Like
prostitutes, they are a class of women apart; they are not
entitled to the considerations and the little courtesies usually
paid to other women; in some countries they are even registered,
like prostitutes; it is scarcely surprising that when they suffer
from so many of the disadvantages of the prostitute, they should
sometimes desire to possess also some of her advantages. Lily
Braun (_Frauenfrage_, pp. 389 et seq.) has set forth in detail
these unfavorable conditions of domestic labor as they bear on
the tendency of servant-girls to become prostitutes. R. de
Ryckère, in his important work, _La Servante Criminelle_ (1907,
pp. 460 et seq.; cf., the same author's article, "La Criminalité
Ancillaire," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, July and
December, 1906), has studied the psychology of the servant-girl.
He finds that she is specially marked by lack of foresight,
vanity, lack of invention, tendency to imitation, and mobility of
mind. These are characters which ally her to the prostitute. De
Ryckère estimates the proportion of former servants among
prostitutes generally as fifty per cent., and adds that what is
called the "white slavery" here finds its most complacent and
docile victims. He remarks, however, that the servant prostitute
is, on the whole, not so much immoral as non-moral.
In Paris Parent-Duchâtelet found that, in proportion to their
number, servants furnished the largest contingent to
prostitution, and his editors also found that they head the list
(Parent-Duchâtelet, edition 1857, vol. i, p. 83). Among
clandestine prostitutes at Paris, Commenge has more recently
found that former servants constitute forty per cent. In Bordeaux
Jeannel (_De le Prostitution Publique_, p. 102) also found that
in 1860 forty per cent, of prostitutes had been servants,
seamstresses coming next with thirty-seven per cent.
In Germany and Austria it has long been recognized that domestic
service furnishes the chief number of recruits to prostitution.
Lippert, in Germany, and Gross-Hoffinger, in Austria, pointed out
this predominance of maid-servants and its significance before
the middle of the nineteenth century, and more recently Blaschko
has stated ("Hygiene der Syphilis" in Weyl's _Handbuch der
Hygiene_, Bd. ii, p. 40) that among Berlin prostitutes in 1898
maid-servants stand at the head with fifty-one per cent.
Baumgarten has stated that in Vienna the proportion of servants
is fifty-eight per cent.
In England, according to the Report of a Select Committee of the
Lords on the laws for the protection of children, sixty per cent,
of prostitutes have been servants. F. Remo, in his _Vie Galante
en Angleterre_, states the proportion as eighty per cent. It
would appear to be even higher as regards the West End of London.
Taking London as a whole the extensive statistics of Merrick
(_Work Among the Fallen_), chaplain of the Millbank Prison,
showed that out of 14,790 prostitutes, 5823, or about forty per
cent., had previously been servants, laundresses coming next, and
then dressmakers; classifying his data somewhat more summarily
and roughly, Merrick found that the proportion of servants was
fifty-three per cent.
In America, among two thousand prostitutes, Sanger states that
forty-three per cent, had been servants, dressmakers coming next,
but at a long interval, with six per cent. (Sanger, _History of
Prostitution_, p. 524). Among Philadelphia prostitutes, Goodchild
states that "domestics are probably in largest proportion,"
although some recruits may be found from almost any occupation.
It is the same in other countries. In Italy, according to Tammeo
(_La Prostituzione_, p. 100), servants come first among
prostitutes with a proportion of twenty-eight per cent., followed
by the group of dressmakers, tailoresses and milliners, seventeen
per cent. In Sardinia, A Mantegazza states, most prostitutes are
servants from the country. In Russia, according to Fiaux, the
proportion is forty-five per cent. In Madrid, according to Eslava
(as quoted by Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo (_La Mala
Vida, en Madrid_, p. 239)), servants come at the head of
registered prostitutes with twenty-seven per cent.--almost the
same proportion as in Italy--and are followed by dressmakers. In
Sweden, according to Welander (_Monatshefte für Praktische
Dermatologie_, 1899, p. 477) among 2541 inscribed prostitutes,
1586 (or sixty-two per cent.) were domestic servants; at a long
interval followed 210 seamstresses, then 168 factory workers,
etc.
2. _The Biological Factor of Prostitution_.--Economic considerations, as
we see, have a highly important modificatory influence on prostitution,
although it is by no means correct to assert that they form its main
cause. There is another question which has exercised many investigators:
To what extent are prostitutes predestined to this career by organic
constitution? It is generally admitted that economic and other conditions
are an exciting cause of prostitution; in how far are those who succumb
predisposed by the possession of abnormal personal characteristics? Some
inquirers have argued that this predisposition is so marked that
prostitution may fairly be regarded as a feminine equivalent for
criminality, and that in a family in which the men instinctively turn to
crime, the women instinctively turn to prostitution. Others have as
strenuously denied this conclusion.
Lombroso has more especially advocated the doctrine that
prostitution is the vicarious equivalent of criminality. In this
he was developing the results reached, in the important study of
the Jukes family, by Dugdale, who found that "there where the
brothers commit crime, the sisters adopt prostitution;" the fines
and imprisonments of the women of the family were not for
violations of the right of property, but mainly for offences
against public decency. "The psychological as well as anatomical
identity of the criminal and the born prostitute," Lombroso and
Ferrero concluded, "could not be more complete: both are
identical with the moral insane, and therefore, according to the
axiom, equal to each other. There is the same lack of moral
sense, the same hardness of heart, the same precocious taste for
evil, the same indifference to social infamy, the same
volatility, love of idleness, and lack of foresight, the same
taste for facile pleasures, for the orgy and for alcohol, the
same, or almost the same, vanity. Prostitution is only the
feminine side of criminality. And so true is it that prostitution
and criminality are two analogous, or, so to say, parallel,
phenomena, that at their extremes they meet. The prostitute is,
therefore, psychologically a criminal: if she commits no offenses
it is because her physical weakness, her small intelligence, the
facility of acquiring what she wants by more easy methods,
dispenses her from the necessity of crime, and on these very
grounds prostitution represents the specific form of feminine
criminality." The authors add that "prostitution is, in a certain
sense, socially useful as an outlet for masculine sexuality and a
preventive of crime" (Lombroso and Ferrero, _La Donna
Delinquente_, 1893, p. 571).
Those who have opposed this view have taken various grounds, and
by no means always understood the position they are attacking.
Thus W. Fischer (in _Die Prostitution_) vigorously argues that
prostitution is not an inoffensive equivalent of criminality, but
a factor of criminality. Féré, again (in _Dégénérescence et
Criminalité_), asserts that criminality and prostitution are not
equivalent, but identical. "Prostitutes and criminals," he holds,
"have as a common character their unproductiveness, and
consequently they are both anti-social. Prostitution thus
constitutes a form of criminality." The essential character of
criminals is not, however, their unproductiveness, for that they
share with a considerable proportion of the wealthiest of the
upper classes; it must be added, also, that the prostitute,
unlike the criminal, is exercising an activity for which there is
a demand, for which she is willingly paid, and for which she has
to work (it has sometimes been noted that the prostitute looks
down on the thief, who "does not work"); she is carrying on a
profession, and is neither more nor less productive than those
who carry on many more reputable professions. Aschaffenburg, also
believing himself in opposition to Lombroso, argues, somewhat
differently from Féré, that prostitution is not indeed, as Féré
said, a form of criminality, but that it is too frequently united
with criminality to be regarded as an equivalent. Mönkemöller has
more recently supported the same view. Here, however, as usual,
there is a wide difference of opinion as to the proportion of
prostitutes of whom this is true. It is recognized by all
investigators to be true of a certain number, but while
Baumgarten, from an examination of eight thousand prostitutes,
only found a minute proportion who were criminals, Ströhmberg
found that among 462 prostitutes there were as many as 175
thieves. From another side, Morasso (as quoted in _Archivio di
Psichiatria_, 1896, fasc. I), on the strength of his own
investigations, is more clearly in opposition to Lombroso, since
he protests altogether against any purely degenerative view of
prostitutes which would in any way assimilate them with
criminals.
The question of the sexuality of prostitutes, which has a certain bearing
on the question of their tendency to degeneration, has been settled by
different writers in different senses. While some, like Morasso, assert
that sexual impulse is a main cause inducing women to adopt a prostitute's
career, others assert that prostitutes are usually almost devoid of sexual
impulse. Lombroso refers to the prevalence of sexual frigidity among
prostitutes.[177] In London, Merrick, speaking from a knowledge of over
16,000 prostitutes, states that he has met with "only a very few cases"
in which gross sexual desire has been the motive to adopt a life of
prostitution. In Paris, Raciborski had stated at a much earlier period
that "among prostitutes one finds very few who are prompted to libertinage
by sexual ardor."[178] Commenge, again, a careful student of the Parisian
prostitute, cannot admit that sexual desire is to be classed among the
serious causes of prostitution. "I have made inquiries of thousands of
women on this point," he states, "and only a very small number have told
me that they were driven to prostitution for the satisfaction of sexual
needs. Although girls who give themselves to prostitution are often
lacking in frankness, on this point, I believe, they have no wish to
deceive. When they have sexual needs they do not conceal them, but, on the
contrary, show a certain _amour-propre_ in acknowledging them, as a
sufficient sort of justification for their life; so that if only a very
small minority avow this motive the reason is that for the great majority
it has no existence."
There can be no doubt that the statements made regarding the sexual
frigidity of prostitutes are often much too unqualified. This is in part
certainly due to the fact that they are usually made by those who speak
from a knowledge of old prostitutes whose habitual familiarity with normal
sexual intercourse in its least attractive aspects has resulted in
complete indifference to such intercourse, so far as their clients are
concerned.[179] It may be stated with truth that to the woman of deep
passions the ephemeral and superficial relationships of prostitution can
offer no temptation. And it may be added that the majority of prostitutes
begin their career at a very early age, long before the somewhat late
period at which in women the tendency for passion to become strong, has
yet arrived.[180] It may also be said that an indifference to sexual
relationships, a tendency to attach no personal value to them, is often a
predisposing cause in the adoption of a prostitute's career; the general
mental shallowness of prostitutes may well be accompanied by shallowness
of physical emotion. On the other hand, many prostitutes, at all events
early in their careers, appear to show a marked degree of sensuality, and
to women of coarse sexual fibre the career of prostitution has not been
without attractions from this point of view; the gratification of physical
desire is known to act as a motive in some cases and is clearly indicated
in others.[181] This is scarcely surprising when we remember that
prostitutes are in a very large proportion of cases remarkably robust and
healthy persons in general respects.[182] They withstand without
difficulty the risks of their profession, and though under its influence
the manifestations of sexual feeling can scarcely fail to become modified
or perverted in course of time, that is no proof of the original absence
of sexual sensibility. It is not even a proof of its loss, for the real
sexual nature of the normal prostitute, and her possibilities of sexual
ardor, are chiefly manifested, not in her professional relations with her
clients, but in her relations with her "fancy boy" or "bully."[183] It is
quite true that the conditions of her life often make it practically
advantageous to the prostitute to have attached to her a man who is
devoted to her interests and will defend them if necessary, but that is
only a secondary, occasional, and subsidiary advantage of the "fancy boy,"
so far as prostitutes generally are concerned. She is attracted to him
primarily because he appeals to her personally and she wants him for
herself. The motive of her attachment is, above all, erotic, in the full
sense, involving not merely sexual relations but possession and common
interests, a permanent and intimate life led together. "You know that what
one does in the way of business cannot fill one's heart," said a German
prostitute; "Why should we not have a husband like other women? I, too,
need love. If that were not so we should not want a bully." And he, on his
part, reciprocates this feeling and is by no means merely moved by
self-interest.[184]
One of my correspondents, who has had much experience of
prostitutes, not only in Britain, but also in Germany, France,
Belgium and Holland, has found that the normal manifestations of
sexual feeling are much more common in British than in
continental prostitutes. "I should say," he writes, "that in
normal coitus foreign women are generally unconscious of sexual
excitement. I don't think I have ever known a foreign woman who
had any semblance of orgasm. British women, on the other hand, if
a man is moderately kind, and shows that he has some feelings
beyond mere sensual gratification, often abandon themselves to
the wildest delights of sexual excitement. Of course in this
life, as in others, there is keen competition, and a woman, to
vie with her competitors, must please her gentlemen friends; but
a man of the world can always distinguish between real and
simulated passion." (It is possible, however, that he may be most
successful in arousing the feelings of his own fellow-country
women.) On the other hand, this writer finds that the foreign
women are more anxious to provide for the enjoyment of their
temporary consorts and to ascertain what pleases them. "The
foreigner seems to make it the business of her life to discover
some abnormal mode of sexual gratification for her consort." For
their own pleasure also foreign prostitutes frequently ask for
_cunnilinctus_, in preference to normal coitus, while anal coitus
is also common. The difference evidently is that the British
women, when they seek gratification, find it in normal coitus,
while the foreign women prefer more abnormal methods. There is,
however, one class of British prostitutes which this
correspondent finds to be an exception to the general rule: the
class of those who are recruited from the lower walks of the
stage. "Such women are generally more licentious--that is to say,
more acquainted with the bizarre in sexualism--than girls who
come from shops or bars; they show a knowledge of _fellatio_, and
even anal coitus, and during menstruation frequently suggest
inter-mammary coitus."
On the whole it would appear that prostitutes, though not usually impelled
to their life by motives of sensuality, on entering and during the early
part of their career possess a fairly average amount of sexual impulse,
with variations in both directions of excess and deficiency as well as of
perversion. At a somewhat later period it is useless to attempt to measure
the sexual impulse of prostitutes by the amount of pleasure they take in
the professional performance of sexual intercourse. It is necessary to
ascertain whether they possess sexual instincts which are gratified in
other ways. In a large proportion of cases this is found to be so.
Masturbation, especially, is extremely common among prostitutes
everywhere; however prevalent it may be among women who have no other
means of obtaining sexual gratification it is admitted by all to be still
more prevalent among prostitutes, indeed almost universal.[185]
Homosexuality, though not so common as masturbation, is very frequently
found among prostitutes--in France, it would seem, more frequently than in
England--and it may indeed be said that it occurs more often among
prostitutes than among any other class of women. It is favored by the
acquired distaste for normal coitus due to professional intercourse with
men, which leads homosexual relationships to be regarded as pure and ideal
by comparison. It would appear also that in a considerable proportion of
cases prostitutes present a congenital condition of sexual inversion, such
a condition, with an accompanying indifference to intercourse with men,
being a predisposing cause of the adoption of a prostitute's career.
Kurella even regards prostitutes as constituting a sub-variety of
congenital inverts. Anna Rüling in Germany states that about twenty per
cent. prostitutes are homosexual; when asked what induced them to become
prostitutes, more than one inverted woman of the street has replied to her
that it was purely a matter of business, sexual feeling not coming into
the question except with a friend of the same sex.[186]
The occurrence of congenital inversion among prostitutes--although we need
not regard prostitutes as necessarily degenerate as a class--suggests the
question whether we are likely to find an unusually large number of
physical and other anomalies among them. It cannot be said that there is
unanimity of opinion on this point. For some authorities prostitutes are
merely normal ordinary women of low social rank, if indeed their instincts
are not even a little superior to those of the class in which they were
born. Other investigators find among them so large a proportion of
individuals deviating from the normal that they are inclined to place
prostitutes generally among one or other of the abnormal classes.[187]
Baumgarten, in Vienna, from a knowledge of over 8000 prostitutes,
concluded that only a very minute proportion are either criminal
or psychopathic in temperament or organization (_Archiv für
Kriminal-Anthropologie_, vol. xi, 1902). It is not clear,
however, that Baumgarten carried out any detailed and precise
investigations. Mr. Lane, a London police magistrate, has stated
as the result of his own observation, that prostitution is "at
once a symptom and outcome of the same deteriorated physique and
decadent moral fibre which determine the manufacture of male
tramps, petty thieves, and professional beggars, of whom the
prostitute is in general the female analogue" (_Ethnological
Journal_, April, 1905, p. 41). This estimate is doubtless correct
as regards a considerable proportion of the women, often
enfeebled by drink, who pass through the police courts, but it
could scarcely be applied without qualification to prostitutes
generally.
Morasso (_Archivio di Psichiatria_, 1896, fasc. I) has protested
against a purely degenerative view of prostitutes on the strength
of his own observations. There is, he states, a category of
prostitutes, unknown to scientific inquirers, which he calls that
of the _prostitute di alto bordo_. Among these the signs of
degeneration, physical or moral, are not to be found in greater
number than among women who do not belong to prostitution. They
reveal all sorts of characters, some of them showing great
refinement, and are chiefly marked off by the possession of an
unusual degree of sexual appetite. Even among the more degraded
group of the _bassa prostituzione_, he asserts, we find a
predominance of sexual, as well as professional, characters,
rather than the signs of degeneration. It is sufficient to quote
one more testimony, as set down many years ago by a woman of high
intelligence and character, Mrs. Craik, the novelist: "The women
who fall are by no means the worst of their station," she wrote.
"I have heard it affirmed by more than one lady--by one in
particular whose experience was as large as her benevolence--that
many of them are of the very best, refined, intelligent,
truthful, and affectionate. 'I don't know how it is,' she would
say, 'whether their very superiority makes them dissatisfied with
their own rank--such brutes or clowns as laboring men often
are!--so that they fall easier victims to the rank above them; or
whether, though this theory will shock many people, other virtues
can exist and flourish entirely distinct from, and after the
loss of, that which we are accustomed to believe the
indispensable prime virtue of our sex--chastity. I cannot explain
it; I can only say that it is so, that some of my most promising
village girls have been the first to come to harm; and some of
the best and most faithful servants I ever had, have been girls
who have fallen into shame, and who, had I not gone to the rescue
and put them in the way to do well, would infallibly have become
"lost women"'" (_A Woman's Thoughts About Women_, 1858, p. 291).
Various writers have insisted on the good moral qualities of
prostitutes. Thus in France, Despine first enumerates their vices
as (1) greediness and love of drink, (2) lying, (3) anger, (4)
want of order and untidiness, (5) mobility of character, (6) need
of movement, (7) tendency to homosexuality; and then proceeds to
detail their good qualities: their maternal and filial affection,
their charity to each other; and their refusal to denounce each
other; while they are frequently religious, sometimes modest, and
generally very honest (Despine, _Psychologie Naturelle_, vol.
iii, pp. 207 et seq.; as regards Sicilian prostitutes, cf.
Callari, _Archivio di Psichiatria_, fasc. IV, 1903). The charity
towards each other, often manifested in distress, is largely
neutralized by a tendency to professional suspicion and jealousy
of each other.
Lombroso believes that the basis of prostitution must be found in
moral idiocy. If by moral idiocy we are to understand a condition
at all closely allied with insanity, this assertion is dubious.
There seems no clear relationship between prostitution and
insanity, and Tammeo has shown (_La Prostituzione_, p. 76) that
the frequency of prostitutes in the various Italian provinces is
in inverse ratio to the frequency of insane persons; as insanity
increases, prostitution decreases. But if we mean a minor degree
of moral imbecility--that is to say, a bluntness of perception
for the ordinary moral considerations of civilization which,
while it is largely due to the hardening influence of an
unfavorable early environment, may also rest on a congenital
predisposition--there can be no doubt that moral imbecility of
slight degree is very frequently found among prostitutes. It
would be plausible, doubtless, to say that every woman who gives
her virginity in exchange for an inadequate return is an
imbecile. If she gives herself for love, she has, at the worst,
made a foolish mistake, such as the young and inexperienced may
at any time make. But if she deliberately proposes to sell
herself, and does so for nothing or next to nothing, the case is
altered. The experiences of Commenge in Paris are instructive on
this point. "For many young girls," he writes, "modesty has no
existence, they experience no emotion in showing themselves
completely undressed, they abandon themselves to any chance
individual whom they will never see again. They attach no
importance to their virginity; they are deflowered under the
strangest conditions, without the least thought or care about the
act they are accomplishing. No sentiment, no calculation, pushes
them into a man's arms. They let themselves go without reflexion
and without motive, in an almost animal manner, from indifference
and without pleasure." He was acquainted with forty-five girls
between the ages of twelve and seventeen who were deflowered by
chance strangers whom they never met again; they lost their
virginity, in Dumas's phrase, as they lost their milk-teeth, and
could give no plausible account of the loss. A girl of fifteen,
mentioned by Commenge, living with her parents who supplied all
her wants, lost her virginity by casually meeting a man who
offered her two francs if she would go with him; she did so
without demur and soon begun to accost men on her own account. A
girl of fourteen, also living comfortably with her parents,
sacrificed her virginity at a fair in return for a glass of beer,
and henceforth begun to associate with prostitutes. Another girl
of the same age, at a local fête, wishing to go round on the
hobby horse, spontaneously offered herself to the man directing
the machinery for the pleasure of a ride. Yet another girl, of
fifteen, at another fête, offered her virginity in return for the
same momentary joy (Commenge, _Prostitution Clandestine_, 1897,
pp. 101 et seq.). In the United States, Dr. W. Travis Gibb,
examining physician to the New York Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, bears similar testimony to the fact that in
a fairly large proportion of "rape" cases the child is the
willing victim. "It is horribly pathetic," he says (_Medical
Record_, April 20, 1907), "to learn how far a nickel or a quarter
will go towards purchasing the virtue of these children."
In estimating the tendency of prostitutes to display congenital
physical anomalies, the crudest and most obvious test, though not
a precise or satisfactory one, is the general impression produced
by the face. In France, when nearly 1000 prostitutes were divided
into five groups from the point of view of their looks, only from
seven to fourteen per cent, were found to belong to the first
group, or that of those who could be said to possess youth and
beauty (Jeannel, _De la Prostitution Publique_, 1860, p. 168).
Woods Hutchinson, again, judging from an extensive acquaintance
with London, Paris, Vienna, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago,
asserts that a handsome or even attractive-looking prostitute, is
rare, and that the general average of beauty is lower than in any
other class of women. "Whatever other evils," he remarks, "the
fatal power of beauty may be responsible for, it has nothing to
do with prostitution" (Woods Hutchinson, "The Economics of
Prostitution," _American Gynæcological and Obstetric Journal_,
September, 1895). It must, of course, be borne in mind that these
estimates are liable to be vitiated through being based chiefly
on the inspection of women who most obviously belong to the class
of prostitutes and have already been coarsened by their
profession.
If we may conclude--and the fact is probably undisputed--that
beautiful, agreeable, and harmoniously formed faces are rare
rather than common among prostitutes, we may certainly say that
minute examination will reveal a large number of physical
abnormalities. One of the earliest important physical
investigations of prostitutes was that of Dr. Pauline Tarnowsky
in Russia (first published in the _Vratch_ in 1887, and
afterwards as _Etudes anthropométriques sur les Prostituées et
les Voleuses_). She examined fifty St. Petersburg prostitutes who
had been inmates of a brothel for not less than two years, and
also fifty peasant women of, so far as possible, the same age and
mental development. She found that (1) the prostitute showed
shorter anterior-posterior and transverse diameters of skull; (2)
a proportion equal to eighty-four per cent. showed various signs
of physical degeneration (irregular skull, asymmetry of face,
anomalies of hard palate, teeth, ears, etc.). This tendency to
anomaly among the prostitutes was to some extent explained when
it was found that about four-fifths of them had parents who were
habitual drunkards, and nearly one-fifth were the last survivors
of large families; such families have been often produced by
degenerate parents.
The frequency of hereditary degeneration has been noted by
Bonhoeffer among German prostitutes. He investigated 190 Breslau
prostitutes in prison, and therefore of a more abnormal class
than ordinary prostitutes, and found that 102 were hereditarily
degenerate, and mostly with one or both parents who were
drunkards; 53 also showed feeble-mindedness (_Zeitschrift für die
Gesamte Strafwissenschaft_, Bd. xxiii, p. 106).
The most detailed examinations of ordinary non-criminal
prostitutes, both anthropometrically and as regards the
prevalence of anomalies, have been made in Italy, though not on a
sufficiently large number of subjects to yield absolutely
decisive results. Thus Fornasari made a detailed examination of
sixty prostitutes belonging chiefly to Emilia and Venice, and
also of twenty-seven others belonging to Bologna, the latter
group being compared with a third group of twenty normal women
belonging to Bologna (_Archivio di Psichiatria_, 1892, fasc. VI).
The prostitutes were found to be of lower type than the normal
individuals, having smaller heads and larger faces. As the author
himself points out, his subjects were not sufficiently numerous
to justify far-reaching generalizations, but it may be worth
while to summarize some of his results. At equal heights the
prostitutes showed greater weight; at equal ages they were of
shorter stature than other women, not only of well-to-do, but of
the poor class: height of face, bi-zygomatic diameter (though not
the distance between zygomas), the distance from chin to external
auditory meatus, and the size of the jaw were all greater in the
prostitutes; the hands were longer and broader, compared to the
palm, than in ordinary women; the foot also was longer in
prostitutes, and the thigh, as compared to the calf, was larger.
It is noteworthy that in most particulars, and especially in
regard to head measurements, the variations were much greater
among the prostitutes than among the other women examined; this
is to some extent, though not entirely, to be accounted for by
the slightly greater number of the former.
Ardu (in the same number of the _Archivio_) gave the result of
observations (undertaken at Lombroso's suggestion) as to the
frequency of abnormalities among prostitutes. The subjects were
seventy-four in number and belonged to Professor Giovannini's
_Clinica Sifilopatica_ at Turin. The abnormalities investigated
were virile distribution of hair on pubes, chest, and limbs,
hypertrichosis on forehead, left-handedness, atrophy of nipple,
and tattooing (which was only found once). Combining Ardu's
observations with another series of observations on fifty-five
prostitutes examined by Lombroso, it is found that virile
disposition of hair is found in fifteen per cent. as against six
per cent. in normal women; some degree of hypertrichosis in
eighteen per cent.; left-handedness in eleven per cent. (but in
normal women as high as twelve per cent. according to Gallia);
and atrophy of nipple in twelve per cent.
Giuffrida-Ruggeri, again (_Atti della, Società Romana di
Antropologia_, 1897, p. 216), on examining eighty-two prostitutes
found anomalies in the following order of decreasing frequency:
tendency of eyebrows to meet, lack of cranial symmetry,
depression at root of nose, defective development of calves,
hypertrichosis and other anomalies of hair, adherent or absent
lobule, prominent zigoma, prominent forehead or frontal bones,
bad implantation of teeth, Darwinian tubercle of ear, thin
vertical lips. These signs are separately of little or no
importance, though together not without significance as an
indication of general anomaly.
More recently Ascarilla, in an elaborate study (_Archivio di
Psichiatria_, 1906, fasc. VI, p. 812) of the finger prints of
prostitutes, comes to the conclusion that even in this respect
prostitutes tend to form a class showing morphological
inferiority to normal women. The patterns tend to show unusual
simplicity and uniformity, and the significance of this is
indicated by the fact that a similar uniformity is shown by the
finger prints of the insane and deaf-mutes (De Sanctis and
Toscano, _Atti Società Romana Antropologia_, vol. viii, 1901,
fasc. II).
In Chicago Dr. Harriet Alexander, in conjunction with Dr. E.S.
Talbot and Dr. J.G. Kiernan, examined thirty prostitutes in the
Bridewell, or House of Correction; only the "obtuse" class of
professional prostitutes reach this institution, and it is not
therefore surprising that they were found to exhibit very marked
stigmata of degeneracy. In race nearly half of those examined
were Celtic Irish. In sixteen the zygomatic processes were
unequal and very prominent. Other facial asymmetries were common.
In three cases the heads were of Mongoloid type; sixteen were
epignathic, and eleven prognathic; five showed arrest of
development of face. Brachycephaly predominated (seventeen
cases); the rest were mesaticephalic; there were no
dolichocephals. Abnormalities in shape of the skull were
numerous, and twenty-nine had defective ears. Four were
demonstrably insane, and one was an epileptic (H.C.B. Alexander,
"Physical Abnormalities in Prostitutes," Chicago Academy of
Medicine, April, 1893; E.S. Talbot, _Degeneracy_, p. 320; _Id.,
Irregularities of the Teeth_, fourth edition, p. 141).
It would seem, on the whole, so far as the evidence at present goes, that
prostitutes are not quite normal representatives of the ranks into which
they were born. There has been a process of selection of individuals who
slightly deviate congenitally from the normal average and are,
correspondingly, slightly inapt for normal life.[188] The psychic
characteristics which accompany such deviation are not always necessarily
of an obviously unfavorable nature; the slightly neurotic girl of low
class birth--disinclined for hard work, through defective energy, and
perhaps greedy and selfish--may even seem to possess a refinement superior
to her station. While, however, there is a tendency to anomaly among
prostitutes, it must be clearly recognized that that tendency remains
slight so long as we consider impartially the whole class of prostitutes.
Those investigators who have reached the conclusion that prostitutes are a
highly degenerate and abnormal class have only observed special groups of
prostitutes, more especially those who are frequently found in prison. It
is not possible to form a just conception of prostitutes by studying them
only in prison, any more than it would be possible to form a just
conception of clergymen, doctors, or lawyers by studying them exclusively
in prison, and this remains true even although a much larger proportion of
prostitutes than of members of the more reputable professions pass through
prisons; that fact no doubt partly indicates the greater abnormality of
prostitutes.
It has, of course, to be remembered that the special conditions of the
lives of prostitutes tend to cause in them the appearance of certain
professional characteristics which are entirely acquired and not
congenital. In that way we may account for the gradual modification of the
feminine secondary and tertiary sexual characters, and the appearance of
masculine characters, such as the frequent deep voice, etc.[189] But with
all due allowance for these acquired characters, it remains true that such
comparative investigations as have so far been made, although
inconclusive, seem to indicate that, even apart from the prevalence of
acquired anomalies, the professional selection of their avocation tends to
separate out from the general population of the same social class,
individuals who possess anthropometrical characters varying in a definite
direction. The observations thus made seem, in this way, to indicate that
prostitutes tend to be in weight over the average, though not in stature,
that in length of arm they are inferior though the hands are longer (this
has been found alike in Italy and Russia); they have smaller ankles and
larger calves, and still larger thighs in proportion to their large
calves. The estimated skull capacity and the skull circumference and
diameters are somewhat below the normal, not only when compared with
respectable women but also with thieves; there is a tendency to
brachycephaly (both in Italy and Russia); the cheek-bones are usually
prominent and the jaws developed; the hair is darker than in respectable
women though less so than in thieves; it is also unusually abundant, not
only on the head but also on the pudenda and elsewhere; the eyes have been
found to be decidedly darker than those of either respectable women or
criminals.[190]
So far as the evidence goes it serves to indicate that prostitutes tend to
approximate to the type which, as was shown in the previous volume, there
is reason to regard as specially indicative of developed sexuality. It is,
however, unnecessary to discuss this question until our anthropometrical
knowledge of prostitutes is more extended and precise.
3. _The Moral Justification of Prostitution_.--There are and always have
been moralists--many of them people whose opinions are deserving of the
most serious respect--who consider that, allowing for the need of
improved hygienic conditions, the existence of prostitution presents no
serious problem for solution. It is, at most, they say, a necessary evil,
and, at best, a beneficent institution, the bulwark of the home, the
inevitable reverse of which monogamy is the obverse. "The immoral guardian
of public morality," is the definition of prostitutes given by one writer,
who takes the humble view of the matter, and another, taking the loftier
ground, writes: "The prostitute fulfils a social mission. She is the
guardian of virginal modesty, the channel to carry off adulterous desire,
the protector of matrons who fear late maternity; it is her part to act as
the shield of the family." "Female Decii," said Balzac in his _Physiologie
du Mariage_ of prostitutes, "they sacrifice themselves for the republic
and make of their bodies a rampart for the protection of respectable
families." In the same way Schopenhauer called prostitutes "human
sacrifices on the altar of monogamy." Lecky, again, in an oft-quoted
passage of rhetoric,[191] may be said to combine both the higher and the
lower view of the prostitute's mission in human society, to which he even
seeks to give a hieratic character. "The supreme type of vice," he
declared, "she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But
for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be
polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity,
think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of
remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are
concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She
remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal
priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people."[192]
I am not aware that the Greeks were greatly concerned with the moral
justification of prostitution. They had not allowed it to assume very
offensive forms and for the most part they were content to accept it. The
Romans usually accepted it, too, but, we gather, not quite so easily.
There was an austerely serious, almost Puritanic, spirit in the Romans of
the old stock and they seem sometimes to have felt the need to assure
themselves that prostitution really was morally justifiable. It is
significant to note that they were accustomed to remember that Cato was
said to have expressed satisfaction on seeing a man emerge from a brothel,
for otherwise he might have gone to lie with his neighbor's wife.[193]
The social necessity of prostitution is the most ancient of all the
arguments of moralists in favor of the toleration of prostitutes; and if
we accept the eternal validity of the marriage system with which
prostitution developed, and of the theoretical morality based on that
system, this is an exceedingly forcible, if not an unanswerable, argument.
The advent of Christianity, with its special attitude towards the "flesh,"
necessarily caused an enormous increase of attention to the moral aspects
of prostitution. When prostitution was not morally denounced, it became
clearly necessary to morally justify it; it was impossible for a Church,
whose ideals were more or less ascetic, to be benevolently indifferent in
such a matter. As a rule we seem to find throughout that while the more
independent and irresponsible divines take the side of denunciation, those
theologians who have had thrust upon them the grave responsibilities of
ecclesiastical statesmanship have rather tended towards the reluctant
moral justification of prostitution. Of this we have an example of the
first importance in St. Augustine, after St. Paul the chief builder of the
Christian Church. In a treatise written in 386 to justify the Divine
regulation of the world, we find him declaring that just as the
executioner, however repulsive he may be, occupies a necessary place in
society, so the prostitute and her like, however sordid and ugly and
wicked they may be, are equally necessary; remove prostitutes from human
affairs and you would pollute the world with lust: "Aufer meretrices de
rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus."[194] Aquinas, the only
theological thinker of Christendom who can be named with Augustine, was of
the same mind with him on this question of prostitution. He maintained the
sinfulness of fornication but he accepted the necessity of prostitution as
a beneficial part of the social structure, comparing it to the sewers
which keep a palace pure.[195] "Prostitution in towns is like the sewer in
a palace; take away the sewers and the palace becomes an impure and
stinking place." Liguori, the most influential theologian of more modern
times, was of the like opinion.
This wavering and semi-indulgent attitude towards prostitution was indeed
generally maintained by theologians. Some, following Augustine and
Aquinas, would permit prostitution for the avoidance of greater evils;
others were altogether opposed to it; others, again, would allow it in
towns but nowhere else. It was, however, universally held by theologians
that the prostitute has a right to her wages, and is not obliged to make
restitution.[196] The earlier Christian moralists found no difficulty in
maintaining that there is no sin in renting a house to a prostitute for
the purposes of her trade; absolution was always granted for this and
abstention not required.[197] Fornication, however, always remained a sin,
and from the twelfth century onwards the Church made a series of organized
attempts to reclaim prostitutes. All Catholic theologians hold that a
prostitute is bound to confess the sin of prostitution, and most, though
not all, theologians have believed that a man also must confess
intercourse with a prostitute. At the same time, while there was a certain
indulgence to the prostitute herself, the Church was always very severe on
those who lived on the profits of promoting prostitution, on the
_lenones_. Thus the Council of Elvira, which was ready to receive without
penance the prostitute who married, refused reconciliation, even at death,
to persons who had been guilty of _lenocinium_.[198]
Protestantism, in this as in many other matters of sexual morality, having
abandoned the confessional, was usually able to escape the necessity for
any definite and responsible utterances concerning the moral status of
prostitution. When it expressed any opinion, or sought to initiate any
practical action, it naturally founded itself on the Biblical injunctions
against fornication, as expressed by St. Paul, and showed no mercy for
prostitutes and no toleration for prostitution. This attitude, which was
that of the Puritans, was the more easy since in Protestant countries,
with the exception of special districts at special periods--such as Geneva
and New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--theologians
have in these matters been called upon to furnish religious exhortation
rather than to carry out practical policies. The latter task they have
left to others, and a certain confusion and uncertainty has thus often
arisen in the lay Protestant mind. This attitude in a thoughtful and
serious writer, is well illustrated in England by Burton, writing a
century after the Reformation. He refers with mitigated approval to "our
Pseudo-Catholics," who are severe with adultery but indulgent to
fornication, being perhaps of Cato's mind that it should be encouraged to
avoid worse mischiefs at home, and who holds brothels "as necessary as
churches" and "have whole Colleges of Courtesans in their towns and
cities." "They hold it impossible," he continues, "for idle persons,
young, rich and lusty, so many servants, monks, friars, to live honest,
too tyrannical a burden to compel them to be chaste, and most unfit to
suffer poor men, younger brothers and soldiers at all to marry, as also
diseased persons, votaries, priests, servants. Therefore as well to keep
and ease the one as the other, they tolerate and wink at these kind of
brothel-houses and stews. Many probable arguments they have to prove the
lawfulness, the necessity, and a toleration of them, as of usery; and
without question in policy they are not to be contradicted, but altogether
in religion."[199]
It was not until the beginning of the following century that the ancient
argument of St. Augustine for the moral justification of prostitution was
boldly and decisively stated in Protestant England, by Bernard Mandeville
in his _Fable of the Bees_, and at its first promulgation it seemed so
offensive to the public mind that the book was suppressed. "If courtesans
and strumpets were to be prosecuted with as much rigor as some silly
people would have it," Mandeville wrote, "what locks or bars would be
sufficient to preserve the honor of our wives and daughters?... It is
manifest that there is a necessity of sacrificing one part of womankind to
preserve the other, and prevent a filthiness of a more heinous nature.
From whence I think I may justly conclude that chastity may be supported
by incontinence, and the best of virtues want the assistance of the worst
of vices."[200] After Mandeville's time this view of prostitution began to
become common in Protestant as well as in other countries, though it was
not usually so clearly expressed.
It may be of interest to gather together a few more modern
examples of statements brought forward for the moral
justification of prostitution.
Thus in France Meusnier de Querlon, in his story of _Psaphion_,
written in the middle of the eighteenth century, puts into the
mouth of a Greek courtesan many interesting reflections
concerning the life and position of the prostitute. She defends
her profession with much skill, and argues that while men imagine
that prostitutes are merely the despised victims of their
pleasures, these would-be tyrants are really dupes who are
ministering to the needs of the women they trample beneath their
feet, and themselves equally deserve the contempt they bestow.
"We return disgust for disgust, as they must surely perceive. We
often abandon to them merely a statue, and while inflamed by
their own desires they consume themselves on insensible charms,
our tranquil coldness leisurely enjoys their sensibility. Then it
is we resume all our rights. A little hot blood has brought
these proud creatures to our feet, and rendered us mistresses of
their fate. On which side, I ask, is the advantage?" But all men,
she adds, are not so unjust towards the prostitute, and she
proceeds to pronounce a eulogy, not without a slight touch of
irony in it, of the utility, facility, and convenience of the
brothel.
A large number of the modern writers on prostitution insist on
its socially beneficial character. Thus Charles Richard concludes
his book on the subject with the words: "The conduct of society
with regard to prostitution must proceed from the principle of
gratitude without false shame for its utility, and compassion for
the poor creatures at whose expense this is attained" (_La
Prostitution devant le Philosophe_, 1882, p. 171). "To make
marriage permanent is to make it difficult," an American medical
writer observes; "to make it difficult is to defer it; to defer
it is to maintain in the community an increasing number of
sexually perfect individuals, with normal, or, in cases where
repression is prolonged, excessive sexual appetites. The social
evil is the natural outcome of the physical nature of man, his
inherited impulses, and the artificial conditions under which he
is compelled to live" ("The Social Evil," _Medicine_, August and
September, 1906). Woods Hutchinson, while speaking with strong
disapproval of prostitution and regarding prostitutes as "the
worst specimens of the sex," yet regards prostitution as a social
agency of the highest value. "From a medico-economic point of
view I venture to claim it as one of the grand selective and
eliminative agencies of nature, and of highest value to the
community. It may be roughly characterized as a safety valve for
the institution of marriage" (_The Gospel According to Darwin_,
p. 193; cf. the same author's article on "The Economics of
Prostitution," summarized in _Boston Medical and Surgical
Journal_, November 21, 1895). Adolf Gerson, in a somewhat similar
spirit, argues ("Die Ursache der Prostitution,"
_Sexual-Probleme_, September, 1908) that "prostitution is one of
the means used by Nature to limit the procreative activity of
men, and especially to postpone the period of sexual maturity."
Molinari considers that the social benefits of prostitution have
been manifested in various ways from the first; by sterilizing,
for instance, the more excessive manifestations of the sexual
impulse prostitution suppressed the necessity for the infanticide
of superfluous children, and led to the prohibition of that
primitive method of limiting the population (G. de Molinari, _La
Viriculture_, p. 45). In quite another way than that mentioned by
Molinari, prostitution has even in very recent times led to the
abandonment of infanticide. In the Chinese province of Ping-Yang,
Matignon states, it was usual not many years ago for poor parents
to kill forty per cent. of the girl children, or even all of
them, at birth, for they were too expensive to rear and brought
nothing in, since men who wished to marry could easily obtain a
wife in the neighboring province of Wenchu, where women were
very easy to obtain. Now, however, the line of steamships along
the coast makes it very easy for girls to reach the brothels of
Shang-Hai, where they can earn money for their families; the
custom of killing them has therefore died out (Matignon,
_Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, 1896, p. 72). "Under
present conditions," writes Dr. F. Erhard ("Auch ein Wort zur
Ehereform," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Jahrgang I, Heft 9),
"prostitution (in the broadest sense, including free
relationships) is necessary in order that young men may, in some
degree, learn to know women, for conventional conversation cannot
suffice for this; an exact knowledge of feminine thought and
action is, however, necessary for a proper choice, since it is
seldom possible to rely on the certainty of instinct. It is good
also that men should wear off their horns before marriage, for
the polygamous tendency will break through somewhere.
Prostitution will only spoil those men in whom there is not much
to spoil, and if the desire for marriage is thus lost, the man's
unbegotten children may have cause to thank him." Neisser, Näcke,
and many others, have pleaded for prostitution, and even for
brothels, as "necessary evils."
It is scarcely necessary to add that many, among even the
strongest upholders of the moral advantages of prostitution,
believe that some improvement in method is still desirable. Thus
Bérault looks forward to a time when regulated brothels will
become less contemptible. Various improvements may, he thinks, in
the near future, "deprive them of the barbarous attributes which
mark them out for the opprobrium of the skeptical or ignorant
multitude, while their recognizable advantages will put an end to
the contempt aroused by their cynical aspect" (_La Maison de
Tolérance_, Thèse de Paris, 1904).
4. _The Civilizational Value of Prostitution._--The moral argument for
prostitution is based on the belief that our marriage system is so
infinitely precious that an institution which serves as its buttress must
be kept in existence, however ugly or otherwise objectionable it may in
itself be. There is, however, another argument in support of prostitution
which scarcely receives the emphasis it deserves. I refer to its influence
in adding an element, in some form or another necessary, of gaiety and
variety to the ordered complexity of modern life, a relief from the
monotony of its mechanical routine, a distraction from its dull and
respectable monotony. This is distinct from the more specific function of
prostitution as an outlet for superfluous sexual energy, and may even
affect those who have little or no commerce with prostitutes. This
element may be said to constitute the civilizational value of
prostitution.
It is not merely the general conditions of civilization, but more
specifically the conditions of urban life, which make this factor
insistent. Urban life imposes by the stress of competition a very severe
and exacting routine of dull work. At the same time it makes men and women
more sensitive to new impressions, more enamored of excitement and change.
It multiplies the opportunities of social intercourse; it decreases the
chances of detection of illegitimate intercourse while at the same time it
makes marriage more difficult, for, by heightening social ambitions and
increasing the expenses of living, it postpones the time when a home can
be created. Urban life delays marriage and yet renders the substitutes for
marriage more imperative.[201]
There cannot be the slightest doubt that it is this motive--the effort to
supplement the imperfect opportunities for self-development offered by our
restrained, mechanical, and laborious civilization--which plays one of the
chief parts in inducing women to adopt, temporarily or permanently, a
prostitute's life. We have seen that the economic factor is not, as was
once supposed, by any means predominant in this choice. Nor, again, is
there any reason to suppose that an over-mastering sexual impulse is a
leading factor. But a large number of young women turn instinctively to a
life of prostitution because they are moved by an obscure impulse which
they can scarcely define to themselves or express, and are often ashamed
to confess. It is, therefore, surprising that this motive should find so
large a place even in the formal statistics of the factors of
prostitution. Merrick, in London, found that 5000, or nearly a third, of
the prostitutes he investigated, voluntarily gave up home or situation
"for a life of pleasure," and he puts this at the head of the causes of
prostitution.[202] In America Sanger found that "inclination" came almost
at the head of the causes of prostitution, while Woods Hutchinson found
"love of display, luxury and idleness" by far at the head. "Disgusted and
wearied with work" is the reason assigned by a large number of Belgian
girls when stating to the police their wish to be enrolled as prostitutes.
In Italy a similar motive is estimated to play an important part. In
Russia "desire for amusement" comes second among the causes of
prostitution. There can, I think, be little doubt that, as a thoughtful
student of London life has concluded, the problem of prostitution is "at
bottom a mad and irresistible craving for excitement, a serious and wilful
revolt against the monotony of commonplace ideals, and the uninspired
drudgery of everyday life."[203] It is this factor of prostitution, we may
reasonably conclude, which is mainly responsible for the fact, pointed out
by F. Schiller,[204] that with the development of civilization the supply
of prostitutes tends to outgrow the demand.
Charles Booth seems to be of the same opinion, and quotes (_Life
and Labor of the People_, Third Series, vol. vii, p. 364) from a
Rescue Committee Report: "The popular idea is, that these women
are eager to leave a life of sin. The plain and simple truth is
that, for the most part, they have no desire at all to be
rescued. So many of these women do not, and will not, regard
prostitution as a sin. 'I am taken out to dinner and to some
place of amusement every night; why should I give it up?'"
Merrick, who found that five per cent. of 14,000 prostitutes who
passed through Millbank Prison, were accustomed to combine
religious observance with the practice of their profession, also
remarks in regard to their feelings about morality: "I am
convinced that there are many poor men and women who do not in
the least understand what is implied in the term 'immorality.'
Out of courtesy to you, they may assent to what you say, but they
do not comprehend your meaning when you talk of virtue or purity;
you are simply talking over their heads" (Merrick, op. cit., p.
28). The same attitude may be found among prostitutes everywhere.
In Italy Ferriani mentions a girl of fifteen who, when accused of
indecency with a man in a public garden, denied with tears and
much indignation. He finally induced her to confess, and then
asked her: "Why did you try to make me believe you were a good
girl?" She hesitated, smiled, and said: "Because _they say_ girls
ought not to do what I do, but ought to work. But I am what I am,
and it is no concern of theirs." This attitude is often more than
an instinctive feeling; in intelligent prostitutes it frequently
becomes a reasoned conviction. "I can bear everything, if so it
must be," wrote the author of the _Tagebuch einer Verlorenen_ (p.
291), "even serious and honorable contempt, but I cannot bear
scorn. Contempt--yes, if it is justified. If a poor and pretty
girl with sick and bitter heart stands alone in life, cast off,
with temptations and seductions offering on every side, and, in
spite of that, out of inner conviction she chooses the grey and
monotonous path of renunciation and middle-class morality, I
recognize in that girl a personality, who has a certain
justification in looking down with contemptuous pity on weaker
girls. But those geese who, under the eyes of their shepherds and
life-long owners, have always been pastured in smooth green
fields, have certainly no right to laugh scornfully at others who
have not been so fortunate." Nor must it be supposed that there
is necessarily any sophistry in the prostitute's justification of
herself. Some of our best thinkers and observers have reached a
conclusion that is not dissimilar. "The actual conditions of
society are opposed to any high moral feeling in women," Marro
observes (_La Pubertà_, p. 462), "for between those who sell
themselves to prostitution and those who sell themselves to
marriage, the only difference is in price and duration of the
contract."
We have already seen how very large a part in prostitution is furnished by
those who have left domestic service to adopt this life (_ante_ p. 264).
It is not difficult to find in this fact evidence of the kind of impulse
which impels a woman to adopt the career of prostitution. "The servant, in
our society of equality," wrote Goncourt, recalling somewhat earlier days
when she was often admitted to a place in the family life, "has become
nothing but a paid pariah, a machine for doing household work, and is no
longer allowed to share the employer's human life."[205] And in England,
even half a century ago, we already find the same statements concerning
the servant's position: "domestic service is a complete slavery," with
early hours and late hours, and constant running up and down stairs till
her legs are swollen; "an amount of ingenuity appears too often to be
exercised, worthy of a better cause, in obtaining the largest possible
amount of labor out of the domestic machine"; in addition she is "a kind
of lightning conductor," to receive the ill-temper and morbid feelings of
her mistress and the young ladies; so that, as some have said, "I felt so
miserable I did not care what became of me, I wished I was dead."[206] The
servant is deprived of all human relationships; she must not betray the
existence of any simple impulse, or natural need. At the same time she
lives on the fringe of luxury; she is surrounded by the tantalizing
visions of pleasure and amusement for which her fresh young nature
craves.[207] It is not surprising that, repelled by unrelieved drudgery
and attracted by idle luxury, she should take the plunge which will alone
enable her to enjoy the glittering aspects of civilization which seem so
desirable to her.[208]
It is sometimes stated that the prevalence of prostitution among
girls who were formerly servants is due to the immense numbers of
servants who are seduced by their masters or the young men of the
family, and are thus forced on to the streets. Undoubtedly in a
certain proportion of cases, perhaps sometimes a fairly
considerable proportion, this is a decisive factor in the matter,
but it scarcely seems to be the chief factor. The existence of
relationships between servants and masters, it must be
remembered, by no means necessarily implies seduction. In a
large number of cases the servant in a household is, in sexual
matters, the teacher rather than the pupil. (In "The Sexual
Impulse in Women," in the third volume of these _Studies_, I have
discussed the part played by servants as sexual initiators of the
young boys in the households in which they are placed.) The more
precise statistics of the causes of prostitution seldom assign
seduction as the main determining factor in more than about
twenty per cent. of cases, though this is obviously one of the
most easily avowable motives (see _ante_, p. 256). Seduction by
any kind of employer constitutes only a proportion (usually less
than half) even of these cases. The special case of seduction of
servants by masters can thus play no very considerable part as a
factor of prostitution.
The statistics of the parentage of illegitimate children have
some bearing on this question. In a series of 180 unmarried
mothers assisted by the Berlin Bund für Mutterschutz, particulars
are given of the occupations both of the mothers, and, as far as
possible, of the fathers. The former were one-third
servant-girls, and the great majority of the remainder assistants
in trades or girls carrying on work at home. At the head of the
fathers (among 120 cases) came artisans (33), followed by
tradespeople (22); only a small proportion (20 to 25) could be
described as "gentlemen," and even this proportion loses some of
its significance when it is pointed out that some of the girls
were also of the middle-class; in nineteen cases the fathers were
married men (_Mutterschutz_, January, 1907, p. 45).
Most authorities in most countries are of opinion that girls who
eventually (usually between the ages of fifteen and twenty)
become prostitutes have lost their virginity at an early age, and
in the great majority of cases through men of their own class.
"The girl of the people falls by the people," stated Reuss in
France (_La Prostitution_, p. 41). "It is her like, workers like
herself, who have the first fruits of her beauty and virginity.
The man of the world who covers her with gold and jewels only has
their leavings." Martineau, again (_De la Prostitution
Clandestine_, 1885), showed that prostitutes are usually
deflowered by men of their own class. And Jeannel, in Bordeaux,
found reason for believing that it is not chiefly their masters
who lead servants astray; they often go into service because they
have been seduced in the country, while lazy, greedy, and
unintelligent girls are sent from the country into the town to
service. In Edinburgh, W. Tait (_Magdalenism_, 1842) found that
soldiers more than any other class in the community are the
seducers of women, the Highlanders being especially notorious in
this respect. Soldiers have this reputation everywhere, and in
Germany especially it is constantly found that the presence of
the soldiery in a country district, as at the annual manoeuvres,
is the cause of unchastity and illegitimate births; it is so also
in Austria, where, long ago, Gross-Hoffinger stated that
soldiers were responsible for at least a third of all
illegitimate births, a share out of all proportion to their
numbers. In Italy, Marro, investigating the occasion of the loss
of virginity in twenty-two prostitutes, found that ten gave
themselves more or less spontaneously to lovers or masters, ten
yielded in the expectation of marriage, and two were outraged
(_La Pubertà_, p. 461). The loss of virginity, Marro adds, though
it may not be the direct cause of prostitution, often leads on to
it. "When a door has once been broken in," a prostitute said to
him, "it is difficult to keep it closed." In Sardinia, as A.
Mantegazza and Ciuffo found, prostitutes are very largely
servants from the country who have already been deflowered by men
of their own class.
This civilizational factor of prostitution, the influence of luxury and
excitement and refinement in attracting the girl of the people, as the
flame attracts the moth, is indicated by the fact that it is the
country-dwellers who chiefly succumb to the fascination. The girls whose
adolescent explosive and orgiastic impulses, sometimes increased by a
slight congenital lack of nervous balance, have been latent in the dull
monotony of country life and heightened by the spectacle of luxury acting
on the unrelieved drudgery of town life, find at last their complete
gratification in the career of a prostitute. To the town girl, born and
bred in the town, this career has not usually much attraction, unless she
has been brought up from the first in an environment that predisposes her
to adopt it. She is familiar from childhood with the excitements of urban
civilization and they do not intoxicate her; she is, moreover, more shrewd
to take care of herself than the country girl, and too well acquainted
with the real facts of the prostitute's life to be very anxious to adopt
her career. Beyond this, also, it is probable that the stocks she belongs
to possess a native or acquired power of resistance to unbalancing
influences which has enabled them to survive in urban life. She has become
immune to the poisons of that life.[209]
In all great cities a large proportion, if not the majority, of
the inhabitants have usually been born outside the city (in
London only about fifty per cent. of heads of households are
definitely reported as born in London); and it is not therefore
surprising that prostitutes also should often be outsiders. Still
it remains a significant fact that so typically urban a
phenomenon as prostitution should be so largely recruited from
the country. This is everywhere the case. Merrick enumerates the
regions from which came some 14,000 prostitutes who passed
through Millbank Prison. Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, Essex and Devon
are the counties that stand at the head, and Merrick estimates
that the contingent of London from the four counties which make
up London was 7000, or one-half of the whole; military towns like
Colchester and naval ports like Plymouth supply many prostitutes
to London; Ireland furnished many more than Scotland, and Germany
far more than any other European country, France being scarcely
represented at all (Merrick, _Work Among the Fallen_, 1890, pp.
14-18). It is, of course, possible that the proportions among
those who pass through a prison do not accurately represent the
proportions among prostitutes generally. The registers of the
London Salvation Army Rescue Home show that sixty per cent. of
the girls and women come from the provinces (A. Sherwell, _Life
in West London_, Ch. V). This is exactly the same proportion as
Tait found among prostitutes generally, half a century earlier,
in Edinburgh. Sanger found that of 2000 prostitutes in New York
as many as 1238 were born abroad (706 in Ireland), while of the
remaining 762 only half were born in the State of New York, and
clearly (though the exact figures are not given) a still smaller
proportion in New York City. Prostitutes come from the
North--where the climate is uncongenial, and manufacturing and
sedentary occupations prevail--much more than from the South;
thus Maine, a cold bleak maritime State, sent twenty-four of
these prostitutes to New York, while equidistant Virginia, which
at the same rate should have sent seventy-two, only sent nine;
there was a similar difference between Rhode Island and Maryland
(Sanger, _History of Prostitution_, p. 452). It is instructive to
see here the influence of a dreary climate and monotonous labor
in stimulating the appetite for a "life of pleasure." In France,
as shown by a map in Parent-Duchâtelet's work (vol. i, pp. 37-64,
1857), if the country is divided into five zones, on the whole
running east and west, there is a steady and progressive decrease
in the number of prostitutes each zone sends to Paris, as we
descend southwards. Little more than a third seem to belong to
Paris, and, as in America, it is the serious and hard-working
North, with its relatively cold climate, which furnishes the
largest contingent; even in old France, Dufour remarks (_op.
cit._, vol. iv, Ch. XV), prostitution, as the _fabliaux_ and
_romans_ show, was less infamous in the _langue d'oil_ than in
the _langue d'oc_, so that they were doubtless rare in the
South. At a later period Reuss states (_La Prostitution_, p. 12)
that "nearly all the prostitutes of Paris come from the
provinces." Jeannel found that of one thousand Bordeaux
prostitutes only forty-six belonged to the city itself, and
Potton (Appendix to Parent-Duchâtelet, vol. ii, p. 446) states
that of nearly four thousand Lyons prostitutes only 376 belonged
to Lyons. In Vienna, in 1873, Schrank remarks that of over 1500
prostitutes only 615 were born in Vienna. The general rule, it
will be seen, though the variations are wide, is that little more
than a third of a city's prostitutes are children of the city.
It is interesting to note that this tendency of the prostitute to
reach cities from afar, this migratory tendency--which they
nowadays share with waiters--is no merely modern phenomenon.
"There are few cities in Lombardy, or France, or Gaul," wrote St.
Boniface nearly twelve centuries ago, "in which there is not an
adulteress or prostitute of the English nation," and the Saint
attributes this to the custom of going on pilgrimage to foreign
shrines. At the present time there is no marked English element
among Continental prostitutes. Thus in Paris, according to Reuss
(_La Prostitution_, p. 12), the foreign prostitutes in decreasing
order are Belgian, German (Alsace-Lorraine), Swiss (especially
Geneva), Italian, Spanish, and only then English. Connoisseurs in
this matter say, indeed, that the English prostitute, as compared
with her Continental (and especially French) sister, fails to
show to advantage, being usually grasping as regards money and
deficient in charm.
It is the appeal of civilization, though not of what is finest and best in
civilization, which more than any other motive, calls women to the career
of a prostitute. It is now necessary to point out that for the man also,
the same appeal makes itself felt in the person of the prostitute. The
common and ignorant assumption that prostitution exists to satisfy the
gross sensuality of the young unmarried man, and that if he is taught to
bridle gross sexual impulse or induced to marry early the prostitute must
be idle, is altogether incorrect. If all men married when quite young, not
only would the remedy be worse than the disease--a point which it would be
out of place to discuss here--but the remedy would not cure the disease.
The prostitute is something more than a channel to drain off superfluous
sexual energy, and her attraction by no means ceases when men are married,
for a large number of the men who visit prostitutes, if not the majority,
are married. And alike whether they are married or unmarried the motive
is not one of uncomplicated lust.
In England, a well-informed writer remarks that "the value of
marriage as a moral agent is evidenced by the fact that all the
better-class prostitutes in London are almost entirely supported
by married men," while in Germany, as stated in the interesting
series of reminiscences by a former prostitute, Hedwig Hard's
_Beichte einer Gefallenen_, (p. 208), the majority of the men who
visit prostitutes are married. The estimate is probably
excessive. Neisser states that only twenty-five per cent. of
cases of gonorrhoea occur in married men. This indication is
probably misleading in the opposite direction, as the married
would be less reckless than the young and unmarried. As regards
the motives which lead married men to prostitutes, Hedwig Hard
narrates from her own experiences an incident which is
instructive and no doubt typical. In the town in which she lived
quietly as a prostitute a man of the best social class was
introduced by a friend, and visited her habitually. She had often
seen and admired his wife, who was one of the beauties of the
place, and had two charming children; husband and wife seemed
devoted to each other, and every one envied their happiness. He
was a man of intellect and culture who encouraged Hedwig's love
of books; she became greatly attached to him, and one day
ventured to ask him how he could leave his lovely and charming
wife to come to one who was not worthy to tie her shoe-lace.
"Yes, my child," he answered, "but all her beauty and culture
brings nothing to my heart. She is cold, cold as ice, proper,
and, above all, phlegmatic. Pampered and spoilt, she lives only
for herself; we are two good comrades, and nothing more. If, for
instance, I come back from the club in the evening and go to her
bed, perhaps a little excited, she becomes nervous and she thinks
it improper to wake her. If I kiss her she defends herself, and
tells me that I smell horribly of cigars and wine. And if perhaps
I attempt more, she jumps out of bed, bristles up as though I
were assaulting her, and threatens to throw herself out of the
window if I touch her. So, for the sake of peace, I leave her
alone and come to you." There can be no doubt whatever that this
is the experience of many married men who would be well content
to find the sweetheart as well as the friend in their wives. But
the wives, from a variety of causes, have proved incapable of
becoming the sexual mates of their husbands. And the husbands,
without being carried away by any impulse of strong passion or
any desire for infidelity, seek abroad what they cannot find at
home.
This is not the only reason why married men visit prostitutes.
Even men who are happily married to women in all chief respects
fitted to them, are apt to find, after some years of married
life, a mysterious craving for variety. They are not tired of
their wives, they have not the least wish or intention to abandon
them, they will not, if they can help it, give them the slightest
pain. But from time to time they are led by an almost
irresistible and involuntary impulse to seek a temporary intimacy
with women to whom nothing would persuade them to join themselves
permanently. Pepys, whose _Diary_, in addition to its other
claims upon us, is a psychological document of unique importance,
furnishes a very characteristic example of this kind of impulse.
He had married a young and charming wife, to whom he is greatly
attached, and he lives happily with her, save for a few
occasional domestic quarrels soon healed by kisses; his love is
witnessed by his jealousy, a jealousy which, as he admits, is
quite unreasonable, for she is a faithful and devoted wife. Yet a
few years after marriage, and in the midst of a life of strenuous
official activity, Pepys cannot resist the temptation to seek the
temporary favors of other women, seldom prostitutes, but nearly
always women of low social class--shop women, workmen's wives,
superior servant-girls. Often he is content to invite them to a
quiet ale-house, and to take a few trivial liberties. Sometimes
they absolutely refuse to allow more than this; when that happens
he frequently thanks Almighty God (as he makes his entry in his
_Diary_ at night) that he has been saved from temptation and from
loss of time and money; in any case, he is apt to vow that it
shall never occur again. It always does occur again. Pepys is
quite sincere with himself; he makes no attempt at justification
or excuse; he knows that he has yielded to a temptation; it is an
impulse that comes over him at intervals, an impulse that he
seems unable long to resist. Throughout it all he remains an
estimable and diligent official, and in most respects a tolerably
virtuous man, with a genuine dislike of loose people and loose
talk. The attitude of Pepys is brought out with incomparable
simplicity and sincerity because he is setting down these things
for his own eyes only, but his case is substantially that of a
vast number of other men, perhaps indeed of the typical _homme
moyen sensuel_ (see Pepys, _Diary_, ed. Wheatley; e.g., vol. iv,
passim).
There is a third class of married men, less considerable in
number but not unimportant, who are impelled to visit
prostitutes: the class of sexually perverted men. There are a
great many reasons why such men may desire to be married, and in
some cases they marry women with whom they find it possible to
obtain the particular form of sexual gratification they crave.
But in a large proportion of cases this is not possible. The
conventionally bred woman often cannot bring herself to humor
even some quite innocent fetishistic whim of her husband's, for
it is too alien to her feelings and too incomprehensible to her
ideas, even though she may be genuinely in love with him; in many
cases the husband would not venture to ask, and scarcely even
wish, that his wife should lend herself to play the fantastic or
possibly degrading part his desires demand. In such a case he
turns naturally to the prostitute, the only woman whose business
it is to fulfil his peculiar needs. Marriage has brought no
relief to these men, and they constitute a noteworthy proportion
of a prostitute's clients in every great city. The most ordinary
prostitute of any experience can supply cases from among her own
visitors to illustrate a treatise of psychopathic sexuality. It
may suffice here to quote a passage from the confessions of a
young London (Strand) prostitute as written down from her lips by
a friend to whom I am indebted for the document; I have merely
turned a few colloquial terms into more technical forms. After
describing how, when she was still a child of thirteen in the
country, a rich old gentleman would frequently come and exhibit
himself before her and other girls, and was eventually arrested
and imprisoned, she spoke of the perversities she had met with
since she had become a prostitute. She knew a young man, about
twenty-five, generally dressed in a sporting style, who always
came with a pair of live pigeons, which he brought in a basket.
She and the girl with whom she lived had to undress and take the
pigeons and wring their necks; he would stand in front of them,
and as the necks were wrung orgasm occurred. Once a man met her
in the street and asked her if he might come with her and lick
her boots. She agreed, and he took her to a hotel, paid half a
guinea for a room, and, when she sat down, got under the table
and licked her boots, which were covered with mud; he did nothing
more. Then there were some things, she said, that were too dirty
to repeat; well, one man came home with her and her friend and
made them urinate into his mouth. She also had stories of
flagellation, generally of men who whipped the girls, more rarely
of men who liked to be whipped by them. One man, who brought a
new birch every time, liked to whip her friend until he drew
blood. She knew another man who would do nothing but smack her
nates violently. Now all these things, which come into the
ordinary day's work of the prostitute, are rooted in deep and
almost irresistible impulses (as will be clear to any reader of
the discussion of Erotic Symbolism in the previous volume of
these _Studies_). They must find some outlet. But it is only the
prostitute who can be relied upon, through her interests and
training, to overcome the natural repulsion to such actions, and
gratify desires which, without gratification, might take on other
and more dangerous forms.
Although Woods Hutchinson quotes with approval the declaration of a
friend, "Out of thousands I have never seen one with good table manners,"
there is still a real sense in which the prostitute represents, however
inadequately, the attraction of civilization. "There was no house in
which I could habitually see a lady's face and hear a lady's voice," wrote
the novelist Anthony Trollope in his _Autobiography_, concerning his early
life in London. "No allurement to decent respectability came in my way. It
seems to me that in such circumstances the temptations of loose life will
almost certainly prevail with a young man. The temptation at any rate
prevailed with me." In every great city, it has been said, there are
thousands of men who have no right to call any woman but a barmaid by her
Christian name.[210] All the brilliant fever of civilization pulses round
them in the streets but their lips never touch it. It is the prostitute
who incarnates this fascination of the city, far better than the virginal
woman, even if intimacy with her were within reach. The prostitute
represents it because she herself feels it, because she has even
sacrificed her woman's honor in the effort to identify herself with it.
She has unbridled feminine instincts, she is a mistress of the feminine
arts of adornment, she can speak to him concerning the mysteries of
womanhood and the luxuries of sex with an immediate freedom and knowledge
the innocent maiden cloistered in her home would be incapable of. She
appeals to him by no means only because she can gratify the lower desires
of sex, but also because she is, in her way, an artist, an expert in the
art of feminine exploitation, a leader of feminine fashions. For she is
this, and there are, as Simmel has stated in his _Philosophie der Mode_,
good psychological reasons why she always should be this. Her uncertain
social position makes all that is conventional and established hateful to
her, while her temperament makes perpetual novelty delightful. In new
fashions she finds "an æsthetic form of that instinct of destruction which
seems peculiar to all pariah existences, in so far as they are not
completely enslaved in spirit."
"However surprising it may seem to some," a modern writer
remarks, "prostitutes must be put on the same level as artists.
Both use their gifts and talents for the joy and pleasure of
others, and, as a rule, for payment. What is the essential
difference between a singer who gives pleasure to hearers by her
throat and a prostitute who gives pleasure to those who seek her
by another part of her body? All art works on the senses." He
refers to the significant fact that actors, and especially
actresses, were formerly regarded much as prostitutes are now (R.
Hellmann, _Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit_, pp. 245-252).
Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo (_La Mala Vida en
Madrid_, p. 242) trace the same influence still lower in the
social scale. They are describing the more squalid kind of _café
chantant_, in which, in Spain and elsewhere, the most vicious and
degenerate feminine creatures become waitresses (and occasionally
singers and dancers), playing the part of amiable and
distinguished _hetairæ_ to the public of carmen and shop-boys who
frequent these resorts. "Dressed with what seems to the youth
irreproachable taste, with hair elaborately prepared, and clean
face adorned with flowers or trinkets, affable and at times
haughty, superior in charm and in finery to the other women he is
able to know, the waitresses become the most elevated example of
the _femme galante_ whom he is able to contemplate and talk to,
the courtesan of his sphere."
But while to the simple, ignorant, and hungry youth the prostitute appeals
as the embodiment of many of the refinements and perversities of
civilization, on many more complex and civilized men she exerts an
attraction of an almost reverse kind. She appeals by her fresh and natural
coarseness, her frank familiarity with the crudest facts of life; and so
lifts them for a moment out of the withering atmosphere of artificial
thought and unreal sentiment in which so many civilized persons are
compelled to spend the greater part of their lives. They feel in the words
which the royal friend of a woman of this temperament is said to have used
in explaining her incomprehensible influence over him: "She is so
splendidly vulgar!"
In illustration of this aspect of the appeal of prostitution, I
may quote a passage in which the novelist, Hermant, in his
_Confession d'un Enfant d'Hier_ (Lettre VII), has set down the
reasons which may lead the super-refined child of a cultured age,
yet by no means radically or completely vicious, to find
satisfaction in commerce with prostitutes: "As long as my heart
was not touched the object of my satisfaction was completely
indifferent to me. I was, moreover, a great lover of absolute
liberty, which is only possible in the circle of these anonymous
creatures and in their reserved dwelling. There everything became
permissible. With other women, however low we may seek them,
certain convenances must be observed, a kind of protocol. To
these one can say everything: one is protected by incognito and
assured that nothing will be divulged. I profited by this
freedom, which suited my age, but with a perverse fancy which was
not characteristic of my years. I scarcely know where I found
what I said to them, for it was the opposite of my tastes, which
were simple, and, if I may venture to say so, classic. It is true
that, in matters of love, unrestrained naturalism always tends to
perversion, a fact that can only seem paradoxical at first sight.
Primitive peoples have many traits in common with degenerates. It
was, however, only in words that I was unbridled; and that was
the only occasion on which I can recollect seriously lying. But
that necessity, which I then experienced, of expelling a lower
depth of ignoble instincts, seems to me characteristic and
humiliating. I may add that even in the midst of these
dissipations I retained a certain reserve. The contacts to which
I exposed myself failed to soil me; nothing was left when I had
crossed the threshold. I have always retained, from that forcible
and indifferent commerce, the habit of attributing no consequence
to the action of the flesh. The amorous function, which religion
and morality have surrounded with mystery or seasoned with sin,
seems to me a function like any other, a little vile, but
agreeable, and one to which the usual epilogue is too long....
This kind of companionship only lasted for a short time." This
analysis of the attitude of a certain common type of civilized
modern man seems to be just, but it may perhaps occur to some
readers that a commerce which led to "the action of the flesh"
being regarded as of no consequence can scarcely be said to have
left no taint.
In a somewhat similar manner, Henri de Régnier, in his novel,
_Les Rencontres de Monsieur Bréot_ (p. 50), represents Bercaillé
as deliberately preferring to take his pleasures with
servant-girls rather than with ladies, for pleasure was, to his
mind, a kind of service, which could well be accommodated with
the services they are accustomed to give; and then they are
robust and agreeable, they possess the _naïveté_ which is always
charming in the common people, and they are not apt to be
repelled by those little accidents which might offend the
fastidious sensibilities of delicately bred ladies.
Bloch, who has especially emphasized this side of the appeal of
prostitution (_Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, pp. 359-362),
refers to the delicate and sensitive young Danish writer, J.P.
Jakobsen, who seems to have acutely felt the contrast between the
higher and more habitual impulses, and the occasional outburst of
what he felt to be lower instincts; in his _Niels Lyhne_ he
describes the kind of double life in which a man is true for a
fortnight to the god he worships, and is then overcome by other
powers which madly bear him in their grip towards what he feels
to be humiliating, perverse, and filthy. "At such moments," Bloch
remarks, "the man is another being. The 'two souls' in the breast
become a reality. Is that the famous scholar, the lofty idealist,
the fine-souled æsthetician, the artist who has given us so many
splendid and pure works in poetry and painting? We no longer
recognize him, for at such moments another being has come to the
surface, another nature is moving within him, and with the power
of an elementary force is impelling him towards things at which
his 'upper consciousness,' the civilized man within him, would
shudder." Bloch believes that we are here concerned with a kind
of normal masculine masochism, which prostitution serves to
gratify.
_IV. The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution._
We have now surveyed the complex fact of prostitution in some of its most
various and typical aspects, seeking to realise, intelligently and
sympathetically, the fundamental part it plays as an elementary
constituent of our marriage system. Finally we have to consider the
grounds on which prostitution now appears to a large and growing number of
persons not only an unsatisfactory method of sexual gratification but a
radically bad method.
The movement of antagonism towards prostitution manifests itself most
conspicuously, as might beforehand have been anticipated, by a feeling of
repugnance towards the most ancient and typical, once the most credited
and best established prostitutional manifestation, the brothel. The growth
of this repugnance is not confined to one or two countries but is
international, and may thus be regarded as corresponding to a real
tendency in our civilization. It is equally pronounced in prostitutes
themselves and in the people who are their clients. The distaste on the
one side increases the distaste on the other. Since only the most helpless
or the most stupid prostitutes are nowadays willing to accept the
servitude of the brothel, the brothel-keeper is forced to resort to
extraordinary methods for entrapping victims, and even to take part in
that cosmopolitan trade in "white slaves" which exists solely to feed
brothels.[211] This state of things has a natural reaction in prejudicing
the clients of prostitution against an institution which is going out of
fashion and out of credit. An even more fundamental antipathy is
engendered by the fact that the brothel fails to respond to the high
degree of personal freedom and variety which civilization produces, and
always demands even when it fails to produce. On one side the prostitute
is disinclined to enter into a slavery which usually fails even to bring
her any reward; on the other side her client feels it as part of the
fascination of prostitution under civilized conditions that he shall enjoy
a freedom and choice the brothel cannot provide.[212] Thus it comes about
that brothels which once contained nearly all the women who made it a
business to minister to the sexual needs of men, now contain only a
decreasing minority, and that the transformation of cloistered
prostitution into free prostitution is approved by many social reformers
as a gain to the cause of morality.[213]
The decay of brothels, whether as cause or as effect, has been associated
with a vast increase of prostitution outside brothels. But the repugnance
to brothels in many essential respects also applies to prostitution
generally, and, as we shall see, it is exerting a profoundly modifying
influence on that prostitution.
The changing feeling in regard to prostitution seems to express itself
mainly in two ways. On the one hand there are those who, without desiring
to abolish prostitution, resent the abnegation which accompanies it, and
are disgusted by its sordid aspects. They may have no moral scruples
against prostitution, and they know no reason why a woman should not
freely do as she will with her own person. But they believe that, if
prostitution is necessary, the relationships of men with prostitutes
should be humane and agreeable to each party, and not degrading to either.
It must be remembered that under the conditions of civilized urban life,
the discipline of work is often too severe, and the excitements of urban
existence too constant, to render an abandonment to orgy a desirable
recreation. The gross form of orgy appeals, not to the town-dweller but to
the peasant, and to the sailor or soldier who reaches the town after long
periods of dreary routine and emotional abstinence. It is a mistake, even,
to suppose that the attraction of prostitution is inevitably associated
with the fulfilment of the sexual act. So far is this from being the case
that the most attractive prostitute may be a woman who, possessing few
sexual needs of her own, desires to please by the charm of her
personality; these are among those who most often find good husbands.
There are many men who are even well content merely to have a few hours'
free intimacy with an agreeable woman, without any further favor, although
that may be open to them. For a very large number of men under urban
conditions of existence the prostitute is ceasing to be the degraded
instrument of a moment's lustful desire; they seek an agreeable human
person with whom they may find relaxation from the daily stress or routine
of life. When an act of prostitution is thus put on a humane basis,
although it by no means thereby becomes conducive to the best development
of either party, it at least ceases to be hopelessly degrading. Otherwise
it would not have been possible for religious prostitution to flourish for
so long in ancient days among honorable women of good birth on the shores
of the Mediterranean, even in regions like Lydia, where the position of
women was peculiarly high.[214]
It is true that the monetary side of prostitution would still exist. But
it is possible to exaggerate its importance. It must be pointed out that,
though it is usual to speak of the prostitute as a woman who "sells
herself," this is rather a crude and inexact way of expressing, in its
typical form, the relationship of a prostitute to her client. A prostitute
is not a commodity with a market-price, like a loaf or a leg of mutton.
She is much more on a level with people belonging to the professional
classes, who accept fees in return for services rendered; the amount of
the fee varies, on the one hand in accordance with professional standing,
on the other hand in accordance with the client's means, and under special
circumstances may be graciously dispensed with altogether. Prostitution
places on a venal basis intimate relationships which ought to spring up
from natural love, and in so doing degrades them. But strictly speaking
there is in such a case no "sale." To speak of a prostitute "selling
herself" is scarcely even a pardonable rhetorical exaggeration; it is both
inexact and unjust.[215]
This tendency in an advanced civilization towards the
humanization of prostitution is the reverse process, we may note,
to that which takes place at an earlier stage of civilization
when the ancient conception of the religious dignity of
prostitution begins to fall into disrepute. When men cease to
reverence women who are prostitutes in the service of a goddess
they set up in their place prostitutes who are merely abject
slaves, flattering themselves that they are thereby working in
the cause of "progress" and "morality." On the shores of the
Mediterranean this process took place more than two thousand
years ago, and is associated with the name of Solon. To-day we
may see the same process going on in India. In some parts of
India (as at Jejuri, near Poonah) first born girls are dedicated
to Khandoba or other gods; they are married to the god and termed
_muralis_. They serve in the temple, sweep it, and wash the holy
vessels, also they dance, sing and prostitute themselves. They
are forbidden to marry, and they live in the homes of their
parents, brothers, or sisters; being consecrated to religious
service, they are untouched by degradation. Nowadays, however,
Indian "reformers," in the name of "civilization and science,"
seek to persuade the _muralis_ that they are "plunged in a career
of degradation." No doubt in time the would-be moralists will
drive the _muralis_ out of their temples and their homes, deprive
them of all self-respect, and convert them into wretched
outcasts, all in the cause of "science and civilization" (see,
e.g., an article by Mrs. Kashibai Deodhar, _The New Reformer_,
October, 1907). So it is that early reformers create for the
reformers of a later day the task of humanizing prostitution
afresh.
There can be no doubt that this more humane conception of
prostitution is to-day beginning to be realized in the actual
civilized life of Europe. Thus in writing of prostitution in
Paris, Dr. Robert Michels ("Erotische Streifzüge,"
_Mutterschutz_, 1906, Heft 9, p. 368) remarks: "While in Germany
the prostitute is generally considered as an 'outcast' creature,
and treated accordingly, an instrument of masculine lust to be
used and thrown away, and whom one would under no circumstances
recognize in public, in France the prostitute plays in many
respects the part which once give significance and fame to the
_hetairæ_ of Athens." And after describing the consideration and
respect which the Parisian prostitute is often able to require of
her friends, and the non-sexual relation of comradeship which she
can enter into with other men, the writer continues: "A girl who
certainly yields herself for money, but by no means for the first
comer's money, and who, in addition to her 'business friends,'
feels the need of, so to say, non-sexual companions with whom she
can associate in a free comrade-like way, and by whom she is
treated and valued as a free human being, is not wholly lost for
the moral worth of humanity." All prostitution is bad, Michels
concludes, but we should have reason to congratulate ourselves if
love-relationships of this Parisian species represented the
lowest known form of extra-conjugal sexuality. (As bearing on the
relative consideration accorded to prostitutes I may mention that
a Paris prostitute remarked to a friend of mine that Englishmen
would ask her questions which no Frenchman would venture to ask.)
It is not, however, only in Paris, although here more markedly
and prominently, that this humanizing change in prostitution is
beginning to make itself felt. It is manifested, for instance, in
the greater openness of a man's sexual life. "While he formerly
slinked into a brothel in a remote street," Dr. Willy Hellpach
remarks (_Nervosität und Kultur_, p. 169), "he now walks abroad
with his 'liaison,' visiting the theatres and cafés, without
indeed any anxiety to meet his acquaintances, but with no
embarrassment on that point. The thing is becoming more
commonplace, more--natural." It is also, Hellpach proceeds to
point out, thus becoming more moral also, and much unwholesome
prudery and pruriency is being done away with.
In England, where change is slow, this tendency to the
humanization of prostitution may be less pronounced. But it
certainly exists. In the middle of the last century Lecky wrote
(_History of European Morals_, vol. ii, p. 285) that habitual
prostitution "is in no other European country so hopelessly
vicious or so irrevocable." That statement, which was also made
by Parent-Duchâtelet and other foreign observers, is fully
confirmed by the evidence on record. But it is a statement which
would hardly be made to-day, except perhaps, in reference to
special confined areas of our cities. It is the same in America,
and we may doubtless find this tendency reflected in the report
on _The Social Evil_ (1902), drawn up by a committee in New York,
who gave it (p. 176) as one of their chief recommendations that
prostitution should no longer be regarded as a crime, in which
light, one gathers, it had formerly been regarded in New York.
That may seem but a small step in the path of humanization, but
it is in the right direction.
It is by no means only in lands of European civilization that we
may trace with developing culture the refinement and humanization
of the slighter bonds of relationship with women. In Japan
exactly the same demands led, several centuries ago, to the
appearance of the geisha. In the course of an interesting and
precise study of the geisha Mr. R.T. Farrer remarks (_Nineteenth
Century_, April, 1904): "The geisha is in no sense necessarily a
courtesan. She is a woman educated to attract; perfected from her
childhood in all the intricacies of Japanese literature;
practiced in wit and repartee; inured to the rapid give-and-take
of conversation on every topic, human and divine. From her
earliest youth she is broken into an inviolable charm of manner
incomprehensible to the finest European, yet she is almost
invariably a blossom of the lower classes, with dumpy claws, and
squat, ugly nails. Her education, physical and moral, is far
harder than that of the _ballerina_, and her success is achieved
only after years of struggle and a bitter agony of torture....
And the geisha's social position may be compared with that of the
European actress. The Geisha-house offers prizes as desirable as
any of the Western stage. A great geisha with twenty nobles
sitting round her, contending for her laughter, and kept in
constant check by the flashing bodkin of her wit, holds a
position no less high and famous than that of Sarah Bernhardt in
her prime. She is equally sought, equally flattered, quite as
madly adored, that quiet little elderly plain girl in dull blue.
But she is prized thus primarily for her tongue, whose power only
ripens fully as her physical charms decline. She demands vast
sums for her owners, and even so often appears and dances only at
her own pleasure. Few, if any, Westerners ever see a really
famous geisha. She is too great to come before a European, except
for an august or imperial command. Finally she may, and
frequently does, marry into exalted places. In all this there is
not the slightest necessity for any illicit relation."
In some respects the position of the ancient Greek _hetaira_ was
more analogous to that of the Japanese _geisha_ than to that of
the prostitute in the strict sense. For the Greeks, indeed, the
_hetaira_, was not strictly a _porne_ or prostitute at all. The
name meant friend or companion, and the woman to whom the name
was applied held an honorable position, which could not be
accorded to the mere prostitute. Athenæus (Bk. xiii, Chs.
XXVIII-XXX) brings together passages showing that the _hetaira_
could be regarded as an independent citizen, pure, simple, and
virtuous, altogether distinct from the common crew of
prostitutes, though these might ape her name. The _hetairæ_ "were
almost the only Greek women," says Donaldson (_Woman_, p. 59),
"who exhibited what was best and noblest in women's nature." This
fact renders it more intelligible why a woman of such
intellectual distinction as Aspasia should have been a _hetaira_.
There seems little doubt as to her intellectual distinction.
"Æschines, in his dialogue entitled 'Aspasia,'" writes Gomperz,
the historian of Greek philosophy (_Greek Thinkers_, vol. iii,
pp. 124 and 343), "puts in the mouth of that distinguished woman
an incisive criticism of the mode of life traditional for her
sex. It would be exceedingly strange," Gomperz adds, in arguing
that an inference may thus be drawn concerning the historical
Aspasia, "if three authors--Plato, Xenophon and Æschines--had
agreed in fictitiously enduing the companion of Pericles with
what we might very reasonably have expected her to possess--a
highly cultivated mind and intellectual influence." It is even
possible that the movement for woman's right which, as we dimly
divine through the pages of Aristophanes, took place in Athens in
the fourth century B.C., was led by _hetairæ_. According to Ivo
Bruns (_Frauenemancipation in Athen_, 1900, p. 19) "the most
certain information which we possess concerning Aspasia bears a
strong resemblance to the picture which Euripides and
Aristophanes present to us of the leaders of the woman movement."
It was the existence of this movement which made Plato's ideas on
the community of women appear far less absurd than they do to us.
It may perhaps be thought by some that this movement represented
on a higher plane that love of distruction, or, as we should
better say, that spirit of revolt and aspiration, which Simmel
finds to mark the intellectual and artistic activity of those who
are unclassed or dubiously classed in the social hierarchy. Ninon
de Lenclos, as we have seen, was not strictly a courtesan, but
she was a pioneer in the assertion of woman's rights. Aphra Behn
who, a little later in England, occupied a similarly dubious
social position, was likewise a pioneer in generous humanitarian
aspirations, which have since been adopted in the world at
large.
These refinements of prostitution may be said to be chiefly the
outcome of the late and more developed stages in civilization. As
Schurtz has put it (_Altersklassen und Männerbünde_, p. 191):
"The cheerful, skilful and artistically accomplished _hetaira_
frequently stands as an ideal figure in opposition to the
intellectually uncultivated wife banished to the interior of the
house. The courtesan of the Italian Renaissance, Japanese
geishas, Chinese flower-girls, and Indian bayaderas, all show
some not unnoble features, the breath of a free artistic
existence. They have achieved--with, it is true, the sacrifice of
their highest worth--an independence from the oppressive rule of
man and of household duties, and a part of the feminine endowment
which is so often crippled comes in them to brilliant
development. Prostitution in its best form may thus offer a path
by which these feminine characteristics may exert a certain
influence on the development of civilization. We may also believe
that the artistic activity of women is in some measure able to
offer a counterpoise to the otherwise less pleasant results of
sexual abandonment, preventing the coarsening and destruction of
the emotional life; in his _Magda_ Sudermann has described a type
of woman who, from the standpoint of strict morality, is open to
condemnation, but in her art finds a foothold, the strength of
which even ill-will must unwillingly recognize." In his _Sex and
Character_, Weininger has developed in a more extreme and
extravagant manner the conception of the prostitute as a
fundamental and essential part of life, a permanent feminine
type.
There are others, apparently in increasing numbers, who approach the
problem of prostitution not from an æsthetic standpoint but from a moral
standpoint. This moral attitude is not, however, that conventionalized
morality of Cato and St. Augustine and Lecky, set forth in previous pages,
according to which the prostitute in the street must be accepted as the
guardian of the wife in the home. These moralists reject indeed the claim
of that belief to be considered moral at all. They hold that it is not
morally possible that the honor of some women shall be purchaseable at the
price of the dishonor of other women, because at such a price virtue loses
all moral worth. When they read that, as Goncourt stated, "the most
luxurious articles of women's _trousseaux_, the bridal chemises of girls
with dowries of six hundred thousand francs, are made in the prison of
Clairvaux,"[216] they see the symbol of the intimate dependence of our
luxurious virtue on our squalid vice. And while they accept the
historical and sociological evidence which shows that prostitution is an
inevitable part of the marriage system which still survives among us, they
ask whether it is not possible so to modify our marriage system that it
shall not be necessary to divide feminine humanity into "disreputable"
women, who make sacrifices which it is dishonorable to make, and
"respectable" women, who take sacrifices which it cannot be less
dishonorable to accept.
Prostitutes, a distinguished man of science has said (Duclaux,
_L'Hygiène Sociale_, p. 243), "have become things which the
public uses when it wants them, and throws on the dungheap when
it has made them vile. In its pharisaism it even has the
insolence to treat their trade as shameful, as though it were not
just as shameful to buy as to sell in this market." Bloch
(_Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, Ch. XV) insists that prostitution
must be ennobled, and that only so can it be even diminished.
Isidore Dyer, of New Orleans, also argues that we cannot check
prostitution unless we create "in the minds of men and women a
spirit of tolerance instead of intolerance of fallen women." This
point may be illustrated by a remark by the prostitute author of
the _Tagebuch einer Verlorenen_. "If the profession of yielding
the body ceased to be a shameful one," she wrote, "the army of
'unfortunates' would diminish by four-fifths--I will even say
nine-tenths. Myself, for example! How gladly would I take a
situation as companion or governess!" "One of two things," wrote
the eminent sociologist Tarde ("La Morale Sexuelle," _Archives
d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, January, 1907), "either prostitution
will disappear through continuing to be dishonorable and will be
replaced by some other institution which will better remedy the
defects of monogamous marriage, or it will survive by becoming
respectable, that is to say, by making itself respected, whether
liked or disliked." Tarde thought this might perhaps come about
by a better organization of prostitutes, a more careful selection
among those who desired admission to their ranks and the
cultivation of professional virtues which would raise their moral
level. "If courtesans fulfil a need," Balzac had already said in
his _Physiologie du Mariage_, "they must become an institution."
This moral attitude is supported and enforced by the inevitable democratic
tendency of civilization which, although it by no means destroys the idea
of class, undermines that idea as the mark of fundamental human
distinctions and renders it superficial. Prostitution no longer makes a
woman a slave; it ought not to make her even a pariah: "My body is my
own," said the young German prostitute of to-day, "and what I do with it
is nobody else's concern." When the prostitute was literally a slave moral
duty towards her was by no means necessarily identical with moral duty
towards the free woman. But when, even in the same family, the prostitute
may be separated by a great and impassable social gulf from her married
sister, it becomes possible to see, and in the opinion of many
imperatively necessary to see, that a readjustment of moral values is
required. For thousands of years prostitution has been defended on the
ground that the prostitute is necessary to ensure the "purity of women."
In a democratic age it begins to be realized that prostitutes also are
women.
The developing sense of a fundamental human equality underlying the
surface divisions of class tends to make the usual attitude towards the
prostitute, the attitude of her clients even more than that of society
generally, seem painfully cruel. The callous and coarsely frivolous tone
of so many young men about prostitutes, it has been said, is "simply
cruelty of a peculiarly brutal kind," not to be discerned in any other
relation of life.[217] And if this attitude is cruel even in speech it is
still more cruel in action, whatever attempts may be made to disguise its
cruelty.
Canon Lyttelton's remarks may be taken to refer chiefly to young
men of the upper middle class. Concerning what is perhaps the
usual attitude of lower middle class people towards prostitution,
I may quote from a remarkable communication which has reached me
from Australia: "What are the views of a young man brought up in
a middle-class Christian English family on prostitutes? Take my
father, for instance. He first mentioned prostitutes to me, if I
remember rightly, when speaking of his life before marriage. And
he spoke of them as he would speak of a horse he had hired, paid
for, and dismissed from his mind when it had rendered him
service. Although my mother was so kind and good she spoke of
abandoned women with disgust and scorn as of some unclean animal.
As it flatters vanity and pride to be able with good countenance
and universal consent to look down on something, I soon grasped
the situation and adopted an attitude which is, in the main, that
of most middle-class Christian Englishmen towards prostitutes.
But as puberty develops this attitude has to be accommodated with
the wish to make use of this scum, these moral lepers. The
ordinary young man, who likes a spice of immorality and has it
when in town, and thinks it is not likely to come to his mother's
or sisters' ears, does not get over his arrogance and disgust or
abate them in the least. He takes them with him, more or less
disguised, to the brothel, and they color his thoughts and
actions all the time he is sleeping with prostitutes, or kissing
them, or passing his hands over them, as he would over a mare,
getting as much as he can for his money. To tell the truth, on
the whole, that was my attitude too. But if anyone had asked me
for the smallest reason for this attitude, for this feeling of
superiority, pride, _hauteur_, and prejudice, I should, like any
other 'respectable' young man, have been entirely at a loss, and
could only have gaped foolishly."
From the modern moral standpoint which now concerns us, not only is the
cruelty involved in the dishonor of the prostitute absurd, but not less
absurd, and often not less cruel, seems the honor bestowed on the
respectable women on the other side of the social gulf. It is well
recognized that men sometimes go to prostitutes to gratify the excitement
aroused by fondling their betrothed.[218] As the emotional and physical
results of ungratified excitement are not infrequently more serious in
women than in men, the betrothed women in these cases are equally
justified in seeking relief from other men, and the vicious circle of
absurdity might thus be completed.
From the point of view of the modern moralist there is another
consideration which was altogether overlooked in the conventional and
traditional morality we have inherited, and was indeed practically
non-existent in the ancient days when that morality was still a living
reality. Women are no longer divided only into the two groups of wives who
are to be honored, and prostitutes who are the dishonored guardians of
that honor; there is a large third class of women who are neither wives
nor prostitutes. For this group of the unmarried virtuous the traditional
morality had no place at all; it simply ignored them. But the new
moralist, who is learning to recognize both the claims of the individual
and the claims of society, begins to ask whether on the one hand these
women are not entitled to the satisfaction of their affectional and
emotional impulses if they so desire, and on the other hand whether, since
a high civilization involves a diminished birthrate, the community is not
entitled to encourage every healthy and able-bodied woman to contribute to
maintain the birthrate when she so desires.
All the considerations briefly indicated in the preceding pages--the
fundamental sense of human equality generated by our civilization, the
repugnance to cruelty which accompanies the refinement of urban life, the
ugly contrast of extremes which shock our developing democratic
tendencies, the growing sense of the rights of the individual to authority
over his own person, the no less strongly emphasized right of the
community to the best that the individual can yield--all these
considerations are every day more strongly influencing the modern moralist
to assume towards the prostitute an attitude altogether different from
that of the morality which we derived from Cato and Augustine. He sees the
question in a larger and more dynamic manner. Instead of declaring that it
is well worth while to tolerate and at the same time to condemn the
prostitute, in order to preserve the sanctity of the wife in her home, he
is not only more inclined to regard each as the proper guardian of her own
moral freedom, but he is less certain about the time-honored position of
the prostitute, and moreover, by no means sure that the wife in the home
may not be fully as much in need of rescuing as the prostitute in the
street; he is prepared to consider whether reform in this matter is not
most likely to take place in the shape of a fairer apportionment of sexual
privileges and sexual duties to women generally, with an inevitably
resultant elevation in the sexual lives of men also.
The revolt of many serious reformers against the injustice and
degradation now involved by our system of prostitution is so
profound that some have declared themselves ready to accept any
revolution of ideas which would bring about a more wholesome
transmutation of moral values. "Better indeed were a saturnalia
of _free_ men and women," exclaims Edward Carpenter (_Love's
Coming of Age_, p. 62), "than the spectacle which, as it is, our
great cities present at night."
Even those who would be quite content with as conservative a
treatment as possible of social institutions still cannot fail to
realize that prostitution is unsatisfactory, unless we are
content to make very humble claims of the sexual act. "The act of
prostitution," Godfrey declares (_The Science of Sex_, p. 202),
"may be physiologically complete, but it is complete in no other
sense. All the moral and intellectual factors which combine with
physical desire to form the perfect sexual attraction are absent.
All the higher elements of love--admiration, respect, honor, and
self-sacrificing devotion--are as foreign to prostitution as to
the egoistic act of masturbation. The principal drawbacks to the
morality of the act lie in its associations more than in the act
itself. Any affectional quality which a more or less promiscuous
connection might possess is at once destroyed by the intrusion of
the monetary element. In the resulting degradation the woman has
the largest share, since it makes her a pariah and involves her
in all the hardening and depraving influences of social
ostracism. But her degradation only serves to render her
influence on her partners more demoralizing. Prostitution," he
concludes, "has a strong tendency towards emphasizing the
naturally selfish attitude of men towards women, and encouraging
them in the delusion, born of unregulated passions, that the
sexual act itself is the aim and end of the sex life.
Prostitution can therefore make no claim to afford even a
temporary solution to the sex problem. It fulfils only that
mission which has made it a 'necessary evil'--the mission of
palliative to the physical rigors of celibacy and monogamy. It
does so at the cost of a considerable amount of physical and
moral deterioration, much of which is undoubtedly due to the
action of society in completing the degradation of the prostitute
by persistent ostracism. Prostitution was not so great an evil
when it was not thought so great, yet even at its best it was a
real evil, a melancholy and sordid travesty of sincere and
natural passional relations. It is an evil which we are bound to
have with us so long as celibacy is a custom and monogamy a law."
It is the wife as well as the prostitute who is degraded by a
system which makes venal love possible. "The time has gone past,"
the same writer remarks elsewhere (p. 195) "when a mere ceremony
can really sanctify what is base and transform lust and greed
into the sincerity of sexual affection. If, to enter into sexual
connections with a man for a solely material end is a disgrace to
humanity, it is a disgrace under the marriage bond just as much
as apart from the hypocritical blessing of the church or the law.
If the public prostitute is a being who deserves to be treated as
a pariah, it is hopelessly irrational to withhold every sort of
moral opprobrium from the woman who leads a similar life under a
different set of external circumstances. Either the prostitute
wife must come under the moral ban, or there must be an end to
the complete ostracism under which the prostitute labors."
The thinker who more clearly and fundamentally than others, and
first of all, realized the dynamical relationships of
prostitution, as dependent upon a change in the other social
relationships of life, was James Hinton. More than thirty years
ago, in fragmentary writings that still remain unpublished, since
he never worked them into an orderly form, Hinton gave vigorous
and often passionate expression to this fundamental idea. It may
be worth while to quote a few brief passages from Hinton's MSS.:
"I feel that the laws of force should hold also amid the waves of
human passion, that the relations of mechanics are true, and will
rule also in human life.... There is a tension, a crushing of the
soul, by our modern life, and it is ready for a sudden spring to
a different order in which the forces shall rearrange themselves.
It is a dynamical question presented in moral terms.... Keeping a
portion of the woman population without prospect of marriage
means having prostitutes, that is women as instruments of man's
mere sensuality, and this means the killing, in many of them, of
all pure love or capacity of it. This is the fact we have to
face.... To-day I saw a young woman whose life was being consumed
by her want of love, a case of threatened utter misery: now see
the price at which we purchase her ill-health; for her ill-health
we pay the crushing of another girl into hell. We give that for
it; her wretchedness of soul and body are bought by prostitution;
we have prostitutes made for that.... We devote some women
recklessly to perdition to make a hothouse Heaven for the
rest.... One wears herself out in vainly trying to endure
pleasures she is not strong enough to enjoy, while other women
are perishing for lack of these very pleasures. If marriage is
this, is it not embodied lust? The happy Christian homes are the
true dark places of the earth.... Prostitution for man, restraint
for woman--they are two sides of the same thing, and both are
denials of love, like luxury and asceticism. The mountains of
restraint must be used to fill up the abysses of luxury."
Some of Hinton's views were set forth by a writer intimately
acquainted with him in a pamphlet entitled _The Future of
Marriage: An Eirenicon for a Question of To-day_, by a
Respectable Woman (1885). "When once the conviction is forced
home upon the 'good' women," the writer remarks, "that their
place of honor and privilege rests upon the degradation of others
as its basis, they will never rest till they have either
abandoned it or sought for it some other pedestal. If our
inflexible marriage system has for its essential condition the
existence side by side with it of prostitution, then one of two
things follows: either prostitution must be shown to be
compatible with the well-being, moral and physical, of the women
who practice it, or our marriage system must be condemned. If it
was clearly put before anyone, he could not seriously assert that
to be 'virtue' which could only be practiced at the expense of
another's vice.... Whilst the laws of physics are becoming so
universally recognized that no one dreams of attempting to
annihilate a particle of matter, or of force, yet we do not
instinctively apply the same conception to moral forces, but
think and act as if we could simply do away with an evil, while
leaving unchanged that which gives it its strength. This is the
only view of the social problem which can give us hope. That
prostitution should simply cease, leaving everything else as it
is, would be disastrous if it were possible. But it is not
possible. The weakness of all existing efforts to put down
prostitution is that they are directed against it as an isolated
thing, whereas it is only one of the symptoms proceeding from a
common disease."
Ellen Key, who during recent years has been the chief apostle of
a gospel of sexual morality based on the needs of women as the
mothers of the race, has, in a somewhat similar spirit, denounced
alike prostitution and rigid marriage, declaring (in her _Essays
on Love and Marriage_) that "the development of erotic personal
consciousness is as much hindered by socially regulated
'morality' as by socially regulated 'immorality,'" and that "the
two lowest and socially sanctioned expressions of sexual dualism,
rigid marriage and prostitution, will gradually become
impossible, because with the conquest of the idea of erotic unity
they will no longer correspond to human needs."
We may sum up the present situation as regards prostitution by saying that
on the one hand there is a tendency for its elevation, in association with
the growing humanity and refinement of civilization, characteristics which
must inevitably tend to mark more and more both those women who become
prostitutes and those men who seek them; on the other hand, but perhaps
through the same dynamic force, there is a tendency towards the slow
elimination of prostitution by the successful competition of higher and
purer methods of sexual relationship freed from pecuniary considerations.
This refinement and humanization, this competition by better forms of
sexual love, are indeed an essential part of progress as civilization
becomes more truly sound, wholesome, and sincere.
This moral change cannot, it seems probable, fail to be accompanied by the
realization that the facts of human life are more important than the
forms. For all changes from lower to higher social forms, from savagery to
civilization, are accompanied--in so far as they are vital changes--by a
slow and painful groping towards the truth that it is only in natural
relations that sanity and sanctity can be found, for, as Nietzsche said,
the "return" to Nature should rather be called the "ascent." Only so can
we achieve the final elimination from our hearts of that clinging
tradition that there is any impurity or dishonor in acts of love for which
the reasonable, and not merely the conventional, conditions have been
fulfilled. For it is vain to attempt to cleanse our laws, or even our
by-laws, until we have first cleansed our hearts.
It would be out of place here to push further the statement of the moral
question as it is to-day beginning to shape itself in the sphere of sex.
In a psychological discussion we are only concerned to set down the actual
attitude of the moralist, and of civilization. The practical outcome of
that attitude must be left to moralists and sociologists and the community
generally to work out.
Our inquiry has also, it may be hoped, incidentally tended to show that in
practically dealing with the question of prostitution it is pre-eminently
necessary to remember the warning which, as regards many other social
problems, has been embodied by Herbert Spencer in his famous illustration
of the bent iron plate. In trying to make the bent plate smooth, it is
useless, Spencer pointed out, to hammer directly on the buckled up part;
if we do so we merely find that we have made matters worse; our hammering,
to be effective, must be around, and not directly on, the offensive
elevation we wish to reduce; only so can the iron plate be hammered
smooth.[219] But this elementary law has not been understood by
moralists. The plain, practical, common-sense reformer, as he fancied
himself to be--from the time of Charlemagne onwards--has over and over
again brought his heavy fist directly down on to the evil of prostitution
and has always made matters worse. It is only by wisely working outside
and around the evil that we can hope to lessen it effectually. By aiming
to develop and raise the relationships of men to women, and of women to
women, by modifying our notions of sexual relationships, and by
introducing a saner and truer conception of womanhood and of the
responsibilities of women as well as of men, by attaining, socially as
well as economically, a higher level of human living--it is only by such
methods as these that we can reasonably expect to see any diminution and
alleviation of the evil of prostitution. So long as we are incapable of
such methods we must be content with the prostitution we deserve, learning
to treat it with the pity, and the respect, which so intimate a failure of
our civilization is entitled to.
FOOTNOTES:
[107] See, e.g., Cheetham's Hulsean Lectures, _The Mysteries, Pagan and
Christian_, pp. 123, 136.
[108] Hormayr's _Taschenbuch_, 1835, p. 255. Hagelstange, in a chapter on
mediæval festivals in his _Süddeutsches Bauernleben im Mittelalter_, shows
how, in these Christian orgies which were really of pagan origin, the
German people reacted with tremendous and boisterous energy against the
laborious and monotonous existence of everyday life.
[109] This was clearly realized by the more intelligent upholders of the
Feast of Fools. Austere persons wished to abolish this Feast, and in a
remarkable petition sent up to the Theological Faculty of Paris (and
quoted by Flogel, _Geschichte des Grotesk-Komischen_, fourth edition, p.
204) the case for the Feast is thus presented: "We do this according to
ancient custom, in order that folly, which is second nature to man and
seems to be inborn, may at least once a year have free outlet. Wine casks
would burst if we failed sometimes to remove the bung and let in air. Now
we are all ill-bound casks and barrels which would let out the wine of
wisdom if by constant devotion and fear of God we allowed it to ferment.
We must let in air so that it may not be spoilt. Thus on some days we give
ourselves up to sport, so that with the greater zeal we may afterwards
return to the worship of God." The Feast of Fools was not suppressed until
the middle of the sixteenth century, and relics of it persisted (as at
Aix) till near the end of the eighteenth century.
[110] A Méray, _La Vie au Temps des Libres Prêcheurs_, vol. ii, Ch. X. A
good and scholarly account of the Feast of Fools is given by E.K.
Chambers, _The Mediæval Stage_, Ch. XIII. It is true that the Church and
the early Fathers often anathematized the theatre. But Gregory of
Nazianzen wished to found a Christian theatre; the Mediæval Mysteries were
certainly under the protection of the clergy; and St. Thomas Aquinas, the
greatest of the schoolmen, only condemns the theatre with cautious
qualifications.
[111] Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, Ch. XII.
[112] _Journal Anthropological Institute_, July-Dec., 1904, p. 329.
[113] Westermarck (_Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii,
pp. 283-9) shows how widespread is the custom of setting apart a
periodical rest day.
[114] A.E. Crawley, _The Mystic Rose_, pp. 273 et seq., Crawley brings
into association with this function of great festivals the custom, found
in some parts of the world, of exchanging wives at these times. "It has
nothing whatever to do with the marriage system, except as breaking it for
a season, women of forbidden degree being lent, on the same grounds as
conventions and ordinary relations are broken at festivals of the
Saturnalia type, the object being to change life and start afresh, by
exchanging every thing one can, while the very act of exchange coincides
with the other desire, to weld the community together" (Ib., p. 479).
[115] See "The Analysis of the Sexual Impulse" in vol. iii of these
_Studies_.
[116] G. Murray, _Ancient Greek Literature_, p. 211.
[117] The Greek drama probably arose out of a folk-festival of more or
less sexual character, and it is even possible that the mediæval drama had
a somewhat similar origin (see Donaldson, _The Greek Theatre_; Gilbert
Murray, loc. cit.; Karl Pearson, _The Chances of Death_, vol. ii, pp.
135-6, 280 et seq.).
[118] R. Canudo, "Les Chorèges Français," _Mercure de France_, May 1,
1907, p. 180.
[119] "This is, in fact," Cyples declares (_The Process of Human
Experience_, p. 743), "Art's great function--to rehearse within us greater
egoistic possibilities, to habituate us to larger actualizations of
personality in a rudimentary manner," and so to arouse, "aimlessly but
splendidly, the sheer as yet unfulfilled possibilities within us."
[120] Even when monotonous labor is intellectual, it is not thereby
protected against degrading orgiastic reactions. Prof. L. Gurlitt shows
(_Die Neue Generation_, January, 1909, pp. 31-6) how the strenuous,
unremitting intellectual work of Prussian seminaries leads among both
teachers and scholars to the worst forms of the orgy.
[121] Rabutaux discusses various definitions of prostitution, _De la
Prostitution en Europe_, pp. 119 et seq. For the origin of the names to
designate the prostitute, see Schrader, _Reallexicon_, art.
"Beischläferin."
[122] _Digest_, lib. xxiii, tit. ii, p. 43. If she only gave herself to
one or two persons, though for money, it was not prostitution.
[123] Guyot, _La Prostitution_, p. 8. The element of venality is
essential, and religious writers (like Robert Wardlaw, D.D., of Edinburgh,
in his _Lectures on Female Prostitution_, 1842, p. 14) who define
prostitution as "the illicit intercourse of the sexes," and synonymous
with theological "fornication," fall into an absurd confusion.
[124] "Such marriages are sometimes stigmatized as 'legalized
prostitution,'" remarks Sidgwick (_Methods of Ethics_, Bk. iii, Ch. XI),
"but the phrase is felt to be extravagant and paradoxical."
[125] Bonger, _Criminalité et Conditions Economiques_, p. 378. Bonger
believes that the act of prostitution is "intrinsically equal to that of a
man or woman who contracts a marriage for economical reasons."
[126] E. Richard, _La Prostitution à Paris_, 1890, p. 44. It may be
questioned whether publicity or notoriety should form an essential part of
the definition; it seems, however, to be involved, or the prostitute
cannot obtain clients. Reuss states that she must, in addition, be
absolutely without means of subsistence; that is certainly not essential.
Nor is it necessary, as the _Digest_ insisted, that the act should be
performed "without pleasure;" that may be as it will, without affecting
the prostitutional nature of the act.
[127] Hawkesworth, _Account of the Voyages_, etc., 1775, vol. ii, p. 254.
[128] R.W. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, p. 235.
[129] F.S. Krauss, _Romanische Forschungen_, 1903, p. 290.
[130] H. Schurtz, _Altersklassen und Männerbünde_, 1902, p. 190. In this
work Schurtz brings together (pp. 189-201) some examples of the germs of
prostitution among primitive peoples. Many facts and references are given
by Westermarck (_History of Human Marriage_, pp. 66 et seq., and _Origin
and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii, pp. 441 _et seq._).
[131] Bachofen (more especially in his _Mutterrecht_ and _Sage von
Tanaquil_) argued that even religious prostitution sprang from the
resistance of primitive instincts to the individualization of love. Cf.
Robertson Smith, _Religion of Semites_, second edition, p. 59.
[132] Whatever the reason may be, there can be no doubt that there is a
widespread tendency for religion and prostitution to be associated; it is
possibly to some extent a special case of that general connection between
the religious and sexual impulses which has been discussed elsewhere
(Appendix C to vol. i of these _Studies_). Thus A.B. Ellis, in his book on
_The Ewe-speaking Peoples of West Africa_ (pp. 124, 141) states that here
women dedicated to a god become promiscuous prostitutes. W.G. Sumner
(_Folkways_, Ch. XVI) brings together many facts concerning the wide
distribution of religious prostitution.
[133] Herodotus, Bk. I, Ch. CXCIX; Baruch, Ch. VI, p. 43. Modern scholars
confirm the statements of Herodotus from the study of Babylonian
literature, though inclined to deny that religious prostitution occupied
so large a place as he gives it. A tablet of the Gilgamash epic, according
to Morris Jastrow, refers to prostitutes as attendants of the goddess
Ishtar in the city Uruk (or Erech), which was thus a centre, and perhaps
the chief centre, of the rites described by Herodotus (Morris Jastrow,
_The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_, 1898, p. 475). Ishtar was the
goddess of fertility, the great mother goddess, and the prostitutes were
priestesses, attached to her worship, who took part in ceremonies intended
to symbolize fertility. These priestesses of Ishtar were known by the
general name Kadishtu, "the holy ones" (op. cit., pp. 485, 660).
[134] It is usual among modern writers to associate Aphrodite Pandemos,
rather than Ourania, with venal or promiscuous sexuality, but this is a
complete mistake, for the Aphrodite Pandemos was purely political and had
no sexual significance. The mistake was introduced, perhaps intentionally,
by Plato. It has been suggested that that arch-juggler, who disliked
democratic ideas, purposely sought to pervert and vulgarize the conception
of Aphrodite Pandemos (Farnell, _Cults of Greek States_, vol. ii, p. 660).
[135] Athenæus, Bk. xiii, cap. XXXII. It appears that the only other
Hellenic community where the temple cult involved unchastity was a city of
the Locri Epizephyrii (Farnell, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 636).
[136] I do not say an earlier "promiscuity," for the theory of a primitive
sexual promiscuity is now widely discredited, though there can be no
reasonable doubt that the early prevalence of mother-right was more
favorable to the sexual freedom of women than the later patriarchal
system. Thus in very early Egyptian days a woman could give her favors to
any man she chose by sending him her garment, even if she were married. In
time the growth of the rights of men led to this being regarded as
criminal, but the priestesses of Amen retained the privilege to the last,
as being under divine protection (Flinders Petrie, _Egyptian Tales_, pp.
10, 48).
[137] It should be added that Farnell ("The Position of Women in Ancient
Religion," _Archiv für Religionswissenschaft_, 1904, p. 88) seeks to
explain the religious prostitution of Babylonia as a special religious
modification of the custom of destroying virginity before marriage in
order to safeguard the husband from the mystic dangers of defloration.
E.S. Hartland, also ("Concerning the Rite at the Temple of Mylitta,"
_Anthropological Essays Presented to E.B. Tyler_, p. 189), suggests that
this was a puberty rite connected with ceremonial defloration. This theory
is not, however, generally accepted by Semitic scholars.
[138] The girls of this tribe, who are remarkably pretty, after spending
two or three years in thus amassing a little dowry, return home to marry,
and are said to make model wives and mothers. They are described by
Bertherand in Parent-Duchâtelet, _La Prostitution à Paris_, vol. ii, p.
539.
[139] In Abyssinia (according to Fiaschi, _British Medical Journal_, March
13, 1897), where prostitution has always been held in high esteem, the
prostitutes, who are now subject to medical examination twice a week,
still attach no disgrace to their profession, and easily find husbands
afterwards. Potter (_Sohrab and Rustem_, pp. 168 et seq.) gives references
as regards peoples, widely dispersed in the Old World and the New, among
whom the young women have practiced prostitution to obtain a dowry.
[140] At Tralles, in Lydia, even in the second century A.D., as Sir W.M.
Ramsay notes (_Cities of Phrygia_, vol. i, pp. 94, 115), sacred
prostitution was still an honorable practice for women of good birth who
"felt themselves called upon to live the divine life under the influence
of divine inspiration."
[141] The gradual secularization of prostitution from its earlier
religious form has been traced by various writers (see, e.g., Dupouey, _La
Prostitution dans l'Antiquité_). The earliest complimentary reference to
the _Hetaira_ in literature is to be found, according to Benecke
(_Antimachus of Colophon_, p. 36), in Bacchylides.
[142] Cicero, _Oratio prô Coelio_, Cap. XX.
[143] Pierre Dufour, _Histoire de la Prostitution_, vol. ii, Chs. XIX-XX.
The real author of this well-known history of prostitution, which, though
not scholarly in its methods, brings together a great mass of interesting
information, is said to be Paul Lacroix.
[144] Rabutaux, in his _Histoire de la Prostitution en Europe_, describes
many attempts to suppress prostitution; cf. Dufour, _op. cit._, vol. iii.
[145] Dufour, op. cit., vol. vi, Ch. XLI. It was in the reign of the
homosexual Henry III that the tolerance of brothels was established.
[146] In the eighteenth century, especially, houses of prostitution in
Paris attained to an astonishing degree of elaboration and prosperity.
Owing to the constant watchful attention of the police a vast amount of
detailed information concerning these establishments was accumulated, and
during recent years much of it has been published. A summary of this
literature will be found in Dühren's _Neue Forshungen über den Marquis de
Sade und seine Zeit_, 1904, pp. 97 et seq.
[147] Rabutaux, op. cit., p. 54.
[148] Calza has written the history of Venetian prostitution; and some of
the documents he found have been reproduced by Mantegazza, _Gli Amori
degli Uomimi_, cap. XIV. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a
comparatively late period, Coryat visited Venice, and in his _Crudities_
gives a full and interesting account of its courtesans, who then numbered,
he says, at least 20,000; the revenue they brought into the State
maintained a dozen galleys.
[149] J. Schrank, _Die Prostitution in Wien_, Bd. I, pp. 152-206.
[150] U. Robert, _Les Signes d'Infamie au Moyen Age_, Ch. IV.
[151] Rudeck (_Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland_,
pp. 26-36) gives many details concerning the important part played by
prostitutes and brothels in mediæval German life.
[152] They are described by Rabutaux, op. cit., pp. 90 _et seq._
[153] _L'Année Sociologique_, seventh year, 1904, p. 440.
[154] Bloch, _Der Ursprung der Syphilis_. As regards the German
"Frauenhausen" see Max Bauer, _Das Geschlechtsleben in der Deutschen
Vergangenheit_, pp. 133-214. In Paris, Dufour states (op. cit., vol. v,
Ch. XXXIV), brothels under the ordinances of St. Louis had many rights
which they lost at last in 1560, when they became merely tolerated houses,
without statutes, special costumes, or confinement to special streets.
[155] "Cortegiana, hoc est meretrix honesta," wrote Burchard, the Pope's
Secretary, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, _Diarium_, ed.
Thuasne, vol. ii, p. 442; other authorities are quoted by Thuasne in a
note.
[156] Burchard, _Diarium_, vol. iii, p. 167. Thuasne quotes other
authorities in confirmation.
[157] The example of Holland, where some large cities have adopted the
regulation of prostitution and others have not, is instructive as regards
the illusory nature of the advantages of regulation. In 1883 Dr. Després
brought forward figures, supplied by Dutch officials, showing that in
Rotterdam, where prostitution was regulated, both prostitution and
venereal diseases were more prevalent than in Amsterdam, a city without
regulation (A. Després, _La Prostitution en France_, p. 122).
[158] It was in 1802 that the medical inspection of prostitutes in Paris
brothels was introduced, though not until 1825 fully established and made
general.
[159] M.L. Heidingsfeld, "The Control of Prostitution," _Journal American
Medical Association_, January 30, 1904.
[160] See, e.g., G. Bérault, _La Maison de Tolérance_, Thèse de Paris,
1904.
[161] Thus the circumstances of the English army in India are of a special
character. A number of statements (from the reports of committees,
official publications, etc.) regarding the good influence of regulation in
reducing venereal diseases in India are brought together by
Surgeon-Colonel F.H. Welch, "The Prevention of Syphilis," _Lancet_, August
12, 1899. The system has been abolished, but only as the result of a
popular outcry and not on the question of its merits.
[162] Thus Richard, who accepts regulation and was instructed to report on
it for the Paris Municipal Council, would not have girls inscribed as
professional prostitutes until they are of age and able to realize what
they are binding themselves to (E. Richard, _La Prostitution à Paris_, p.
147). But at that age a large proportion of prostitutes have been
practicing their profession for years.
[163] In Germany, where the cure of infected prostitutes under regulation
is nearly everywhere compulsory, usually at the cost of the community, it
is found that 18 is the average age at which they are affected by
syphilis; the average age of prostitutes in brothels is higher than that
of those outside, and a much larger proportion have therefore become
immune to disease (Blaschko, "Hygiene der Syphilis," in Weyl's _Handbuch
der Hygiene_, Bd. ii, p. 62, 1900).
[164] A. Sherwell, _Life in West London_, 1897, Ch. V.
[165] Bonger brings together statistics illustrating this point, op. cit.,
pp. 402-6.
[166] _The Nightless City_, p. 125.
[167] Ströhmberg, as quoted by Aschaffenburg, _Das Verbrechen_, 1903, p.
77.
[168] _Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und Sexuelle Hygiene_, 1906. Heft
10, p. 460. But this cause is undoubtedly effective in some cases of
unmarried women in Germany unable to get work (see article by Sister
Henrietta Arendt, Police-Assistant at Stuttgart, _Sexual-Probleme_,
December, 1908).
[169] Thus, for instance, we find Irma von Troll-Borostyáni saying in her
book, _Im Freien Reich_ (p. 176): "Go and ask these unfortunate creatures
if they willingly and freely devoted themselves to vice. And nearly all of
them will tell you a story of need and destitution, of hunger and lack of
work, which compelled them to it, or else of love and seduction and the
fear of the discovery of their false step which drove them out of their
homes, helpless and forsaken, into the pool of vice from which there is
hardly any salvation." It is, of course, quite true that the prostitute is
frequently ready to tell such stories to philanthropic persons who expect
to hear them, and sometimes even put the words into her mouth.
[170] C. Booth, _Life and Labour_, final volume, p. 125. Similarly in
Sweden, Kullberg states that girls of thirteen to seventeen, living at
home with their parents in comfortable circumstances, have often been
found on the streets.
[171] W. Acton, _Prostitution_, 1870, pp. 39, 49.
[172] In Lyons, according to Potton, of 3884 prostitutes, 3194 abandoned,
or apparently abandoned, their profession; in Paris a very large number
became servants, dressmakers, or tailoresses, occupations which, in many
cases, doubtless, they had exercised before (Parent-Duchâtelet, _De la
Prostitution_, 1857, vol. i, p. 584; vol. ii, p. 451). Sloggett (quoted by
Acton) stated that at Davenport, 250 of the 1775 prostitutes there
married. It is well known that prostitutes occasionally marry extremely
well. It was remarked nearly a century ago that marriages of prostitutes
to rich men were especially frequent in England, and usually turned out
well; the same seems to be true still. In their own social rank they not
infrequently marry cabmen and policemen, the two classes of men with whom
they are brought most closely in contact in the streets. As regards
Germany, C.K. Schneider (_Die Prostituirte und die Gesellschaft_), states
that young prostitutes take up all sorts of occupations and situations,
sometimes, if they have saved a little money, establishing a business,
while old prostitutes become procuresses, brothel-keepers, lavatory women,
and so on. Not a few prostitutes marry, he adds, but the proportion among
inscribed German prostitutes is very small, less than 2 per cent.
[173] G. de Molinari, _La Viriculture_, 1897, p. 155.
[174] Reuss and other writers have reproduced typical extracts from the
private account books of prostitutes, showing the high rate of their
earnings. Even in the common brothels, in Philadelphia (according to
Goodchild, "The Social Evil in Philadelphia," _Arena_, March, 1896), girls
earn twenty dollars or more a week, which is far more than they could earn
in any other occupation open to them.
[175] A. Després, _La Prostitution en France_, 1883.
[176] Bonger, _Criminalité et Conditions Economiques_, 1905, pp. 378-414.
[177] _La Donna Delinquente_, p. 401.
[178] Raciborski, _Traité de l'Impuissance_, p. 20. It may be added that
Bergh, a leading authority on the anatomical peculiarities of the external
female sexual organs, who believe that strong development of the external
genital organs accompanies libidinous tendencies, has not found such
development to be common among prostitutes.
[179] Hammer, who has had much opportunity of studying the psychology of
prostitutes, remarks that he has seen no reason to suspect sexual coldness
(_Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und Sexuelle Hygiene_, 1906, Heft 2,
p. 85), although, as he has elsewhere stated, he is of opinion that
indolence, rather than excess of sensuality, is the chief cause of
prostitution.
[180] See "The Sexual Impulse in Women," in the third volume of these
_Studies_.
[181] Tait stated that in Edinburgh many married women living with their
husbands in comfortable circumstances, and having children, were found to
be acting as prostitutes, that is, in the regular habit of making
assignations with strangers (W. Tait, _Magdalenism in Edinburgh_, 1842, p.
16).
[182] Janke brings together opinions to this effect, _Die Willkürliche
Hervorbringen des Geschlechts_, p. 275. "If we compare a prostitute of
thirty-five with her respectable sister," Acton remarked (_Prostitution_,
1870, p. 39), "we seldom find that the constitutional ravages often
thought to be necessary consequences of prostitution exceed those
attributable to the cares of a family and the heart-wearing struggles of
virtuous labor."
[183] Hirschfeld states (_Wesen der Liebe_, p. 35) that the desire for
intercourse with a sympathetic person is heightened, and not decreased, by
a professional act of coitus.
[184] This has been clearly shown by Hans Ostwald (from whom I take the
above-quoted observation of a prostitute), one of the best authorities on
prostitute life and character; see, e.g., his article, "Die erotischen
Beziehungen zwischen Dirne und Zuhälter," _Sexual-Probleme_, June, 1908.
In the subsequent number of the same periodical (July, 1908, p. 393) Dr.
Max Marcuse supports Ostwald's experiences, and says that the letters of
prostitutes and their bullies are love-letters exactly like those of
respectable people of the same class, and with the same elements of love
and jealousy; these relationships, he remarks, often prove very enduring.
The prostitute author of the _Tagebuch einer Verlorenen_ (p. 147) also has
some remarks on the prostitute's relations to her bully, stating that it
is simply the natural relationship of a girl to her lover.
[185] Thus Moraglia found that among 180 prostitutes in North Italian
brothels, and among 23 elegant Italian and foreign cocottes, every one
admitted that she masturbated, preferably by friction of the clitoris; 113
of them, the majority, declared that they preferred solitary or mutual
masturbation to normal coitus. Hammer states (_Zehn Lebensläufe Berliner
Kontrollmädchen_ in Ostwald's series of "Grosstadt Dokumente," 1905) that
when in hospital all but three or four of sixty prostitutes masturbate,
and those who do not are laughed at by the rest.
[186] _Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, Jahrgang VII, 1905, p. 148;
"Sexual Inversion," vol. ii of these _Studies_, Ch. IV. Hammer found that
of twenty-five prostitutes in a reformatory as many as twenty-three were
homosexual, or, on good grounds, suspected to be such. Hirschfeld
(_Berlins Drittes Geschlecht_, p. 65) mentions that prostitutes sometimes
accost better-class women who, from their man-like air, they take to be
homosexual; from persons of their own sex prostitutes will accept a
smaller remuneration, and sometimes refuse payment altogether.
[187] With prostitution, as with criminality, it is of course difficult to
disentangle the element of heredity from that of environment, even when we
have good grounds for believing that the factor of heredity here, as
throughout the whole of life, cannot fail to carry much weight. It is
certain, in any case, that prostitution frequently runs in families. "It
has often been my experience," writes a former prostitute (Hedwig Hard,
_Beichte einer Gefallenen_, p. 156) "that when in a family a girl enters
this path, her sister soon afterwards follows her: I have met with
innumerable cases; sometimes three sisters will all be on the register,
and I knew a case of four sisters, whose mother, a midwife, had been in
prison, and the father drank. In this case, all four sisters, who were
very beautiful, married, one at least very happily, to a rich doctor who
took her out of the brothel at sixteen and educated her."
[188] This fact is not contradicted by the undoubted fact that prostitutes
are by no means always contented with the life they choose.
[189] This point has been discussed by Bloch, _Sexualleben unserer Zeit_,
Ch. XIII.
[190] Various series of observations are summarized by Lombroso and
Ferrero, _La Donna Delinquente_, 1893, Part III, cap. IV.
[191] _History of European Morals_, vol. iii, p. 283.
[192] Similarly Lord Morley has written (_Diderot_, vol. ii, p. 20): "The
purity of the family, so lovely and dear as it is, has still only been
secured hitherto by retaining a vast and dolorous host of female outcasts
... upon whose heads, as upon the scapegoat of the Hebrew ordinance, we
put all the iniquities of the children of the house, and all their
transgressions in all their sins, and then banish them with maledictions
into the foul outer wilderness and the land not inhabited."
[193] Horace, _Satires_, lib. i, 2.
[194] Augustine, _De Ordine_, Bk. II, Ch. IV.
[195] _De Regimine Principum_ (_Opuscula XX_), lib. iv, cap. XIV. I am
indebted to the Rev. H. Northcote for the reference to the precise place
where this statement occurs; it is usually quoted more vaguely.
[196] Lea, _History of Auricular Confession_, vol. ii, p. 69. There was
even, it seems, an eccentric decision of the Salamanca theologians that a
nun might so receive money, "licite et valide."
[197] Lea, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 263, 399.
[198] Rabutaux, _De la Prostitution en Europe_, pp. 22 et seq.
[199] Burton, _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Part III, Sect. III, Mem. IV, Subs.
II.
[200] B. Mandeville, _Remarks to Fable of the Bees_, 1714, pp. 93-9; cf.
P. Sakmann, _Bernard de Mandeville_, pp. 101-4.
[201] These conditions favor temporary free unions, but they also favor
prostitution. The reason is, according to Adolf Gerson (_Sexual-Probleme_,
September, 1908), that the woman of good class will not have free unions.
Partly moved by moral traditions, and partly by the feeling that a man
should be legally her property, she will not give herself out of love to a
man; and he therefore turns to the lower-class woman who gives herself for
money.
[202] Many girls, said Ellice Hopkins, get into mischief merely because
they have in them an element of the "black kitten," which must frolic and
play, but has no desire to get into danger. "Do you not think it a little
hard," she added, "that men should have dug by the side of her foolish
dancing feet a bottomless pit, and that she cannot have her jump and fun
in safety, and put on her fine feathers like the silly bird-witted thing
she is, without a single false step dashing her over the brink, and
leaving her with the very womanhood dashed out of her?"
[203] A. Sherwell, _Life in West London_, 1897, Ch. V.
[204] As quoted by Bloch, _Sexualleben Unserer Zeit_, p. 358. In Berlin
during recent years the number of prostitutes has increased at nearly
double the rate at which the general population has increased. It is no
doubt probable that the supply tends to increase the demand.
[205] Goncourt, _Journal_, vol. iii, p. 49.
[206] Vanderkiste, _The Dens of London_, 1854, p. 242.
[207] Bonger (_Criminalité et Conditions Economiques_, p. 406) refers to
the prevalence of prostitution among dressmakers and milliners, as well as
among servants, as showing the influence of contact with luxury, and adds
that the rich women, who look down on prostitution, do not always realize
that they are themselves an important factor of prostitution, both by
their luxury and their idleness; while they do not seem to be aware that
they would themselves act in the same way if placed under the same
conditions.
[208] H. Lippert, in his book on prostitution in Hamburg, laid much stress
on the craving for dress and adornment as a factor of prostitution, and
Bloch (_Das Sexualleben unsurer Zeit_, p. 372) considers that this factor
is usually underestimated, and that it exerts an especially powerful
influence on servants.
[209] Since this was written the influence of several generations of
town-life in immunizing a stock to the evils of that life (though without
reference to prostitution) has been set forth by Reibmayr, _Die
Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies_, 1908, vol. ii, pp. 73 _et
seq._
[210] In France this intimacy is embodied in the delicious privilege of
_tutoiement_. "The mystery of _tutoiement!_" exclaims Ernest La Jennesse
in _L'Holocauste:_ "Barriers broken down, veils drawn away, and the ease
of existence! At a time when I was very lonely, and trying to grow
accustomed to Paris and to misfortune, I would go miles--on foot,
naturally--to see a girl cousin and an aunt, merely to have something to
_tutoyer_. Sometimes they were not at home, and I had to come back with my
_tu_, my thirst for confidence and familiarity and brotherliness."
[211] For some facts and references to the extensive literature concerning
this trade, see, e.g., Bloch, _Das Sexualleben Unserer Zeit_, pp. 374-376;
also K.M. Baer, _Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, Sept., 1908;
Paulucci de Calboli, _Nuova Antologia_, April, 1902.
[212] These considerations do not, it is true, apply to many kinds of
sexual perverts who form an important proportion of the clients of
brothels. These can frequently find what they crave inside a brothel much
more easily than outside.
[213] Thus Charles Booth, in his great work on _Life and Labor in London_,
final volume (p. 128), recommends that "houses of accommodation," instead
of being hunted out, should be tolerated as a step towards the suppression
of brothels.
[214] "Towns like Woolwich, Aldershot, Portsmouth, Plymouth," it has been
said, "abound with wretched, filthy monsters that bear no resemblance to
women; but it is drink, scorn, brutality and disease which have reduced
them to this state, not the mere fact of associating with men."
[215] "The contract of prostitution in the opinion of prostitutes
themselves," Bernaldo de Quirós and Llanas Aguilaniedo remark (_La Mala
Vida en Madrid_, p. 254), "cannot be assimilated to a sale, nor to a
contract of work, nor to any other form of barter recognized by the civil
law. They consider that in these pacts there always enters an element
which makes it much more like a gift in a matter in which no payment could
be adequate. 'A woman's body is without price' is an axiom of
prostitution. The money placed in the hands of her who procures the
satisfaction of sexual desire is not the price of the act, but an offering
which the priestess of Venus applies to her maintenance." To the Spaniard,
it is true, every transaction which resembles trade is repugnant, but the
principle underlying this feeling holds good of prostitution generally.
[216] _Journal des Goncourt_, vol. iii; this was in 1866.
[217] Rev. the Hon. C. Lyttelton, _Training of the Young in Laws of Sex_,
p. 42.
[218] See, e.g., R.W. Taylor, _Treatise on Sexual Disorders_, 1897, pp.
74-5. Georg Hirth (_Wege zur Heimat_, 1909, p. 619) narrates the case of a
young officer who, being excited by the caresses of his betrothed and
having too much respect for her to go further than this, and too much
respect for himself to resort to masturbation, knew nothing better than to
go to a prostitute. Syphilis developed a few days after the wedding. Hirth
adds, briefly, that the results were terrible.
[219] It is an oft-quoted passage, but can scarcely be quoted too often:
"You see that this wrought-iron plate is not quite flat: it sticks up a
little, here towards the left--'cockles,' as we say. How shall we flatten
it? Obviously, you reply, by hitting down on the part that is prominent.
Well, here is a hammer, and I give the plate a blow as you advise. Harder,
you say. Still no effect. Another stroke? Well, there is one, and another,
and another. The prominence remains, you see: the evil is as great as
ever--greater, indeed. But that is not all. Look at the warp which the
plate has got near the opposite edge. Where it was flat before it is now
curved. A pretty bungle we have made of it. Instead of curing the original
defect we have produced a second. Had we asked an artisan practiced in
'planishing,' as it is called, he would have told us that no good was to
be done, but only mischief, by hitting down on the projecting part. He
would have taught us how to give variously-directed and specially-adjusted
blows with a hammer elsewhere: so attacking the evil, not by direct, but
by indirect actions. The required process is less simple than you thought.
Even a sheet of metal is not to be successfully dealt with after those
common-sense methods in which you have so much confidence. What, then,
shall we say about a society?... Is humanity more readily straightened
than an iron plate?" (_The Study of Sociology_, p. 270.)
CHAPTER VIII.
THE CONQUEST OF THE VENEREAL DISEASES.
The Significance of the Venereal Diseases--The History of Syphilis--The
Problem of Its Origin--The Social Gravity of Syphilis--The Social Dangers
of Gonorrhoea--The Modern Change in the Methods of Combating
Venereal Diseases--Causes of the Decay of the System of Police
Regulation--Necessity of Facing the Facts--The Innocent Victims of
Venereal Diseases--Diseases Not Crimes--The Principle of Notification--The
Scandinavian System--Gratuitous Treatment--Punishment for Transmitting
Venereal Diseases--Sexual Education in Relation to Venereal
Diseases--Lectures, Etc.--Discussion in Novels and on the Stage--The
"Disgusting" Not the "Immoral."
It may, perhaps, excite surprise that in the preceding discussion of
prostitution scarcely a word has been said of venereal diseases. In the
eyes of many people, the question of prostitution is simply the question
of syphilis. But from the psychological point of view with which we are
directly concerned, as from the moral point of view with which we cannot
fail to be indirectly concerned, the question of the diseases which may
be, and so frequently are, associated with prostitution cannot be placed
in the first line of significance. The two questions, however intimately
they may be mingled, are fundamentally distinct. Not only would venereal
diseases still persist even though prostitution had absolutely ceased,
but, on the other hand, when we have brought syphilis under the same
control as we have brought the somewhat analogous disease of leprosy, the
problem of prostitution would still remain.
Yet, even from the standpoint which we here occupy, it is scarcely
possible to ignore the question of venereal disease, for the psychological
and moral aspects of prostitution, and even the whole question of the
sexual relationships, are, to some extent, affected by the existence of
the serious diseases which are specially liable to be propagated by sexual
intercourse.
Fournier, one of the leading authorities on this subject, has well said
that syphilis, alcoholism, and tuberculosis are the three modern plagues.
At a much earlier period (1851) Schopenhauer in _Parerga und Paralipomena_
had expressed the opinion that the two things which mark modern social
life, in distinction from that of antiquity, and to the advantage of the
latter, are the knightly principle of honor and venereal disease;
together, he added, they have poisoned life, and introduced a hostile and
even diabolical element into the relations of the sexes, which has
indirectly affected all other social relationships.[220] It is like a
merchandise, says Havelburg, of syphilis, which civilization has
everywhere carried, so that only a very few remote districts of the globe
(as in Central Africa and Central Brazil) are to-day free from it.[221]
It is undoubtedly true that in the older civilized countries the
manifestations of syphilis, though still severe and a cause of physical
deterioration in the individual and the race, are less severe than they
were even a generation ago.[222] This is partly the result of earlier and
better treatment, partly, it is possible, the result also of the
syphilization of the race, some degree of immunity having now become an
inherited possession, although it must be remembered that an attack of
syphilis does not necessarily confer immunity from the actual attack of
the disease even in the same individual. But it must be added that, even
though it has become less severe, syphilis, in the opinion of many, is
nevertheless still spreading, even in the chief centres of civilization;
this has been noted alike in Paris and in London.[223]
According to the belief which is now tending to prevail, syphilis was
brought to Europe at the end of the fifteenth century by the first
discoverers of America. In Seville, the chief European port for America,
it was known as the Indian disease, but when Charles VIII and his army
first brought it to Italy in 1495, although this connection with the
French was only accidental, it was called the Gallic disease, "a monstrous
disease," said Cataneus, "never seen in previous centuries and altogether
unknown in the world."
The synonyms of syphilis were at first almost innumerable. It was in his
Latin poem _Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus_, written before 1521 and
published at Verona in 1530, that Fracastorus finally gave the disease its
now universally accepted name, inventing a romantic myth to account for
its origin.
Although the weight of authoritative opinion now seems to incline
towards the belief that syphilis was brought to Europe from
America, on the discovery of the New World, it is only within
quite recent years that that belief has gained ground, and it
scarcely even yet seems certain that what the Spaniards brought
back from America was really a disease absolutely new to the Old
World, and not a more virulent form of an old disease of which
the manifestations had become benign. Buret, for instance (_Le
Syphilis Aujourd'hui et chez les Anciens_, 1890), who some years
ago reached "the deep conviction that syphilis dates from the
creation of man," and believed, from a minute study of classic
authors, that syphilis existed in Rome under the Cæsars, was of
opinion that it has broken out at different places and at
different times, in epidemic bursts exhibiting different
combinations of its manifold symptoms, so that it passed
unnoticed at ordinary times, and at the times of its more intense
manifestation was looked upon as a hitherto unknown disease. It
was thus regarded in classic times, he considers, as coming from
Egypt, though he looked upon its real home as Asia. Leopold Glück
has likewise quoted (_Archiv für Dermatologie und Syphilis_,
January, 1899) passages from the medical epigrams of a sixteenth
century physician, Gabriel Ayala, declaring that syphilis is not
really a new disease, though popularly supposed to be so, but an
old disease which has broken out with hitherto unknown violence.
There is, however, no conclusive reason for believing that
syphilis was known at all in classic antiquity. A.V. Notthaft
("Die Legende von der Althertums-syphilis," in the Rindfleisch
_Festschrift_, 1907, pp. 377-592) has critically investigated the
passages in classic authors which were supposed by Rosenbaum,
Buret, Proksch and others to refer to syphilis. It is quite
true, Notthaft admits, that many of these passages might possibly
refer to syphilis, and one or two would even better fit syphilis
than any other disease. But, on the whole, they furnish no proof
at all, and no syphilologist, he concludes, has ever succeeded in
demonstrating that syphilis was known in antiquity. That belief
is a legend. The most damning argument against it, Notthaft
points out, is the fact that, although in antiquity there were
great physicians who were keen observers, not one of them gives
any description of the primary, secondary, tertiary, and
congenital forms of this disease. China is frequently mentioned
as the original home of syphilis, but this belief is also quite
without basis, and the Japanese physician, Okamura, has shown
(_Monatsschrift für praktische Dermatologie_, vol. xxviii, pp.
296 et seq.) that Chinese records reveal nothing relating to
syphilis earlier than the sixteenth century. At the Paris Academy
of Medicine in 1900 photographs from Egypt were exhibited by
Fouquet of human remains which date from B.C. 2400, showing bone
lesions which seemed to be clearly syphilitic; Fournier, however,
one of the greatest of authorities, considered that the diagnosis
of syphilis could not be maintained until other conditions liable
to produce somewhat similar bone lesions had been eliminated
(_British Medical Journal_, September 29, 1900, p. 946). In
Florida and various regions of Central America, in undoubtedly
pre-Columbian burial places, diseased bones have been found which
good authorities have declared could not be anything else than
syphilitic (e.g., _British Medical Journal_, November 20, 1897,
p. 1487), though it may be noted that so recently as 1899 the
cautious Virchow stated that pre-Columbian syphilis in America
was still for him an open question (_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_,
Heft 2 and 3, 1899, p. 216). From another side, Seler, the
distinguished authority on Mexican antiquity, shows (_Zeitschrift
für Ethnologie_, 1895, Heft 5, p. 449) that the ancient Mexicans
were acquainted with a disease which, as they described it, might
well have been syphilis. It is obvious, however, that while the
difficulty of demonstrating syphilitic diseased bones in America
is as great as in Europe, the demonstration, however complete,
would not suffice to show that the disease had not already an
existence also in the Old World. The plausible theory of Ayala
that fifteenth century syphilis was a virulent recrudescence of
an ancient disease has frequently been revived in more modern
times. Thus J. Knott ("The Origin of Syphilis," _New York Medical
Journal_, October 31, 1908) suggests that though not new in
fifteenth century Europe, it was then imported afresh in a form
rendered more aggravated by coming from an exotic race, as is
believed often to be the case.
It was in the eighteenth century that Jean Astruc began the
rehabilitation of the belief that syphilis is really a
comparatively modern disease of American origin, and since then
various authorities of weight have given their adherence to this
view. It is to the energy and learning of Dr. Iwan Bloch, of
Berlin (the first volume of whose important work, _Der Ursprung
der Syphilis_, was published in 1901) that we owe the fullest
statement of the evidence in favor of the American origin of
syphilis. Bloch regards Ruy Diaz de Isla, a distinguished Spanish
physician, as the weightiest witness for the Indian origin of the
disease, and concludes that it was brought to Europe by
Columbus's men from Central America, more precisely from the
Island of Haiti, to Spain in 1493 and 1494, and immediately
afterwards was spread by the armies of Charles VIII in an
epidemic fashion over Italy and the other countries of Europe.
It may be added that even if we have to accept the theory that
the central regions of America constitute the place of origin of
European syphilis, we still have to recognize that syphilis has
spread in the North American continent very much more slowly and
partially than it has in Europe, and even at the present day
there are American Indian tribes among whom it is unknown.
Holder, on the basis of his own experiences among Indian tribes,
as well as of wide inquiries among agency physicians, prepared a
table showing that among some thirty tribes and groups of tribes,
eighteen were almost or entirely free from venereal disease,
while among thirteen it was very prevalent. Almost without
exception, the tribes where syphilis is rare or unknown refuse
sexual intercourse with strangers, while those among whom such
disease is prevalent are morally lax. It is the whites who are
the source of infection among these tribes (A.B. Holder, "Gynecic
Notes Among the American Indians," _American Journal of
Obstetrics_, 1892, No. 1).
Syphilis is only one, certainly the most important, of a group of three
entirely distinct "venereal diseases" which have only been distinguished
in recent times, and so far as their precise nature and causation are
concerned, are indeed only to-day beginning to be understood, although two
of them were certainly known in antiquity. It is but seventy years ago
since Ricord, the great French syphilologist, following Bassereau, first
taught the complete independence of syphilis both from gonorrhoea
and soft chancre, at the same time expounding clearly the three stages,
primary, secondary and tertiary, through which syphilitic manifestations
tend to pass, while the full extent of tertiary syphilitic symptoms is
scarcely yet grasped, and it is only to-day beginning to be generally
realized that two of the most prevalent and serious diseases of the brain
and nervous system--general paralysis and tabes dorsalis or locomotor
ataxia--have their predominant though not sole and exclusive cause in the
invasion of the syphilitic poison many years before. In 1879 a new stage
of more precise knowledge of the venereal diseases began with Neisser's
discovery of the gonococcus which is the specific cause of gonorrhoea.
This was followed a few years later by the discovery by Ducrey and Unna of
the bacillus of soft chancre, the least important of the venereal diseases
because exclusively local in its effects. Finally, in 1905--after
Metchnikoff had prepared the way by succeeding in carrying syphilis from
man to monkey, and Lassar, by inoculation, from monkey to monkey--Fritz
Schaudinn made his great discovery of the protozoal _Spirochoeta
pallida_ (since sometimes called _Treponema pallidum_), which is now
generally regarded as the cause of syphilis, and thus revealed the final
hiding place of one of the most dangerous and insidious foes of
humanity.[224]
There is no more subtle poison than that of syphilis. It is not, like
smallpox or typhoid, a disease which produces a brief and sudden storm, a
violent struggle with the forces of life, in which it tends, even without
treatment, provided the organism is healthy, to succumb, leaving little or
no traces of its ravages behind. It penetrates ever deeper and deeper into
the organism, with the passage of time leading to ever new manifestations,
and no tissue is safe from its attack. And so subtle is this all-pervading
poison that though its outward manifestations are amenable to prolonged
treatment, it is often difficult to say that the poison has been finally
killed out.[225]
The immense importance of syphilis, and the chief reason why it is
necessary to consider it here, lies in the fact that its results are not
confined to the individual himself, nor even to the persons to whom he may
impart it by the contagion due to contact in or out of sexual
relationships: it affects the offspring, and it affects the power to
produce offspring. It attacks men and women at the centre of life, as the
progenitors of the coming race, inflicting either sterility or the
tendency to aborted and diseased products of conception. The father alone
can perhaps transmit syphilis to his child, even though the mother escapes
infection, and the child born of syphilitic parents may come into the
world apparently healthy only to reveal its syphilitic origin after a
period of months or even years. Thus syphilis is probably a main cause of
the enfeeblement of the race.[226]
Alike in the individual and in his offspring syphilis shows its
deteriorating effects on all the structures of the body, but especially on
the brain and nervous system. There are, as has been pointed out by Mott,
a leading authority in this matter,[227] five ways in which syphilis
affects the brain and nervous system: (1) by moral shock; (2) by the
effects of the poison in producing anæmia and impaired general nutrition;
(3) by causing inflammation of the membranes and tissues of the brain; (4)
by producing arterial degeneration, leading on to brain-softening,
paralysis, and dementia; (5) as a main cause of the para-syphilitic
affections of general paralysis and tabes dorsalis.
It is only within recent years that medical men have recognized the
preponderant part played by acquired or inherited syphilis in producing
general paralysis, which so largely helps to fill lunatic asylums, and
tabes dorsalis which is the most important disease of the spinal cord.
Even to-day it can scarcely be said that there is complete agreement as
to the supreme importance of the factor of syphilis in these diseases.
There can, however, be little doubt that in about ninety-five per cent. at
least of cases of general paralysis syphilis is present.[228]
Syphilis is not indeed by itself an adequate cause of general paralysis
for among many savage peoples syphilis is very common while general
paralysis is very rare. It is, as Krafft-Ebing was accustomed to say,
syphilization and civilization working together which produce general
paralysis, perhaps in many cases, there is reason for thinking, on a
nervous soil that is hereditarily degenerated to some extent; this is
shown by the abnormal prevalence of congenital stigmata of degeneration
found in general paralytics by Näcke and others. "Paralyticus nascitur
atque fit," according to the dictum of Obersteiner. Once undermined by
syphilis, the deteriorated brain is unable to resist the jars and strains
of civilized life, and the result is general paralysis, truly described as
"one of the most terrible scourges of modern times." In 1902 the
Psychological Section of the British Medical Association, embodying the
most competent English authority on this question, unanimously passed a
resolution recommending that the attention of the Legislature and other
public bodies should be called to the necessity for immediate action in
view of the fact that "general paralysis, a very grave and frequent form
of brain disease, together with other varieties of insanity, is largely
due to syphilis, and is therefore preventable." Yet not a single step has
yet been taken in this direction.
The dangers of syphilis lie not alone in its potency and its persistence
but also in its prevalence. It is difficult to state the exact incidence
of syphilis, but a great many partial investigations have been made in
various countries, and it would appear that from five to twenty per cent.
of the population in European countries is syphilitic, while about fifteen
per cent. of the syphilitic cases die from causes directly or indirectly
due to the disease.[229] In France generally, Fournier estimates that
seventeen per cent. of the whole population have had syphilis, and at
Toulouse, Audry considers that eighteen per cent. of all his patients are
syphilitic. In Copenhagen, where notification is obligatory, over four per
cent. of the population are said to be syphilitic. In America a committee
of the Medical Society of New York, appointed to investigate the question,
reported as the result of exhaustive inquiry that in the city of New York
not less than a quarter of a million of cases of venereal disease occurred
every year, and a leading New York dermatologist has stated that among the
better class families he knows intimately at least one-third of the sons
have had syphilis. In Germany eight hundred thousand cases of venereal
disease are by one authority estimated to occur yearly, and in the larger
universities twenty-five per cent. of the students are infected every
term, venereal disease being, however, specially common among students.
The yearly number of men invalided in the German army by venereal diseases
equals a third of the total number wounded in the Franco-Prussian war. Yet
the German army stands fairly high as regards freedom from venereal
disease when compared with the British army which is more syphilized than
any other European army.[230] The British army, however, being
professional and not national, is less representative of the people than
is the case in countries where some form of conscription prevails. At one
London hospital it could be ascertained that ten per cent. of the patients
had had syphilis; this probably means a real proportion of about fifteen
per cent., a high though not extremely high ratio. Yet it is obvious that
even if the ratio is really lower than this the national loss in life and
health, in defective procreation and racial deterioration, must be
enormous and practically incalculable. Even in cash the venereal budget is
comparable in amount to the general budget of a great nation. Stritch
estimates that the cost to the British nation of venereal diseases in the
army, navy and Government departments alone, amounts annually to
£3,000,000, and when allowance is made for superannuations and sick-leave
indirectly occasioned through these diseases, though not appearing in the
returns as such, the more accurate estimate of the cost to the nation is
stated to be £7,000,000. The adoption of simple hygienic measures for the
prevention and the speedy cure of venereal diseases will be not only
indirectly but even directly a source of immense wealth to the nation.
Syphilis is the most obviously and conspicuously appalling of the venereal
diseases. Yet it is less frequent and in some respects less dangerously
insidious than the other chief venereal disease, gonorrhoea.[231]
At one time the serious nature of gonorrhoea, especially in women, was
little realized. Men accepted it with a light heart as a trivial accident;
women ignored it. This failure to realize the gravity of gonorrhoea, even
sometimes on the part of the medical profession--so that it has been
popularly looked upon, in Grandin's words, as of little more significance
than a cold in the nose--has led to a reaction on the part of some towards
an opposite extreme, and the risks and dangers of gonorrhoea have been
even unduly magnified. This is notably the case as regards sterility. The
inflammatory results of gonorrhoea are indubitably a potent cause of
sterility in both sexes; some authorities have stated that not only eighty
per cent. of the deaths from inflammatory diseases of the pelvic organs
and the majority of the cases of chronic invalidism in women, but ninety
per cent. of involuntary sterile marriages, are due to gonorrhoea.
Neisser, a great authority, ascribes to this disease without doubt fifty
per cent, of such marriages. Even this estimate is in the experience of
some observers excessive. It is fully proved that the great majority of
men who have had gonorrhoea, even if they marry within two years of being
infected, fail to convey the disease to their wives, and even of the women
infected by their husbands more than half have children. This is, for
instance, the result of Erb's experience, and Kisch speaks still more
strongly in the same sense. Bumm, again, although regarding gonorrhoea as
one of the two chief causes of sterility in women, finds that it is not
the most frequent cause, being only responsible for about one-third of the
cases; the other two-thirds are due to developmental faults in the genital
organs. Dunning in America has reached results which are fairly concordant
with Bumm's.
With regard to another of the terrible results of gonorrhoea, the part it
plays in producing life-long blindness from infection of the eyes at
birth, there has long been no sort of doubt. The Committee of the
Ophthalmological Society in 1884, reported that thirty to forty-one per
cent. of the inmates of four asylums for the blind in England owed their
blindness to this cause.[232] In German asylums Reinhard found that thirty
per cent. lost their sight from the same cause. The total number of
persons blind from gonorrhoeal infection from their mothers at birth is
enormous. The British Royal Commission on the Condition of the Blind
estimated there were about seven thousand persons in the United Kingdom
alone (or twenty-two per cent. of the blind persons in the country) who
became blind as the result of this disease, and Mookerji stated in his
address on Ophthalmalogy at the Indian Medical Congress of 1894 that in
Bengal alone there were six hundred thousand totally blind beggars, forty
per cent. of whom lost their sight at birth through maternal gonorrhoea;
and this refers to the beggar class alone.
Although gonorrhoea is liable to produce many and various calamities,[233]
there can be no doubt that the majority of gonorrhoeal persons escape
either suffering or inflicting any very serious injury. The special reason
why gonorrhoea has become so peculiarly serious a scourge is its extreme
prevalence. It is difficult to estimate the proportion of men and women in
the general population who have had gonorrhoea, and the estimates vary
within wide limits. They are often set too high. Erb, of Heidelberg,
anxious to disprove exaggerated estimates of the prevalence of gonorrhoea,
went over the records of two thousand two hundred patients in his private
practice (excluding all hospital patients) and found the proportion of
those who had suffered from gonorrhoea was 48.5 per cent.
Among the working classes the disease is much less prevalent than among
higher-class people. In a Berlin Industrial Sick Club, 412 per 10,000 men
and 69 per 10,000 women had gonorrhoea in a year; taking a series of years
the Club showed a steady increase in the number of men, and decrease in
the number of women, with venereal infection; this seems to indicate that
the laboring classes are beginning to have intercourse more with
prostitutes and less with respectable girls.[234] In America Wood Ruggles
has given (as had Noggerath previously, for New York), the prevalence of
gonorrhoea among adult males as from 75 to 80 per cent.; Tenney places it
much lower, 20 per cent. for males and 5 per cent. for females. In
England, a writer in the _Lancet_, some years ago,[235] found as the
result of experience and inquiries that 75 per cent. adult males have had
gonorrhoea once, 40 per cent. twice, 15 per cent. three or more times.
According to Dulberg about twenty per cent. of new cases occur in married
men of good social class, the disease being comparatively rare among
married men of the working class in England.
Gonorrhoea in its prevalence is thus only second to measles and in the
gravity of its results scarcely second to tuberculosis. "And yet," as
Grandin remarks in comparing gonorrhoea to tuberculosis, "witness the
activity of the crusade against the latter and the criminal apathy
displayed when the former is concerned."[236] The public must learn to
understand, another writer remarks, that "gonorrhoea is a pest that
concerns its highest interests and most sacred relations as much as do
smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, or tuberculosis."[237]
It cannot fairly be said that no attempts have been made to beat back the
flood of venereal disease. On the contrary, such attempts have been made
from the first. But they have never been effectual;[238] they have never
been modified to changed condition; at the present day they are
hopelessly unscientific and entirely opposed alike to the social and the
individual demands of modern peoples. At the various conferences on this
question which have been held during recent years the only generally
accepted conclusion which has emerged is that all the existing systems
of interference or non-interference with prostitution are
unsatisfactory.[239]
The character of prostitution has changed and the methods of dealing with
it must change. Brothels, and the systems of official regulation which
grew up with special reference to brothels, are alike out of date; they
have about them a mediæval atmosphere, an antiquated spirit, which now
render them unattractive and suspected. The conspicuously distinctive
brothel is falling into disrepute; the liveried prostitute absolutely
under municipal control can scarcely be said to exist. Prostitution tends
to become more diffused, more intimately mingled with social life
generally, less easily distinguished as a definitely separable part of
life. We can nowadays only influence it by methods of permeation which
bear upon the whole of our social life.
The objection to the regulation of prostitution is still of slow
growth, but it is steadily developing everywhere, and may be
traced equally in scientific opinion and in popular feeling. In
France the municipalities of some of the largest cities have
either suppressed the system of regulation entirely or shown
their disapproval of it, while an inquiry among several hundred
medical men showed that less than one-third were in favor of
maintaining regulation (_Die Neue Generation_, June, 1909, p.
244). In Germany, where there is in some respects more patient
endurance of interference with the liberty of the individual than
in France, England, or America, various elaborate systems for
organizing prostitution and dealing with venereal disease
continue to be maintained, but they cannot be completely carried
out, and it is generally admitted that in any case they could not
accomplish the objects sought. Thus in Saxony no brothels are
officially tolerated, though as a matter of fact they
nevertheless exist. Here, as in many other parts of Germany, most
minute and extensive regulations are framed for the use of
prostitutes. Thus at Leipzig they must not sit on the benches in
public promenades, nor go to picture galleries, or theatres, or
concerts, or restaurants, nor look out of their windows, nor
stare about them in the street, nor smile, nor wink, etc., etc.
In fact, a German prostitute who possesses the heroic
self-control to carry out conscientiously all the self-denying
ordinances officially decreed for her guidance would seem to be
entitled to a Government pension for life.
Two methods of dealing with prostitution prevail in Germany. In
some cities public houses of prostitution are tolerated (though
not licensed); in other cities prostitution is "free," though
"secret." Hamburg is the most important city where houses of
prostitution are tolerated and segregated. But, it is stated,
"everywhere, by far the larger proportion of the prostitutes
belong to the so-called 'secret' class." In Hamburg, alone, are
suspected men, when accused of infecting women, officially
examined; men of every social class must obey a summons of this
kind, which is issued secretly, and if diseased, they are bound
to go under treatment, if necessary under compulsory treatment in
the city hospital, until no longer dangerous to the community.
In Germany it is only when a woman has been repeatedly observed
to act suspiciously in the streets that she is quietly warned; if
the warning is disregarded she is invited to give her name and
address to the police, and interviewed. It is not until these
methods fail that she is officially inscribed as a prostitute.
The inscribed women, in some cities at all events, contribute to
a sick benefit fund which pays their expenses when in hospital.
The hesitation of the police to inscribe a woman on the official
list is legitimate and inevitable, for no other course would be
tolerated; yet the majority of prostitutes begin their careers
very young, and as they tend to become infected very early after
their careers begin, it is obvious that this delay contributes to
render the system of regulation ineffective. In Berlin, where
there are no officially recognized brothels, there are some six
thousand inscribed prostitutes, but it is estimated that there
are over sixty thousand prostitutes who are not inscribed. (The
foregoing facts are taken from a series of papers describing
personal investigations in Germany made by Dr. F. Bierhoff, of
New York, "Police Methods for the Sanitary Control of
Prostitution," _New York Medical Journal_, August, 1907.) The
estimation of the amount of clandestine prostitution can indeed
never be much more than guesswork; exactly the same figure of
sixty thousand is commonly brought forward as the probable number
of prostitutes not only in Berlin, but also in London and in New
York. It is absolutely impossible to say whether it is under or
over the real number, for secret prostitution is quite
intangible. Even if the facts were miraculously revealed there
would still remain the difficulty of deciding what is and what is
not prostitution. The avowed and public prostitute is linked by
various gradations on the one side to the respectable girl living
at home who seeks some little relief from the oppression of her
respectability, and on the other hand to the married woman who
has married for the sake of a home. In any case, however, it is
very certain that public prostitutes living entirely on the
earnings of prostitution form but a small proportion of the vast
army of women who may be said, in a wide sense of the word, to be
prostitutes, i.e., who use their attractiveness to obtain from
men not love alone, but money or goods.
"The struggle against syphilis is only possible if we agree to regard its
victims as unfortunate and not as guilty.... We must give up the prejudice
which has led to the creation of the term 'shameful diseases,' and which
commands silence concerning this scourge of the family and of humanity."
In these words of Duclaux, the distinguished successor of Pasteur at the
Pasteur Institute, in his noble and admirable work _L'Hygiène Sociale_, we
have indicated to us, I am convinced, the only road by which we can
approach the rational and successful treatment of the great social problem
of venereal disease.
The supreme importance of this key to the solution of a problem
which has often seemed insoluble is to-day beginning to become
recognized in all quarters, and in every country. Thus a
distinguished German authority, Professor Finger (_Geschlecht und
Gesellschaft_, Bd. i, Heft 5) declares that venereal disease must
not be regarded as the well-merited punishment for a debauched
life, but as an unhappy accident. It seems to be in France,
however, that this truth has been proclaimed with most courage
and humanity, and not alone by the followers of science and
medicine, but by many who might well be excused from interfering
with so difficult and ungrateful a task. Thus the brothers, Paul
and Victor Margueritte, who occupy a brilliant and honorable
place in contemporary French letters, have distinguished
themselves by advocating a more humane attitude towards
prostitutes, and a more modern method of dealing with the
question of venereal disease. "The true method of prevention is
that which makes it clear to all that syphilis is not a
mysterious and terrible thing, the penalty of the sin of the
flesh, a sort of shameful evil branded by Catholic malediction,
but an ordinary disease which may be treated and cured." It may
be remarked that the aversion to acknowledge venereal disease is
at least as marked in France as in any other country; "maladies
honteuses" is a consecrated French term, just as "loathsome
disease" is in English; "in the hospital," says Landret, "it
requires much trouble to obtain an avowal of gonorrhoea,
and we may esteem ourselves happy if the patient acknowledges the
fact of having had syphilis."
No evils can be combated until they are recognized, simply and frankly,
and honestly discussed. It is a significant and even symbolic fact that
the bacteria of disease rarely flourish when they are open to the free
currents of pure air. Obscurity, disguise, concealment furnish the best
conditions for their vigor and diffusion, and these favoring conditions we
have for centuries past accorded to venereal diseases. It was not always
so, as indeed the survival of the word 'venereal' itself in this
connection, with its reference to a goddess, alone suffices to show. Even
the name "syphilis" itself, taken from a romantic poem in which
Fracastorus sought a mythological origin for the disease, bears witness to
the same fact. The romantic attitude is indeed as much out of date as that
of hypocritical and shamefaced obscurantism. We need to face these
diseases in the same simple, direct, and courageous way which has already
been adopted successfully in the ease of smallpox, a disease which, of
old, men thought analogous to syphilis and which was indeed once almost as
terrible in its ravages.
At this point, however, we encounter those who say that it is unnecessary
to show any sort of recognition of venereal diseases, and immoral to do
anything that might seem to involve indulgence to those who suffer from
such diseases; they have got what they deserve and may well be left to
perish. Those who take this attitude place themselves so far outside the
pale of civilization--to say nothing of morality or religion--that they
might well be disregarded. The progress of the race, the development of
humanity, in fact and in feeling, has consisted in the elimination of an
attitude which it is an insult to primitive peoples to term savage. Yet
it is an attitude which should not be ignored for it still carries weight
with many who are too weak to withstand those who juggle with fine moral
phrases. I have even seen in a medical quarter the statement that venereal
disease cannot be put on the same level with other infectious diseases
because it is "the result of voluntary action." But all the diseases,
indeed all the accidents and misfortunes of suffering human beings, are
equally the involuntary results of voluntary actions. The man who is run
over in crossing the street, the family poisoned by unwholesome food, the
mother who catches the disease of the child she is nursing, all these
suffer as the involuntary result of the voluntary act of gratifying some
fundamental human instinct--the instinct of activity, the instinct of
nutrition, the instinct of affection. The instinct of sex is as
fundamental as any of these, and the involuntary evils which may follow
the voluntary act of gratifying it stand on exactly the same level. This
is the essential fact: a human being in following the human instincts
implanted within him has stumbled and fallen. Any person who sees, not
this essential fact but merely some subsidiary aspect of it, reveals a
mind that is twisted and perverted; he has no claim to arrest our
attention.
But even if we were to adopt the standpoint of the would-be moralist, and
to agree that everyone must be left to suffer his deserts, it is far
indeed from being the fact that all those who contract venereal diseases
are in any sense receiving their deserts. In a large number of cases the
disease has been inflicted on them in the most absolutely involuntary
manner. This is, of course, true in the case of the vast number of infants
who are infected at conception or at birth. But it is also true in a
scarcely less absolute manner of a large proportion of persons infected in
later life.
_Syphilis insontium_, or syphilis of the innocent, as it is commonly
called, may be said to fall into five groups: (1) the vast army of
congenitally syphilitic infants who inherit the disease from father or
mother; (2) the constantly occurring cases of syphilis contracted, in the
course of their professional duties, by doctors, midwives and wet-nurses;
(3) infection as a result of affection, as in simple kissing; (4)
accidental infection from casual contacts and from using in common the
objects and utensils of daily life, such as cups, towels, razors, knives
(as in ritual circumcision), etc; (5) the infection of wives by their
husbands.[240]
Hereditary congenital syphilis belongs to the ordinary pathology of the
disease and is a chief element in its social danger since it is
responsible for an enormous infantile mortality.[241] The risks of
extragenital infection in the professional activity of doctors, midwives
and wet-nurses is also universally recognized. In the case of wet-nurses
infected by their employers' syphilitic infants at their breast, the
penalty inflicted on the innocent is peculiarly harsh and unnecessary. The
influence of infected low-class midwives is notably dangerous, for they
may inflict widespread injury in ignorance; thus the case has been
recorded of a midwife, whose finger became infected in the course of her
duties, and directly or indirectly contaminated one hundred persons.
Kissing is an extremely common source of syphilitic infection, and of all
extragenital regions the mouth is by far the most frequent seat of primary
syphilitic sores. In some cases, it is true, especially in prostitutes,
this is the result of abnormal sexual contacts. But in the majority of
cases it is the result of ordinary and slight kisses as between young
children, between parents and children, between lovers and friends and
acquaintances. Fairly typical examples, which have been reported, are
those of a child, kissed by a prostitute, who became infected and
subsequently infected its mother and grandmother; of a young French bride
contaminated on her wedding-day by one of the guests who, according to
French custom, kissed her on the cheek after the ceremony; of an American
girl who, returning from a ball, kissed, at parting, the young man who had
accompanied her home, thus acquiring the disease which she not long
afterwards imparted in the same way to her mother and three sisters. The
ignorant and unthinking are apt to ridicule those who point out the
serious risks of miscellaneous kissing. But it remains nevertheless true
that people who are not intimate enough to know the state of each other's
health are not intimate enough to kiss each other. Infection by the use of
domestic utensils, linen, etc., while comparatively rare among the better
social classes, is extremely common among the lower classes and among the
less civilized nations; in Russia, according to Tarnowsky, the chief
authority, seventy per cent. of all cases of syphilis in the rural
districts are due to this cause and to ordinary kissing, and a special
conference in St. Petersburg in 1897, for the consideration of the methods
of dealing with venereal disease, recorded its opinion to the same effect;
much the same seems to be true regarding Bosnia and various parts of the
Balkan peninsula where syphilis is extremely prevalent among the
peasantry. As regards the last group, according to Bulkley in America,
fifty per cent. of women generally contract syphilis innocently, chiefly
from their husbands, while Fournier states that in France seventy-five per
cent. of married women with syphilis have been infected by their husbands,
most frequently (seventy per cent.) by husbands who were themselves
infected before marriage and supposed that they were cured. Among men the
proportion of syphilitics who have been accidentally infected, though less
than among women, is still very considerable; it is stated to be at least
ten per cent., and possibly it is a much larger proportion of cases. The
scrupulous moralist who is anxious that all should have their deserts
cannot fail to be still more anxious to prevent the innocent from
suffering in place of the guilty. But it is absolutely impossible for him
to combine these two aims; syphilis cannot be at the same time perpetuated
for the guilty and abolished for the innocent.
I have been taking only syphilis into account, but nearly all
that is said of the accidental infection of syphilis applies with
equal or greater force to gonorrhoea, for though gonorrhoea does
not enter into the system by so many channels as syphilis, it is
a more common as well as a more subtle and elusive disease.
The literature of Syphilis Insontium is extremely extensive.
There is a bibliography at the end of Duncan Bulkley's _Syphilis
in the Innocent_, and a comprehensive summary of the question in
a Leipzig Inaugural Dissertation by F. Moses, _Zur Kasuistik der
Extragenitalen Syphilis-infektion_, 1904.
Even, however, when we have put aside the vast number of venereally
infected people who may be said to be, in the narrowest and most
conventionally moral sense, "innocent" victims of the diseases they have
contracted, there is still much to be said on this question. It must be
remembered that the majority of those who contract venereal diseases by
illegitimate sexual intercourse are young. They are youths, ignorant of
life, scarcely yet escaped from home, still undeveloped, incompletely
educated, and easily duped by women; in many cases they have met, as they
thought, a "nice" girl, not indeed strictly virtuous but, it seemed to
them, above all suspicion of disease, though in reality she was a
clandestine prostitute. Or they are young girls who have indeed ceased to
be absolutely chaste, but have not yet lost all their innocence, and who
do not consider themselves, and are not by others considered, prostitutes;
that indeed, is one of the rocks on which the system of police regulation
of prostitution comes to grief, for the police cannot catch the prostitute
at a sufficiently early stage. Of women who become syphilitic, according
to Fournier, twenty per cent. are infected before they are nineteen; in
hospitals the proportion is as high as forty per cent.; and of men fifteen
per cent. cases occur between eleven and twenty-one years of age. The age
of maximum frequency of infection is for women twenty years (in the rural
population eighteen), and for men twenty-three years. In Germany Erb
finds that as many as eighty-five per cent men with gonorrhoea
contracted the disease between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, a very
small percentage being infected after thirty. These young things for the
most part fell into a trap which Nature had baited with her most
fascinating lure; they were usually ignorant; not seldom they were
deceived by an attractive personality; often they were overcome by
passion; frequently all prudence and reserve had been lost in the fumes of
wine. From a truly moral point of view they were scarcely less innocent
than children.
"I ask," says Duclaux, "whether when a young man, or a young
girl, abandon themselves to a dangerous caress society has done
what it can to warn them. Perhaps its intentions were good, but
when the need came for precise knowledge a silly prudery has held
it back, and it has left its children without _viaticum_.... I
will go further, and proclaim that in a large number of cases the
husbands who contaminate their wives are innocent. No one is
responsible for the evil which he commits without knowing it and
without willing it." I may recall the suggestive fact, already
referred to, that the majority of husbands who infect their wives
contracted the disease before marriage. They entered on marriage
believing that their disease was cured, and that they had broken
with their past. Doctors have sometimes (and quacks frequently)
contributed to this result by too sanguine an estimate of the
period necessary to destroy the poison. So great an authority as
Fournier formerly believed that the syphilitic could safely be
allowed to marry three or four years after the date of infection,
but now, with increased experience, he extends the period to four
or five years. It is undoubtedly true that, especially when
treatment has been thorough and prompt, the diseased
constitution, in a majority of cases, can be brought under
complete control in a shorter period than this, but there is
always a certain proportion of cases in which the powers of
infection persist for many years, and even when the syphilitic
husband is no longer capable of infecting his wife he may still
perhaps be in a condition to effect a disastrous influence on the
offspring.
In nearly all these cases there was more or less ignorance--which is but
another word for innocence as we commonly understand innocence--and when
at last, after the event, the facts are more or less bluntly explained to
the victim he frequently exclaims: "Nobody told me!" It is this fact which
condemns the pseudo-moralist. If he had seen to it that mothers began to
explain the facts of sex to their little boys and girls from childhood, if
he had (as Dr. Joseph Price urges) taught the risks of venereal disease in
the Sunday-school, if he had plainly preached on the relations of the
sexes from the pulpit, if he had seen to it that every youth at the
beginning of adolescence received some simple technical instruction from
his family doctor concerning sexual health and sexual disease--then,
though there would still remain the need of pity for those who strayed
from a path that must always be difficult to walk in, the would-be
moralist at all events would in some measure be exculpated. But he has
seldom indeed lifted a finger to do any of these things.
Even those who may be unwilling to abandon an attitude of private moral
intolerance towards the victims of venereal diseases may still do well to
remember that since the public manifestation of their intolerance is
mischievous, and at the best useless, it is necessary for them to restrain
it in the interests of society. They would not be the less free to order
their own personal conduct in the strictest accordance with their superior
moral rigidity; and that after all is for them the main thing. But for the
sake of society it is necessary for them to adopt what they may consider
the convention of a purely hygienic attitude towards these diseases. The
erring are inevitably frightened by an attitude of moral reprobation into
methods of concealment, and these produce an endless chain of social evils
which can only be dissipated by openness. As Duclaux has so earnestly
insisted, it is impossible to grapple successfully with venereal disease
unless we consent not to introduce our prejudices, or even our morals and
religion, into the question, but treat it purely and simply as a sanitary
question. And if the pseudo-moralist still has difficulty in coöperating
towards the healing of this social sore he may be reminded that he
himself--like every one of us little though we may know it--has certainly
had a great army of syphilitic and gonorrhoeal persons among his own
ancestors during the past four centuries. We are all bound together, and
it is absurd, even when it is not inhuman, to cast contempt on our own
flesh and blood.
I have discussed rather fully the attitude of those who plead morality as
a reason for ignoring the social necessity of combating venereal disease,
because although there may not be many who seriously and understandingly
adopt so anti-social and inhuman an attitude there are certainly many who
are glad at need of the existence of so fine an excuse for their moral
indifference or their mental indolence.[242] When they are confronted by
this great and difficult problem they find it easy to offer the remedy of
conventional morality, although they are well aware that on a large scale
that remedy has long been proved to be ineffectual. They ostentatiously
affect to proffer the useless thick end of the wedge at a point where it
is only possible with much skill and prudence to insinuate the thin
working end.
The general acceptance of the fact that syphilis and gonorrhoea
are diseases, and not necessarily crimes or sins, is the condition for any
practical attempt to deal with this question from the sanitary point of
view which is now taking the place of the antiquated and ineffective
police point of view. The Scandinavian countries of Europe have been the
pioneers in practical modern hygienic methods of dealing with venereal
disease. There are several reasons why this has come about. All the
problems of sex--of sexual love as well as of sexual disease--have long
been prominent in these countries, and an impatience with prudish
hypocrisy seems here to have been more pronounced than elsewhere; we see
this spirit, for instance, emphatically embodied in the plays of Ibsen,
and to some extent in Björnson's works. The fearless and energetic temper
of the people impels them to deal practically with sexual difficulties,
while their strong instincts of independence render them averse to the
bureaucratic police methods which have flourished in Germany and France.
The Scandinavians have thus been the natural pioneers of the methods of
combating venereal diseases which are now becoming generally recognized
to be the methods of the future, and they have fully organized the system
of putting venereal diseases under the ordinary law and dealing with them
as with other contagious diseases.
The first step in dealing with a contagious disease is to apply to it the
recognized principles of notification. Every new application of the
principle, it is true, meets with opposition. It is without practical
result, it is an unwarranted inquisition into the affairs of the
individual, it is a new tax on the busy medical practitioner, etc.
Certainly notification by itself will not arrest the progress of any
infectious disease. But it is an essential element in every attempt to
deal with the prevention of disease. Unless we know precisely the exact
incidence, local variations, and temporary fluctuations of a disease we
are entirely in the dark and can only beat about at random. All progress
in public hygiene has been accompanied by the increased notification of
disease, and most authorities are agreed that such notification must be
still further extended, any slight inconvenience thus caused to
individuals being of trifling importance compared to the great public
interests at stake. It is true that so great an authority as Neisser has
expressed doubt concerning the extension of notification to gonorrhoea;
the diagnosis cannot be infallible, and the patients often give false
names. These objections, however, seem trivial; diagnosis can very seldom
be infallible (though in this field no one has done so much for exact
diagnosis as Neisser himself), and names are not necessary for
notification, and are not indeed required in the form of compulsory
notification of venereal disease which existed a few years ago in Norway.
The principle of the compulsory notification of venereal diseases seems to
have been first established in Prussia, where it dates from 1835. The
system here, however, is only partial, not being obligatory in all cases
but only when in the doctor's opinion secrecy might be harmful to the
patient himself or to the community; it is only obligatory when the
patient is a soldier. This method of notification is indeed on a wrong
basis, it is not part of a comprehensive sanitary system but merely an
auxiliary to police methods of dealing with prostitution. According to
the Scandinavian system, notification, though not an essential part of
this system, rests on an entirely different basis.
The Scandinavian plan in a modified form has lately been established in
Denmark. This little country, so closely adjoining Germany, for some time
followed in this matter the example of its great neighbor and adopted the
police regulation of prostitution and venereal disease. The more
fundamental Scandinavian affinities of Denmark were, however, eventually
asserted, and in 1906, the system of regulation was entirely abandoned and
Denmark resolved to rely on thorough and systematic application of the
sanitary principle already accepted in the country, although something of
German influence still persists in the strict regulation of the streets
and the penalties imposed upon brothel-keepers, leaving prostitution
itself free. The decisive feature of the present system is, however, that
the sanitary authorities are now exclusively medical. Everyone, whatever
his social or financial position, is entitled to the free treatment of
venereal disease. Whether he avails himself of it or not, he is in any
case bound to undergo treatment. Every diseased person is thus, so far as
it can be achieved, in a doctor's hands. All doctors have their
instructions in regard to such cases, they have not only to inform their
patients that they cannot marry so long as risks of infection are
estimated to be present, but that they are liable for the expenses of
treatment, as well as the dangers suffered, by any persons whom they may
infect. Although it has not been possible to make the system at every
point thoroughly operative, its general success is indicated by the entire
reliance now placed on it, and the abandonment of the police regulation of
prostitution. A system very similar to that of Denmark was established
some years previously in Norway. The principle of the treatment of
venereal disease at the public expense exists also in Sweden as well as in
Finland, where treatment is compulsory.[243]
It can scarcely be said that the principle of notification has yet been
properly applied on a large scale to venereal diseases. But it is
constantly becoming more widely advocated, more especially in England and
the United States,[244] where national temperament and political
traditions render the system of the police regulation of prostitution
impossible--even if it were more effective than it practically is--and
where the system of dealing with venereal disease on the basis of public
health has to be recognized as not only the best but the only possible
system.[245]
In association with this, it is necessary, as is also becoming ever more
widely recognized, that there should be the most ample facilities for the
gratuitous treatment of venereal diseases; the general establishment of
free dispensaries, open in the evenings, is especially necessary, for many
can only seek advice and help at this time. It is largely to the
systematic introduction of facilities for gratuitous treatment that the
enormous reduction in venereal disease in Sweden, Norway, and Bosnia is
attributed. It is the absence of the facilities for treatment, the implied
feeling that the victims of venereal disease are not sufferers but merely
offenders not entitled to care, that has in the past operated so
disastrously in artificially promoting the dissemination of preventable
diseases which might be brought under control.
If we dispense with the paternal methods of police regulation, if we rely
on the general principles of medical hygiene, and for the rest allow the
responsibility for his own good or bad actions to rest on the individual
himself, there is a further step, already fully recognized in principle,
which we cannot neglect to take: We must look on every person as
accountable for the venereal diseases he transmits. So long as we refuse
to recognize venereal diseases as on the same level as other infectious
diseases, and so long as we offer no full and fair facilities for their
treatment, it is unjust to bring the individual to account for spreading
them. But if we publicly recognize the danger of infectious venereal
diseases, and if we leave freedom to the individual, we must inevitably
declare, with Duclaux, that every man or woman must be held responsible
for the diseases he or she communicates.
According to the Oldenburg Code of 1814 it was a punishable offence for a
venereally diseased person to have sexual intercourse with a healthy
person, whether or not infection resulted. In Germany to-day, however,
there is no law of this kind, although eminent German legal authorities,
notably Von Liszt, are of opinion that a paragraph should be added to the
Code declaring that sexual intercourse on the part of a person who knows
that he is diseased should be punishable by imprisonment for a period not
exceeding two years, the law not to be applied as between married couples
except on the application of one of the parties. At the present time in
Germany the transmission of venereal disease is only punishable as a
special case of the infliction of bodily injury.[246] In this matter
Germany is behind most of the Scandinavian countries where individual
responsibility for venereal infection is well recognized and actively
enforced.
In France, though the law is not definite and satisfactory, actions for
the transmission of syphilis are successfully brought before the courts.
Opinion seems to be more decisively in favor of punishment for this
offense than it is in Germany. In 1883 Després discussed the matter and
considered the objections. Few may avail themselves of the law, he
remarks, but all would be rendered more cautious by the fear of infringing
it; while the difficulties of tracing and proving infection are not
greater, he points out, than those of tracing and proving paternity in the
case of illegitimate children. Després would punish with imprisonment for
not more than two years any person, knowing himself to be diseased, who
transmitted a venereal disease, and would merely fine those who
communicated the contagion by imprudence, not realizing that they were
diseased.[247] The question has more recently been discussed by Aurientis
in a Paris thesis. He states that the present French law as regards the
transmission of sexual diseases is not clearly established and is
difficult to act upon, but it is certainly just that those who have been
contaminated and injured in this way should easily be able to obtain
reparation. Although it is admitted in principle that the communication of
syphilis is an offence even under common law he is in agreement with those
who would treat it as a special offence, making a new and more practical
law.[248] Heavy damages are even at the present time obtained in the
French courts from men who have infected young women in sexual
intercourse, and also from the doctors as well as the mothers of
syphilitic infants who have infected the foster-mothers they were
entrusted to. Although the French Penal Code forbids in general the
disclosure of professional secrets, it is the duty of the medical
practitioner to warn the foster-mother in such a case of the danger she is
incurring, but without naming the disease; if he neglects to give this
warning he may be held liable.
In England, as well as in the United States, the law is more
unsatisfactory and more helpless, in relation to this class of offences,
than it is in France. The mischievous and barbarous notion, already dealt
with, according to which venereal disease is the result of illicit
intercourse and should be tolerated as a just visitation of God, seems
still to flourish in these countries with fatal persistency. In England
the communication of venereal disease by illicit intercourse is not an
actionable wrong if the act of intercourse has been voluntary, even
although there has been wilful and intentional concealment of the disease.
_Ex turpi causâ non oritur actio_, it is sententiously said; for there is
much dormitative virtue in a Latin maxim. No legal offence has still been
committed if a husband contaminates his wife, or a wife her husband.[249]
The "freedom" enjoyed in this matter by England and the United States is
well illustrated by an American case quoted by Dr. Isidore Dyer, of New
Orleans, in his report to the Brussels Conference on the Prevention of
Venereal Diseases, in 1899: "A patient with primary syphilis refused even
charitable treatment and carried a book wherein she kept the number of men
she had inoculated. When I first saw her she declared the number had
reached two hundred and nineteen and that she would not be treated until
she had had revenge on five hundred men." In a community where the most
elementary rules of justice prevailed facilities would exist to enable
this woman to obtain damages from the man who had injured her or even to
secure his conviction to a term of imprisonment. In obtaining some
indemnity for the wrong done her, and securing the "revenge" she craved,
she would at the same time have conferred a benefit on society. She is
shut out from any action against the one person who injured her; but as a
sort of compensation she is allowed to become a radiating focus of
disease, to shorten many lives, to cause many deaths, to pile up
incalculable damages; and in so doing she is to-day perfectly within her
legal rights. A community which encourages this state of things is not
only immoral but stupid.
There seems, however, to be a growing body of influential opinion, both in
England and in the United States, in favor of making the transmission of
venereal disease an offence punishable by heavy fine or by
imprisonment.[250] In any enactment no stress should be put on the
infection being conveyed "knowingly." Any formal limitation of this kind
is unnecessary, as in such a case the Court always takes into account the
offender's ignorance or mere negligence, and it is mischievous because it
tends to render an enactment ineffective and to put a premium on
ignorance; the husbands who infect their wives with gonorrhoea
immediately after marriage have usually done so from ignorance, and it
should be at least necessary for them to prove that they have been
fortified in their ignorance by medical advice. It is sometimes said that
the existing law could be utilized for bringing actions of this kind, and
that no greater facilities should be offered for fear of increasing
attempts at blackmail. The inutility of the law at present for this
purpose is shown by the fact that it seldom or never happens that any
attempt is made to utilize it, while not only are there a number of
existing punishable offences which form the subject of attempts at
blackmail, but blackmail can still be demanded even in regard to
disreputable actions that are not legally punishable at all. Moreover, the
attempt to levy blackmail is itself an offence always sternly dealt with
in the courts.
It is possible to trace the beginning of a recognition that the
transmission of a venereal disease is a matter of which legal cognizance
may be taken in the English law courts. It is now well settled that the
infection of a wife by her husband may be held to constitute the legal
cruelty which, according to the present law, must be proved, in addition
to adultery, before a wife can obtain divorce from her husband. In 1777
Restif de la Bretonne proposed in his _Gynographes_ that the communication
of a venereal disease should itself be an adequate ground for divorce;
this, however, is not at present generally accepted.[251]
It is sometimes said that it is very well to make the individual legally
responsible for the venereal disease he communicates, but that the
difficulties of bringing that responsibility home would still remain. And
those who admit these difficulties frequently reply that at the worst we
should have in our hands a means of educating responsibility; the man who
deliberately ran the risk of transmitting such infection would be made to
feel that he was no longer fairly within his legal rights but had done a
bad action. We are thus led on finally to what is now becoming generally
recognized as the chief and central method of combating venereal disease,
if we are to accept the principle of individual responsibility as ruling
in this sphere of life. Organized sanitary and medical precautions, and
proper legal protection for those who have been injured, are inoperative
without the educative influence of elementary hygienic instruction placed
in the possession of every young man and woman. In a sphere that is
necessarily so intimate medical organization and legal resort can never be
all-sufficing; knowledge is needed at every step in every individual to
guide and even to awaken that sense of personal moral responsibility which
must here always rule. Wherever the importance of these questions is
becoming acutely realized--and notably at the Congresses of the German
Society for Combating Venereal Disease--the problem is resolving itself
mainly into one of education.[252] And although opinion and practice in
this matter are to-day more advanced in Germany than elsewhere the
conviction of this necessity is becoming scarcely less pronounced in all
other civilized countries, in England and America as much as in France and
the Scandinavian lands.
A knowledge of the risks of disease by sexual intercourse, both in and out
of marriage,--and indeed, apart from sexual intercourse altogether,--is a
further stage of that sexual education which, as we have already seen,
must begin, so far as the elements are concerned, at a very early age.
Youths and girls should be taught, as the distinguished Austrian
economist, Anton von Menger wrote, shortly before his death, in his
excellent little book, _Neue Sittenlehre_, that the production of children
is a crime when the parents are syphilitic or otherwise incompetent
through transmissible chronic diseases. Information about venereal disease
should not indeed be given until after puberty is well established. It is
unnecessary and undesirable to impart medical knowledge to young boys and
girls and to warn them against risks they are yet little liable to be
exposed to. It is when the age of strong sexual instinct, actual or
potential, begins that the risks, under some circumstances, of yielding to
it, need to be clearly present to the mind. No one who reflects on the
actual facts of life ought to doubt that it is in the highest degree
desirable that every adolescent youth and girl ought to receive some
elementary instruction in the general facts of venereal disease,
tuberculosis, and alcoholism. These three "plagues of civilization" are so
widespread, so subtle and manifold in their operation, that everyone comes
in contact with them during life, and that everyone is liable to suffer,
even before he is aware, perhaps hopelessly and forever, from the results
of that contact. Vague declamation about immorality and vaguer warnings
against it have no effect and possess no meaning, while rhetorical
exaggeration is unnecessary. A very simple and concise statement of the
actual facts concerning the evils that beset life is quite sufficient and
adequate, and quite essential. To ignore this need is only possible to
those who take a dangerously frivolous view of life.
It is the young woman as much as the youth who needs this enlightenment.
There are still some persons so ill-informed as to believe that though it
may be necessary to instruct the youth it is best to leave his sister
unsullied, as they consider it, by a knowledge of the facts of life. This
is the very reverse of the truth. It is desirable indeed that all should
be acquainted with facts so vital to humanity, even although not
themselves personally concerned. But the girl is even more concerned than
the youth. A man has the matter more within his own grasp, and if he so
chooses he may avoid all the grosser risks of contact with venereal
disease. But it is not so with the woman. Whatever her own purity, she
cannot be sure that she may not have to guard against the possibility of
disease in her future husband as well as in those to whom she may entrust
her child. It is a possibility which the educated woman, so far from
being dispensed from, is more liable to encounter than is the
working-class woman, for venereal disease is less prevalent among the poor
than the rich.[253] The careful physician, even when his patient is a
minister of religion, considers it his duty to inquire if he has had
syphilis, and the clergyman of most severely correct life recognizes the
need of such inquiry and may perhaps smile, but seldom feels himself
insulted. The relationship between husband and wife is even much more
intimate and important than that between doctor and patient, and a woman
is not dispensed from the necessity of such inquiry concerning her future
husband by the conviction that the reply must surely be satisfactory.
Moreover, it may well be in some cases that, if she is adequately
enlightened, she may be the means of saving him, before it is too late,
from the guilt of premature marriage and its fateful consequences, so
deserving to earn his everlasting gratitude. Even if she fails in winning
that, she still has her duty to herself and to the future race which her
children will help to form.
In most countries there is a growing feeling in favor of the
enlightenment of young women equally with young men as regards
venereal diseases. Thus in Germany Max Flesch, in his
_Prostitution und Frauenkrankheiten_, considers that at the end
of their school days all girls should receive instruction
concerning the grave physical and social dangers to which women
are exposed in life. In France Duclaux (in his _L'Hygiène
Sociale_) is emphatic that women must be taught. "Already," he
states, "doctors who by custom have been made, in spite of
themselves, the husband's accomplices, will tell you of the
ironical gaze they sometimes encounter when they seek to lead a
wife astray concerning the causes of her ills. The day is
approaching of a revolt against the social lie which has made so
many victims, and you will be obliged to teach women what they
need to know in order to guard themselves against you." It is the
same in America. Reform in this field, Isidore Dyer declares,
must emblazon on its flag the motto, "Knowledge is Health," as
well of mind as of body, for women as well as for men. In a
discussion introduced by Denslow Lewis at the annual meeting of
the American Medical Association in 1901 on the limitation of
venereal diseases (_Medico-Legal Journal_, June and September,
1903), there was a fairly general agreement among all the
speakers that almost or quite the chief method of prevention lay
in education, the education of women as much as of men.
"Education lies at the bottom of the whole thing," declared one
speaker (Seneca Egbert, of Philadelphia), "and we will never gain
much headway until every young man, and every young woman, even
before she falls in love and becomes engaged, knows what these
diseases are, and what it will mean if she marries a man who has
contracted them." "Educate father and mother, and they will
educate their sons and daughters," exclaims Egbert Grandin, more
especially in regard to gonorrhoea (_Medical Record_, May 26,
1906); "I lay stress on the daughter because she becomes the
chief sufferer from inoculation, and it is her right to know that
she should protect herself against the gonorrhoeic as well as
against the alcoholic."
We must fully face the fact that it is the woman herself who must be
accounted responsible, as much as a man, for securing the right conditions
of a marriage she proposes to enter into. In practice, at the outset, that
responsibility may no doubt be in part delegated to parents or guardians.
It is unreasonable that any false delicacy should be felt about this
matter on either side. Questions of money and of income are discussed
before marriage, and as public opinion grows sounder none will question
the necessity of discussing the still more serious question of health,
alike that of the prospective bridegroom and of the bride. An incalculable
amount of disease and marital unhappiness would be prevented if before an
engagement was finally concluded each party placed himself or herself in
the hands of a physician and authorized him to report to the other party.
Such a report would extend far beyond venereal disease. If its necessity
became generally recognized it would put an end to much fraud which now
takes place when entering the marriage bond. It constantly happens at
present that one party or the other conceals the existence of some serious
disease or disability which is speedily discovered after marriage,
sometimes with a painful and alarming shock--as when a man discovers his
wife in an epileptic fit on the wedding night--and always with the bitter
and abiding sense of having been duped. There can be no reasonable doubt
that such concealment is an adequate cause of divorce. Sir Thomas More
doubtless sought to guard against such frauds when he ordained in his
_Utopia_ that each party should before marriage be shown naked to the
other. The quaint ceremony he describes was based on a reasonable idea,
for it is ludicrous, if it were not often tragic in its results, that any
person should be asked to undertake to embrace for life a person whom he
or she has not so much as seen.
It may be necessary to point out that every movement in this direction
must be the spontaneous action of individuals directing their own lives
according to the rules of an enlightened conscience, and cannot be
initiated by the dictation of the community as a whole enforcing its
commands by law. In these matters law can only come in at the end, not at
the beginning. In the essential matters of marriage and procreation laws
are primarily made in the brains and consciences of individuals for their
own guidance. Unless such laws are already embodied in the actual practice
of the great majority of the community it is useless for parliaments to
enact them by statute. They will be ineffective or else they will be worse
than ineffective by producing undesigned mischiefs. We can only go to the
root of the matter by insisting on education in moral responsibility and
instruction, in matters of fact.
The question arises as to the best person to impart this instruction. As
we have seen there can be little doubt that before puberty the parents,
and especially the mother, are the proper instructors of their children in
esoteric knowledge. But after puberty the case is altered. The boy and the
girl are becoming less amenable to parental influence, there is greater
shyness on both sides, and the parents rarely possess the more technical
knowledge that is now required. At this stage it seems that the assistance
of the physician, of the family doctor if he has the proper qualities for
the task, should be called in. The plan usually adopted, and now widely
carried out, is that of lectures setting forth the main facts concerning
venereal diseases, their dangers, and allied topics.[254] This method is
quite excellent. Such lectures should be delivered at intervals by medical
lecturers at all urban, educational, manufacturing, military, and naval
centres, wherever indeed a large number of young persons are gathered
together. It should be the business of the central educational authority
either to carry them out or to enforce on those controlling or employing
young persons the duty of providing such lectures. The lectures should be
free to all who have attained the age of sixteen.
In Germany the principle of instruction by lectures concerning
venereal diseases seems to have become established, at all events
so far as young men are concerned, and such lectures are
constantly becoming more usual. In 1907 the Minister of Education
established courses of lectures by doctors on sexual hygiene and
venereal diseases for higher schools and educational
institutions, though attendance was not made compulsory. The
courses now frequently given by medical men to the higher classes
in German secondary schools on the general principles of sexual
anatomy and physiology nearly always include sexual hygiene with
special reference to venereal diseases (see, e.g.,
_Sexualpädagogik_, pp. 131-153). In Austria, also, lectures on
personal hygiene and the dangers of venereal disease are
delivered to students about to leave the gymnasium for the
university; and the working men's clubs have instituted regular
courses of lectures on the same subjects delivered by physicians.
In France many distinguished men, both inside and outside the
medical profession, are working for the cause of the instruction
of the young in sexual hygiene, though they have to contend
against a more obstinate degree of prejudice and prudery on the
part of the middle class than is to be found in the Germanic
lands. The Commission Extraparlementaire du Régime des Moeurs,
with the conjunction of Augagneur, Alfred Fournier, Yves Guyot,
Gide, and other distinguished professors, teachers, etc., has
lately pronounced in favor of the official establishment of
instruction in sexual hygiene, to be given in the highest classes
at the lycées, or in the earliest class at higher educational
colleges; such instruction, it is argued, would not only furnish
needed enlightenment, but also educate the sense of moral
responsibility. There is in France, also, an active and
distinguished though unofficial Société Française de Prophylaxie
Sanitaire et Morale, which delivers public lectures on sexual
hygiene. Fournier, Pinard, Burlureaux and other eminent
physicians have written pamphlets on this subject for popular
distribution (see, e.g., _Le Progrès Médical_ of September,
1907). In England and the United States very little has yet been
done in this direction, but in the United States, at all events,
opinion in favor of action is rapidly growing (see, e.g., W.A.
Funk, "The Venereal Peril," _Medical Record_, April 13, 1907).
The American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis (based on
the parent society founded in Paris in 1900 by Fournier) was
established in New York in 1905. There are similar societies in
Chicago and Philadelphia. The main object is to study venereal
diseases and to work toward their social control. Doctors,
laymen, and women are members. Lectures and short talks are now
given under the auspices of these societies to small groups of
young women in social settlements, and in other ways, with
encouraging success; it is found to be an excellent method of
reaching the young women of the working classes. Both men and
women physicians take part in the lectures (Clement Cleveland,
Presidential Address on "Prophylaxis of Venereal Diseases,"
_Transactions American Gynecological Society_, Philadelphia, vol.
xxxii, 1907).
An important auxiliary method of carrying out the task of sexual
hygiene, and at the same time of spreading useful enlightenment,
is furnished by the method of giving to every syphilitic patient
in clinics where such cases are treated a card of instruction for
his guidance in hygienic matters, together with a warning of the
risks of marriage within four or five years after infection, and
in no case without medical advice. Such printed instruction, in
clear, simple, and incisive language, should be put into the
hands of every syphilitic patient as a matter of routine, and it
might be as well to have a corresponding card for gonorrhoeal
patients. This plan has already been introduced at some
hospitals, and it is so simple and unobjectionable a precaution
that it will, no doubt, be generally adopted. In some countries
this measure is carried out on a wider scale. Thus in Austria, as
the result of a movement in which several university professors
have taken an active part, leaflets and circulars, explaining
briefly the chief symptoms of venereal diseases and warning
against quacks and secret remedies, are circulated among young
laborers and factory hands, matriculating students, and scholars
who are leaving trade schools.
In France, where great social questions are sometimes faced with
a more chivalrous daring than elsewhere, the dangers of syphilis,
and the social position of the prostitute, have alike been dealt
with by distinguished novelists and dramatists. Huysmans
inaugurated this movement with his first novel, _Marthe_, which
was immediately suppressed by the police. Shortly afterwards
Edmond de Goncourt published _La Fille Elisa_, the first notable
novel of the kind by a distinguished author. It was written with
much reticence, and was not indeed a work of high artistic
value, but it boldly faced a great social problem and clearly set
forth the evils of the common attitude towards prostitution. It
was dramatized and played by Antoine at the Théâtre Libre, but
when, in 1891, Antoine wished to produce it at the
Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre, the censor interfered and prohibited
the play on account of its "contexture générale." The Minister of
Education defended this decision on the ground that there was
much in the play that might arouse repugnance and disgust.
"Repugnance here is more moral than attraction," exclaimed M.
Paul Déroulède, and the newspapers criticized a censure which
permitted on the stage all the trivial indecencies which favor
prostitution, but cannot tolerate any attack on prostitution. In
more recent years the brothers Margueritte, both in novels and in
journalism, have largely devoted their distinguished abilities
and high literary skill to the courageous and enlightened
advocacy of many social reforms. Victor Margueritte, in his
_Prostituée_ (1907)--a novel which has attracted wide attention
and been translated into various languages--has sought to
represent the condition of women in our actual society, and more
especially the condition of the prostitute under what he regards
as the odious and iniquitous system still prevailing. The book is
a faithful picture of the real facts, thanks to the assistance
the author received from the Paris Préfecture of Police, and
largely for that reason is not altogether a satisfactory work of
art, but it vividly and poignantly represents the cruelty,
indifference, and hypocrisy so often shown by men towards women,
and is a book which, on that account, cannot be too widely read.
One of the most notable of modern plays is Brieux's _Les Avariés_
(1902). This distinguished dramatist, himself a medical man,
dedicates his play to Fournier, the greatest of syphilographers.
"I think with you," he writes here, "that syphilis will lose much
of its danger when it is possible to speak openly of an evil
which is neither a shame nor a punishment, and when those who
suffer from it, knowing what evils they may propagate, will
better understand their duties towards others and towards
themselves." The story developed in the drama is the old and
typical story of the young man who has spent his bachelor days in
what he considers a discrete and regular manner, having only had
two mistresses, neither of them prostitutes, but at the end of
this period, at a gay supper at which he bids farewell to his
bachelor life, he commits a fatal indiscretion and becomes
infected by syphilis; his marriage is approaching and he goes to
a distinguished specialist who warns him that treatment takes
time, and that marriage is impossible for several years; he finds
a quack, however, who undertakes to cure him in six months; at
the end of the time he marries; a syphilitic child is born; the
wife discovers the state of things and forsakes her home to
return to her parents; her indignant father, a deputy in
Parliament, arrives in Paris; the last word is with the great
specialist who brings finally some degree of peace and hope into
the family. The chief morals Brieux points out are that it is the
duty of the bride's parents before marriage to ascertain the
bridegroom's health; that the bridegroom should have a doctor's
certificate; that at every marriage the part of the doctors is at
least as important as that of the lawyers. Even if it were a less
accomplished work of art than it is, _Les Avariés_ is a play
which, from the social and educative point of view alone, all who
have reached the age of adolescence should be compelled to see.
Another aspect of the same problem has been presented in _Plus
Fort que le Mal_, a book written in dramatic form (though not as
a properly constituted play intended for the stage) by a
distinguished French medical author who here adopts the name of
Espy de Metz. The author (who is not, however, pleading _pro
domo_) calls for a more sympathetic attitude towards those who
suffer from syphilis, and though he writes with much less
dramatic skill than Brieux, and scarcely presents his moral in so
unequivocal a form, his work is a notable contribution to the
dramatic literature of syphilis.
It will probably be some time before these questions, poignant as
they are from the dramatic point of view, and vitally important
from the social point of view, are introduced on the English or
the American stage. It is a remarkable fact that, notwithstanding
the Puritanic elements which still exist in Anglo-Saxon thought
and feeling generally, the Puritanic aspect of life has never
received embodiment in the English or American drama. On the
English stage it is never permitted to hint at the tragic side of
wantonness; vice must always be made seductive, even though a
_deus ex machina_ causes it to collapse at the end of the
performance. As Mr. Bernard Shaw has said, the English theatrical
method by no means banishes vice; it merely consents that it
shall be made attractive; its charms are advertised and its
penalties suppressed. "Now, it is futile to plead that the stage
is not the proper place for the representation and discussion of
illegal operations, incest, and venereal disease. If the stage is
the proper place for the exhibition and discussion of seduction,
adultery, promiscuity, and prostitution, it must be thrown open
to all the consequences of these things, or it will demoralize
the nation."
The impulse to insist that vice shall always be made attractive
is not really, notwithstanding appearances, a vicious impulse. It
arises from a mental confusion, a common psychic tendency, which
is by no means confined to Anglo-Saxon lands, and is even more
well marked among the better educated in the merely literary
sense, than among the worse educated people. The æsthetic is
confused with the moral, and what arouses disgust is thus
regarded as immoral. In France the novels of Zola, the most
pedestrianally moralistic of writers, were for a long time
supposed to be immoral because they were often disgusting. The
same feeling is still more widespread in England. If a
prostitute is brought on the stage, and she is pretty,
well-dressed, seductive, she may gaily sail through the play and
every one is satisfied. But if she were not particularly pretty,
well-dressed, or seductive, if it were made plain that she was
diseased and was reckless in infecting others with that disease,
if it were hinted that she could on occasion be foul-mouthed, if,
in short, a picture were shown from life--then we should hear
that the unfortunate dramatist had committed something that was
"disgusting" and "immoral." Disgusting it might be, but, on that
very account, it would be moral. There is a distinction here that
the psychologist cannot too often point out or the moralist too
often emphasize.
It is not for the physician to complicate and confuse his own task as
teacher by mixing it up with considerations which belong to the spiritual
sphere. But in carrying out impartially his own special work of
enlightenment he will always do well to remember that there is in the
adolescent mind, as it has been necessary to point out in a previous
chapter, a spontaneous force working on the side of sexual hygiene. Those
who believe that the adolescent mind is merely bent on sensual indulgence
are not less false and mischievous in their influence than are those who
think it possible and desirable for adolescents to be preserved in sheer
sexual ignorance. However concealed, suppressed, or deformed--usually by
the misplaced and premature zeal of foolish parents and teachers--there
arise at puberty ideal impulses which, even though they may be rooted in
sex, yet in their scope transcend sex. These are capable of becoming far
more potent guides of the physical sex impulse than are merely material or
even hygienic considerations.
It is time to summarize and conclude this discussion of the prevention of
venereal disease, which, though it may seem to the superficial observer to
be merely a medical and sanitary question outside the psychologist's
sphere, is yet seen on closer view to be intimately related even to the
most spiritual conception of the sexual relationships. Not only are
venereal diseases the foes to the finer development of the race, but we
cannot attain to any wholesome and beautiful vision of the relationships
of sex so long as such relationships are liable at every moment to be
corrupted and undermined at their source. We cannot yet precisely measure
the interval which must elapse before, so far as Europe at least is
concerned, syphilis and gonorrhoea are sent to that limbo of monstrous old
dead diseases to which plague and leprosy have gone and smallpox is
already drawing near. But society is beginning to realize that into this
field also must be brought the weapons of light and air, the sword and the
breastplate with which all diseases can alone be attacked. As we have
seen, there are four methods by which in the more enlightened countries
venereal disease is now beginning to be combated.[255] (1) By proclaiming
openly that the venereal diseases are diseases like any other disease,
although more subtle and terrible than most, which may attack anyone from
the unborn baby to its grandmother, and that they are not, more than other
diseases, the shameful penalties of sin, from which relief is only to be
sought, if at all, by stealth, but human calamities; (2) by adopting
methods of securing official information concerning the extent,
distribution, and variation of venereal disease, through the already
recognized plan of notification and otherwise, and by providing such
facilities for treatment, especially for free treatment, as may be found
necessary; (3) by training the individual sense of moral responsibility,
so that every member of the community may realize that to inflict a
serious disease on another person, even only as a result of reckless
negligence, is a more serious offence than if he or she had used the knife
or the gun or poison as the method of attack, and that it is necessary to
introduce special legal provision in every country to assist the recovery
of damages for such injuries and to inflict penalties by loss of liberty
or otherwise; (4) by the spread of hygienic knowledge, so that all
adolescents, youths and girls alike, may be furnished at the outset of
adult life with an equipment of information which will assist them to
avoid the grosser risks of contamination and enable them to recognize and
avoid danger at the earliest stages.
A few years ago, when no method of combating venereal disease was known
except that system of police regulation which is now in its decadence, it
would have been impossible to bring forward such considerations as these;
they would have seemed Utopian. To-day they are not only recognizable as
practical, but they are being actually put into practice, although, it is
true, with very varying energy and insight in different countries. Yet it
is certain that in the competition of nationalities, as Max von Niessen
has well said, "that country will best take a leading place in the march
of civilization which has the foresight and courage to introduce and carry
through those practical movements of sexual hygiene which have so wide and
significant a bearing on its own future, and that of the human race
generally."[256]
FOOTNOTES:
[220] It is probable that Schopenhauer felt a more than merely speculative
interest in this matter. Bloch has shown good reason for believing that
Schopenhauer himself contracted syphilis in 1813, and that this was a
factor in constituting his conception of the world and in confirming his
constitutional pessimism (_Medizinische Klinik_, Nos. 25 and 26, 1906).
[221] Havelburg, in Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation
to Marriage_, vol. i, pp. 186-189.
[222] This is the very definite opinion of Lowndes after an experience of
fifty-four years in the treatment of venereal diseases in Liverpool
(_British Medical Journal_, Feb. 9, 1907, p. 334). It is further indicated
by the fact (if it is a real fact) that since 1876 there has been a
decline of both the infantile and general mortality from syphilis in
England.
[223] "There is no doubt whatever that syphilis is on the increase in
London, judging from hospital work alone," says Pernet (_British Medical
Journal_, March 30, 1907). Syphilis was evidently very prevalent, however,
a century or two ago, and there is no ground for asserting positively that
it is more prevalent to-day.
[224] See, e.g., A. Neisser, _Die experimentelle Syphilisforschung_, 1906,
and E. Hoffmann (who was associated with Schaudinn's discovery), _Die
Aetiologie der Syphilis_, 1906; D'Arcy Power, _A System of Syphilis_,
1908, etc.; F.W. Mott, "Pathology of Syphilis in the Light of Modern
Research," _British Medical Journal_, February 20, 1909; also, _Archives
of Neurology and Psychiatry_, vol. iv, 1909.
[225] There is some difference of opinion on this point, and though it
seems probable that early and thorough treatment usually cures the disease
in a few years and renders further complications highly improbable, it is
not possible, even under the most favorable circumstances, to speak with
absolute certainty as to the future.
[226] "That syphilis has been, and is, one of the chief causes of physical
degeneration in England cannot be denied, and it is a fact that is
acknowledged on all sides," writes Lieutenant-Colonel Lambkin, the medical
officer in command of the London Military Hospital for Venereal Diseases.
"To grapple with the treatment of syphilis among the civil population of
England ought to be the chief object of those interested in that most
burning question, the physical degeneration of our race" (_British Medical
Journal_, August 19, 1905).
[227] F.W. Mott, "Syphilis as a Cause of Insanity," _British Medical
Journal_, October 18, 1902.
[228] It can seldom be proved in more than eighty per cent. of cases, but
in twenty per cent. of old syphilitic cases it is commonly impossible to
find traces of the disease or to obtain a history of it. Crocker found
that it was only in eighty per cent. of cases of absolutely certain
syphilitic skin diseases that he could obtain a history of syphilitic
infection, and Mott found exactly the same percentage in absolutely
certain syphilitic lesions of the brain; Mott believes (e.g., "Syphilis in
Relation to the Nervous System," _British Medical Journal_, January 4,
1908) that syphilis is the essential cause of general paralysis and tabes.
[229] Audry. _La Semaine Médicale_, June 26, 1907. When Europeans carry
syphilis to lands inhabited by people of lower race, the results are often
very much worse than this. Thus Lambkin, as a result of a special mission
to investigate syphilis in Uganda, found that in some districts as many as
ninety per cent, of the people suffer from syphilis, and fifty to sixty
per cent, of the infant mortality is due to this cause. These people are
Baganda, a highly intelligent, powerful, and well-organized tribe before
they received, in the gift of syphilis, the full benefit of civilization
and Christianity, which (Lambkin points out) has been largely the cause of
the spread of the disease by breaking down social customs and emancipating
the women. Christianity is powerful enough to break down the old morality,
but not powerful enough to build up a new morality (_British Medical
Journal_, October 3, 1908, p. 1037).
[230] Even within the limits of the English army it is found In India
(H.C. French, _Syphilis in the Army_, 1907) that venereal disease is ten
times more frequent among British troops than among Native troops. Outside
of national armies it is found, by admission to hospital and death rates,
that the United States stands far away at the head for frequency of
venereal disease, being followed by Great Britain, then France and
Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany.
[231] There is no dispute concerning the antiquity of gonorrhoea in the
Old World as there is regarding syphilis. The disease was certainly known
at a very remote period. Even Esarhaddon, the famous King of Assyria,
referred to in the Old Testament, was treated by the priests for a
disorder which, as described in the cuneiform documents of the time, could
only have been gonorrhoea. The disease was also well known to the ancient
Egyptians, and evidently common, for they recorded many prescriptions for
its treatment (Oefele, "Gonorrhoe 1350 vor Christi Geburt," _Monatshefte
für Praktische Dermatologie_, 1899, p. 260).
[232] Cf. Memorandum by Sydney Stephenson, Report of Ophthalmia Neonatorum
Committee, _British Medical Journal_, May 8, 1909.
[233] The extent of these evils is set forth, e.g., in a comprehensive
essay by Taylor, _American Journal Obstetrics_, January, 1908.
[234] Neisser brings together figures bearing on the prevalence of
gonorrhoea in Germany, Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in
Relation to Marriage_, vol. ii, pp. 486-492.
[235] _Lancet_, September 23, 1882. As regards women, Dr. Frances Ivens
(_British Medical Journal_, June 19, 1909) has found at Liverpool that 14
per cent. of gynæcological cases revealed the presence of gonorrhoea. They
were mostly poor respectable married women. This is probably a high
proportion, as Liverpool is a busy seaport, but it is less than Sänger's
estimate of 18 per cent.
[236] E.H. Grandin, _Medical Record_, May 26, 1906.
[237] E.W. Cushing, "Sociological Aspects of Gonorrhoea," _Transactions
American Gynecological Society_, vol. xxii, 1897.
[238] It is only in very small communities ruled by an autocratic power
with absolute authority to control conditions and to examine persons of
both sexes that reglementation becomes in any degree effectual. This is
well shown by Dr. W.E. Harwood, who describes the system he organized in
the mines of the Minnesota Iron Company (_Journal American Medical
Association_, December 22, 1906). The women in the brothels on the
company's estate were of the lowest class, and disease was very prevalent.
Careful examination of the women was established, and control of the men,
who, immediately on becoming diseased, were bound to declare by what woman
they had been infected. The woman was responsible for the medical bill of
the man she infected, and even for his board, if incapacitated, and the
women were compelled to maintain a fund for their own hospital expenses
when required. In this way venereal disease, though not entirely uprooted,
was very greatly diminished.
[239] A clear and comprehensive statement of the present position of the
question is given by Iwan Bloch, _Das Sexualleben Unserer Zeit_, Chs.
XIII-XV. How ineffectual the system of police regulation is, even in
Germany, where police interference is tolerated to so marked a degree, may
be illustrated by the case of Mannheim. Here the regulation of
prostitution is very severe and thorough, yet a careful inquiry in 1905
among the doctors of Mannheim (ninety-two of whom sent in detailed
returns) showed that of six hundred cases of venereal disease in men,
nearly half had been contracted from prostitutes. About half the remaining
cases (nearly a quarter of the whole) were due to waitresses and
bar-maids; then followed servant-girls (Lion and Loeb, in
_Sexualpädagogik_, the Proceedings of the Third German Congress for
Combating Venereal Diseases, 1907, p. 295).
[240] A sixth less numerous class might be added of the young girls, often
no more than children, who have been practically raped by men who believe
that intercourse with a virgin is a cure for obstinate venereal disease.
In America this belief is frequently held by Italians, Chinese, negroes,
etc. W. Travis Gibb, Examining Physician of the New York Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children, has examined over 900 raped children
(only a small proportion, he states, of the cases actually occurring), and
finds that thirteen per cent have venereal diseases. A fairly large
proportion of these cases, among girls from twelve to sixteen, are, he
states, willing victims. Dr. Flora Pollack, also, of the Johns Hopkins
Hospital Dispensary, estimates that in Baltimore alone from 800 to 1,000
children between the ages of one and fifteen are venereally infected every
year. The largest number, she finds, is at the age of six, and the chief
cause appears to be, not lust, but superstition.
[241] For a discussion of inherited syphilis, see, e.g., Clement Lucas,
_Lancet_, February 1, 1908.
[242] Much harm has been done in some countries by the foolish and
mischievous practice of friendly societies and sick clubs of ignoring
venereal diseases, and not according free medical aid or sick pay to those
members who suffer from them. This practice prevailed, for instance, in
Vienna until 1907, when a more humane and enlightened policy was
inaugurated, venereal diseases being placed on the same level as other
diseases.
[243] Active measures against venereal disease were introduced in Sweden
early in the last century, and compulsory and gratuitous treatment
established. Compulsory notification was introduced many years ago in
Norway, and by 1907 there was a great diminution in the prevalence of
venereal diseases; there is compulsory treatment.
[244] See, e.g., Morrow, _Social Diseases and Marriage_, Ch. XXXVII.
[245] A committee of the Medical Society of New York, appointed in 1902 to
consider this question, reported in favor of notification without giving
names and addresses, and Dr. C.R. Drysdale, who took an active part in the
Brussels International Conference of 1899, advocated a similar plan in
England, _British Medical Journal_, February 3, 1900.
[246] Thus in Munich, in 1908, a man who had given gonorrhoea to a
servant-girl was sent to prison for ten months on this ground. The state
of German opinion to-day on this subject is summarized by Bloch,
_Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, p. 424.
[247] A. Després, _La Prostitution à Paris_, p. 191.
[248] F. Aurientis, _Etude Medico-légale sur la jurisprudence actuelle à
propos de la Transmission des Maladies Venériennes_, Thèse de Paris, 1906.
[249] In England at present "a husband knowingly and wilfully infecting
his wife with the venereal disease, cannot be convicted criminally, either
under a charge of assault or of inflicting grievous bodily harm" (N.
Geary, _The Law of Marriage_, p. 479). This was decided in 1888 in the
case of _R. v. Clarence_ by nine judges to four judges in the Court for
the Consideration of Crown Cases Reserved.
[250] Modern democratic sentiment is opposed to the sequestration of a
prostitute merely because she is diseased. But there can be no reasonable
doubt whatever that if a diseased prostitute infects another person, and
is unable to pay the very heavy damages which should be demanded in such a
case, she ought to be secluded and subjected to treatment. That is
necessary in the interests of the community. But it is also necessary, to
avoid placing a premium on the commission of an offence which would ensure
gratuitous treatment and provision for a prostitute without means, that
she should be furnished with facilities for treatment in any case.
[251] It has, however, been decided by the Paris Court of Appeal that for
a husband to marry when knowingly suffering from a venereal disease and to
communicate that disease to his wife is a sufficient cause for divorce
(_Semaine Médicale_, May, 1896).
[252] The large volume, entitled _Sexualpädagogik_, containing the
Proceedings of the Third of these Congresses, almost ignores the special
subject of venereal disease, and is devoted to the questions involved by
the general sexual education of the young, which, as many of the speakers
maintained, must begin with the child at his mother's knee.
[253] "Workmen, soldiers, and so on," Neisser remarks (Senator and
Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage_, vol. ii, p. 485),
"can more easily find non-prostitute girls of their own class willing to
enter into amorous relations with them which result in sexual intercourse,
and they are therefore less exposed to the danger of infection than those
men who have recourse almost exclusively to prostitutes" (see also Bloch,
_Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, p. 437).
[254] The character and extent of such lectures are fully discussed in the
Proceedings of the Third Congress of the German Society for Combating
Venereal Diseases, _Sexualpädagogik_, 1907.
[255] I leave out of account, as beyond the scope of the present work, the
auxiliary aids to the suppression of venereal diseases furnished by the
promising new methods, only now beginning to be understood, of treating or
even aborting such diseases (see, e.g., Metchnikoff, _The New Hygiene_,
1906).
[256] Max von Niessen, "Herr Doktor, darf ich heiraten?" _Mutterschutz_,
1906, p. 352.
CHAPTER IX.
SEXUAL MORALITY.
Prostitution in Relation to Our Marriage System--Marriage and
Morality--The Definition of the Term "Morality"--Theoretical Morality--Its
Division Into Traditional Morality and Ideal Morality--Practical
Morality--Practical Morality Based on Custom--The Only Subject of
Scientific Ethics--The Reaction Between Theoretical and Practical
Morality--Sexual Morality in the Past an Application of Economic
Morality--The Combined Rigidity and Laxity of This Morality--The
Growth of a Specific Sexual Morality and the Evolution of Moral
Ideals--Manifestations of Sexual Morality--Disregard of the Forms of
Marriage--Trial Marriage--Marriage After Conception of Child--Phenomena in
Germany, Anglo-Saxon Countries, Russia, etc.--The Status of Woman--The
Historical Tendency Favoring Moral Equality of Women with Men--The Theory
of the Matriarchate--Mother-Descent--Women in Babylonia--Egypt--Rome--The
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries--The Historical Tendency
Favoring Moral Inequality of Woman--The Ambiguous Influence of
Christianity--Influence of Teutonic Custom and Feudalism--Chivalry--Woman
in England--The Sale of Wives--The Vanishing Subjection of
Woman--Inaptitude of the Modern Man to Domineer--The Growth of Moral
Responsibility in Women--The Concomitant Development of Economic
Independence--The Increase of Women Who Work--Invasion of the Modern
Industrial Field by Women--In How Far This Is Socially Justifiable--The
Sexual Responsibility of Women and Its Consequences--The Alleged Moral
Inferiority of Women--The "Self-Sacrifice" of Women--Society Not Concerned
with Sexual Relationships--Procreation the Sole Sexual Concern of the
State--The Supreme Importance of Maternity.
It has been necessary to deal fully with the phenomena of prostitution
because, however aloof we may personally choose to hold ourselves from
those phenomena, they really bring us to the heart of the sexual question
in so far as it constitutes a social problem. If we look at prostitution
from the outside, as an objective phenomenon, as a question of social
dynamics, it is seen to be not a merely accidental and eliminable incident
of our present marriage system but an integral part of it, without which
it would fall to pieces. This will probably be fairly clear to all who
have followed the preceding exposition of prostitutional phenomena. There
is, however, more than this to be said. Not only is prostitution to-day,
as it has been for more than two thousand years, the buttress of our
marriage system, but if we look at marriage, not from the outside as a
formal institution, but from the inside with relation to the motives that
constitute it, we find that marriage in a large proportion of cases is
itself in certain respects a form of prostitution. This has been
emphasized so often and from so many widely different standpoints that it
may seem hardly necessary to labor the point here. But the point is one of
extreme importance in relation to the question of sexual morality. Our
social conditions are unfavorable to the development of a high moral
feeling in woman. The difference between the woman who sells herself in
prostitution and the woman who sells herself in marriage, according to the
saying of Marro already quoted, "is only a difference in price and
duration of the contract." Or, as Forel puts it, marriage is "a more
fashionable form of prostitution," that is to say, a mode of obtaining, or
disposing of, for monetary considerations, a sexual commodity. Marriage
is, indeed, not merely a more fashionable form of prostitution, it is a
form sanctified by law and religion, and the question of morality is not
allowed to intrude. Morality may be outraged with impunity provided that
law and religion have been invoked. The essential principle of
prostitution is thus legalized and sanctified among us. That is why it is
so difficult to arouse any serious indignation, or to maintain any
reasoned objections, against our prostitution considered by itself. The
most plausible ground is that of those[257] who, bringing marriage down to
the level of prostitution, maintain that the prostitute is a "blackleg"
who is accepting less than the "market rate of wages," i.e., marriage, for
the sexual services she renders. But even this low ground is quite unsafe.
The prostitute is really paid extremely well considering how little she
gives in return; the wife is really paid extremely badly considering how
much she often gives, and how much she necessarily gives up. For the sake
of the advantage of economic dependence on her husband, she must give up,
as Ellen Key observes, those rights over her children, her property, her
work, and her own person which she enjoys as an unmarried woman, even, it
may be added, as a prostitute. The prostitute never signs away the right
over her own person, as the wife is compelled to do; the prostitute,
unlike the wife, retains her freedom and her personal rights, although
these may not often be of much worth. It is the wife rather than the
prostitute who is the "blackleg."
It is by no means only during recent years that our marriage
system has been arraigned before the bar of morals. Forty years
ago James Hinton exhausted the vocabulary of denunciation in
describing the immorality and selfish licentiousness which our
marriage system covers with the cloak of legality and sanctity.
"There is an unsoundness in our marriage relations," Hinton
wrote. "Not only practically are they dreadful, but they do not
answer to feelings and convictions far too widespread to be
wisely ignored. Take the case of women of marked eminence
consenting to be a married man's mistress; of pure and simple
girls saying they cannot see why they should have a marriage by
law; of a lady saying that if she were in love she would not have
any legal tie; of its being necessary--or thought so by good and
wise men--to keep one sex in bitter and often fatal ignorance.
These things (and how many more) show some deep unsoundness in
the marriage relations. This must be probed and searched to the
bottom."
At an earlier date, in 1847, Gross-Hoffinger, in his _Die
Schicksale der Frauen und die Prostitution_--a remarkable book
which Bloch, with little exaggeration, describes as possessing an
epoch-marking significance--vigorously showed that the problem of
prostitution is in reality the problem of marriage, and that we
can only reform away prostitution by reforming marriage, regarded
as a compulsory institution resting on an antiquated economic
basis. Gross-Hoffinger was a pioneering precursor of Ellen Key.
More than a century and a half earlier a man of very different
type scathingly analyzed the morality of his time, with a brutal
frankness, indeed, that seemed to his contemporaries a
revoltingly cynical attitude towards their sacred institutions,
and they felt that nothing was left to them save to burn his
books. Describing modern marriage in his _Fable of the Bees_
(1714, p. 64), and what that marriage might legally cover,
Mandeville wrote: "The fine gentleman I spoke of need not
practice any greater self-denial than the savage, and the latter
acted more according to the laws of nature and sincerity than the
first. The man that gratifies his appetite after the manner the
custom of the country allows of, has no censure to fear. If he
is hotter than goats or bulls, as soon as the ceremony is over,
let him sate and fatigue himself with joy and ecstasies of
pleasure, raise and indulge his appetite by turns, as
extravagantly as his strength and manhood will give him leave. He
may, with safety, laugh at the wise men that should reprove him:
all the women and above nine in ten of the men are of his side;
nay, he has the liberty of valuing himself upon the fury of his
unbridled passions, and the more he wallows in lust and strains
every faculty to be abandonedly voluptuous, the sooner he shall
have the good-will and gain the affection of the women, not the
young, vain, and lascivious only, but the prudent, grave, and
most sober matrons."
Thus the charge brought against our marriage system from the
point of view of morality is that it subordinates the sexual
relationship to considerations of money and of lust. That is
precisely the essence of prostitution.
The only legitimately moral end of marriage--whether we regard it from the
wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of human
society--is as a sexual selection, effected in accordance with the laws of
sexual selection, and having as its direct object a united life of
complete mutual love and as its indirect object the procreation of the
race. Unless procreation forms part of the object of marriage, society has
nothing whatever to do with it and has no right to make its voice heard.
But if procreation is one of the ends of marriage, then it is imperative
from the biological and social points of view that no influences outside
the proper natural influence of sexual selection should be permitted to
affect the choice of conjugal partners, for in so far as wholesome sexual
selection is interfered with the offspring is likely to be injured and the
interests of the race affected.
It must, of course, be clearly understood that the idea of
marriage as a form of sexual union based not on biological but on
economic considerations, is very ancient, and is sometimes found
in societies that are almost primitive. Whenever, however,
marriage on a purely property basis, and without due regard to
sexual selection, has occurred among comparatively primitive and
vigorous peoples, it has been largely deprived of its evil
results by the recognition of its merely economic character, and
by the absence of any desire to suppress, even nominally, other
sexual relationships on a more natural basis which were outside
this artificial form of marriage. Polygamy especially tended to
conciliate unions on an economic basis with unions on a natural
sexual basis. Our modern marriage system has, however, acquired
an artificial rigidity which excludes the possibility of this
natural safeguard and compensation. Whatever its real moral
content may be, a modern marriage is always "legal" and "sacred."
We are indeed so accustomed to economic forms of marriage that,
as Sidgwick truly observed (_Method of Ethics_, Bk. ii, Ch. XI),
when they are spoken of as "legalized prostitution" it constantly
happens that "the phrase is felt to be extravagant and
paradoxical."
A man who marries for money or for ambition is departing from the
biological and moral ends of marriage. A woman who sells herself for life
is morally on the same level as one who sells herself for a night. The
fact that the payment seems larger, that in return for rendering certain
domestic services and certain personal complacencies--services and
complacencies in which she may be quite inexpert--she will secure an
almshouse in which she will be fed and clothed and sheltered for life
makes no difference in the moral aspect of her case. The moral
responsibility is, it need scarcely be said, at least as much the man's as
the woman's. It is largely due to the ignorance and even the indifference
of men, who often know little or nothing of the nature of women and the
art of love. The unintelligence with which even men who might, one thinks,
be not without experience, select as a mate, a woman who, however fine and
charming she may be, possesses none of the qualities which her wooer
really craves, is a perpetual marvel. To refrain from testing and proving
the temper and quality of the woman he desires for a mate is no doubt an
amiable trait of humility on a man's part. But it is certain that a man
should never be content with less than the best of what a woman's soul and
body have to give, however unworthy he may feel himself of such a
possession. This demand, it must be remarked, is in the highest interests
of the woman herself. A woman can offer to a man what is a part at all
events of the secret of the universe. The woman degrades herself who sinks
to the level of a candidate for an asylum for the destitute.
Our discussion of the psychic facts of sex has thus, it will be seen,
brought us up to the question of morality. Over and over again, in
setting forth the phenomena of prostitution, it has been necessary to use
the word "moral." That word, however, is vague and even, it may be,
misleading because it has several senses. So far, it has been left to the
intelligent reader, as he will not fail to perceive, to decide from the
context in what sense the word was used. But at the present point, before
we proceed to discuss sexual psychology in relation to marriage, it is
necessary, in order to avoid ambiguity, to remind the reader what
precisely are the chief main senses in which the word "morality" is
commonly used.
The morality with which ethical treatises are concerned is _theoretical
morality_. It is concerned with what people "ought"--or what is "right"
for them--to do. Socrates in the Platonic dialogues was concerned with
such theoretical morality: what "ought" people to seek in their actions?
The great bulk of ethical literature, until recent times one may say the
whole of it, is concerned with that question. Such theoretical morality
is, as Sidgwick said, a study rather than a science, for science can only
be based on what is, not on what ought to be.
Even within the sphere of theoretical morality there are two very
different kinds of morality, so different indeed that sometimes each
regards the other as even inimical or at best only by courtesy, with yet a
shade of contempt, "moral." These two kinds of theoretical morality are
_traditional morality_ and _ideal morality_. Traditional morality is
founded on the long established practices of a community and possesses the
stability of all theoretical ideas based in the past social life and
surrounding every individual born into the community from his earliest
years. It becomes the voice of conscience which speaks automatically in
favor of all the rules that are thus firmly fixed, even when the
individual himself no longer accepts them. Many persons, for example, who
were brought up in childhood to the Puritanical observance of Sunday, will
recall how, long after they had ceased to believe that such observances
were "right," they yet in the violation of them heard the protest of the
automatically aroused voice of "conscience," that is to say the expression
within the individual of customary rules which have indeed now ceased to
be his own but were those of the community in which he was brought up.
Ideal morality, on the other hand, refers not to the past of the community
but to its future. It is based not on the old social actions that are
becoming antiquated, and perhaps even anti-social in their tendency, but
on new social actions that are as yet only practiced by a small though
growing minority of the community. Nietzsche in modern times has been a
conspicuous champion of ideal morality, the heroic morality of the
pioneer, of the individual of the coming community, against traditional
morality, or, as he called it, herd-morality, the morality of the crowd.
These two moralities are necessarily opposed to each other, but, we have
to remember, they are both equally sound and equally indispensable, not
only to those who accept them but to the community which they both
contribute to hold in vital theoretical balance. We have seen them both,
for instance, applied to the question of prostitution; traditional
morality defends prostitution, not for its own sake, but for the sake of
the marriage system which it regards as sufficiently precious to be worth
a sacrifice, while ideal morality refuses to accept the necessity of
prostitution, and looks forward to progressive changes in the marriage
system which will modify and diminish prostitution.
But altogether outside theoretical morality, or the question of what
people "ought" to do, there remains _practical morality_, or the question
of what, as a matter of fact, people actually do. This is the really
fundamental and essential morality. Latin _mores_ and Greek aethos both
refer to _custom_, to the things that are, and not to the things that
"ought" to be, except in the indirect and secondary sense that whatever
the members of the community, in the mass, actually do, is the thing that
they feel they ought to do. In the first place, however, a moral act was
not done because it was felt that it ought to be done, but for reasons of
a much deeper and more instinctive character.[258] It was not first done
because it was felt it ought to be done, but it was felt it "ought" to be
done because it had actually become the custom to do it.
The actions of a community are determined by the vital needs of a
community under the special circumstances of its culture, time, and land.
When it is the general custom for children to kill their aged parents that
custom is always found to be the best not only for the community but even
for the old people themselves, who desire it; the action is both
practically moral and theoretically moral.[259] And when, as among
ourselves, the aged are kept alive, that action is also both practically
and theoretically moral; it is in no wise dependent on any law or rule
opposed to the taking of life, for we glory in the taking of life under
the patriotic name of "war," and are fairly indifferent to it when
involved by the demands of our industrial system; but the killing of the
aged no longer subserves any social need and their preservation ministers
to our civilized emotional needs. The killing of a man is indeed
notoriously an act which differs widely in its moral value at different
periods and in different countries. It was quite moral in England two
centuries ago and less, to kill a man for trifling offences against
property, for such punishment commended itself as desirable to the general
sense of the educated community. To-day it would be regarded as highly
immoral. We are even yet only beginning to doubt the morality of
condemning to death and imprisoning for life an unmarried girl who
destroyed her infant at birth, solely actuated, against all her natural
impulses, by the primitive instinct of self-defense. It cannot be said
that we have yet begun to doubt the morality of killing men in war, though
we no longer approve of killing women and children, or even non-combatants
generally. Every age or land has its own morality.
"Custom, in the strict sense of the word," well says Westermarck,
"involves a moral rule.... Society is the school in which men learn to
distinguish between right and wrong. The headmaster is custom."[260]
Custom is not only the basis of morality but also of law. "Custom is
law."[261] The field of theoretical morality has been found so fascinating
a playground for clever philosophers that there has sometimes been a
danger of forgetting that, after all, it is not theoretical morality but
practical morality, the question of what men in the mass of a community
actually do, which constitutes the real stuff of morals.[262] If we define
more precisely what we mean by morals, on the practical side, we may say
that it is constituted by those customs which the great majority of the
members of a community regard as conducive to the welfare of the community
at some particular time and place. It is for this reason--i.e., because it
is a question of what is and not of merely what some think ought to
be--that practical morals form the proper subject of science. "If the word
'ethics' is to be used as the name for a science," Westermarck says, "the
object of that science can only be to study the moral consciousness as a
fact."[263]
Lecky's _History of European Morals_ is a study in practical
rather than in theoretical morals. Dr. Westermarck's great work,
_The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, is a more modern
example of the objectively scientific discussion of morals,
although this is not perhaps clearly brought out by the title. It
is essentially a description of the actual historical facts of
what has been, and not of what "ought" to be. Mr. L.T. Hobhouse's
_Morals in Evolution_, published almost at the same time, is
similarly a work which, while professedly dealing with ideas,
i.e., with rules and regulations, and indeed disclaiming the task
of being "the history of conduct," yet limits itself to those
rules which are "in fact, the normal conduct of the average man"
(vol. i, p. 26). In other words, it is essentially a history of
practical morality, and not of theoretical morality. One of the
most subtle and suggestive of living thinkers, M. Jules de
Gaultier, in several of his books, and notably in _La Dépendance
de la Morale et l'Indépendance des Moeurs_ (1907), has analyzed
the conception of morals in a somewhat similar sense. "Phenomena
relative to conduct," as he puts it (op. cit., p. 58), "are given
in experience like other phenomena, so that morality, or the
totality of the laws which at any given moment of historic
evolution are applied to human practice, is dependent on
customs." I may also refer to the masterly exposition of this
aspect of morality in Lévy-Bruhl's _La Morale et la Science des
Moeurs_ (there is an English translation).
Practical morality is thus the solid natural fact which forms the
biological basis of theoretical morality, whether traditional or ideal.
The excessive fear, so widespread among us, lest we should injure morality
is misplaced. We cannot hurt morals though we can hurt ourselves. Morals
is based on nature and can at the most only be modified. As Crawley
rightly insists,[264] even the categorical imperatives of our moral
traditions, so far from being, as is often popularly supposed, attempts to
suppress Nature, arise in the desire to assist Nature; they are simply an
attempt at the rigid formulation of natural impulses. The evil of them
only lies in the fact that, like all things that become rigid and dead,
they tend to persist beyond the period when they were a beneficial vital
reaction to the environment. They thus provoke new forms of ideal
morality; and practical morals develops new structures, in accordance with
new vital relationships, to replace older and desiccated traditions.
There is clearly an intimate relationship between theoretical morals and
practical morals or morality proper. For not only is theoretical morality
the outcome in consciousness of realized practices embodied in the
general life of the community, but, having thus become conscious, it
reacts on those practices and tends to support them or, by its own
spontaneous growth, to modify them. This action is diverse, according as
we are dealing with one or the other of the strongly marked divisions of
theoretical morality: traditional and posterior morality, retarding the
vital growth of moral practice, or ideal and anterior morality,
stimulating the vital growth of moral practice. Practical morality, or
morals proper, may be said to stand between these two divisions of
theoretical morality. Practice is perpetually following after anterior
theoretical morality, in so far of course as ideal morality really is
anterior and not, as so often happens, astray up a blind alley. Posterior
or traditional morality always follows after practice. The result is that
while the actual morality, in practice at any time or place, is always
closely related to theoretical morality, it can never exactly correspond
to either of its forms. It always fails to catch up with ideal morality;
it is always outgrowing traditional morality.
It has been necessary at this point to formulate definitely the three
chief forms in which the word "moral" is used, although under one shape or
another they cannot but be familiar to the reader. In the discussion of
prostitution it has indeed been easily possible to follow the usual custom
of allowing the special sense in which the word was used to be determined
by the context. But now, when we are, for the moment, directly concerned
with the specific question of the evolution of sexual morality, it is
necessary to be more precise in formulating the terms we use. In this
chapter, except when it is otherwise stated, we are concerned primarily
with morals proper, with actual conduct as it develops among the masses of
a community, and only secondarily with anterior morality or with posterior
morality.
Sexual morality, like all other kinds of morality, is necessarily
constituted by inherited traditions modified by new adaptations to the
changing social environment. If the influence of tradition becomes unduly
pronounced the moral life tends to decay and lose its vital adaptability.
If adaptability becomes too facile the moral life tends to become unstable
and to lose authority. It is only by a reasonable synthesis of structure
and function--of what is called the traditional with what is called the
ideal--that the moral life can retain its authority without losing its
reality. Many, even among those who call themselves moralists, have found
this hard to understand. In a vain desire for an impossible logicality
they have over-emphasized either the ideal influence on practical morals
or, still more frequently, the traditional influence, which has appealed
to them because of the impressive authority its _dicta_ seem to convey.
The results in the sphere we are here concerned with have often been
unfortunate, for no social impulse is so rebellious to decayed traditions,
so volcanically eruptive, as that of sex.
We are accustomed to identify our present marriage system with "morality"
in the abstract, and for many people, perhaps for most, it is difficult to
realize that the slow and insensible movement which is always affecting
social life at the present time, as at every other time, is profoundly
affecting our sexual morality. A transference of values is constantly
taking place; what was once the very standard of morality becomes immoral,
what was once without question immoral becomes a new standard. Such a
process is almost as bewildering as for the European world two thousand
years ago was the great struggle between the Roman city and the Christian
Church, when it became necessary to realize that what Marcus Aurelius, the
great pattern of morality, had sought to crush as without question
immoral,[265] was becoming regarded as the supreme standard of morality.
The classic world considered love and pity and self-sacrifice as little
better than weakness and sometimes worse; the Christian world not only
regarded them as moralities but incarnated them in a god. Our sexual
morality has likewise disregarded natural human emotions, and is incapable
of understanding those who declare that to retain unduly traditional laws
that are opposed to the vital needs of human societies is not a morality
but an immorality.
The reason why the gradual evolution of moral ideals, which is always
taking place, tends in the sexual sphere, at all events among ourselves,
to reach a stage in which there seems to be an opposition between
different standards lies in the fact that as yet we really have no
specific sexual morality at all.[266] That may seem surprising at first to
one who reflects on the immense weight which is usually attached to
"sexual morality." And it is undoubtedly true that we have a morality
which we apply to the sphere of sex. But that morality is one which
belongs mainly to the sphere of property and was very largely developed on
a property basis. All the historians of morals in general, and of marriage
in particular, have set forth this fact, and illustrated it with a wealth
of historical material. We have as yet no generally recognized sexual
morality which has been based on the specific sexual facts of life. That
becomes clear at once when we realize the central fact that the sexual
relationship is based on love, at the very least on sexual desire, and
that that basis is so deep as to be even physiological, for in the absence
of such sexual desire it is physiologically impossible for a man to effect
intercourse with a woman. Any specific sexual morality must be based on
that fact. But our so-called "sexual morality," so far from being based on
that fact, attempts to ignore it altogether. It makes contracts, it
arranges sexual relationships beforehand, it offers to guarantee
permanency of sexual inclinations. It introduces, that is, considerations
of a kind that is perfectly sound in the economic sphere to which such
considerations rightly belong, but ridiculously incongruous in the sphere
of sex to which they have solemnly been applied. The economic
relationships of life, in the large sense, are, as we shall see, extremely
important in the evolution of any sound sexual morality, but they belong
to the conditions of its development and do not constitute its basis.[267]
The fact that, from the legal point of view, marriage is
primarily an arrangement for securing the rights of property and
inheritance is well illustrated by the English divorce law
to-day. According to this law, if a woman has sexual intercourse
with any man beside her husband, he is entitled to divorce her;
if, however, the husband has intercourse with another woman
beside his wife, she is not entitled to a divorce; that is only
accorded if, in addition, he has also been cruel to her, or
deserted her, and from any standpoint of ideal morality such a
law is obviously unjust, and it has now been discarded in nearly
all civilized lands except England.
But from the standpoint of property and inheritance it is quite
intelligible, and on that ground it is still supported by the
majority of Englishmen. If the wife has intercourse with other
men there is a risk that the husband's property will be inherited
by a child who is not his own. But the sexual intercourse of the
husband with other women is followed by no such risk. The
infidelity of the wife is a serious offence against property; the
infidelity of the husband is no offence against property, and
cannot possibly, therefore, be regarded as a ground for divorce
from our legal point of view. The fact that his adultery
complicated by cruelty is such a ground, is simply a concession
to modern feeling. Yet, as Helena Stöcker truly points out
("Verschiedenheit im Liebesleben des Weibes und des Mannes,"
_Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, Dec., 1908), a married man
who has an unacknowledged child with a woman outside of marriage,
has committed an act as seriously anti-social as a married woman
who has a child without acknowledging that the father is not her
husband. In the first case, the husband, and in the second case,
the wife, have placed an undue amount of responsibility on
another person. (The same point is brought forward by the author
of _The Question of English Divorce_, p. 56.)
I insist here on the economic element in our sexual morality,
because that is the element which has given it a kind of
stability and become established in law. But if we take a wider
view of our sexual morality, we cannot ignore the ancient element
of asceticism, which has given religious passion and sanction to
it. Our sexual morality is thus, in reality, a bastard born of
the union of property-morality with primitive ascetic morality,
neither in true relationship to the vital facts of the sexual
life. It is, indeed, the property element which, with a few
inconsistencies, has become finally the main concern of our law,
but the ascetic element (with, in the past, a wavering
relationship to law) has had an important part in moulding
popular sentiment and in creating an attitude of reprobation
towards sexual intercourse _per se_, although such intercourse is
regarded as an essential part of the property-based and
religiously sanctified institution of legal marriage.
The glorification of virginity led by imperceptible stages to the
formulation of "fornication" as a deadly sin, and finally as an
actual secular "crime." It is sometimes stated that it was not
until the Council of Trent that the Church formally anathematized
those who held that the state of marriage was higher than that of
virginity, but the opinion had been more or less formally held
from almost the earliest ages of Christianity, and is clear in
the epistles of Paul. All the theologians agree that fornication
is a mortal sin. Caramuel, indeed, the distinguished Spanish
theologian, who made unusual concessions to the demands of reason
and nature, held that fornication is only evil because it is
forbidden, but Innocent XI formally condemned that proposition.
Fornication as a mortal sin became gradually secularized into
fornication as a crime. Fornication was a crime in France even as
late as the eighteenth century, as Tarde found in his historical
investigations of criminal procedure in Périgord; adultery was
also a crime and severely punished quite independently of any
complaint from either of the parties (Tarde, "Archéologie
Criminelle en Périgord," _Archives de l'Anthropologie
Criminelle_, Nov. 15, 1898).
The Puritans of the Commonwealth days in England (like the
Puritans of Geneva) followed the Catholic example and adopted
ecclesiastical offences against chastity into the secular law. By
an Act passed in 1653 fornication became punishable by three
months' imprisonment inflicted on both parties. By the same Act
the adultery of a wife (nothing is said of a husband) was made
felony, both for her and her partner in guilt, and therefore
punishable by death (Scobell, _Acts and Ordinances_, p. 121).
The action of a pseudo-morality, such as our sexual morality has been, is
double-edged. On the one side it induces a secret and shamefaced laxity,
on the other it upholds a rigid and uninspiring theoretical code which so
few can consistently follow that theoretical morality is thereby degraded
into a more or less empty form. "The human race would gain much," said the
wise Sénancour, "if virtue were made less laborious. The merit would not
be so great, but what is the use of an elevation which can rarely be
sustained?"[268] At present, as a more recent moralist, Ellen Key, puts
it, we only have an immorality which favors vice and makes virtue
irrealizable, and, as she exclaims with pardonable extravagance, to preach
a sounder morality to the young, without at the same time condemning the
society which encourages the prevailing immorality, is "worse than folly,
it is crime."
It is on the lines along which Sénancour a century ago and Ellen Key
to-day are great pioneers that the new forms of anterior or ideal
theoretical morality are now moving, in advance, according to the general
tendency in morals, of traditional morality and even of practice.
There is one great modern movement of a definite kind which will serve to
show how clearly sexual morality is to-day moving towards a new
standpoint. This is the changing attitude of the bulk of the community
towards both State marriage and religious marriage, and the growing
tendency to disallow State interference with sexual relationships, apart
from the production of children.
There has no doubt always been a tendency among the masses of the
population in Europe to dispense with the official sanction of sexual
relationships until such relationships have been well established and the
hope of offspring has become justifiable. This tendency has been
crystallized into recognized customs among numberless rural communities
little touched either by the disturbing influences of the outside world or
the controlling influences of theological Christian conceptions. But at
the present day this tendency is not confined to the more primitive and
isolated communities of Europe among whom, on the contrary, it has tended
to die out. It is an unquestionable fact, says Professor Bruno Meyer, that
far more than the half of sexual intercourse now takes place outside legal
marriage.[269] It is among the intelligent classes and in prosperous and
progressive communities that this movement is chiefly marked. We see
throughout the world the practical common sense of the people shaping
itself in the direction which has been pioneered by the ideal moralists
who invariably precede the new growth of practical morality.
The voluntary childless marriages of to-day have served to show the
possibility of such unions outside legal marriage, and such free unions
are becoming, as Mrs. Parsons points out, "a progressive substitute for
marriage."[270] The gradual but steady rise in the age for entering on
legal marriage also points in the same direction, though it indicates not
merely an increase of free unions but an increase of all forms of normal
and abnormal sexuality outside marriage. Thus in England and Wales, in
1906, only 43 per 1,000 husbands and 146 per 1,000 wives were under age,
while the average age for husbands was 28.6 years and for wives 26.4
years. For men the age has gone up some eight months during the past forty
years, for women more than this. In the large cities, like London, where
the possibilities of extra-matrimonial relationships are greater, the age
for legal marriage is higher than in the country.
If we are to regard the age of legal marriage as, on the whole,
the age at which the population enters into sexual unions, it is
undoubtedly too late. Beyer, a leading German neurologist, finds
that there are evils alike in early and in late marriage, and
comes to the conclusion that in temperate zones the best age for
women to marry is the twenty-first year, and for men the
twenty-fifth year.
Yet, under bad economic conditions and with a rigid marriage law,
early marriages are in every respect disastrous. They are among
the poor a sign of destitution. The very poorest marry first, and
they do so through the feeling that their condition cannot be
worse. (Dr. Michael Ryan brought together much interesting
evidence concerning the causes of early marriage in Ireland in
his _Philosophy of Marriage_, 1837, pp. 58-72). Among the poor,
therefore, early marriage is always a misfortune. "Many good
people," says Mr. Thomas Holmes, Secretary of the Howard
Association and missionary at police courts (in an interview,
_Daily Chronicle_, Sept. 8, 1906), "advise boys and girls to get
married in order to prevent what they call a 'disgrace.' This I
consider to be absolutely wicked, and it leads to far greater
evils than it can possibly avert."
Early marriages are one of the commonest causes both of
prostitution and divorce. They lead to prostitution in
innumerable cases, even when no outward separation takes place.
The fact that they lead to divorce is shown by the significant
circumstance that in England, although only 146 per 1,000 women
are under twenty-one at marriage, of the wives concerned in
divorce cases, 280 per 1,000 were under twenty-one at marriage,
and this discrepancy is even greater than it appears, for in the
well-to-do class, which can alone afford the luxury of divorce,
the normal age at marriage is much higher than for the population
generally. Inexperience, as was long ago pointed out by Milton
(who had learnt this lesson to his cost), leads to shipwreck in
marriage. "They who have lived most loosely," he wrote, "prove
most successful in their matches, because their wild affections,
unsettling at will, have been so many divorces to teach them
experience."
Miss Clapperton, referring to the educated classes, advocates
very early marriage, even during student life, which might then
be to some extent carried on side by side (_Scientific
Meliorism_, Ch. XVII). Ellen Key, also, advocates early marriage.
But she wisely adds that it involves the necessity for easy
divorce. That, indeed, is the only condition which can render
early marriage generally desirable. Young people--unless they
possess very simple and inert natures--can neither foretell the
course of their own development and their own strongest needs,
nor estimate accurately the nature and quality of another
personality. A marriage formed at an early age very speedily
ceases to be a marriage in anything but name. Sometimes a young
girl applies for a separation from her husband even on the very
day after marriage.
The more or less permanent free unions formed among us in Europe are
usually to be regarded merely as trial-marriages. That is to say they are
a precaution rendered desirable both by uncertainty as to either the
harmony or the fruitfulness of union until actual experiment has been
made, and by the practical impossibility of otherwise rectifying any
mistake in consequence of the antiquated rigidity of most European divorce
laws. Such trial marriages are therefore demanded by prudence and caution,
and as foresight increases with the development of civilization, and
constantly grows among us, we may expect that there will be a parallel
development in the frequency of trial marriage and in the social attitude
towards such unions. The only alternative--that a radical reform in
European marriage laws should render the divorce of a legal marriage as
economical and as convenient as the divorce of a free marriage--cannot yet
be expected, for law always lags behind public opinion and public
practice.
If, however, we take a wider historical view, we find that we are in
presence of a phenomenon which, though favored by modern conditions, is
very ancient and widespread, dating, so far as Europe is concerned, from
the time when the Church first sought to impose ecclesiastical marriage,
so that it is practically a continuation of the ancient European custom of
private marriage.
Trial-marriages pass by imperceptible gradations into the group
of courtship customs which, while allowing the young couple to
spend the night together, in a position of more or less intimacy,
exclude, as a rule, actual sexual intercourse. Night-courtship
flourishes in stable and well-knit European communities not
liable to disorganization by contact with strangers. It seems to
be specially common in Teutonic and Celtic lands, and is known by
various names, as _Probenächte, fensterln, Kiltgang,
hand-fasting, bundling, sitting-up, courting on the bed, etc_. It
is well known in Wales; it is found in various English counties
as in Cheshire; it existed in eighteenth century Ireland
(according to Richard Twiss's _Travels_); in New England it was
known as _tarrying_; in Holland it is called _questing_. In
Norway, where it is called _night-running_, on account of the
long distance between the homesteads, I am told that it is
generally practiced, though the clergy preach against it; the
young girl puts on several extra skirts and goes to bed, and the
young man enters by door or window and goes to bed with her; they
talk all night, and are not bound to marry unless it should
happen that the girl becomes pregnant.
Rhys and Brynmor-Jones (_Welsh People_, pp. 582-4) have an
interesting passage on this night-courtship with numerous
references. As regards Germany see, e.g., Rudeck, _Geschichte der
öffentlichen Sittlichkeit_, pp. 146-154. With reference to
trial-marriage generally many facts and references are given by
M.A. Potter (_Sohrab and Rustem_, pp. 129-137).
The custom of free marriage unions, usually rendered legal before
or after the birth of children, seems to be fairly common in
many, or perhaps all, rural parts of England. The union is made
legal, if found satisfactory, even when there is no prospect of
children. In some counties it is said to be almost a universal
practice for the women to have sexual relationships before legal
marriage; sometimes she marries the first man whom she tries;
sometimes she tries several before finding the man who suits her.
Such marriages necessarily, on the whole, turn out better than
marriages in which the woman, knowing nothing of what awaits her
and having no other experiences for comparison, is liable to be
disillusioned or to feel that she "might have done better." Even
when legal recognition is not sought until after the birth of
children, it by no means follows that any moral deterioration is
involved. Thus in some parts of Staffordshire where it is the
custom of the women to have a child before marriage,
notwithstanding this "corruption," we are told (Burton, _City of
the Saints_, Appendix IV), the women are "very good neighbors,
excellent, hard-working, and affectionate wives and mothers."
"The lower social classes, especially peasants," remarks Dr.
Ehrhard ("Auch Ein Wort zur Ehereform," _Geschlecht und
Gesellschaft_, Jahrgang I, Heft 10), "know better than we that
the marriage bed is the foundation of marriage. On that account
they have retained the primitive custom of trial-marriage which,
in the Middle Ages, was still practiced even in the best circles.
It has the further advantage that the marriage is not concluded
until it has shown itself to be fruitful. Trial-marriage assumes,
of course, that virginity is not valued beyond its true worth."
With regard to this point it may be mentioned that in many parts
of the world a woman is more highly esteemed if she has had
intercourse before marriage (see, e.g., Potter, op. cit., pp. 163
et seq.). While virginity is one of the sexual attractions a
woman may possess, an attraction that is based on a natural
instinct (see "The Evolution of Modesty," in vol. i of these
_Studies_), yet an exaggerated attention to virginity can only be
regarded as a sexual perversion, allied to _paidophilia_, the
sexual attraction to children.
In very small coördinated communities the primitive custom of
trial-marriage tends to decay when there is a great invasion of
strangers who have not been brought up to the custom (which seems
to them indistinguishable from the license of prostitution), and
who fail to undertake the obligations which trial-marriage
involves. This is what happened in the case of the so-called
"island custom" of Portland, which lasted well on into the
nineteenth century; according to this custom a woman before
marriage lived with her lover until pregnant and then married
him; she was always strictly faithful to him while living with
him, but if no pregnancy occurred the couple might decide that
they were not meant for each other, and break off relations. The
result was that for a long period of years no illegitimate
children were born, and few marriages were childless. But when
the Portland stone trade was developed, the workmen imported from
London took advantage of the "island custom," but refused to
fulfil the obligation of marriage when pregnancy occurred. The
custom consequently fell into disuse (see, e.g., translator's
note to Bloch's _Sexual Life of Our Time_, p. 237, and the
quotation there given from Hutchins, _History and Antiquities of
Dorset_, vol. ii, p. 820).
It is, however, by no means only in rural districts, but in great
cities also that marriages are at the outset free unions. Thus in
Paris Després stated more than thirty years ago (_La Prostitution
à Paris_, p. 137) that in an average arrondissement nine out of
ten legal marriages are the consolidation of a free union;
though, while that was an average, in a few arrondissements it
was only three out of ten. Much the same conditions prevail in
Paris to-day; at least half the marriages, it is stated, are of
this kind.
In Teutonic lands the custom of free unions is very ancient and
well-established. Thus in Sweden, Ellen Key states (_Liebe und
Ehe_, p. 123), the majority of the population begin married life
in this way. The arrangement is found to be beneficial, and
"marital fidelity is as great as pre-marital freedom is
unbounded." In Denmark, also, a large number of children are
conceived before the unions of the parents are legalized (Rubin
and Westergaard, quoted by Gaedeken, _Archives d'Anthropologie
Criminelle_, Feb. 15, 1909).
In Germany not only is the proportion of illegitimate births very
high, since in Berlin it is 17 per cent., and in some towns very
much higher, but ante-nuptial conceptions take place in nearly
half the marriages, and sometimes in the majority. Thus in Berlin
more than 40 per cent, of all legitimate firstborn children are
conceived before marriage, while in some rural provinces (where
the proportion of illegitimate births is lower) the percentage of
marriages following ante-nuptial conceptions is much higher than
in Berlin. The conditions in rural Germany have been especially
investigated by a committee of Lutheran pastors, and were set
forth a few years ago in two volumes, _Die Geschlecht-sittlich
Verhältnisse im Deutschen Reiche_, which are full of instruction
concerning German sexual morality. In Hanover, it is said in this
work, the majority of authorities state that intercourse before
marriage is the rule. At the very least, a _probe_, or trial, is
regarded as a matter-of-course preliminary to a marriage, since
no one wishes "to buy a pig in a poke." In Saxony, likewise, we
are told, it is seldom that a girl fails to have intercourse
before marriage, or that her first child is not born, or at all
events conceived, outside marriage. This is justified as a proper
proving of a bride before taking her for good. "One does not buy
even a penny pipe without trying it," a German pastor was
informed. Around Stettin, in twelve districts (nearly half the
whole), sexual intercourse before marriage is a recognized
custom, and in the remainder, if not exactly a custom, it is very
common, and is not severely or even at all condemned by public
opinion. In some districts marriage immediately follows
pregnancy. In the Dantzig neighborhood, again, according to the
Lutheran Committee, intercourse before marriage occurs in more
than half the cases, but marriage by no means always follows
pregnancy. Nearly all the girls who go as servants have lovers,
and country people in engaging servants sometimes tell them that
at evening and night they may do as they like. This state of
things is found to be favorable to conjugal fidelity. The German
peasant girl, as another authority remarks (E.H. Meyer, _Deutsche
Volkskunde_, 1898, pp. 154, 164), has her own room; she may
receive her lover; it is no great shame if she gives herself to
him. The number of women who enter legal marriage still virgins
is not large (this refers more especially to Baden), but public
opinion protects them, and such opinion is unfavorable to the
disregard of the responsibilities involved by sexual
relationships. The German woman is less chaste before marriage
than her French or Italian sister. But, Meyer adds, she is
probably more faithful after marriage than they are.
It is assumed by many that this state of German morality as it
exists to-day is a new phenomenon, and the sign of a rapid
national degeneration. That is by no means the case. In this
connection we may accept the evidence of Catholic priests, who,
by the experience of the confessional, are enabled to speak with
authority. An old Bavarian priest thus writes (_Geschlecht und
Gesellschaft_, 1907, Bd. ii, Heft I): "At Moral Congresses we
hear laudation of 'the good old times' when, faith and morality
prevailed among the people. Whether that is correct is another
question. As a young priest I heard of as many and as serious
sins as I now hear of as an old man. The morality of the people
is not greater nor is it less. The error is the belief that
immorality goes out of the towns and poisons the country. People
talk as though the country were a pure Paradise of innocence. I
will by no means call our country people immoral, but from an
experience of many years I can say that in sexual respects there
is no difference between town and country. I have learnt to know
more than a hundred different parishes, and in the most various
localities, in the mountain and in the plain, on poor land and on
rich land. But everywhere I find the same morals and lack of
morals. There are everywhere the same men, though in the country
there are often better Christians than in the towns."
If, however, we go much farther back than the memories of a
living man it seems highly probable that the sexual customs of
the German people of the present day are not substantially
different--though it may well be that at different periods
different circumstances have accentuated them--from what they
were in the dawn of Teutonic history. This is the opinion of one
of the profoundest students of Indo-Germanic origins. In his
_Reallexicon_ (art. "Keuschheit") O. Schrader points out that the
oft-quoted Tacitus, strictly considered, can only be taken to
prove that women were chaste after marriage, and that no
prostitution existed. There can be no doubt, he adds, and the
earliest historical evidence shows, that women in ancient Germany
were not chaste before marriage. This fact has been disguised by
the tendency of the old classic writers to idealize the Northern
peoples.
Thus we have to realize that the conception of "German virtue,"
which has been rendered so familiar to the world by a long
succession of German writers, by no means involves any special
devotion to the virtue of chastity. Tacitus, indeed, in the
passage more often quoted in Germany than any other passage in
classic literature, while correctly emphasizing the late puberty
of the Germans and their brutal punishment of conjugal infidelity
on the part of the wife, seemed to imply that they were also
chaste. But we have always to remark that Tacitus wrote as a
satirizing moralist as well as a historian, and that, as he
declaimed concerning the virtues of the German barbarians, he had
one eye on the Roman gallery whose vices he desired to lash. Much
the same perplexing confusion has been created by Gildas, who, in
describing the results of the Saxon Conquest of Britain, wrote as
a preacher as well as a historian, and the same moral purpose (as
Dill has pointed out) distorts Salvian's picture of the vices of
fifth century Gaul. (I may add that some of the evidence in favor
of the sexual freedom involved by early Teutonic faiths and
customs is brought together in the study of "Sexual Periodicity"
in the first volume of these _Studies_; cf. also, Rudeck,
_Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland_, 1897,
pp. 146 et seq.).
The freedom and tolerance of Russian sexual customs is fairly
well-known. As a Russian correspondent writes to me, "the
liberalism of Russian manners enables youths and girls to enjoy
complete independence. They visit each other alone, they walk out
alone, and they return home at any hour they please. They have a
liberty of movement as complete as that of grown-up persons; some
avail themselves of it to discuss politics and others to make
love. They are able also to procure any books they please; thus
on the table of a college girl I knew I saw the _Elements of
Social Science_, then prohibited in Russia; this girl lived with
her aunt, but she had her own room, which only her friends were
allowed to enter: her aunt or other relations never entered it.
Naturally, she went out and came back at what hours she pleased.
Many other college girls enjoy the same freedom in their
families. It is very different in Italy, where girls have no
freedom of movement, and can neither go out alone nor receive
gentlemen alone, and where, unlike Russia, a girl who has sexual
intercourse outside marriage is really 'lost' and 'dishonored'"
(cf. _Sexual-Probleme_, Aug., 1908, p. 506).
It would appear that freedom of sexual relationships in
Russia--apart from the influence of ancient custom--has largely
been rendered necessary by the difficulty of divorce. Married
couples, who were unable to secure divorce, separated and found
new partners without legal marriage. In 1907, however, an attempt
was made to remedy this defect in the law; a liberal divorce law
has been introduced, mutual consent with separation for a period
of over a year being recognized as adequate ground for divorce
(Beiblatt to _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. ii, Heft 5, p.
145).
During recent years there has developed among educated young men
and women in Russia a movement of sexual license, which, though
it is doubtless supported by the old traditions of sexual
freedom, must by no means be confused with that freedom, since it
is directly due to causes of an entirely different order. The
strenuous revolutionary efforts made during the last years of the
past century to attain political freedom absorbed the younger and
more energetic section of the educated classes, involved a high
degree of mental tension, and were accompanied by a tendency to
asceticism. The prospect of death was constantly before their
eyes, and any pre-occupation with sexual matters would have been
felt as out of harmony with the spirit of revolution. But during
the present century revolutionary activity has largely ceased. It
has been, to a considerable extent, replaced by a movement of
interest in sexual problems and of indulgence in sexual
unrestraint, often taking on a somewhat licentious and sensual
character. "Free love" unions have been formed by the students of
both sexes for the cultivation of these tendencies. A novel,
Artzibascheff's _Ssanin_, has had great influence in promoting
these tendencies. It is not likely that this movement, in its
more extravagant forms, will be of long duration. (For some
account of this movement, see, e.g., Werner Daya, "Die Sexuelle
Bewegung in Russland," _Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_,
Aug., 1908; also, "Les Associations Erotiques en Russe," _Journal
du Droit International Privé_, Jan., 1909, fully summarized in
_Revue des Idées_, Feb., 1909.)
The movement of sexual freedom in Russia lies much deeper,
however, than this fashion of sensual license; it is found in
remote and uncontaminated parts of the country, and is connected
with very ancient customs.
There is considerable interest in realizing the existence of
long-continued sexual freedom--by some incorrectly termed
"immorality," for what is in accordance with the customs or
_mores_ of a people cannot be immoral--among peoples so virile
and robust, so eminently capable of splendid achievements, as the
Germans and the Russians. There is, however, a perhaps even
greater interest in tracing the development of the same tendency
among new prosperous and highly progressive communities who have
either not inherited the custom of sexual freedom or are now only
reviving it. We may, for instance, take the case of Australia and
New Zealand. This development may not, indeed, be altogether
recent. The frankness of sexual freedom in Australia and the
tolerance in regard to it were conspicuous thirty years ago to
those who came from England to live in the Southern continent,
and were doubtless equally visible at an earlier date. It seems,
however, to have developed with the increase of self-conscious
civilization. "After careful inquiry," says the Rev. H.
Northcote, who has lived for many years in the Southern
hemisphere (_Christianity and Sex Problems_, Ch. VIII), "the
writer finds sufficient evidence that of recent years intercourse
out of wedlock has tended towards an actual increase in parts of
Australia." Coghlan, the chief authority on Australian
statistics, states more precisely in his _Childbirth in New South
Wales_, published a few years ago: "The prevalence of births of
ante-nuptial conception--a matter hitherto little understood--has
now been completely investigated. In New South Wales, during six
years, there were 13,366 marriages, in respect of which there was
ante-nuptial conception, and, as the total number of marriages
was 49,641, at least twenty-seven marriages in a hundred followed
conception. During the same period the illegitimate births
numbered 14,779; there were, therefore, 28,145 cases of
conception amongst unmarried women; in 13,366 instances marriage
preceded the birth of the child, so that the children were
legitimatized in rather more than forty-seven cases out of one
hundred. A study of the figures of births of ante-nuptial
conception makes it obvious that in a very large number of
instances pre-marital intercourse is not an anticipation of
marriage already arranged, but that the marriages are forced upon
the parties, and would not be entered into were it not for the
condition of the woman" (cf. Powys, _Biometrika_, vol. i, 1901-2,
p. 30). That marriage should be, as Coghlan puts it, "forced upon
the parties," is not, of course, desirable in the general moral
interests, and it is also a sign of imperfect moral
responsibility in the parties themselves.
The existence of such a state of things, in a young country
belonging to a part of the world where the general level of
prosperity, intelligence, morality and social responsibility may
perhaps be said to be higher than in any other region inhabited
by people of white race, is a fact of the very first significance
when we are attempting to forecast the direction in which
civilized morality is moving.
It is sometimes said, or at least implied, that in this movement women are
taking only a passive part, and that the initiative lies with men who are
probably animated by a desire to escape the responsibilities of marriage.
This is very far from being the case.
The active part taken by German girls in sexual matters is
referred to again and again by the Lutheran pastors in their
elaborate and detailed report. Of the Dantzig district it is said
"the young girls give themselves to the youths, or even seduce
them." The military manoeuvres are frequently a source of
unchastity in rural districts. "The fault is not merely with the
soldiers, but chiefly with the girls, who become half mad as soon
as they see a soldier," it is reported from the Dresden district.
And in summarizing conditions in East Germany the report states:
"In sexual wantonness girls are not behind the young men; they
allow themselves to be seduced only too willingly; even grown-up
girls often go with half-grown youths, and girls frequently give
themselves to several men, one after the other. It is by no means
always the youth who effects the seduction, it is very frequently
the girls who entice the youth to sexual intercourse; they do not
always wait till the men come to their rooms, but will go to the
men's rooms and await them in their beds. With this inclination
to sexual intercourse, it is not surprising that many believe
that after sixteen no girl is a virgin. Unchastity among the
rural laboring classes is universal, and equally pronounced in
both sexes" (op. cit., vol. i, 218).
Among women of the educated classes the conditions are somewhat
different. Restraints, both internal and external, are very much
greater. Virginity, at all events in its physical fact, is
retained, for the most part, till long past girlhood, and when it
is lost that loss is concealed with a scrupulous care and
prudence unknown to the working-classes. Yet the fundamental
tendencies remain the same. So far as England is concerned,
Geoffrey Mortimer quite truly writes (_Chapters on Human Love_,
1898, p. 117) that the two groups of (1) women who live in
constant secret association with a single lover, and (2) women
who give themselves to men, without fear, from the force of their
passions, are "much larger than is generally supposed. In all
classes of society there are women who are only virgins by
repute. Many have borne children without being even suspected of
cohabitation; but the majority adopt methods of preventing
conception. A doctor in a small provincial town declared to me
that such irregular intimacies were the rule, and not by any
means the exception in his district." As regards Germany, a lady
doctor, Frau Adams-Lehmann, states in a volume of the
Transactions of the German Society for Combating Venereal Disease
(_Sexualpädagogik_, p. 271): "I can say that during consultation
hours I see very few virgins over thirty. These women," she adds,
"are sensible, courageous and natural, often the best of their
sex; and we ought to give them our moral support. They are
working towards a new age."
It is frequently stated that the pronounced tendency witnessed at the
present time to dispense as long as possible with the formal ceremony of
binding marriage is unfortunate because it places women in a
disadvantageous position. In so far as the social environment in which she
lives views with disapproval sexual relationship without formal marriage,
the statement is obviously to that extent true, though it must be
remarked, on the other hand, that when social opinion strongly favors
legal marriage it acts as a compelling force in the direction of
legitimating free unions. But if the absence of the formal marriage bond
constituted a real and intrinsic disadvantage to women in sexual relations
they would not show themselves so increasingly ready to dispense with it.
And, as a matter of fact, those who are intimately acquainted with the
facts declare that the absence of formal marriage tends to give increased
consideration to women and is even favorable to fidelity and to the
prolongation of the union. This seems to be true as regards people of the
most different social classes and even of different races. It is probably
based on fundamental psychological facts, for the sense of compulsion
always tends to produce a movement of exasperation and revolt. We are not
here concerned with the question as to how far formal marriage also is
based on natural facts; that is a question which will come up for
discussion at a later stage.
The advantage for women of free sexual unions over compulsory
marriage is well recognized in the case of the working classes of
London, among whom sexual relationships before marriage are not
unusual, and are indulgently regarded. It is, for instance,
clearly asserted in the monumental work of C. Booth, _Life and
Labour of the People_. "It is even said of rough laborers," we
read, for instance, in the final volume of this work (p. 41),
"that they behave best if not married to the woman with whom they
live." The evidence on this point is often the more impressive
because brought forward by people who are very far indeed from
being anxious to base any general conclusions on it. Thus in the
same volume a clergyman is quoted as saying: "These people manage
to live together fairly peaceably so long as they are not
married, but if they marry it always seems to lead to blows and
rows."
It may be said that in such a case we witness not so much the
operation of a natural law as the influences of a great centre of
civilization exerting its moralizing effects even on those who
stand outside the legally recognized institution of marriage.
That contention may, however, be thrust aside. We find exactly
the same tendency in Jamaica where the population is largely
colored, and the stress of a high civilization can scarcely be
said to exist. Legal marriage is here discarded to an even
greater extent than in London, for little care is taken to
legitimate children by marriage. It was found by a committee
appointed to inquire into the marriage laws of Jamaica, that
three out of every five births are illegitimate, that is to say
that legal illegitimacy has ceased to be immoral, having become
the recognized custom of the majority of the inhabitants. There
is no social feeling against illegitimacy. The men approve of the
decay of legal marriage, because they say the women work better
in the house when they are not married; the women approve of it,
because they say that men are more faithful when not bound by
legal marriage. This has been well brought out by W.P.
Livingstone in his interesting book, _Black Jamaica_ (1899). The
people recognize, he tells us (p. 210), that "faithful living
together constitutes marriage;" they say that they are "married
but not parsoned." One reason against legal marriage is that they
are disinclined to incur the expense of the official sanction.
(In Venezuela, it may be added, where also the majority of births
take place outside official marriage, the chief reason is stated
to be, not moral laxity, but the same disinclination to pay the
expenses of legal weddings.) Frequently in later life, sometimes
when they have grown up sons and daughters, couples go through
the official ceremony. (In Abyssinia, also, it is stated by
Hugues Le Roux, where the people are Christian and marriage is
indissoluble and the ceremony expensive, it is not usual for
married couples to make their unions legal until old age is
coming on, _Sexual-Probleme_, April, 1908, p. 217.) It is
significant that this condition of things in Jamaica, as
elsewhere, is associated with the superiority of women. "The
women of the peasant class," remarks Livingstone (p. 212), "are
still practically independent of the men, and are frequently
their superiors, both in physical and mental capacity." They
refuse to bind themselves to a man who may turn out to be good
for nothing, a burden instead of a help and protection. So long
as the unions are free they are likely to be permanent. If made
legal, the risk is that they will become intolerable, and cease
by one of the parties leaving the other. "The necessity for
mutual kindness and forbearance establishes a condition that is
the best guarantee of permanency" (p. 214). It is said, however,
that under the influence of religious and social pressure the
people are becoming more anxious to adopt "respectable" ideas of
sexual relationships, though it seems evident, in view of
Livingstone's statement, that such respectability is likely to
involve a decrease of real morality. Livingstone points out,
however, one serious defect in the present conditions which makes
it easy for immoral men to escape paternal responsibilities, and
this is the absence of legal provision for the registration of
the father's name on birth certificates (p. 256). In every
country where the majority of births are illegitimate it is an
obvious social necessity that the names of both parents should be
duly registered on all birth certificates. It has been an
unpardonable failure on the part of the Jamaican Government to
neglect the simple measure needed to give "each child born in the
country a legal father" (p. 258).
We thus see that we have to-day reached a position in which--partly owing
to economic causes and partly to causes which are more deeply rooted in
the tendencies involved by civilization--women are more often detached
than of old from legal sexual relationship with men and both sexes are
less inclined than in earlier stages of civilization to sacrifice their
own independence even when they form such relationships. "I never heard of
a woman over sixteen years of age who, prior to the breakdown of
aboriginal customs after the coming of the whites, had not a husband,"
wrote Curr of the Australian Blacks.[271] Even as regards some parts of
Europe, it is still possible to-day to make almost the same statement. But
in all the richer, more energetic, and progressive countries very
different conditions prevail. Marriage is late and a certain proportion of
men, and a still larger proportion of women (who exceed the men in the
general population) never marry at all.[272]
Before we consider the fateful significance of this fact of the growing
proportion of adult unmarried women whose sexual relationships are
unrecognized by the state and largely unrecognized altogether, it may be
well to glance summarily at the two historical streams of tendency, both
still in action among us, which affect the status of women, the one
favoring the social equality of the sexes, the other favoring the social
subjection of women. It is not difficult to trace these two streams both
in conduct and opinion, in practical morality and in theoretical morality.
At one time it was widely held that in early states of society, before the
establishment of the patriarchal stage which places women under the
protection of men, a matriarchal stage prevailed in which women possessed
supreme power.[273] Bachofen, half a century ago, was the great champion
of this view. He found a typical example of a matriarchal state among the
ancient Lycians of Asia Minor with whom, Herodotus stated, the child takes
the name of the mother, and follows her status, not that of the
father.[274] Such peoples, Bachofen believed, were gynæcocratic; power was
in the hands of women. It can no longer be said that this opinion, in the
form held by Bachofen, meets with any considerable support. As to the
widespread prevalence of descent through the mother, there is no doubt
whatever that it has prevailed very widely. But such descent through the
mother, it has become recognized, by no means necessarily involves the
power of the mother, and mother-descent may even be combined with a
patriarchal system.[275] There has even been a tendency to run to the
opposite extreme from Bachofen and to deny that mother-descent conferred
any special claim for consideration on women. That, however, seems
scarcely in accordance with the evidence and even in the absence of
evidence could scarcely be regarded as probable. It would seem that we may
fairly take as a type of the matriarchal family that based on the _ambil
anak_ marriage of Sumatra, in which the husband lives in the wife's
family, paying nothing and occupying a subordinate position. The example
of the Lycians is here in point, for although, as reported by Herodotus,
there is nothing to show that there was anything of the nature of a
gynæcocracy in Lycia, we know that women in all these regions of Asia
Minor enjoyed high consideration and influence, traces of which may be
detected in the early literature and history of Christianity. A decisive
and better known example of the favorable influence of mother-descent on
the status of woman is afforded by the _beena_ marriage of early Arabia.
Under such a system the wife is not only preserved from the subjection
involved by purchase, which always casts upon her some shadow of the
inferiority belonging to property, but she herself is the owner of the
tent and the household property, and enjoys the dignity always involved by
the possession of property and the ability to free herself from her
husband.[276]
It is also impossible to avoid connecting the primitive tendency to
mother-descent, and the emphasis it involved on maternal rather than
paternal generative energy, with the tendency to place the goddess rather
than the god in the forefront of primitive pantheons, a tendency which
cannot possibly fail to reflect honor on the sex to which the supreme
deity belongs, and which may be connected with the large part which
primitive women often play in the functions of religion. Thus, according
to traditions common to all the central tribes of Australia, the woman
formerly took a much greater share in the performance of sacred ceremonies
which are now regarded as coming almost exclusively within the masculine
province, and in at least one tribe which seems to retain ancient
practices the women still actually take part in these ceremonies.[277] It
seems to have been much the same in Europe. We observe, too, both in the
Celtic pantheon and among Mediterranean peoples, that while all the
ancient divinities have receded into the dim background yet the goddesses
loom larger than the gods.[278] In Ireland, where ancient custom and
tradition have always been very tenaciously preserved, women retained a
very high position, and much freedom both before and after marriage.
"Every woman," it was said, "is to go the way she willeth freely," and
after marriage she enjoyed a better position and greater freedom of
divorce than was afforded either by the Christian Church or the English
common law.[279] There is less difficulty in recognizing that
mother-descent was peculiarly favorable to the high status of women when
we realize that even under very unfavorable conditions women have been
able to exert great pressure on the men and to resist successfully the
attempts to tyrannize over them.[280]
If we consider the status of woman in the great empires of antiquity we
find on the whole that in their early stage, the stage of growth, as well
as in their final stage, the stage of fruition, women tend to occupy a
favorable position, while in their middle stage, usually the stage of
predominating military organization on a patriarchal basis, women occupy a
less favorable position. This cyclic movement seems to be almost a natural
law of the development of great social groups. It was apparently well
marked in the very stable and orderly growth of Babylonia. In the earliest
times a Babylonian woman had complete independence and equal rights with
her brothers and her husband; later (as shown by the code of Hamurabi) a
woman's rights, though not her duties, were more circumscribed; in the
still later Neo-Babylonian periods, she again acquired equal rights with
her husband.[281]
In Egypt the position of women stood highest at the end, but it seems to
have been high throughout the whole of the long course of Egyptian
history, and continuously improving, while the fact that little regard was
paid to prenuptial chastity and that marriage contracts placed no stress
on virginity indicate the absence of the conception of women as property.
More than three thousand five hundred years ago men and women were
recognized as equal in Egypt. The high position of the Egyptian woman is
significantly indicated by the fact that her child was never illegitimate;
illegitimacy was not recognized even in the case of a slave woman's
child.[282] "It is the glory of Egyptian morality," says Amélineau, "to
have been the first to express the Dignity of Woman."[283] The idea of
marital authority was altogether unknown in Egypt. There can be no doubt
that the high status of woman in two civilizations so stable, so vital, so
long-lived, and so influential on human culture as Babylonia and Egypt, is
a fact of much significance.
Among the Jews there seems to have been no intermediate stage of
subordination of women, but instead a gradual progress throughout
from complete subjection of the woman as wife to ever greater
freedom. At first the husband could repudiate his wife at will
without cause. (This was not an extension of patriarchal
authority, but a purely marital authority.) The restrictions on
this authority gradually increased, and begin to be observable
already in the Book of Deuteronomy. The Mishnah went further and
forbade divorce whenever the wife's condition inspired pity (as
in insanity, captivity, etc.). By A.D. 1025, divorce was no
longer possible except for legitimate reasons or by the wife's
consent. At the same time, the wife also began to acquire the
right of divorce in the form of compelling the husband to
repudiate her on penalty of punishment in case of refusal. On
divorce the wife became an independent woman in her own right,
and was permitted to carry off the dowry which her husband gave
her on marriage. Thus, notwithstanding Jewish respect for the
letter of the law, the flexible jurisprudence of the Rabbis, in
harmony with the growth of culture, accorded an ever-growing
measure of sexual justice and equality to women (D.W. Amram, _The
Jewish Law of Divorce_).
Among the Arabs the tendency of progress has also been favorable
to women in many respects, especially as regards inheritance.
Before Mahommed, in accordance with the system prevailing at
Medina, women had little or no right of inheritance. The
legislation of the Koran modified this rule, without entirely
abolishing it, and placed women in a much better position. This
is attributed largely to the fact that Mahommed belonged not to
Medina, but to Mecca, where traces of matriarchal custom still
survived (W. Marçais, _Des Parents et des Alliés Successibles en
Droit Musulman_).
It may be pointed out--for it is not always realized--that even
that stage of civilization--when it occurs--which involves the
subordination and subjection of woman and her rights really has
its origin in the need for the protection of women, and is
sometimes even a sign of the acquirement of new privileges by
women. They are, as it were, locked up, not in order to deprive
them of their rights, but in order to guard those rights. In the
later more stable phase of civilization, when women are no longer
exposed to the same dangers, this motive is forgotten and the
guardianship of woman and her rights seems, and indeed has really
become, a hardship rather than an advantage.
Of the status of women at Rome in the earliest periods we know little or
nothing; the patriarchal system was already firmly established when Roman
history begins to become clear and it involved unusually strict
subordination of the woman to her father first and then to her husband.
But nothing is more certain than that the status of women in Rome rose
with the rise of civilization, exactly in the same way as in Babylonia and
in Egypt. In the case of Rome, however, the growing refinement of
civilization, and the expansion of the Empire, were associated with the
magnificent development of the system of Roman law, which in its final
forms consecrated the position of women. In the last days of the Republic
women already began to attain the same legal level as men, and later the
great Antonine jurisconsults, guided by their theory of natural law,
reached the conception of the equality of the sexes as a principle of the
code of equity. The patriarchal subordination of women fell into complete
discredit, and this continued until, in the days of Justinian, under the
influence of Christianity, the position of women began to suffer.[284] In
the best days the older forms of Roman marriage gave place to a form
(apparently old but not hitherto considered reputable) which amounted in
law to a temporary deposit of the woman by her family. She was independent
of her husband (more especially as she came to him with her own dowry) and
only nominally dependent on her family. Marriage was a private contract,
accompanied by a religious ceremony if desired, and being a contract it
could be dissolved, for any reason, in the presence of competent
witnesses and with due legal forms, after the advice of the family council
had been taken. Consent was the essence of this marriage and no shame,
therefore, attached to its dissolution. Nor had it any evil effect either
on the happiness or the morals of Roman women.[285] Such a system is
obviously more in harmony with modern civilized feeling than any system
that has ever been set up in Christendom.
In Rome, also, it is clear that this system was not a mere legal invention
but the natural outgrowth of an enlightened public feeling in favor of the
equality of men and women, often even in the field of sexual morality.
Plautus, who makes the old slave Syra ask why there is not the same law in
this respect for the husband as for the wife,[286] had preceded the legist
Ulpian who wrote: "It seems to be very unjust that a man demands chastity
of his wife while he himself shows no example of it."[287] Such demands
lie deeper than social legislation, but the fact that these questions
presented themselves to typical Roman men indicates the general attitude
towards women. In the final stage of Roman society the bond of the
patriarchal system so far as women were concerned dwindled to a mere
thread binding them to their fathers and leaving them quite free face to
face with their husbands. "The Roman matron of the Empire," says Hobhouse,
"was more fully her own mistress than the married woman of any earlier
civilization, with the possible exception of a certain period of Egyptian
history, and, it must be added, than the wife of any later civilization
down to our own generation."[288]
On the strength of the statements of two satirical writers,
Juvenal and Tacitus, it has been supposed by many that Roman
women of the late period were given up to license. It is,
however, idle to seek in satirists any balanced picture of a
great civilization. Hobhouse (loc. cit., p. 216) concludes that
on the whole, Roman women worthily retained the position of their
husbands' companions, counsellors and friends which they had
held when an austere system placed them legally in his power.
Most authorities seem now to be of this opinion, though at an
earlier period Friedländer expressed himself more dubiously. Thus
Dill, in his judicious _Roman Society_ (p. 163), states that the
Roman woman's position, both in law and in fact, rose during the
Empire; without being less virtuous or respected, she became far
more accomplished and attractive; with fewer restraints she had
greater charm and influence, even in public affairs, and was more
and more the equal of her husband. "In the last age of the
Western Empire there is no deterioration in the position and
influence of women." Principal Donaldson, also, in his valuable
historical sketch, _Woman_, considers (p. 113) that there was no
degradation of morals in the Roman Empire; "the licentiousness of
Pagan Rome is nothing to the licentiousness of Christian Africa,
Rome, and Gaul, if we can put any reliance on the description of
Salvian." Salvian's description of Christendom is probably
exaggerated and one-sided, but exactly the same may be said in an
even greater degree of the descriptions of ancient Rome left by
clever Pagan satirists and ascetic Christian preachers.
It thus becomes necessary to leap over considerably more than a thousand
years before we reach a stage of civilization in any degree approaching in
height the final stage of Roman society. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, at first in France, then in England, we find once more the
moral and legal movement tending towards the equalization of women with
men. We find also a long series of pioneers of that movement foreshadowing
its developments: Mary Astor, "Sophia, a Lady of Quality," Ségur, Mrs.
Wheeler, and very notably Mary Wollstonecraft in _A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman_, and John Stuart Mill in _The Subjection of Women_.[289]
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
associated 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 sex 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 Satanæ_.[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
passed 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 (Bedollière, _Histoire de Moeurs des Français_,
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 sanctity 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 sexual
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. "Sexes, Separation
of").
By attempting to desexualize the idea of man and to oversexualize
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 Mâcon, 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 Mâcon.
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 illustrated in the saying of
Jesus, "Let him who is without sin amongst you cast the first
stone," implying that each sex 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 sexes 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
sexes 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 mediæval 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 sex 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 mediæval 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 Clavière, 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 assumed 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," _Sexual-Probleme_, Feb., 1908). The woman is
"dishonored" by sexual 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 sexual intercourse.
This fact has even led some to advocate the "abolition of
physical virginity." Thus the German authoress 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 assumes 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
"noble 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 assume effectually the part of the "noble 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 entitled 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
sexual 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 sexual 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 sexual
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. Sexual 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 sexual
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 sexual
morality, and has often been illustrated 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 substituting 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 chastity 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 chastity 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 chastity is
distressingly low."
It must always be remembered that when the highly organized
primitive system of mixed spiritual and physical restraints is
removed, chastity 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 passion of love even in high
civilizations. "No perfection of moral constitution 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 sexual 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 assumes 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 Japan, 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 aptitudes of men, but the fact that the sexual 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 mass 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
damned," 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 circumstances, 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 sex. 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 sex and the
large part of life dependent on sex. 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 reconstituting 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 sexual 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 sex. Moral
irresponsibility has too often combined with economic dependence to induce
a woman to treat the sexual 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 assume
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 incumbent 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 title 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 sexual equality as it is to the biological traditions of
natural courtship in the world generally.
In controlling her own sexual life, and in realizing that her
responsibility for such control can no longer be shifted on to the
shoulders of the other sex, women will also indirectly affect the sexual
lives of men, much as men already affect the sexual 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 classes, 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
prostitute. Prostitution, as we have seen, is ultimately as incompatible
with complete sexual responsibility as is the patriarchal marriage system
with which it has been so closely associated. 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 sexual
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 association with a certain social organization. It is
not completely congruous with a democratic stage of civilization involving
the economic independence and the sexual responsibility of both sexes
alike in all social classes. 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 sex 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 sexual 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 assumes 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 assumption 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 sex,
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 constitution 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 sex 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
Sénancour (_De l'Amour_, vol. ii, p. 85), "we have no reason to
assert the moral superiority of either sex. Both sexes, 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 preëminence of one sex
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 aptitude 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
assume it. And an attempt is made to justify their attitude by asserting
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
masochistic; and that there is, as Krafft-Ebing argues, a natural "sexual
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 (_Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, Part
II, p. 178), in agreement with Eulenburg, energetically denies
that there is any such natural "sexual 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 prone 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 Gérard 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 sex 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 sex. 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 sexual conduct is to deprive that conduct
of its conspicuously public character as a virtue or a vice. Sexual 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 zoölogical, 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 sexual acts of its
members. The sexual 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 entitled 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 sexual morality, as Ellen Key has said, revolves
round the child.
At this final point in our discussion of sexual 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 sexual behavior, for
her "virtue," it was necessary that the whole of sexual morality should
revolve around the entrance to the vagina. 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 assumes her
own moral responsibility, in sexual 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 sexual acts while a woman is not equally
free to do the like, a premium is placed on sexual 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 class of acts in which
men find chief gratification; it is the latter class in which women find
chief gratification. For the tragic part of the old sexual morality in its
bearing on women was that while it made men alone morally responsible for
sexual 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 sexual intercourse, being the sexual act in which men found
chief pleasure, was under all circumstances an act of little social
gravity; the act of bringing a child into the world, which is for women
the most massively gratifying of all sexual 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 sexes; 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 aptitudes 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
sexual 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 Sexual 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 sexual matters. Since women play the predominant part in the
sexual 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 entitled 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 circumstances 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]
FOOTNOTES:
[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.
[259] See Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol.
i, pp. 386-390, 522.
[260] Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, pp. 9,
159; also the whole of Ch. VII. Actions that are in accordance with custom
call forth public approval, actions that are opposed to custom call forth
public resentment, and Westermarck powerfully argues that such approval
and such resentment are the foundation of moral judgments.
[261] This is well recognized by legal writers (e.g., E.A. Schroeder, _Das
Recht in der Geschlechtlichen Ordnung_, p. 5).
[262] W.G. Sumner (_Folkways_, p. 418) even considers it desirable to
change the form of the word in order to emphasize the real and fundamental
meaning of morals, and proposes the word _mores_ to indicate "popular
usages and traditions conducive to societal reform." "'Immoral,'" he
points out, "never means anything but contrary to the _mores_ of the time
and place." There is, however, no need whatever to abolish or to
supplement the good old ancient word "morality," so long as we clearly
realize that, on the practical side, it means essentially custom.
[263] Westermarck, op. cit., vol. i, p. 19.
[264] See, e.g., "Exogamy and the Mating of Cousins," in _Essays Presented
to E.B. Tylor_, 1907, p. 53. "In many departments of primitive life we
find a naïve desire to, as it were, assist Nature, to affirm what is
normal, and later to confirm it by the categorical imperative of custom
and law. This tendency still flourishes in our civilized communities, and,
as the worship of the normal, is often a deadly foe to the abnormal and
eccentric, and too often paralyzes originality."
[265] The spirit of Christianity, as illustrated by Paulinus, in his
_Epistle XXV_, was from the Roman point of view, as Dill remarks (_Roman
Society_, p. 11), "a renunciation, not only of citizenship, but of all the
hard-won fruits of civilization and social life."
[266] It thus happens that, as Lecky said in his _History of European
Morals_, "of all the departments of ethics the questions concerning the
relations of the sexes and the proper position of woman are those upon the
future of which there rests the greatest uncertainty." Some progress has
perhaps been made since these words were written, but they still hold true
for the majority of people.
[267] Concerning economic marriage as a vestigial survival, see, e.g.,
Bloch, _The Sexual Life of Our Time_, p. 212.
[268] Sénancour, _De l'Amour_, vol. ii, p. 233. The author of _The
Question of English Divorce_ attributes the absence of any widespread
feeling against sexual license to the absurd rigidity of the law.
[269] Bruno Meyer, "Etwas von Positiver Sexualreform," _Sexual-Probleme_,
Nov., 1908.
[270] Elsie Clews Parsons, _The Family_, p. 351. Dr. Parsons rightly
thinks such unions a social evil when they check the development of
personality.
[271] For evidence regarding the general absence of celibacy among both
savage and barbarous peoples, see, e.g., Westermarck, _History of Human
Marriage_, Ch. VII.
[272] There are, for instance, two millions of unmarried women in France,
while in Belgium 30 per cent, of the women, and in Germany sometimes even
50 per cent, are unmarried.
[273] Such a position would not be biologically unreasonable, in view of
the greatly preponderant part played by the female in the sexual process
which insures the conservation of the race. "If the sexual instinct is
regarded solely from the physical side," says D.W.H. Busch (_Das
Geschlechtsleben des Weibes_, 1839, vol. i, p. 201), "the woman cannot be
regarded as the property of the man, but with equal and greater reason the
man may be regarded as the property of the woman."
[274] Herodotus, Bk. i, Ch. CLXXIII.
[275] That power and relationship are entirely distinct was pointed out
many years ago by L. von Dargun, _Mutterrecht und Vaterrecht_, 1892.
Westermarck (_Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. i, p. 655),
who is inclined to think that Steinmetz has not proved conclusively that
mother-descent involves less authority of husband over wife, makes the
important qualification that the husband's authority is impaired when he
lives among his wife's kinsfolk.
[276] Robertson Smith, _Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia_; J.G. Frazer
has pointed out (_Academy_, March 27, 1886) that the partially Semitic
peoples on the North frontier of Abyssinia, not subjected to the
revolutionary processes of Islam, preserve a system closely resembling
_beena_ marriage, as well as some traces of the opposite system, by
Robertson Smith called _ba'al_ marriage, in which the wife is acquired by
purchase and becomes a piece of property.
[277] Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 358.
[278] Rhys and Brynmor-Jones, _The Welsh People_, pp. 55-6; cf. Rhys,
_Celtic Heathendom_, p. 93.
[279] Rhys and Brynmor-Jones, op. cit., p. 214.
[280] Crawley (_The Mystic Rose_, p. 41 et seq.) gives numerous instances.
[281] Revillout, "La Femme dans l'Antiquité," _Journal Asiatique_, 1906,
vol. vii, p. 57. See, also, Victor Marx, _Beiträge zur Assyriologie_,
1899, Bd. iv, Heft 1.
[282] Donaldson, _Woman_, pp. 196, 241 et seq. Nietzold, (_Die Ehe in_
"_Agypten_," p. 17), thinks the statement of Diodorus that no children
were illegitimate, needs qualification, but that certainly the
illegitimate child in Egypt was at no social disadvantage.
[283] Amélineau, _La Morale Egyptienne_, p. 194; Hobhouse, _Morals in
Evolution_, vol. i, p. 187; Flinders Petrie, _Religion and Conscience in
Ancient Egypt_, pp. 131 et seq.
[284] Maine, _Ancient Law_, Ch. V.
[285] Donaldson, _Woman_, pp. 109, 120.
[286] _Mercator_, iv, 5.
[287] Digest XLVIII, 13, 5.
[288] Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_, vol. i, p. 213.
[289] For an account of the work of some of the less known of these
pioneers, see a series of articles by Harriet McIlquham in the
_Westminster Review_, especially Nov., 1898, and Nov., 1903.
[290] The influence of Christianity on the position of women has been well
discussed by Lecky, _History of European Morals_, vol. ii, pp. 316 et
seq., and more recently by Donaldson, _Woman_, Bk. iii.
[291] Migne, _Patrologia_, vol. clviii, p. 680.
[292] Rosa Mayreder, "Einiges über die Starke Faust," _Zur Kritik der
Weiblichkeit_, 1905.
[293] Rasmussen (_People of the Polar North_, p. 56), describes a
ferocious quarrel between husband and wife, who each in turn knocked the
other down. "Somewhat later, when I peeped in, they were lying
affectionately asleep, with their arms around each other."
[294] Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_, vol. ii, p. 367. Dr. Stöcker, in
_Die Liebe und die Frauen_, also insists on the significance of this
factor of personal responsibility.
[295] Olive Schreiner has especially emphasized the evils of parasitism
for women. "The increased wealth of the male," she remarks ("The Woman's
Movement of Our Day," _Harper's Bazaar_, Jan., 1902), "no more of
necessity benefits and raises the female upon whom he expends it, than the
increased wealth of his mistress necessarily benefits, mentally or
physically, a poodle, because she can then give him a down cushion in
place of one of feathers, and chicken in place of beef." Olive Schreiner
believes that feminine parasitism is a danger which really threatens
society at the present time, and that if not averted "the whole body of
females in civilized societies must sink into a state of more or less
absolute dependence."
[296] In Rome and in Japan, Hobhouse notes (op. cit., vol. i, pp. 169,
176), the patriarchal system reached its fullest extension, yet the laws
of both these countries placed the husband in a position of practical
subjugation to a rich wife.
[297] Herodotus, Bk. ii, Ch. XXXV. Herodotus noted that it was the woman
and not the man on whom the responsibility for supporting aged parents
rested. That alone involved a very high economic position of women. It is
not surprising that to some observers, as to Diodorus Siculus, it seemed
that the Egyptian woman was mistress over her husband.
[298] Hobhouse (loc. cit.), Hale, and also Grosse, believe that good
economic position of a people involves high position of women. Westermarck
(_Moral Ideas_, vol. i, p. 661), here in agreement with Olive Schreiner,
thinks this statement cannot be accepted without modification, though
agreeing that agricultural life has a good effect on woman's position,
because they themselves become actively engaged in it. A good economic
position has no real effect in raising woman's position, unless women
themselves take a real and not merely parasitic part in it.
[299] Westermarck (_Moral Ideas_, vol. i, Ch. XXVI, vol. ii, p. 29) gives
numerous references with regard to the considerable proprietary and other
privileges of women among savages which tend to be lost at a somewhat
higher stage of culture.
[300] The steady rise in the proportion of women among English workers in
machine industries began in 1851. There are now, it is estimated, three
and a half million women employed in industrial occupations, beside a
million and a half domestic servants. (See for details, James Haslam, in a
series of papers in the _Englishwoman_ 1909.)
[301] See, e.g., J.A. Hobson, _The Evolution of Modern Capitalism_, second
edition, 1907, Ch. XII, "Women in Modern Industry."
[302] Hobhouse, op. cit., vol. i, p. 228.
[303] Fielding, _Tom Jones_, Bk. iii, Ch. VII.
[304] Even the Church to some extent adopted this allotment of the
responsibility, and "solicitation," i.e., the sin of a confessor in
seducing his female penitent, is constantly treated as exclusively the
confessor's sin.
[305] Adolf Gerson, _Sexual-Probleme_, Sept., 1908, p. 547.
[306] It has already been necessary to refer to the unfortunate results
which may follow the ignorance of husbands (see, e.g., "The Sexual Impulse
in Women," vol. iii of these _Studies_), and will be necessary again in
Ch. XI of the present volume.
[307] Pepys, _Diary_, ed. Wheatley, vol. vii, p. 10.
[308] Lombroso and Ferrero, _La Donna Delinquente_; cf. Havelock Ellis,
_Man and Woman_, fourth edition, p. 196.
[309] Gury, _Théologie Morale_, art. 381.
[310] "Men will not learn what women are," remarks Rosa Mayreder (_Zur
Kritik der Weiblichkeit_, p. 199), "until they have left off prescribing
what they ought to be."
[311] It has been set out, for instance, by Professor Wahrmund in _Ehe und
Eherecht_, 1908. I need scarcely refer again to the writings of Ellen Key,
which may be said to be almost epoch-making in their significance,
especially (in German translation) _Ueber Liebe und Ehe_ (also French
translation), and (in English translation, Putnam, 1909), the valuable,
though less important work, _The Century of the Child_. See also Edward
Carpenter, _Love's Coming of Age_; Forel, _Die Sexuelle Frage_ (English
translation, abridged, _The Sexual Question_, Rebman, 1908); Bloch,
_Sexualleben unsere Zeit_ (English translation, _The Sexual Life of Our
Time_, Rebman, 1908); Helene Stöcker, _Die Liebe und die Frauen_, 1906;
and Paul Lapie, _La Femme dans la Famille_, 1908.
CHAPTER X.
MARRIAGE.
The Definition of Marriage--Marriage Among Animals--The Predominance of
Monogamy--The Question of Group Marriage--Monogamy a Natural Fact, Not
Based on Human Law--The Tendency to Place the Form of Marriage Above the
Fact of Marriage--The History of Marriage--Marriage in Ancient
Rome--Germanic Influence on Marriage--Bride-Sale--The Ring--The Influence
of Christianity on Marriage--The Great Extent of This Influence--The
Sacrament of Matrimony--Origin and Growth of the Sacramental
Conception--The Church Made Marriage a Public Act--Canon Law--Its Sound
Core--Its Development--Its Confusions and Absurdities--Peculiarities of
English Marriage Law--Influence of the Reformation on Marriage--The
Protestant Conception of Marriage as a Secular Contract--The Puritan
Reform of Marriage--Milton as the Pioneer of Marriage Reform--His Views on
Divorce--The Backward Position of England in Marriage Reform--Criticism of
the English Divorce Law--Traditions of the Canon Law Still Persistent--The
Question of Damages for Adultery--Collusion as a Bar to
Divorce--Divorce in France, Germany, Austria, Russia, etc.--The United
States--Impossibility of Deciding by Statute the Causes for
Divorce--Divorce by Mutual Consent--Its Origin and Development--Impeded by
the Traditions of Canon Law--Wilhelm von Humboldt--Modern Pioneer
Advocates of Divorce by Mutual Consent--The Arguments Against Facility of
Divorce--The Interests of the Children--The Protection of Women--The
Present Tendency of the Divorce Movement--Marriage Not a Contract--The
Proposal of Marriage for a Term of Years--Legal Disabilities and
Disadvantages in the Position of the Husband and the Wife--Marriage Not a
Contract But a Fact--Only the Non-Essentials of Marriage, Not the
Essentials, a Proper Matter for Contract--The Legal Recognition of
Marriage as a Fact Without Any Ceremony--Contracts of the Person Opposed
to Modern Tendencies--The Factor of Moral Responsibility--Marriage as an
Ethical Sacrament--Personal Responsibility Involves Freedom--Freedom the
Best Guarantee of Stability--False Ideas of Individualism--Modern Tendency
of Marriage--With the Birth of a Child Marriage Ceases to be a Private
Concern--Every Child Must Have a Legal Father and Mother--How This Can be
Effected--The Firm Basis of Monogamy--The Question of Marriage
Variations--Such Variations Not Inimical to Monogamy--The Most Common
Variations--The Flexibility of Marriage Holds Variations in
Check--Marriage Variations _versus_ Prostitution--Marriage on a Reasonable
and Humane Basis--Summary and Conclusion.
The discussion in the previous chapter of the nature of sexual morality,
with the brief sketch it involved of the direction in which that morality
is moving, has necessarily left many points vague. It may still be asked
what definite and precise forms sexual unions are tending to take among
us, and what relation these unions bear to the religious, social, and
legal traditions we have inherited. These are matters about which a very
considerable amount of uncertainty seems to prevail, for it is not unusual
to hear revolutionary or eccentric opinions concerning them.
Sexual union, involving the cohabitation, temporary or permanent, of two
or more persons, and having for one of its chief ends the production and
care of offspring, is commonly termed marriage. The group so constituted
forms a family. This is the sense in which the words "marriage" and the
"family" are most properly used, whether we speak of animals or of Man.
There is thus seen to be room for variation as regards both the time
during which the union lasts, and the number of individuals who form it,
the chief factor in the determination of these points being the interests
of the offspring. In actual practice, however, sexual unions, not only in
Man but among the higher animals, tend to last beyond the needs of the
offspring of a single season, while the fact that in most species the
numbers of males and females are approximately equal makes it inevitable
that both among animals and in Man the family is produced by a single
sexual couple, that is to say that monogamy is, with however many
exceptions, necessarily the fundamental rule.
It will thus be seen that marriage centres in the child, and has at the
outset no reason for existence apart from the welfare of the offspring.
Among those animals of lowly organization which are able to provide for
themselves from the beginning of existence there is no family and no need
for marriage. Among human races, when sexual unions are not followed by
offspring, there may be other reasons for the continuance of the union
but they are not reasons in which either Nature or society is in the
slightest degree directly concerned. The marriage which grew up among
animals by heredity on the basis of natural selection, and which has been
continued by the lower human races through custom and tradition, by the
more civilized races through the superimposed regulative influence of
legal institutions, has been marriage for the sake of the offspring.[312]
Even in civilized races among whom the proportion of sterile marriages is
large, marriage tends to be so constituted as always to assume the
procreation of children and to involve the permanence required by such
procreation.
Among birds, which from the point of view of erotic development
stand at the head of the animal world, monogamy frequently
prevails (according to some estimates among 90 per cent.), and
unions tend to be permanent; there is an approximation to the
same condition among some of the higher mammals, especially the
anthropoid apes; thus among gorillas and oran-utans permanent
monogamic marriages take place, the young sometimes remaining
with the parents to the age of six, while any approach to loose
behavior on the part of the wife is severely punished by the
husband. The variations that occur are often simply matters of
adaptation to circumstances; thus, according to J.G. Millais
(_Natural History of British Ducks_, pp. 8, 63), the Shoveler
duck, though normally monogamic, will become polyandric when
males are in excess, the two males being in constant and amicable
attendance on the female without signs of jealousy; among the
monogamic mallards, similarly, polygyny and polyandry may also
occur. See also R.W. Shufeldt, "Mating Among Birds," _American
Naturalist_, March, 1907; for mammal marriages, a valuable paper
by Robert Müller, "Säugethierehen," _Sexual-Probleme_, Jan.,
1909, and as regards the general prevalence of monogamy, Woods
Hutchinson, "Animal Marriage," _Contemporary Review_, Oct., 1904,
and Sept., 1905.
There has long been a dispute among the historians of marriage as
to the first form of human marriage. Some assume a primitive
promiscuity gradually modified in the direction of monogamy;
others argue that man began where the anthropoid apes left off,
and that monogamy has prevailed, on the whole, throughout. Both
these opposed views, in an extreme form, seem untenable, and the
truth appears to lie midway. It has been shown by various
writers, and notably Westermarck (_History of Human Marriage_,
Chs. IV-VI), that there is no sound evidence in favor of
primitive promiscuity, and that at the present day there are few,
if any, savage peoples living in genuine unrestricted sexual
promiscuity. This theory of a primitive promiscuity seems to have
been suggested, as J.A. Godfrey has pointed out (_Science of
Sex_, p. 112), by the existence in civilized societies of
promiscuous prostitution, though this kind of promiscuity was
really the result, rather than the origin, of marriage. On the
other hand, it can scarcely be said that there is any convincing
evidence of primitive strict monogamy beyond the assumption that
early man continued the sexual habits of the anthropoid apes. It
would seem probable, however, that the great forward step
involved in passing from ape to man was associated with a change
in sexual habits involving the temporary adoption of a more
complex system than monogamy. It is difficult to see in what
other social field than that of sex primitive man could find
exercise for the developing intellectual and moral aptitudes, the
subtle distinctions and moral restraints, which the strict
monogamy practiced by animals could afford no scope for. It is
also equally difficult to see on what basis other than that of a
more closely associated sexual system the combined and harmonious
efforts needed for social progress could have developed. It is
probable that at least one of the motives for exogamy, or
marriage outside the group, is (as was probably first pointed out
by St. Augustine in his _De Civitate Dei_) the need of creating a
larger social circle, and so facilitating social activities and
progress. Exactly the same end is effected by a complex marriage
system binding a large number of people together by common
interests. The strictly small and confined monogamic family,
however excellently it subserved the interests of the offspring,
contained no promise of a wider social progress. We see this
among both ants and bees, who of all animals, have attained the
highest social organization; their progress was only possible
through a profound modification of the systems of sexual
relationship. As Espinas said many years ago (in his suggestive
work, _Des Sociétés Animales_): "The cohesion of the family and
the probabilities for the birth of societies are inverse." Or, as
Schurtz more recently pointed out, although individual marriage
has prevailed more or less from the first, early social
institutions, early ideas and early religion involved sexual
customs which modified a strict monogamy.
The most primitive form of complex human marriage which has yet
been demonstrated as still in existence is what is called
group-marriage, in which all the women of one class are regarded
as the actual, or at all events potential, wives of all the men
in another class. This has been observed among some central
Australian tribes, a people as primitive and as secluded from
external influence as could well be found, and there is evidence
to show that it was formerly more widespread among them. "In the
Urabunna tribe, for example," say Spencer and Gillen, "a group of
men actually do have, continually and as a normal condition,
marital relations with a group of women. This state of affairs
has nothing whatever to do with polygamy any more than it has
with polyandry. It is simply a question of a group of men and a
group of women who may lawfully have what we call marital
relations. There is nothing whatever abnormal about it, and, in
all probability, this system of what has been called group
marriage, serving as it does to bind more or less closely
together groups of individuals who are mutually interested in one
another's welfare, has been one of the most powerful agents in
the early stages of the upward development of the human race"
(Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p.
74; cf. A.W. Howitt, _The Native Tribes of South-East
Australia_). Group-marriage, with female descent, as found in
Australia, tends to become transformed by various stages of
progress into individual marriage with descent in the male line,
a survival of group-marriage perhaps persisting in the
much-discussed _jus primæ noctis_. (It should be added that Mr.
N.W. Thomas, in his book on _Kinship and Marriage in Australia_,
1908, concludes that group-marriage in Australia has not been
demonstrated, and that Professor Westermarck, in his _Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_, as in his previous _History of
Human Marriage_, maintains a skeptical opinion in regard to
group-marriage generally; he thinks the Urabunna custom may have
developed out of ordinary individual marriage, and regards the
group-marriage theory as "the residuary legatee of the old theory
of promiscuity." Durkheim also believes that the Australian
marriage system is not primitive, "Organisation Matrimoniale
Australienne," _L'Année Sociologique_, eighth year, 1905). With
the attainment of a certain level of social progress it is easy
to see that a wide and complicated system of sexual relationships
ceases to have its value, and a more or less qualified monogamy
tends to prevail as more in harmony with the claims of social
stability and executive masculine energy.
The best historical discussion of marriage is still probably
Westermarck's _History of Human Marriage_, though at some points
it now needs to be corrected or supplemented; among more recent
books dealing with primitive sexual conceptions may be specially
mentioned Crawley's _Mystic Rose_, while the facts concerning the
transformation of marriage among the higher human races are set
forth in G.E. Howard's _History of Matrimonial Institutions_ (3
vols.), which contains copious bibliographical references. There
is an admirably compact, but clear and comprehensive, sketch of
the development of modern marriage in Pollock and Maitland,
_History of English Law_, vol. ii.
It is necessary to make allowance for variations, thereby shunning the
extreme theorists who insist on moulding all facts to their theories, but
we may conclude that--as the approximately equal number of the sexes
indicates--in the human species, as among many of the higher animals, a
more or less permanent monogamy has on the whole tended to prevail. That
is a fact of great significance in its implications. For we have to
realize that we are here in the presence of a natural fact. Sexual
relationships, in human as in animal societies, follow a natural law,
oscillating on each side of the norm, and there is no place for the theory
that that law was imposed artificially. If all artificial "laws" could be
abolished the natural order of the sexual relationships would continue to
subsist substantially as at present. Virtue, said Cicero, is but Nature
carried out to the utmost. Or, as Holbach put it, arguing that our
institutions tend whither Nature tends, "art is only Nature acting by the
help of the instruments she has herself made." Shakespeare had already
seen much the same truth when he said that the art which adds to Nature
"is an art that Nature makes." Law and religion have buttressed monogamy;
it is not based on them but on the needs and customs of mankind, and these
constitute its completely adequate sanctions.[313] Or, as Cope put it,
marriage is not the creation of law but the law is its creation.[314]
Crawley, again, throughout his study of primitive sex relationships,
emphasizes the fact that our formal marriage system is not, as so many
religious and moral writers once supposed, a forcible repression of
natural impulses, but merely the rigid crystallization of those natural
impulses, which in a more fluid form have been in human nature from the
first. Our conventional forms, we must believe, have not introduced any
elements of value, while in some respects they have been mischievous.
It is necessary to bear in mind that the conclusion that
monogamic marriage is natural, and represents an order which is
in harmony with the instincts of the majority of people, by no
means involves agreement with the details of any particular legal
system of monogamy. Monogamic marriage is a natural biological
fact, alike in many animals and in man. But no system of legal
regulation is a natural biological fact. When a highly esteemed
alienist, Dr. Clouston, writes (_The Hygiene of Mind_, p. 245)
"there is only one natural mode of gratifying sexual _nisus_ and
reproductive instinct, that of marriage," the statement requires
considerable exegesis before it can be accepted, or even receive
an intelligible meaning, and if we are to understand by
"marriage" the particular form and implications of the English
marriage law, or even of the somewhat more enlightened Scotch
law, the statement is absolutely false. There is a world of
difference, as J.A. Godfrey remarks (_The Science of Sex_, 1901,
p. 278), between natural monogamous marriage and our legal
system; "the former is the outward expression of the best that
lies in the sexuality of man; the latter is a creation in which
religious and moral superstitions have played a most important
part, not always to the benefit of individual and social health."
We must, therefore, guard against the tendency to think that
there is anything rigid or formal in the natural order of
monogamy. Some sociologists would even limit the naturalness of
monogamy still further. Thus Tarde ("La Morale Sexuelle,"
_Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan., 1907), while
accepting as natural under present conditions the tendency for
monogamy, mitigated by more or less clandestine concubinage, to
prevail over all other forms of marriage, considers that this is
not due to any irresistible influence, but merely to the fact
that this kind of marriage is practiced by the majority of
people, including the most civilized.
With the acceptance of the tendency to monogamy we are not at the
end of sexual morality, but only at the beginning. It is not
monogamy that is the main thing, but the kind of lives that
people lead in monogamy. The mere acceptance of a monogamic rule
carries us but a little way. That is a fact which cannot fail to
impress itself on those who approach the questions of sex from
the psychological side.
If monogamy is thus firmly based it is unreasonable to fear, or to hope
for, any radical modification in the institution of marriage, regarded,
not under its temporary religious and legal aspects but as an order which
appeared on the earth even earlier than man. Monogamy is the most natural
expression of an impulse which cannot, as a rule, be so adequately
realized in full fruition under conditions involving a less prolonged
period of mutual communion and intimacy. Variations, regarded as
inevitable oscillations around the norm, are also natural, but union in
couples must always be the rule because the numbers of the sexes are
always approximately equal, while the needs of the emotional life, even
apart from the needs of offspring, demand that such unions based on mutual
attraction should be so far as possible permanent.
It must here again be repeated that it is the reality, and not
the form or the permanence of the marriage union, which is its
essential and valuable part. It is not the legal or religious
formality which sanctifies marriage, it is the reality of the
marriage which sanctifies the form. Fielding has satirized in
Nightingale, Tom Jones's friend, the shallow-brained view of
connubial society which degrades the reality of marriage to exalt
the form. Nightingale has the greatest difficulty in marrying a
girl with whom he has already had sexual relations, although he
is the only man who has had relations with her. To Jones's
arguments he replies: "Common-sense warrants all you say, but yet
you well know that the opinion of the world is so contrary to it,
that were I to marry a whore, though my own, I should be ashamed
of ever showing my face again." It cannot be said that Fielding's
satire is even yet out of date. Thus in Prussia, according to
Adele Schreiber ("Heirathsbeschränkungen," _Die Neue Generation_,
Feb., 1909), it seems to be still practically impossible for a
military officer to marry the mother of his own illegitimate
child.
The glorification of the form at the expense of the reality of
marriage has even been attempted in poetry by Tennyson in the
least inspired of his works, _The Idylls of the King_. In
"Lancelot and Elaine" and "Guinevere" (as Julia Magruder points
out, _North American Review_, April, 1905) Guinevere is married
to King Arthur, whom she has never seen, when already in love
with Lancelot, so that the "marriage" was merely a ceremony, and
not a real marriage (cf., May Child, "The Weird of Sir Lancelot,"
_North American Review_, Dec., 1908).
It may seem to some that so conservative an estimate of the tendencies of
civilization in matters of sexual love is due to a timid adherence to mere
tradition. That is not the case. We have to recognize that marriage is
firmly held in position by the pressure of two opposing forces. There are
two currents in the stream of our civilization: one that moves towards an
ever greater social order and cohesion, the other that moves towards an
ever greater individual freedom. There is real harmony underlying the
apparent opposition of these two tendencies, and each is indeed the
indispensable complement of the other. There can be no real freedom for
the individual in the things that concern that individual alone unless
there is a coherent order in the things that concern him as a social unit.
Marriage in one of its aspects only concerns the two individuals involved;
in another of its aspects it chiefly concerns society. The two forces
cannot combine to act destructively on marriage, for the one counteracts
the other. They combine to support monogamy, in all essentials, on its
immemorial basis.
It must be added that in the circumstances of monogamy that are not
essential there always has been, and always must be, perpetual
transformation. All traditional institutions, however firmly founded on
natural impulses, are always growing dead and rigid at some points and
putting forth vitally new growths at other points. It is the effort to
maintain their vitality, and to preserve their elastic adjustment to the
environment, which involves this process of transformation in
non-essentials.
The only way in which we can fruitfully approach the question of the value
of the transformations now taking place in our marriage-system is by
considering the history of that system in the past. In that way we learn
the real significance of the marriage-system, and we understand what
transformations are, or are not, associated with a fine civilization. When
we are acquainted with the changes of the past we are enabled to face more
confidently the changes of the present.
The history of the marriage-system of modern civilized peoples begins in
the later days of the Roman Empire at the time when the foundations were
being laid of that Roman law which has exerted so large an influence in
Christendom. Reference has already been made[315] to the significant fact
that in late Rome women had acquired a position of nearly complete
independence in relation to their husbands, while the patriarchal
authority still exerted over them by their fathers had become, for the
most part, almost nominal. This high status of women was associated, as it
naturally tends to be, with a high degree of freedom in the marriage
system. Roman law had no power of intervening in the formation of
marriages and there were no legal forms of marriage. The Romans recognized
that marriage is a fact and not a mere legal form; in marriage by _usus_
there was no ceremony at all; it was constituted by the mere fact of
living together for a whole year; yet such marriage was regarded as just
as legal and complete as if it had been inaugurated by the sacred rite of
_confarreatio_. Marriage was a matter of simple private agreement in which
the man and the woman approached each other on a footing of equality. The
wife retained full control of her own property; the barbarity of admitting
an action for restitution of conjugal rights was impossible, divorce was a
private transaction to which the wife was as fully entitled as the
husband, and it required no inquisitorial intervention of magistrate or
court; Augustus ordained, indeed, that a public declaration was necessary,
but the divorce itself was a private legal act of the two persons
concerned.[316] It is interesting to note this enlightened conception of
marriage prevailing in the greatest and most masterful Empire which has
ever dominated the world, at the period not indeed of its greatest
force,--for the maximum of force and the maximum of expansion, the bud and
the full flower, are necessarily incompatible,--but at the period of its
fullest development. In the chaos that followed the dissolution of the
Empire Roman law remained as a precious legacy to the new developing
nations, but its influence was inextricably mingled with that of
Christianity, which, though not at the first anxious to set up marriage
laws of its own, gradually revealed a growing ascetic feeling hostile
alike to the dignity of the married woman and the freedom of marriage and
divorce.[317] With that influence was combined the influence, introduced
through the Bible, of the barbaric Jewish marriage-system conferring on
the husband rights in marriage and divorce which were totally denied to
the wife; this was an influence which gained still greater force at the
Reformation when the authority once accorded to the Church was largely
transformed to the Bible. Finally, there was in a great part of Europe,
including the most energetic and expansive parts, the influence of the
Germans, an influence still more primitive than that of the Jews,
involving the conception of the wife as almost her husband's chattel, and
marriage as a purchase. All these influences clashed and often appeared
side by side, though they could not be harmonized. The result was that the
fifteen hundred years that followed the complete conquest of Christianity
represent on the whole the most degraded condition to which the marriage
system has ever been known to fall for so long a period during the whole
course of human history.
At first indeed the beneficent influence of Rome continued in some degree
to prevail and even exhibited new developments. In the time of the
Christian Emperors freedom of divorce by mutual consent was alternately
maintained, and abolished.[318] We even find the wise and far-seeing
provision of the law enacting that a contract of the two parties never to
separate could have no legal validity. Justinian's prohibition of divorce
by consent led to much domestic unhappiness, and even crime, which appears
to be the reason why it was immediately abrogated by his successor,
Theodosius, still maintaining the late Roman tradition of the moral
equality of the sexes, allowed the wife equally with the husband to obtain
a divorce for adultery; that is a point we have not yet attained in
England to-day.
It seems to be admitted on all sides that it was largely the fatal
influence of the irruption of the barbarous Germans which degraded, when
it failed to sweep away, the noble conception of the equality of women
with men, and the dignity and freedom of marriage, slowly moulded by the
organizing genius of the Roman into a great tradition which still retains
a supreme value. The influence of Christianity had at the first no
degrading influence of this kind; for the ascetic ideal was not yet
predominant, priests married as a matter of course, and there was no
difficulty in accepting the marriage order established in the secular
world; it was even possible to add to it a new vitality and freedom. But
the Germans, with all the primitively acquisitive and combative instincts
of untamed savages, went far beyond even the early Romans in the
subjection of their wives; they allowed indeed to their unmarried girls a
large measure of indulgence and even sexual freedom,--just as the
Christians also reverenced their virgins,[319]--but the German marriage
system placed the wife, as compared to the wife of the Roman Empire, in a
condition little better than that of a domestic slave. In one form or
another, under one disguise or another, the system of wife-purchase
prevailed among the Germans, and, whenever that system is influential,
even when the wife is honored her privileges are diminished.[320] Among
the Teutonic peoples generally, as among the early English, marriage was
indeed a private transaction but it took the form of a sale of the bride
by the father, or other legal guardian, to the bridegroom. The _beweddung_
was a real contract of sale.[321] "Sale-marriage" was the most usual form
of marriage. The ring, indeed, probably was not in origin, as some have
supposed, a mark of servitude, but rather a form of bride-price, or
_arrha_, that is to say, earnest money on the contract of marriage and so
the symbol of it.[322] At first a sign of the bride's purchase, it was not
till later that the ring acquired the significance of subjection to the
bridegroom, and that significance, later in the Middle Ages, was further
emphasized by other ceremonies. Thus in England the York and Sarum manuals
in some of their forms direct the bride, after the delivery of the ring,
to fall at her husband's feet, and sometimes to kiss his right foot. In
Russia, also, the bride kissed her husband's feet. At a later period, in
France, this custom was attenuated, and it became customary for the bride
to let the ring fall in front of the altar and then stoop at her husband's
feet to pick it up.[323] Feudalism carried on, and by its military
character exaggerated, these Teutonic influences. A fief was land held on
condition of military service, and the nature of its influence on marriage
is implied in that fact. The woman was given with the fief and her own
will counted for nothing.[324]
The Christian Church in the beginning accepted the forms of marriage
already existing in those countries in which it found itself, the Roman
forms in the lands of Latin tradition and the German forms in Teutonic
lands. It merely demanded (as it also demanded for other civil contracts,
such as an ordinary sale) that they should be hallowed by priestly
benediction. But the marriage was recognized by the Church even in the
absence of such benediction. There was no special religious marriage
service, either in the East or the West, earlier than the sixth century.
It was simply the custom for the married couple, after the secular
ceremonies were completed, to attend the church, listen to the ordinary
service and take the sacrament. A special marriage service was developed
slowly, and it was no part of the real marriage. During the tenth century
(at all events in Italy and France) it was beginning to become customary
to celebrate the first part of the real nuptials, still a purely temporal
act, outside the church door. Soon this was followed by the regular
bride-mass, directly applicable to the occasion, inside the church. By the
twelfth century the priest directed the ceremony, now involving an
imposing ritual, which began outside the church and ended with the bridal
mass inside. By the thirteenth century, the priest, superseding the
guardians of the young couple, himself officiated through the whole
ceremony. Up to that time marriage had been a purely private business
transaction. Thus, after more than a millennium of Christianity, not by
law but by the slow growth of custom, ecclesiastical marriage was
established.[325]
It was undoubtedly an event of very great importance not merely for the
Church but for the whole history of European marriage even down to to-day.
The whole of our public method of celebrating marriage to-day is based on
that of the Catholic Church as established in the twelfth century and
formulated in the Canon law. Even the publication of banns has its origin
here, and the fact that in our modern civil marriage the public ceremony
takes place in an office and not in a Church may disguise but cannot
alter the fact that it is the direct and unquestionable descendant of the
public ecclesiastical ceremony which embodied the slow and subtle
triumph--so slow and subtle that its history is difficult to trace--of
Christian priests over the private affairs of men and women. Before they
set themselves to this task marriage everywhere was the private business
of the persons concerned; when they had completed their task,--and it was
not absolutely complete until the Council of Trent,--a private marriage
had become a sin and almost a crime.[326]
It may seem a matter for surprise that the Church which, as we know, had
shown an ever greater tendency to reverence virginity and to cast
contumely on the sexual relationship, should yet, parallel with that
movement and with the growing influence of asceticism, have shown so great
an anxiety to capture marriage and to confer on it a public, dignified,
and religious character. There was, however, no contradiction. The factors
that were constituting European marriage, taken as a whole, were indeed of
very diverse characters and often involved unreconciled contradictions.
But so far as the central efforts of the ecclesiastical legislators were
concerned, there was a definite and intelligible point of view. The very
depreciation of the sexual instinct involved the necessity, since the
instinct could not be uprooted, of constituting for it a legitimate
channel, so that ecclesiastical matrimony was, it has been said,
"analogous to a license to sell intoxicating liquors."[327] Moreover,
matrimony exhibited the power of the Church to confer on the license a
dignity and distinction which would clearly separate it from the general
stream of lust. Sexual enjoyment is impure, the faithful cannot partake of
it until it has been purified by the ministrations of the Church. The
solemnization of marriage was the necessary result of the sanctification
of virginity. It became necessary to sanctify marriage also, and hence
was developed the indissoluble sacrament of matrimony. The conception of
marriage as a religious sacrament, a conception of far-reaching influence,
is the great contribution of the Catholic Church to the history of
marriage.
It is important to remember that, while Christianity brought the
idea of marriage as a sacrament into the main stream of the
institutional history of Europe, that idea was merely developed,
not invented, by the Church. It is an ancient and even primitive
idea. The Jews believed that marriage is a magico-religious bond,
having in it something mystical resembling a sacrament, and that
idea, says Durkheim (_L'Année Sociologique_, eighth year, 1905,
p. 419), is perhaps very archaic, and hangs on to the generally
magic character of sex relations. "The mere act of union,"
Crawley remarks (_The Mystic Rose_, p. 318) concerning savages,
"is potentially a marriage ceremony of the sacramental kind....
One may even credit the earliest animistic men with some such
vague conception before any ceremony became crystallized." The
essence of a marriage ceremony, the same writer continues, "is
the 'joining together' of a man and a woman; in the words of our
English service, 'for this cause shall a man leave his father and
mother and shall be joined unto his wife; and they two shall be
one flesh.' At the other side of the world, amongst the Orang
Benuas, these words are pronounced by an elder, when a marriage
is solemnized: 'Listen all ye that are present; those that were
distant are now brought together; those that were separated are
now united.' Marriage ceremonies in all stages of culture may be
called religious with as much propriety as any ceremony whatever.
Those who were separated are now joined together, those who were
mutually taboo now break the taboo." Thus marriage ceremonies
prevent sin and neutralize danger.
The Catholic conception of marriage was, it is clear, in
essentials precisely the primitive conception. Christianity drew
the sacramental idea from the archaic traditions in popular
consciousness, and its own ecclesiastical contribution lay in
slowly giving that idea a formal and rigid shape, and in
declaring it indissoluble. As among savages, it was in the act of
consent that the essence of the sacrament lay; the intervention
of the priest was not, in principle, necessary to give marriage
its religiously binding character. The essence of the sacrament
was mutual acceptance of each other by the man and the woman, as
husband and wife, and technically the priest who presided at the
ceremony was simply a witness of the sacrament. The essential
fact being thus the mental act of consent, the sacrament of
matrimony had the peculiar character of being without any outward
and visible sign. Perhaps it was this fact, instinctively felt
as a weakness, which led to the immense emphasis on the
indissolubility of the sacrament of matrimony, already
established by St. Augustine. The Canonists brought forward
various arguments to account for that indissolubility, and a
frequent argument has always been the Scriptural application of
the term "one flesh" to married couples; but the favorite
argument of the Canonists was that matrimony represents the union
of Christ with the Church; that is indissoluble, and therefore
its image must be indissoluble (Esmein, op. cit., vol. i, p. 64).
In part, also, one may well believe, the idea of the
indissolubility of marriage suggested itself to the
ecclesiastical mind by a natural association of ideas: the vow of
virginity in monasticism was indissoluble; ought not the vow of
sexual relationship in matrimony to be similarly indissoluble? It
appears that it was not until 1164, in Peter Lombard's
_Sentences_, that clear and formal recognition is found of
matrimony as one of the seven sacraments (Howard, op. cit., vol.
i, p. 333).
The Church, however, had not only made marriage a religious act; it had
also made it a public act. The officiating priest, who had now become the
arbiter of marriage, was bound by all the injunctions and prohibitions of
the Church, and he could not allow himself to bend to the inclinations and
interests of individual couples or their guardians. It was inevitable that
in this matter, as in other similar matters, a code of ecclesiastical
regulations should be gradually developed for his guidance. This need of
the Church, due to its growing control of the world's affairs, was the
origin of Canon law. With the development of Canon law the whole field of
the regulation of the sexual relationships, and the control of its
aberrations, became an exclusively ecclesiastical matter. The secular law
could take no more direct cognizance of adultery than of fornication or
masturbation; bigamy, incest, and sodomy were not temporal crimes; the
Church was supreme in the whole sphere of sex.
It was during the twelfth century that Canon law developed, and Gratian
was the master mind who first moulded it. He belonged to the Bolognese
school of jurisprudence which had inherited the sane traditions of Roman
law. The Canons which Gratian compiled were, however, no more the mere
result of legal traditions than they were the outcome of cloistered
theological speculation. They were the result of a response to the
practical needs of the day before those needs had had time to form a
foundation for fine-spun subtleties. At a somewhat later period, before
the close of the century, the Italian jurists were vanquished by the
Gallic theologians of Paris as represented by Peter Lombard. The result
was the introduction of mischievous complexities which went far to rob
Canon law alike of its certainty and its adaptation to human necessities.
Notwithstanding, however, all the parasitic accretions which swiftly began
to form around the Canon law and to entangle its practical activity, that
legislation embodied--predominantly at the outset and more obscurely
throughout its whole period of vital activity--a sound core of real value.
The Canon law recognized at the outset that the essential fact of marriage
is the actual sexual union, accomplished with the intention of
inaugurating a permanent relationship. The _copula carnalis_, the making
of two "one flesh," according to the Scriptural phrase, a mystic symbol of
the union of the Church to Christ, was the essence of marriage, and the
mutual consent of the couple alone sufficed to constitute marriage, even
without any religious benediction, or without any ceremony at all. The
formless and unblessed union was still a real and binding marriage if the
two parties had willed it so to be.[328]
Whatever hard things may be said about the Canon law, it must
never be forgotten that it carried through the Middle Ages until
the middle of the sixteenth century the great truth that the
essence of marriage lies not in rites and forms, but in the
mutual consent of the two persons who marry each other. When the
Catholic Church, in its growing rigidity, lost that conception,
it was taken up by the Protestants and Puritans in their first
stage of ardent vital activity, though it was more or less
dropped as they fell back into a state of subservience to forms.
It continued to be maintained by moralists and poets. Thus George
Chapman, the dramatist, who was both moralist and poet, in _The
Gentleman Usher_ (1606), represents the riteless marriage of his
hero and heroine, which the latter thus introduces:--
"May not we now
Our contract make and marry before Heaven?
Are not the laws of God and Nature more
Than formal laws of men? Are outward rites
More virtuous than the very substance is
Of holy nuptials solemnized within?
.... The eternal acts of our pure souls
Knit us with God, the soul of all the world,
He shall be priest to us; and with such rites
As we can here devise we will express
And strongly ratify our hearts' true vows,
Which no external violence shall dissolve."
And to-day, Ellen Key, the distinguished prophet of marriage
reform, declares at the end of her _Liebe und Ehe_ that the true
marriage law contains only the paragraph: "They who love each
other are husband and wife."
The establishment of marriage on this sound and naturalistic basis had the
further excellent result that it placed the man and the woman, who could
thus constitute marriage by their consent in entire disregard of the
wishes of their parents or families, on the same moral level. Here the
Church was following alike the later Romans and the early Christians like
Lactantius and Jerome who had declared that what was licit for a man was
licit for a woman. The Penitentials also attempted to set up this same
moral law for both sexes. The Canonists finally allowed a certain
supremacy to the husband, though, on the other hand, they sometimes seemed
to assign even the chief part in marriage to the wife, and the attempt was
made to derive the word _matrimonium_ from _matris munium_, thereby
declaring the maternal function to be the essential fact of marriage.[329]
The sound elements in the Canon law conception of marriage were, however,
from a very early period largely if not altogether neutralized by the
verbal subtleties by which they were overlaid, and even by its own
fundamental original defects. Even in the thirteenth century it began to
be possible to attach a superior force to marriage verbally formed _per
verba de præsenti_ than to one constituted by sexual union, while so many
impediments to marriage were set up that it became difficult to know what
marriages were valid, an important point since a marriage even innocently
contracted within the prohibited degrees was only a putative marriage. The
most serious and the most profoundly unnatural feature of this
ecclesiastical conception of marriage was the flagrant contradiction
between the extreme facility with which the gate of marriage was flung
open to the young couple, even if they were little more than children, and
the extreme rigor with which it was locked and bolted when they were
inside. That is still the defect of the marriage system we have inherited
from the Church, but in the hands of the Canonists it was emphasized both
on the side of its facility for entrance and of its difficulty for
exit.[330] Alike from the standpoint of reason and of humanity the gate
that is easy of ingress must be easy of egress; or if the exit is
necessarily difficult then extreme care must be taken in admission. But
neither of these necessary precautions was possible to the Canonists.
Matrimony was a sacrament and all must be welcome to a sacrament, the more
so since otherwise they may be thrust into the mortal sin of fornication.
On the other side, since matrimony was a sacrament, when once truly
formed, beyond the permissible power of verbal quibbles to invalidate, it
could never be abrogated. The very institution that, in the view of the
Church, had been set up as a bulwark against license became itself an
instrument for artificially creating license. So that the net result of
the Canon law in the long run was the production of a state of things
which--in the eyes of a large part of Christendom--more than neutralized
the soundness of its original conception.[331]
In England, where from the ninth century, marriage was generally
accepted by the ecclesiastical and temporal powers as
indissoluble, Canon law was, in the main, established as in the
rest of Christendom. There were, however, certain points in which
Canon law was not accepted by the law of England. By English law
a ceremony before a priest was necessary to the validity of a
marriage, though in Scotland the Canon law doctrine was accepted
that simple consent of the parties, even exchanged secretly,
sufficed to constitute marriage. Again, the issue of a void
marriage contracted in innocence, and the issue of persons who
subsequently marry each other, are legitimate by Canon law, but
not by the common law of England (Geary, _Marriage and Family
Relations_, p. 3; Pollock and Maitland, loc. cit.). The Canonists
regarded the disabilities attaching to bastardy as a punishment
inflicted on the offending parents, and considered, therefore,
that no burden should fall on the children when there had been a
ceremony in good faith on the part of one at least of the
parents. In this respect the English law is less reasonable and
humane. It was at the Council of Merton, in 1236, that the barons
of England rejected the proposal to make the laws of England
harmonize with the Canon law, that is, with the ecclesiastical
law of Christendom generally, in allowing children born before
wedlock to be legitimated by subsequent marriage. Grosseteste
poured forth his eloquence and his arguments in favor of the
change, but in vain, and the law of England has ever since stood
alone in this respect (Freeman, "Merton Priory," _English Towns
and Districts_). The proposal was rejected in the famous formula,
"Nolumus leges Angliæ mutare," a formula which merely stood for
an unreasonable and inhumane obstinacy.
In the United States, while by common law subsequent marriage
fails to legitimate children born before marriage, in many of the
States the subsequent marriage of the parents effects by statute
the legitimacy of the child, sometimes (as in Maine)
automatically, more usually (as in Massachusetts) through special
acknowledgment by the father.
The appearance of Luther and the Reformation involved the decay of the
Canon law system so far as Europe as a whole was concerned. It was for
many reasons impossible for the Protestant reformers to retain formally
either the Catholic conception of matrimony or the precariously elaborate
legal structure which the Church had built up on that conception. It can
scarcely be said, indeed, that the Protestant attitude towards the
Catholic idea of matrimony was altogether a clear, logical, or consistent
attitude. It was a revolt, an emotional impulse, rather than a matter of
reasoned principle. In its inevitable necessity, under the circumstances
of the rise of Protestantism, lies its justification, and, on the whole,
its wholesome soundness. It took the form, which may seem strange in a
religious movement, of proclaiming that marriage is not a religious but a
secular matter. Marriage is, said Luther, "a worldly thing," and Calvin
put it on the same level as house-building, farming, or shoe-making. But
while this secularization of marriage represents the general and final
drift of Protestantism, the leaders of Protestantism were themselves not
altogether confident and clear-sighted in the matter. Even Luther was a
little confused on this point; sometimes he seems to call marriage "a
sacrament," sometimes "a temporal business," to be left to the state.[332]
It was the latter view which tended to prevail. But at first there was a
period of confusion, if not of chaos, in the minds of the Reformers; not
only were they not always convinced in their own minds; they were at
variance with each other, especially on the very practical question of
divorce. Luther on the whole belonged to the more rigid party, including
Calvin and Beza, which would grant divorce only for adultery and malicious
desertion; some, including many of the early English Protestants, were in
favor of allowing the husband to divorce for adultery but not the wife.
Another party, including Zwingli, were influenced by Erasmus in a more
liberal direction, and--moving towards the standpoint of Roman Imperial
legislation--admitted various causes of divorce. Some, like Bucer,
anticipating Milton, would even allow divorce when the husband was unable
to love his wife. At the beginning some of the Reformers adopted the
principle of self-divorce, as it prevailed among the Jews and was accepted
by some early Church Councils. In this way Luther held that the cause for
the divorce itself effected the divorce without any judicial decree,
though a magisterial permission was needed for remarriage. This question
of remarriage, and the treatment of the adulterer, were also matters of
dispute. The remarriage of the innocent party was generally accepted; in
England it began in the middle of the sixteenth century, was pronounced
valid by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and confirmed by Parliament. Many
Reformers were opposed, however, to the remarriage of the adulterous
party. Beust, Beza, and Melancthon would have him hanged and so settle the
question of remarriage; Luther and Calvin would like to kill him, but
since the civil rulers were slack in adopting that measure they allowed
him to remarry, if possible in some other part of the country.[333]
The final outcome was that Protestantism framed a conception of marriage
mainly on the legal and economic factor--a factor not ignored but strictly
subordinated by the Canonists--and regarded it as essentially a contract.
In so doing they were on the negative side effecting a real progress, for
they broke the power of an antiquated and artificial system, but on the
positive side they were merely returning to a conception which prevails in
barbarous societies, and is most pronounced when marriage is most
assimilable to purchase. The steps taken by Protestantism involved a
considerable change in the nature of marriage, but not necessarily any
great changes in its form. Marriage was no longer a sacrament, but it was
still a public and not a private function and was still, however
inconsistently, solemnized in Church. And as Protestantism had no rival
code to set up, both in Germany and England it fell back on the general
principles of Canon law, modifying them to suit its own special attitude
and needs.[334] It was the later Puritanic movement, first in the
Netherlands (1580), then in England (1653), and afterwards in New England,
which introduced a serious and coherent conception of Protestant marriage,
and began to establish it on a civil base.
The English Reformers under Edward VI and his enlightened
advisers, including Archbishop Cranmer, took liberal views of
marriage, and were prepared to carry through many admirable
reforms. The early death of that King exerted a profound
influence on the legal history of English marriage. The Catholic
reaction under Queen Mary killed off the more radical Reformers,
while the subsequent accession of Queen Elizabeth, whose attitude
towards marriage was grudging, illiberal, and old-fashioned,
approximating to that of her father, Henry VIII (as witnessed,
for instance, in her decided opposition to the marriage of the
clergy), permanently affected English marriage law. It became
less liberal than that of other Protestant countries, and closer
to that of Catholic countries.
The reform of marriage attempted by the Puritans began in England
in 1644, when an Act was passed asserting "marriage to be no
sacrament, nor peculiar to the Church of God, but common to
mankind and of public interest to every Commonwealth." The Act
added, notwithstanding, that it was expedient marriage should be
solemnized by "a lawful minister of the Word." The more radical
Act of 1653 swept away this provision, and made marriage purely
secular. The banns were to be published (by registrars specially
appointed) in the Church, or (if the parties desired) the
market-place. The marriage was to be performed by a Justice of
the Peace; the age of consent to marriage for a man was made
sixteen, for a woman fourteen (Scobell's _Acts and Ordinances_,
pp. 86, 236). The Restoration abolished this sensible Act, and
reintroduced Canon-law traditions, but the Puritan conception of
marriage was carried over to America, where it took root and
flourished.
It was out of Puritanism, moreover, as represented by Milton, that the
first genuinely modern though as yet still imperfect conception of the
marriage relationship was destined to emerge. The early Reformers in this
matter acted mainly from an obscure instinct of natural revolt in an
environment of plebeian materialism. The Puritans were moved by their
feeling for simplicity and civil order as the conditions for religious
freedom. Milton, in his _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_, published in
1643, when he was thirty-five years of age, proclaimed the supremacy of
the substance of marriage over the form of it, and the spiritual autonomy
of the individual in the regulation of that form. He had grasped the
meaning of that conception of personal responsibility which is the
foundation of sexual relationships as they are beginning to appear to men
to-day. If Milton had left behind him only his writings on marriage and
divorce they would have sufficed to stamp him with the seal of genius.
Christendom had to wait a century and a half before another man of genius
of the first rank, Wilhelm von Humboldt, spoke out with equal authority
and clearness in favor of free marriage and free divorce.
It is to the honor of Milton, and one of his chief claims on our
gratitude, that he is the first great protagonist in Christendom
of the doctrine that marriage is a private matter, and that,
therefore, it should be freely dissoluble by mutual consent, or
even at the desire of one of the parties. We owe to him, says
Howard, "the boldest defence of the liberty of divorce which had
yet appeared. If taken in the abstract, and applied to both sexes
alike, it is perhaps the strongest defence which can be made
through an appeal to mere authority;" though his arguments, being
based on reason and experience, are often ill sustained by his
authority; he is really speaking the language of the modern
social reformer, and Milton's writings on this subject are now
sometimes ranked in importance above all his other work (Masson,
_Life of Milton_, vol. iii; Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 86,
vol. iii, p. 251; C.B. Wheeler, "Milton's Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce," _Nineteenth Century_, Jan., 1907).
Marriage, said Milton, "is not a mere carnal coition, but a human
society; where that cannot be had there can be no true marriage"
(_Doctrine of Divorce_, Bk. i, Ch. XIII); it is "a covenant, the
very being whereof consists not in a forced cohabitation, and
counterfeit performance of duties, but in unfeigned love and
peace" (Ib., Ch. VI). Any marriage that is less than this is "an
idol, nothing in the world." The weak point in Milton's
presentation of the matter is that he never explicitly accords to
the wife the same power of initiative in marriage and divorce as
to the husband. There is, however, nothing in his argument to
prevent its equal application to the wife, an application which,
while never asserting he never denies; and it has been pointed
out that he assumes that women are the equals of men and demands
from them intellectual and spiritual companionship; however ready
Milton may have been to grant complete equality of divorce to the
wife, it would have been impossible for a seventeenth century
Puritan to have obtained any hearing for such a doctrine; his
arguments would have been received with, if that were possible,
even more neglect than they actually met. (Milton's scornful
sonnet concerning the reception of his book is well known.)
Milton insists that in the conventional Christian marriage
exclusive importance is attached to carnal connection. So long as
that connection is possible, no matter what antipathy may exist
between the couple, no matter how mistaken they may have been
"through any error, concealment, or misadventure," no matter if
it is impossible for them to "live in any union or contentment
all their days," yet the marriage still holds good, the two must
"fadge together" (op. cit., Bk. i). It is the Canon law, he says,
which is at fault, "doubtless by the policy of the devil," for
the Canon law leads to licentiousness (op. cit.). It is, he
argues, the absence of reasonable liberty which causes license,
and it is the men who desire to retain the privileges of license
who oppose the introduction of reasonable liberty.
The just ground for divorce is "indisposition, unfitness, or
contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable,
hindering, and ever likely to hinder, the main benefits of
conjugal society, which are solace and peace." Without the "deep
and serious verity" of mutual love, wedlock is "nothing but the
empty husks of a mere outside matrimony," a mere hypocrisy, and
must be dissolved (op. cit.).
Milton goes beyond the usual Puritan standpoint, and not only
rejects courts and magistrates, but approves of self-divorce; for
divorce cannot rightly belong to any civil or earthly power,
since "ofttimes the causes of seeking divorce reside so deeply in
the radical and innocent affections of nature, as is not within
the diocese of law to tamper with." He adds that, for the
prevention of injustice, special points may be referred to the
magistrate, who should not, however, in any case, be able to
forbid divorce (op. cit., Bk. ii, Ch. XXI). Speaking from a
standpoint which we have not even yet attained, he protests
against the absurdity of "authorizing a judicial court to toss
about and divulge the unaccountable and secret reason of
disaffection between man and wife."
In modern times Hinton was accustomed to compare the marriage law
to the law of the Sabbath as broken by Jesus. We find exactly the
same comparison in Milton. The Sabbath, he believes, was made for
God. "Yet when the good of man comes into the scales, we have
that voice of infinite goodness and benignity, that 'Sabbath was
made for man and not man for Sabbath.' What thing ever was made
more for man alone, and less for God, than marriage?" (_op.
cit._, Bk. i, Ch. XI). "If man be lord of the Sabbath, can he be
less than lord of marriage?"
Milton, in this matter as in others, stood outside the currents of his
age. His conception of marriage made no more impression on contemporary
life than his _Paradise Lost_. Even his own Puritan party who had passed
the Act of 1653 had strangely failed to transfer divorce and nullity cases
to the temporal courts, which would at least have been a step on the right
road. The Puritan influence was transferred to America and constituted the
leaven which still works in producing the liberal though too minutely
detailed divorce laws of many States. The American secular marriage
procedure followed that set up by the English Commonwealth, and the dictum
of the great Quaker, George Fox, "We marry none, but are witnesses of
it,"[335] (which was really the sound kernel in the Canon law) is regarded
as the spirit of the marriage law of the conservative but liberal State of
Pennsylvania, where, as recently as 1885, a statute was passed expressly
authorizing a man and woman to solemnize their own marriage.[336]
In England itself the reforms in marriage law effected by the Puritans
were at the Restoration largely submerged. For two and a half centuries
longer the English spiritual courts administered what was substantially
the old Canon law. Divorce had, indeed, become more difficult than before
the Reformation, and the married woman's lot was in consequence harder.
From the sixteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth, English
marriage law was peculiarly harsh and rigid, much less liberal than that
of any other Protestant country. Divorce was unknown to the ordinary
English law, and a special act of Parliament, at enormous expense, was
necessary to procure it in individual cases.[337] There was even an
attitude of self-righteousness in the maintenance of this system. It was
regarded as moral. There was complete failure to realize that nothing is
more immoral than the existence of unreal sexual unions, not only from
the point of view of theoretical but also of practical morality, for no
community could tolerate a majority of such unions.[338] In 1857 an act
for reforming the system was at last passed with great difficulty. It was
a somewhat incoherent and make-shift measure, and was avowedly put forward
only as a step towards further reform; but it still substantially governs
English procedure, and in the eyes of many has set a permanent standard of
morality. The spirit of blind conservatism,--_Nolumus leges Angliæ
mutare_,--which in this sphere had reasserted itself after the vital
movement of Reform and Puritanism, still persists. In questions of
marriage and divorce English legislation and English public feeling are
behind alike both the Latin land of France and the Puritanically moulded
land of the United States.
The author of an able and temperate essay on _The Question of
English Divorce_, summing up the characteristics of the English
divorce law, concludes that it is: (1) unequal, (2) immoral, (3)
contradictory, (4) illogical, (5) uncertain, and (6) unsuited to
present requirements. It was only grudgingly introduced in a
bill, presented to Parliament in 1857, which was stubbornly
resisted during a whole session, not only on religious grounds by
the opponents of divorce, but also by the friends of divorce, who
desired a more liberal measure. It dealt with the sexes
unequally, granting the husband but not the wife divorce for
adultery alone. In introducing the bill the Attorney-General
apologized for this defect, stating that the measure was not
intended to be final, but merely as a step towards further
legislation. That was more than half a century ago, but the
further step has not yet been taken. Incomplete and
unsatisfactory as the measure was, it seems to have been regarded
by many as revolutionary and dangerous in the highest degree. The
author of an article on "Modern Divorce" in the _Universal
Review_ for July, 1859, while approving in principle of the
establishment of a special Divorce Court, yet declared that the
new court was "tending to destroy marriage as a social
institution and to sap female chastity," and that "everyone now
is a husband and wife at will." "No one," he adds, "can now
justly quibble at a deficiency of matrimonial vomitories."
Yet, according to this law, it is not even possible for a wife to
obtain a divorce for her husband's adultery, unless he is also
cruel or deserts her. At first "cruelty" meant physical cruelty
and of a serious kind. But in course of time the meaning of the
word was extended to pain inflicted on the mind, and now coldness
and neglect may almost of themselves constitute cruelty, though
the English court has sometimes had the greatest hesitation in
accepting the most atrocious forms of refined cruelty, because it
involved no "physical" element. "The time may very reasonably be
looked forward to, however," a legal writer has stated
(Montmorency, "The Changing Status of a Married Woman," _Law
Quarterly Review_, April, 1897), "when almost any act of
misconduct will, in itself, be considered to convey such mental
agony to the innocent party as to constitute the cruelty
requisite under the Act of 1857." (The question of cruelty is
fully discussed in J.R. Bishop's _Commentaries on Marriage,
Divorce and Separation_, 1891, vol. i, Ch. XLIX; cf. Howard, op.
cit., vol. ii, p. 111).
There can be little doubt, however, that cruelty alone is a
reasonable cause for divorce. In many American States, where the
facilities for divorce are much greater than in England, cruelty
is recognized as itself sufficient cause, whether the wife or the
husband is the complainant. The acts of cruelty alleged have
sometimes been seemingly very trivial. Thus divorces have been
pronounced in America on the ground of the "cruel and inhuman
conduct" of a wife who failed to sew her husband's buttons on, or
because a wife "struck plaintiff a violent blow with her bustle,"
or because a husband does not cut his toe-nails, or because
"during our whole married life my husband has never offered to
take me out riding. This has been a source of great mental
suffering and injury." In many other cases, it must be added, the
cruelty inflicted by the husband, even by the wife--for though
usually, it is not always, the husband who is the brute--is of an
atrocious and heart-rending character (_Report on Marriage and
Divorce in the United States_, issued by Hon. Carroll D. Wright,
Commissioner of Labor, 1889). But even in many of the apparently
trivial cases--as of a husband who will not wash, and a wife who
is constantly evincing a hasty temper--it must be admitted that
circumstances which, in the more ordinary relationships of life
may be tolerated, become intolerable in the intimate relationship
of sexual union. As a matter of fact, it has been found by
careful investigation that the American courts weigh well the
cases that come before them, and are not careless in the granting
of decrees of divorce.
In 1859 an exaggerated importance was attached to the gross
reasons for divorce, to the neglect of subtle but equally fatal
impediments to the continuance of marriage. This was pointed out
by Gladstone, who was opposed to making adultery a cause of
divorce at all. "We have many causes," he said, "more fatal to
the great obligation of marriage, as disease, idiocy, crime
involving punishment for life." Nowadays we are beginning to
recognize not only such causes as these, but others of a far more
intimate character which, as Milton long ago realized, cannot be
embodied in statutes, or pleaded in law courts. The matrimonial
bond is not merely a physical union, and we have to learn that,
as the author of _The Question of English Divorce_ (p. 49)
remarks, "other than physical divergencies are, in fact, by far
the most important of the originating causes of matrimonial
disaster."
In England and Wales more husbands than wives petition for
divorce, the wives who petition being about 40 per cent, of the
whole. Divorces are increasing, though the number is not large,
in 1907 about 1,300, of whom less than half remarried. The
inadequacy of the divorce law is shown by the fact that during
the same year about 7,000 orders for judicial separation were
issued by magistrates. These separation orders not only do not
give the right to remarry, but they make it impossible to obtain
divorce. They are, in effect, an official permission to form
relationships outside State marriage.
In the United States during the years 1887-1906 nearly 40 per
cent, of the divorces granted were for "desertion," which is
variously interpreted in different States, and must often mean a
separation by mutual consent. Of the remainder, 19 per cent, were
for unfaithfulness, and the same proportion for cruelty; but
while the divorces granted to husbands for the infidelity of
their wives are nearly three times as great proportionately as
those granted to wives for their husband's adultery, with regard
to cruelty it is the reverse, wives obtaining 27 per cent, of
their divorces on that ground and husbands only 10 per cent.
In Prussia divorce is increasing. In 1907 there were eight
thousand divorces, the cause in half the cases being adultery,
and in about a thousand cases malicious desertion. In cases of
desertion the husbands were the guilty parties nearly twice as
often as the wives, in cases of adultery only a fifth to an
eighth part.
There cannot be the slightest doubt that the difficulty, the confusion,
the inconsistency, and the flagrant indecency which surround divorce and
the methods of securing it are due solely and entirely to the subtle
persistence of traditions based, on the one hand, on the Canon law
doctrines of the indissolubility of marriage and the sin of sexual
intercourse outside marriage, and, on the other hand, on the primitive
idea of marriage as a contract which economically subordinates the wife to
the husband and renders her person, or at all events her guardianship, his
property. It is only when we realize how deeply these traditions have
become embedded in the religious, legal, social and sentimental life of
Europe that we can understand how it is that barbaric notions of marriage
and divorce can to-day subsist in a stage of civilization which has, in
many respects, advanced beyond such notions.
The Canon law conception of the abstract religious sanctity of matrimony,
when transferred to the moral sphere, makes a breach of the marriage
relationship seem a public wrong; the conception of the contractive
subordination of the wife makes such a breach on her part, and even, by
transference of ideas, on his part, seem a private wrong. These two ideas
of wrong incoherently flourish side by side in the vulgar mind, even
to-day.
The economic subordination of the wife as a species of property
significantly comes into view when we find that a husband can claim, and
often secure, large sums of money from the man who sexually approaches his
property, by such trespass damaging it in its master's eyes.[339] To a
psychologist it would be obvious that a husband who has lacked the skill
so to gain and to hold his wife's love and respect that it is not
perfectly easy and natural to her to reject the advances of any other man
owes at least as much damages to her as she or her partner owes to him;
while if the failure is really on her side, if she is so incapable of
responding to love and trust and so easy a prey to an outsider, then
surely the husband, far from wishing for any money compensation, should
consider himself more than fully compensated by being delivered from the
necessity of supporting such a woman. In the absence of any false
traditions that would be obvious. It might not, indeed, be unreasonable
that a husband should pay heavily in order to free himself from a wife
whom, evidently, he has made a serious mistake in choosing. But to ordain
that a man should actually be indemnified because he has shown himself
incapable of winning a woman's love is an idea that could not occur in a
civilized society that was not twisted by inherited prejudice.[340] Yet as
matters are to-day there are civilized countries in which it is legally
possible for a husband to enter a prayer for damages against his wife's
paramour in combination with either a petition for judicial separation or
for dissolution of wedlock. In this way adultery is not a crime but a
private injury.[341]
At the same time, however, the influence of Canon law comes inconsistently
to the surface and asserts that a breach of matrimony is a public wrong, a
sin transformed by the State into something almost or quite like a crime.
This is clearly indicated by the fact that in some countries the adulterer
is liable to imprisonment, a liability scarcely nowadays carried into
practice. But exactly the same idea is beautifully illustrated by the
doctrine of "collusion," which, in theory, is still strictly observed in
many countries. According to the doctrine of "collusion" the conditions
necessary to make the divorce possible must on no account be secured by
mutual agreement. In practice it is impossible to prevent more or less
collusion, but if proved in court it constitutes an absolute impediment to
the granting of a divorce, however just and imperative the demand for
divorce may be.
The English Divorce Act of 1857 refused divorce when there was
collusion, as well as when there was any countercharge against
the petitioner, and the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1860 provided
the machinery for guaranteeing these bars to divorce. This
question of collusion is discussed by G.P. Bishop (op. cit.,
vol. ii, Ch. IX). "However just a cause may be," Bishop remarks,
"if parties collude in its management, so that in real fact both
parties are plaintiffs, while by the record the one appears as
plaintiff and the other as defendant, it cannot go forward. All
conduct of this sort, disturbing to the course of justice, falls
within the general idea of fraud on the court. Such is the
doctrine in principle everywhere."
It is quite evident that from the social or the moral point of view, it is
best that when a husband and wife can no longer live together, they should
part amicably, and in harmonious agreement effect all the arrangements
rendered necessary by their separation. The law ridiculously forbids them
to do so, and declares that they must not part at all unless they are
willing to part as enemies. In order to reach a still lower depth of
absurdity and immorality the law goes on to say that if as a matter of
fact they have succeeded in becoming enemies to each other to such an
extent that each has wrongs to plead against the other party they cannot
be divorced at all![342] That is to say that when a married couple have
reached a degree of separation which makes it imperatively necessary, not
merely in their own interests but in the moral interests of society, that
they should be separated and their relations to other parties concerned
regularized, then they must on no account be separated.
It is clear how these provisions of the law are totally opposed to the
demands of reason and morality. Yet at the same time it is equally clear
how no efforts of the lawyers, however skilful or humane those efforts may
be, can bring the present law into harmony with the demands of modern
civilization. It is not the lawyers who are at fault; they have done
their best, and, in England, it is entirely owing to the skilful and
cautious way in which the judges have so far as possible pressed the law
into harmony with modern needs, that our antiquated divorce laws have
survived at all. It is the system which is wrong. That system is the
illegitimate outgrowth of the Canon law which grew up around conceptions
long since dead. It involves the placing of the person who imperils the
theoretical indissolubility of the matrimonial bond in the position of a
criminal, now that he can no longer be publicly condemned as a sinner. To
aid and abet that criminal is itself an offence, and the aider and abettor
of the criminal must, therefore, be inconsequently punished by the curious
method of refraining from punishing the criminal. We do not openly assert
that the defendant in a divorce case is a criminal; that would be to
render the absurdity of it too obvious, and, moreover, would be hardly
consistent with the permission to claim damages which is based on a
different idea. We hover uncertainly between two conceptions of divorce,
both of them bad, each inconsistent with the other, and neither of them
capable of being pushed to its logical conclusions.
The result is that if a perfectly virtuous married couple comes forward to
claim divorce, they are told that it is out of the question, for in such a
case there must be a "defendant." They are to be punished for their
virtue. If each commits adultery and they again come forward to claim
divorce, they are told that it is still out of the question, for there
must be a "plaintiff." Before they were punished for their virtue; now
they are to be punished in exactly the same way for their lack of it. The
couple must humor the law by adopting a course of action which may be
utterly repugnant to both. If only the wife alone will commit adultery, if
only the husband will commit adultery and also inflict some act of cruelty
upon his wife, if the innocent party will descend to the degradation of
employing detectives and hunting up witnesses, the law is at their feet
and hastens to accord to both parties the permission to remarry. Provided,
of course, that the parties have arranged this without "collusion." That
is to say that our law, with its ecclesiastical traditions behind it,
says to the wife: Be a sinner, or to the husband: Be a sinner and a
criminal--then we will do all you wish. The law puts a premium on sin and
on crime. In order to pile absurdity on absurdity it claims that this is
done in the cause of "public morality." To those who accept this point of
view it seems that the sweeping away of divorce laws would undermine the
bases of morality. Yet there can be little doubt that the sooner such
"morality" is undermined, and indeed utterly destroyed, the better it will
be for true morality.
There is an influential movement in England for the reform of
divorce, on the grounds that the present law is unjust,
illogical, and immoral, represented by the Divorce Law Reform
Union. Even the former president of the Divorce Court, Lord
Gorell, declared from the bench in 1906 that the English law
produces deplorable results, and is "full of inconsistencies,
anomalies and inequalities, amounting almost to absurdities." The
points in the law which have aroused most protest, as being most
behind the law of other nations, are the great expense of
divorce, the inequality of the sexes, the failure to grant
divorces for desertion and in cases of hopeless insanity, and the
failure of separation orders to enable the separated parties to
marry again. Separation orders are granted by magistrates for
cruelty, adultery, and desertion. This "separation" is really the
direct descendant of the Canon law divorce _a mensa et thoro_,
and the inability to marry which it involves is merely a survival
of the Canon law tradition. At the present time
magistrates--exercising their discretion, it is admitted, in a
careful and prudent manner--issue some 7,000 separation orders
annually, so that every year the population is increased by
14,000 individuals mostly in the age of sexual vigor, and some
little more than children, who are forbidden by law to form legal
marriages. They contribute powerfully to the great forward
movement which, as was shown in the previous chapter, marks the
morality of our age. But it is highly undesirable that free
marriages should be formed, helplessly, by couples who have no
choice in the matter, for it is unlikely that under such
circumstances any high level of personal responsibility can be
reached. The matter could be easily remedied by dropping
altogether a Canon law tradition which no longer has any vitality
or meaning, and giving to the magistrate's separation order the
force of a decree of divorce.
New Zealand and the Australian colonies, led by Victoria in 1889,
have passed divorce laws which, while more or less framed on the
English model, represent a distinct advance. Thus in New Zealand
the grounds for divorce are adultery on either side, wilful
desertion, habitual drunkenness, and conviction to imprisonment
for a term of years.
It is natural that an Englishman should feel acutely sensitive to this
blot in the law of England and desire the speedy disappearance of a system
so open to scathing sarcasm. It is natural that every humane person should
grow impatient of the spectacle of so many blighted lives, of so much
misery inflicted on innocent persons--and on persons who even when
technically guilty are often the victims of unnatural circumstances--by
the persistence of a mediæval system of ecclesiastical tyranny and
inquisitorial insolence into an age when sexual relationships are becoming
regarded as the sacred secret of the persons intimately concerned, and
when more and more we rely on the responsibility of the individual in
making and maintaining such relationships.
When, however, we refrain from concentrating our attention on particular
countries and embrace the general movement of civilization in the matter
of divorce during recent times, there cannot be the slightest doubt as to
the direction of that movement. England was a pioneer in the movement half
a century ago, and to-day every civilized country is moving in the same
direction. France broke with the old ecclesiastical tradition of the
indissolubility of matrimony in 1885 by a divorce law in some respects
very reasonable. The wife may obtain a divorce on an equality with the
husband (though she is liable to imprisonment for adultery), the
co-respondent occupies a very subordinate position in adultery charges,
and facility is offered for divorce on the ground of simple _injures
graves_ (excluding as far as possible mere incompatibility of temper),
while the judge has the power, which he often successfully exerts, to
effect a reconciliation in private or to grant a decree without public
trial. The influence of France has doubtless been influential in moulding
the divorce laws of the other Latin countries.
In Prussia an enlightened divorce law formerly prevailed by which it was
possible for a couple to separate without scandal when it was clearly
shown that they could not live together in agreement. But the German Code
of 1900 introduced provisions as regards divorce which--while in some
respects more liberal than those of the English law, especially by
permitting divorce for desertion and insanity--are, on the whole,
retrograde as compared with the earlier Prussian law and place the matter
on a cruder and more brutal basis. For two years after the Code came into
operations the number of divorces sank; after that the public and the
courts adapted themselves to the new provisions (more especially one which
allowed divorce for serious neglect of conjugal duties) and the number of
divorces began to increase with great rapidity. "But," remarks Hirschfeld,
"how painful it has now become to read divorce cases! One side abuses the
other, makes accusations of the grossest character, employs detectives to
obtain the necessary proofs of 'dishonorable and immoral conduct,'
whereas, before, both parties realized that they had been deceived in each
other, that they failed to suit each other, and that they could no longer
live together. Thus we see that the narrowing of individual responsibility
in sexual matters has not only had no practical effect, but leads to
injurious results of a serious kind."[343] In England a similar state of
things has prevailed ever since divorce was established, but it seems to
have become too familiar to excite either pain or disgust. Yet, as Adner
has pointed out,[344] it has moved in a direction contrary to the general
tendency of civilization, not only by increasing the inquisitorial
authority of public courts but by emphasizing merely external causes of
divorce and abolishing the more subtle internal causes which constantly
grow in importance with the refinement of civilization.
In Austria until recent years, Canon law ruled absolutely, and matrimony
was indissoluble, as it still remains for the Catholic population. The
results as regards matrimonial happiness were in the highest degree
deplorable. Half a century ago Gross-Hoffinger investigated the marital
happiness of 100 Viennese couples of all social classes, without choice of
cases, and presented the results in detail. He found that 48 couples were
positively unhappy, only 16 were undoubtedly happy, and even among these
there was only one case in which happiness resulted from mutual
faithfulness, happiness in the other cases being only attained by setting
aside the question of fidelity.[345] This picture, it is to be hoped, no
longer remains true. There is an influential Austrian Marriage Reform
Association, publishing a journal called _Die Fessel_, or The Fetter. "One
was chained to another," we are told. "In certain circumstances this must
have been the worst and most torturing penalty of all. The most bizarre
and repulsive couplings took place. There were, it is true, many
affectionate companionships of the chain. But there were many more which
inflicted an eternity of suffering upon one of the pair." This quotation,
it must be added, has nothing to do with what the Canonists, borrowing the
technical term for a prisoner's shackles, suggestively termed the
_vinculum matrimonii_; it was written many years ago concerning the
galleys of the old French convict system. It is, however, recalled to
one's mind by the title which the Austrian Marriage Reform Association has
given to its official organ.
Russia, where the marriage laws are arranged by the Holy Synod aided by
jurists, stands almost alone among the great countries in the reasonable
simplicity of its divorce provisions. Before 1907 divorce was very
difficult to obtain in Russia, but in that year it became possible for a
married couple to separate by mutual consent and after living apart for a
year to become thereby entitled to a divorce enabling them to remarry.
This provision is in accordance with the humane conception of the sexual
relationship which has always tended to prevail in Russia, whither, it
must be remembered, the stern and unnatural ideals of compulsory celibacy
cherished by the Western Church never completely penetrated; the clergy of
the Eastern Church are married, though the marriage must take place before
they enter the priesthood, and they could not sympathize with the
anti-sexual tone of the marriage regulations laid down by the celibate
clergy of the west.
Switzerland, again, which has been regarded as the political laboratory
of Europe, also stands apart in the liberality of its divorce legislation.
A renewable divorce for two years may be obtained in Switzerland when
there are "circumstances which seriously affect the maintenance of the
conjugal tie." To the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, finally, belongs the
honor of having firmly maintained throughout the great principle of
divorce by mutual consent under legal conditions, as established by
Napoleon in his Code of 1803. The smaller countries generally are in
advance of the large in matters of divorce law. The Norwegian law is
liberal. The new Roumanian Code permits divorce by mutual consent,
provided both parents grant equal shares of their property to the
children. The little principality of Monaco has recently introduced the
reasonable provision of granting divorce for, among other causes,
alcoholism, syphilis, and epilepsy, so protecting the future race.
Outside Europe the most instructive example of the tendency of divorce is
undoubtedly furnished by the United States of America. The divorce laws of
the States are mainly on a Puritanic basis, and they retain not only the
Puritanic love of individual freedom but the Puritanic precisianism.[346]
In some States, notably Iowa, the statute-makers have been constantly
engaged in adopting, changing, abrogating and re-enacting the provisions
of their divorce laws, and Howard has shown how much confusion and
awkwardness arise by such perpetual legislative fiddling over small
details.
This restless precisianism has somewhat disguised the generally broad and
liberal tendency of marriage law in America, and has encouraged foreign
criticism of American social institutions. As a matter of fact the
prevalence of divorce in America is enormously exaggerated. The proportion
of divorced persons in the population appears to be less than one per
cent., and, contrary to a frequent assertion, it is by no means the rule
for divorced persons to remarry immediately. Taking into account the
special conditions of life in the United States the prevalence of divorce
is small and its character by no means reveals a low grade morality. An
impartial and competent critic of the American people, Professor
Münsterberg, remarks that the real ground which mainly leads to divorce in
the United States--not the mere legal pretexts made compulsory by the
precisianism of the law--is the highly ethical objection to continuing
externally in a marriage which has ceased to be spiritually congenial. "It
is the women especially," he says, "and generally the very best women, who
prefer to take the step, with all the hardships which it involves, to
prolonging a marriage which is spiritually hypocritical and immoral."[347]
The people of the United States, above all others, cherish ideals of
individualism; they are also the people among whom, above all others,
there is the greatest amount of what Reibmayr calls "blood-chaos." Under
such circumstances the difficulties of conjugal life are necessarily at a
maximum, and marriage union is liable to subtle impediments which must
forever elude the statute-book.[348] There can be little doubt that the
practical sagacity of the American people will enable them sooner or later
to recognize this fact, and that finally fulfilling the Puritanic drift of
their divorce legislation--as foreshadowed in its outcome by Milton--they
will agree to trust their own citizens with the responsibility of deciding
so private a matter as their conjugal relationships, with, of course,
authority in the courts to see that no injustice is committed. It is,
indeed, surprising that the American people, usually intolerant of State
interference, should in this matter so long have tolerated such
interference in so private a matter.
The movement of divorce is not confined to Christendom; it is a mark of
modern civilization. In Japan the proportion of divorces is higher than in
any other country, not excluding the United States.[349] The most vigorous
and progressive countries are those that insist most firmly on the purity
of sexual unions. In the United States it was pointed out many years ago
that divorce is most prevalent where the standard of education and
morality is highest. It was the New England States, with strong Puritanic
traditions of moral freedom, which took the lead in granting facility to
divorce. The divorce movement is not, as some have foolishly supposed, a
movement making for immorality.[350] Immorality is the inevitable
accompaniment of indissoluble marriage; the emphasis on the sanctity of a
merely formal union discourages the growth of moral responsibility as
regards the hypothetically unholy unions which grow up beneath its shadow.
To insist, on the other hand, by establishing facility of divorce, that
sexual unions shall be real, is to work in the cause of morality. The
lands in which divorce by mutual consent has prevailed longest are
probably among the most, and not the least, moral of lands.
Surprise has been expressed that although divorce by mutual consent
commended itself as an obviously just and reasonable measure two thousand
years ago to the legally-minded Romans that solution has even yet been so
rarely attained by modern states.[351] Wherever society is established on
a solidly organized basis and the claims of reason and humanity receive
due consideration--even when the general level of civilization is not in
every respect high--there we find a tendency to divorce by mutual consent.
In Japan, according to the new Civil Code, much as in ancient
Rome, marriage is effected by giving notice of the fact to the
registrar in the presence of two witnesses, and with the consent
(in the case of young couples) of the heads of their families.
There may be a ceremony, but it is not demanded by the law.
Divorce is effected in exactly the same way, by simply having the
registration cancelled, provided both husband and wife are over
twenty-five years of age. For younger couples unhappily married,
and for cases in which mutual consent cannot be obtained,
judicial divorce exists. This is granted for various specific
causes, of which the most important is "grave insult, such as to
render living together unbearable" (Ernest W. Clement, "The New
Woman in Japan," _American Journal Sociology_, March, 1903). Such
a system, like so much else achieved by Japanese organization,
seems reasonable, guarded, and effective.
In the very different and far more ancient marriage system of
China, divorce by mutual consent is equally well-established.
Such divorce by mutual consent takes place for incompatibility of
temperament, or when both husband and wife desire it. There are,
however, various antiquated and peculiar provisions in the
Chinese marriage laws, and divorce is compulsory for the wife's
adultery or serious physical injuries inflicted by either party
on the other. (The marriage laws of China are fully set forth by
Paul d'Enjoy, _La Revue_, Sept. 1, 1905.)
Among the Eskimo (who, as readers of Nansen's fascinating books
on their morals will know, are in some respects a highly
socialized people) the sexes are absolutely equal, marriages are
perfectly free, and separation is equally free. The result is
that there are no uncongenial unions, and that no unpleasant word
is heard between man and wife (Stefánsson, _Harper's Magazine_,
Nov., 1908).
Among the ancient Welsh, women, both before and after marriage,
enjoyed great freedom, far more than was afforded either by
Christianity or the English Common law. "Practically either
husband or wife could separate when either one or both chose"
(Rhys and Brynmor-Jones, _The Welsh People_, p. 214). It was so
also in ancient Ireland. Women held a very high position, and the
marriage tie was very free, so as to be practically, it would
appear, dissoluble by mutual consent. So far as the Brehon laws
show, says Ginnell (_The Brehon Laws_, p. 212), "the marriage
relation was extremely loose, and divorce was as easy, and could
be obtained on as slight ground, as is now the case in some of
the States of the American Union. It appears to have been
obtained more easily by the wife than by the husband. When
obtained on her petition, she took away with her all the property
she had brought her husband, all her husband had settled upon
her on their marriage, and in addition so much of her husband's
property as her industry appeared to have entitled her to."
Even in early French history we find that divorce by mutual
consent was very common. It was sufficient to prepare in
duplicate a formal document to this effect: "Since between N. and
his wife there is discord instead of charity according to God,
and that in consequence it is impossible for them to live
together, it has pleased both to separate, and they have
accordingly done so." Each of the parties was thus free either to
retire into a cloister or to contract another union (E. de la
Bedollière, _Histoire des Moeurs des Français_, vol. i, p. 317).
Such a practice, however it might accord with the germinal
principle of consent embodied in the Canon law, was far too
opposed to the ecclesiastical doctrine of the sacramental
indissolubility of matrimony to be permanently allowed, and it
was completely crushed out.
The fact that we so rarely find divorce by mutual consent in Christendom
until the beginning of the nineteenth century, that then it required a man
of stupendous and revolutionary genius like Napoleon to reintroduce it,
and that even he was unable to do so effectually, is clearly due to the
immense victory which the ascetic spirit of Christianity, as firmly
embodied in the Canon law, had gained over the souls and bodies of men. So
subjugated were European traditions and institutions by this spirit that
even the volcanic emotional uprising of the Reformation, as we have seen,
could not shake it off. When Protestant States naturally resumed the
control of secular affairs which had been absorbed by the Church, and
rescued from ecclesiastical hands those things which belonged to the
sphere of the individual conscience, it might have seemed that marriage
and divorce would have been among the first concerns to be thus
transferred. Yet, as we know, England was about as much enslaved to the
spirit and even the letter of Canon law in the nineteenth as in the
fourteenth century, and even to-day English law, though no longer
supported by the feeling of the masses, clings to the same traditions.
There seems to be little doubt, however, that the modern movement for
divorce must inevitably tend to reach the goal of separation by the will
of both parties, or, under proper conditions and restrictions, by the
will of one party. It now requires the will of two persons to form a
marriage; law insists on that condition.[352] It is logical as well as
just that law should take the next step involved by the historical
evolution of marriage, and equally insist that it requires the will of two
persons to maintain a marriage. This solution is, without doubt, the only
way of deliverance from the crudities, the indecencies, the inextricable
complexities which are introduced into law by the vain attempt to foresee
in detail all the possibilities of conjugal disharmony which may arise
under the conditions of modern civilization. It is, moreover, we may rest
assured, the only solution which the growing modern sense of personal
responsibility in sexual matters traced in the previous chapter--the
responsibility of women as well as of men--will be content to accept.
The subtle and complex character of the sexual relationships in a
high civilization and the unhappy results of their State
regulation were well expressed by Wilhelm von Humboldt in his
_Ideen zu einen Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates
zu bestimmen_, so long ago as 1792. "A union so closely allied
with the very nature of the respective individuals must be
attended with the most hurtful consequences when the State
attempts to regulate it by law, or, through the force of its
institutions, to make it repose on anything save simple
inclination. When we remember, moreover, that the State can only
contemplate the final results of such regulations on the race, we
shall be still more ready to admit the justice of this
conclusion. It may reasonably be argued that a solicitude for the
race only conducts to the same results as the highest solicitude
for the most beautiful development of the inner man. For, after
careful observation, it has been found that the uninterrupted
union of one man with one woman is most beneficial to the race,
and it is likewise undeniable that no other union springs from
true, natural, harmonious love. And further, it may be observed,
that such love leads to the same results as those very relations
which law and custom tend to establish. The radical error seems
to be that the law commands; whereas such a relation cannot mould
itself according to external arrangements, but depends wholly on
inclination; and wherever coercion or guidance comes into
collision with inclination, they divert it still farther from the
proper path. Wherefore it appears to me that the State should not
only loosen the bonds in this instance and leave ampler freedom
to the citizen, but that it should entirely withdraw its active
solicitude from the institution of marriage, and, both generally
and in its particular modifications, should rather leave it
wholly to the free choice of the individuals, and the various
contracts they may enter into with respect to it. I should not be
deterred from the adoption of this principle by the fear that all
family relations might be disturbed, for, although such a fear
might be justified by considerations of particular circumstances
and localities, it could not fairly be entertained in an inquiry
into the nature of men and States in general. For experience
frequently convinces us that just where law has imposed no
fetters, morality most surely binds; the idea of external
coercion is one entirely foreign to an institution which, like
marriage, reposes only on inclination and an inward sense of
duty; and the results of such coercive institutions do not at all
correspond to the intentions in which they originate."
A long succession of distinguished thinkers--moralists,
sociologists, political reformers--have maintained the social
advantages of divorce by mutual consent, or, under guarded
circumstances, at the wish of one party. Mutual consent was the
corner-stone of Milton's conception of marriage. Montesquieu said
that true divorce must be the result of mutual consent and based
on the impossibility of living together. Sénancour seems to agree
with Montesquieu. Lord Morley (_Diderot_, vol. ii, Ch. I),
echoing and approving the conclusions of Diderot's _Supplément au
Voyage de Bougainville_ (1772), adds that the separation of
husband and wife is "a transaction in itself perfectly natural
and blameless, and often not only laudable, but a duty." Bloch
(_Sexual Life of Our Time_, p. 240), with many other writers,
emphasizes the truth of Shelley's saying, that the freedom of
marriage is the guarantee of its durability. (That the facts of
life point in the same direction has been shown in the previous
chapter.) The learned Caspari (_Die Soziale Frage über die
Freiheit der Ehe_), while disclaiming any prevision of the
future, declares that if sexual relationships are to remain or to
become moral, there must be an easier dissolution of marriage.
Howard, at the conclusion of his exhaustive history of
matrimonial institutions (vol. iii p. 220), though he himself
believes that marriage is peculiarly in need of regulation by
law, is yet constrained to admit that it is perfectly clear to
the student of history that the modern divorce movement is "but a
part of the mighty movement for social liberation which has been
gaining in volume and strength since the Reformation." Similarly
the cautious and judicial Westermarck concludes the chapter on
marriage of his _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_ (vol.
ii, p. 398) with the statement that "when both husband and wife
desire to separate, it seems to many enlightened minds that the
State has no right to prevent them from dissolving the marriage
contract, provided the children are properly cared for; and that,
for the children, also, it is better to have the supervision of
one parent only than of two who cannot agree."
In France the leaders of the movement of social reform seem to be
almost, or quite, unanimous in believing that the next step in
regard to divorce is the establishment of divorce by mutual
consent. This was, for instance, the result reached in a
symposium to which thirty-one distinguished men and women
contributed. All were in favor of divorce by mutual consent; the
only exception was Madame Adam, who said she had reached a state
of skepticism with regard to political and social forms, but
admitted that for nearly half a century she had been a strong
advocate of divorce. A large number of the contributors were in
favor of divorce at the desire of one party only (_La Revue_,
March 1, 1901). In other countries, also, there is a growing
recognition that this solution of the question, with due
precautions to avoid any abuses to which it might otherwise be
liable, is the proper and inevitable solution.
As to the exact method by which divorce by mutual consent should
be effected, opinions differ, and the matter is likely to be
differently arranged in different countries. The Japanese plan
seems simple and judicious (see _ante_, p. 461). Paul and Victor
Margueritte (_Quelques Idées_, pp. 3 et seq.), while realizing
that the conflict of feeling in the matter of personal
associations involves decisions which are entirely outside the
competence of legal tribunals, recognize that such tribunals are
necessary in order to deal with the property of divorced persons,
and also, in the last resort, with the question of the care of
the children. They should not act in public. These writers
propose that each party should choose a representative, and that
these two should choose a third; and that this tribunal should
privately investigate, and if they agreed should register the
divorce, which should take place six or twelve months later, or
three years later, if only desired by one of the parties. Dr.
Shufeldt ("Psychopathia Sexualis and Divorce") proposes that a
divorce-court judge should conduct, alone, the hearing of any
cases of marital discord, the husband and wife appearing directly
before him, without counsel, though with their witnesses, if
necessary; should medical experts be required the judge alone
would be empowered to call them.
When we realize that the long delay in the acceptance of so just and
natural a basis of divorce is due to an artificial tension created by the
pressure of the dead hand of Canon law--a tension confined exclusively to
Christendom--we may also realize that with the final disappearance of that
tension the just and natural order in this relationship will spring back
the more swiftly because that relief has been so long delayed. "Nature
abhors a vacuum nowhere more than in a marriage," Ellen Key remarks in the
language of antiquated physical metaphor; the vacuum will somehow be
filled, and if it cannot be filled in a natural and orderly manner it will
be filled in an unnatural and disorderly manner. It is the business of
society to see that no laws stand in the way of the establishment of
natural order.
Reform upon a reasonable basis has been made difficult by the unfortunate
retention of the idea of delinquency. With the traditions of the Canonists
at the back of our heads we have somehow persuaded ourselves that there
cannot be a divorce unless there is a delinquent, a real serious
delinquent who, if he had his deserts, would be imprisoned and consigned
to infamy. But in the marriage relationship, as in all other
relationships, it is only in a very small number of cases that one party
stands towards the other as a criminal, even a defendant. This is often
obvious in the early stages of conjugal alienation. But it remains true in
the end. The wife commits adultery and the husband as a matter of course
assumes the position of plaintiff. But we do not inquire how it is that he
has not so won her love that her adultery is out of the question; such
inquiry might lead to the conclusion that the real defendant is the
husband. And similarly when the husband is accused of brutal cruelty the
law takes no heed to inquire whether in the infliction of less brutal but
not less poignant wounds, the wife also should not be made defendant.
There are a few cases, but only a few, in which the relationship of
plaintiff and defendant is not a totally false and artificial
relationship, an immoral legal fiction. In most cases, if the truth were
fully known, husband and wife should come side by side to the divorce
court and declare: "We are both in the wrong: we have not been able to
fulfil our engagements to each other; we have erred in choosing each
other." The long reports of the case in open court, the mutual
recriminations, the detectives, the servant girls and other witnesses, the
infamous inquisition into intimate secrets--all these things, which no
necessity could ever justify, are altogether unnecessary.
It is said by some that if there were no impediments to divorce a man
might be married in succession to half a dozen women. These simple-minded
or ignorant persons do not seem to be aware that even when marriage is
absolutely indissoluble a man can, and frequently does, carry on sexual
relationships not merely successively, but, if he chooses, even
simultaneously, with half a dozen women. There is, however, this important
difference that, in the one case, the man is encouraged by the law to
believe that he need only treat at most one of the six women with anything
approaching to justice and humanity; in the other case the law insists
that he shall fairly and openly fulfil his obligations towards all the six
women. It is a very important difference, and there ought to be no
question as to which state of things is moral and which immoral. It is no
concern of the State to inquire into the number of persons with whom a man
or a woman chooses to have sexual relationships; it is a private matter
which may indeed affect their own finer spiritual development but which it
is impertinent for the State to pry into. It is, however, the concern of
the State, in its own collective interest and that of its members, to see
that no injustice is done.
But what about the children? That is necessarily a very important
question. The question of the arrangements made for the children in cases
of divorce is always one to which the State must give its regulative
attention, for it is only when there are children that the State has any
real concern in the matter.
At one time it was even supposed by some that the existence of children
was a serious argument against facility of divorce. A more reasonable view
is now generally taken. It is, in the first place, recognized that a very
large proportion of couples seeking divorce have no children. In England
the proportion is about forty per cent.; in some other countries it is
doubtless larger still. But even when there are children no one who
realizes what the conditions are in families where the parents ought to be
but are not divorced can have any doubt that usually those conditions are
extremely bad for the children. The tension between the parents absorbs
energy which should be devoted to the children. The spectacle of the
grievances or quarrels of their parents is demoralizing for the children,
and usually fatal to any respect towards them. At the best it is
injuriously distressing to the children. One effective parent, there
cannot be the slightest doubt, is far better for a child than two
ineffective parents. There is a further point, often overlooked, for
consideration here. Two people when living together at variance--one of
them perhaps, it is not rarely the case, nervously abnormal or
diseased--are not fitted to become parents, nor in the best condition for
procreation. It is, therefore, not merely an act of justice to the
individual, but a measure called for in the interests of the State, that
new citizens should not be brought into the community through such
defective channels.[353] From this point of view all the interests of the
State are on the side of facility of divorce.
There is a final argument which is often brought forward against facility
of divorce. Marriage, it is said, is for the protection of women;
facilitate divorce and women are robbed of that protection. It is obvious
that this argument has little application as against divorce by mutual
consent. Certainly it is necessary that divorce should only be arranged
under conditions which in each individual case have received the approval
of the law as just. But it must always be remembered that the essential
fact of marriage is not naturally, and should never artificially be made,
an economic question. It is possible--that is a question which society
will have to consider--that a woman should be paid for being a mother on
the ground that she is rearing new citizens for the State. But neither the
State nor her husband nor anyone else ought to pay her for exercising
conjugal rights. The fact that such an argument can be brought forward
shows how far we are from the sound biological attitude towards sexual
relationships. Equally unsound is the notion that the virgin bride brings
her husband at marriage an important capital which is consumed in the
first act of intercourse and can never be recovered. That is a notion
which has survived into civilization, but it belongs to barbarism and not
to civilization. So far as it has any validity it lies within a sphere of
erotic perversity which cannot be taken into consideration in an
estimation of moral values. For most men, however, in any case, whether
they realize it or not, the woman who has been initiated into the
mysteries of love has a higher erotic value than the virgin, and there
need be no anxiety on this ground concerning the wife who has lost her
virginity. It is probably a significant fact that this anxiety for the
protection of women by the limitation of divorce is chiefly brought
forward by men and not by women themselves. A woman at marriage is
deprived by society and the law of her own name. She has been deprived
until recently of the right to her own earnings. She is deprived of the
most intimate rights in her own person. She is deprived under some
circumstances of her own child, against whom she may have committed no
offence whatever. It is perhaps scarcely surprising that she is not
greatly appreciative of the protection afforded her by the withholding of
the right to divorce her husband. "Ah, no, no protection!" a brilliant
French woman has written. "We have been protected long enough. The only
protection to grant women is to cease protecting them."[354] As a matter
of fact the divorce movement appears to develop, on the whole, with that
development of woman's moral responsibility traced in the previous
chapter, and where divorce is freest women occupy the highest position.
We cannot fail to realize as we grasp the nature and direction of the
modern movement of divorce that the final tendency of that movement is to
efface itself. Necessary as the Divorce Court has been as the inevitable
corollary of an impossible ecclesiastical conception of marriage, no
institution is now more hideous, more alien to the instinctive feelings
generated by a fine civilization, and more opposed to the dignity of
womanhood.[355] Its disappearance and its substitution by private
arrangements, effected on their contractive sides, especially if there are
children to provide for, under legal and if necessary judicial
supervision, is, and always has been, the natural result of the attainment
of a reasonably high stage of civilization. The Divorce Court has merely
been a phase in the history of modern marriage, and a phase that has
really been repugnant to all concerned in it. There is no need to view the
project of its ultimate disappearance with anything but satisfaction. It
was merely the outcome of an artificial conception of marriage. It is time
to return to the consideration of that conception.
We have seen that when the Catholic development of the archaic conception
of marriage as a sacrament, slowly elaborated and fossilized by the
ingenuity of the Canonists, was at last nominally dethroned, though not
destroyed, by the movement associated with the Reformation, it was
replaced by the conception of marriage as a contract. This conception of
marriage as a contract still enjoys a considerable amount of credit
amongst us.
There must always be contractive elements, implicit or explicit, in a
marriage; that was well recognized even by the Canonists. But when we
treat marriage as all contract, and nothing but contract, we have to
realize that we have set up a very peculiar form of contract, not
voidable, like other contracts, by the agreement of the parties to it, but
dissoluble as a sort of punishment of delinquency rather than by the
voluntary annulment of a bond.[356] When the Protestant Reformers seized
on the idea of marriage as a contract they were not influenced by any
reasoned analysis of the special characteristics of a contract; they were
merely anxious to secure a plausible ground, already admitted even by the
Canonists to cover certain aspects of the matrimonial union, on which they
could declare that marriage is a secular and not an ecclesiastical matter,
a civil bond and not a sacramental process.[357]
Like so much else in the Protestant revolt, the strength of this attitude
lay in the fact that it was a protest, based on its negative side on
reasonable and natural grounds. But while Protestantism was right in its
attempt--for it was only an attempt--to deny the authority of Canon law,
that attempt was altogether unsatisfactory on the positive side. As a
matter of fact marriage is not a true contract and no attempt has ever
been made to convert it into a true contract.
Various writers have treated marriage as an actual contract or
argued that it ought to be converted into a true contract. Mrs.
Mona Caird, for instance ("The Morality of Marriage,"
_Fortnightly Review_, 1890), believes that when marriage becomes
really a contract "a couple would draw up their agreement, or
depute the task to their friends, as is now generally done as
regards marriage settlements. They agree to live together on such
and such terms, making certain stipulations within the limits of
the code." The State, she holds, should, however, demand an
interval of time between notice of divorce and the divorce
itself, if still desired when that interval has passed.
Similarly, in the United States Dr. Shufeldt ("Needed Revision of
the Laws of Marriage and Divorce," _Medico-Legal Journal_, Dec.,
1897) insists that marriage must be entirely put into the hands
of the legal profession and "made a civil contract, explicit in
detail, and defining terms of divorce, in the event that a
dissolution of the contract is subsequently desired." He adds
that medical certificates of freedom from hereditary and acquired
disease should be required, and properly regulated probationary
marriages also be instituted.
In France, a deputy of the Chamber was, in 1891, so convinced
that marriage is a contract, like any other contract, that he
declared that "to perform music at the celebration of a marriage
is as ridiculous as it would be to send for a tenor to a notary's
to celebrate a sale of timber." He was of quite different mind
from Pepys, who, a couple of centuries earlier, had been equally
indignant at the absence of music from a wedding, which, he said,
made it like a coupling of dog and bitch.
A frequent demand of those who insist that marriage must be
regarded as a contract is marriage contracted for a term of
years. Marriages could be contracted for a term of five years or
less in old Japan, and it is said that they were rarely or never
dissolved at the end of the term. Goethe, in his
_Wahlverwandtschaften_ (Part I, Ch. X) incidentally introduced a
proposal for marriages for a term of five years and attached much
moral significance to the prolongation of the marriage beyond
that term without external compulsion. (Bloch considers that
Goethe had probably heard of the Japanese custom, _Sexual Life of
Our Time_, p. 241.) Professor E.D. Cope ("The Marriage Problem,"
_Open Court_, Nov. 15 and 22, 1888), likewise, in order to remove
matrimony from the domain of caprice and to permit full and fair
trial, advocated "a system of civil marriage contracts which
shall run for a definite time. These contracts should be of the
same value and effect as the existing marriage contract. The time
limits should be increased rapidly, so as to prevent women of
mature years being deprived of support. The first contract ought
not to run for less than five years, so as to give ample
opportunity for acquaintance, and for the recovery from temporary
disagreements." This first contract, Cope held, should be
terminable at the wish of either party; the second contract, for
ten or fifteen years, should only be terminable at the wish of
both parties, and the third should be permanent and indissoluble.
George Meredith, the distinguished novelist, also, more recently,
threw out the suggestion that marriages should be contracted for
a term of years.
It can scarcely be said that marriages for a term of years
constitute a very satisfactory solution of the difficulties at
present encountered. They would not commend themselves to young
lovers, who believe that their love is eternal, nor, so long as
the union proves satisfactory, is there any need to introduce the
disturbing idea of a legal termination of the contract. On the
other hand, if the union proves unhappy, it is not reasonable to
insist on the continuation for ten or even five years of an empty
form which corresponds to no real marriage union. Even if
marriage is placed on the most prosaic contractive basis it is a
mistake, and indeed an impossibility, to pre-ordain the length of
its duration. The system of fixing the duration of marriage
beforehand for a term of years involves exactly the same
principle as the system of fixing it beforehand for life. It is
open to the same objection that it is incompatible with any
vital relationship. As the demand for vital reality and
effectiveness in social relationships grows, this fact is
increasingly felt. We see exactly the same change among us in
regard to the system of inflicting fixed sentences of
imprisonment on criminals. To send a man to prison for five years
or for life, without any regard to the unknown problem of the
vital reaction of imprisonment on the man--a reaction which will
be different in every individual case--is slowly coming to be
regarded as an absurdity.
If marriage were really placed on the basis of a contract, not only would
that contract be voidable at the will of the two parties concerned,
without any question of delinquency coming into the question, but those
parties would at the outset themselves determine the conditions regulating
the contract. But nothing could be more unlike our actual marriage. The
two parties are bidden to accept each other as husband and wife; they are
not invited to make a contract; they are not even told that, little as
they may know it, they have in fact made a very complicated and elaborate
contract that was framed on lines laid down, for a large part, thousands
of years before they were born. Unless they have studied law they are
totally ignorant, also, that this contract contains clauses which under
some circumstances may be fatal to either of them. All that happens is
that a young couple, perhaps little more than children, momentarily dazed
by emotion, are hurried before the clergyman or the civil registrar of
marriages, to bind themselves together for life, knowing nothing of the
world and scarcely more of each other, knowing nothing also of the
marriage laws, not even perhaps so much as that there are any marriage
laws, never realizing that--as has been truly said--from the place they
are entering beneath a garland of flowers there is, on this side of death,
no exit except through the trapdoor of a sewer.[358]
When a woman marries she gives up the right to her own person.
Thus, according to the law of England, a man "cannot be guilty of
a rape upon his lawful wife." Stephen, who, in the first edition
of his _Digest of Criminal Law_, thought that under some
circumstances a man might be indicted for rape upon his wife, in
the last edition withdrew that opinion. A man may rape a
prostitute, but he cannot rape his wife. Having once given her
consent to sexual intercourse by the act of marrying a man, she
has given it forever, whatever new circumstances may arise, and
he has no need to ask her consent to sexual intercourse, not even
if he is knowingly suffering at the time from a venereal disease
(see, e.g., an article on "Sex Bias," _Westminster Review_,
March, 1888).
The duty of the wife to allow "conjugal rights" to her husband is
another aspect of her legal subjection to him. Even in the
nineteenth century a Suffolk lady of good family was imprisoned
in Ipswich Goal for many years and fed on bread and water, though
suffering from various diseases, till she died, simply because
she continued to disregard the decree requiring her to render
conjugal rights to her husband. This state of things was partly
reformed by the Matrimonial Causes Bill of 1884, and that bill
was passed, not to protect women, but men, against punishment for
refusal to restore conjugal rights. Undoubtedly, the modern
tendency, although it has progressed very slowly, is against
applying compulsion to either husband or wife to yield "conjugal
rights;" and since the Jackson case it is not possible in England
for a husband to use force in attempting to compel his wife to
live with him. This tendency is still more marked in the United
States; thus the Iowa Supreme Court, a few years ago, decided
that excessive demands for coitus constituted cruelty of a degree
justifying divorce (J.G. Kiernan, _Alienist and Neurologist_,
Nov. 1906, p. 466).
The slender tenure of the wife over her person is not confined to
the sexual sphere, but even extends to her right to life. In
England, if a wife kills her husband, it was formerly the very
serious offence of "petit treason," and it is still murder. But,
if a husband kills his wife and is able to plead her adultery and
his jealousy, it is only manslaughter. (In France, where jealousy
is regarded with extreme indulgence, even a wife who kills her
husband is often acquitted.)
It must not, however, be supposed that all the legal inequalities
involved by marriage are in favor of the husband. A large number
of injustices are also inflicted on the husband. The husband, for
instance, is legally responsible for the libels uttered by his
wife, and he is equally responsible civilly for the frauds she
commits, even if she is living apart from him. (This was, for
instance, held by an English judge in 1908; "he could only say he
regretted it, for it seems a hard case. But it was the law.")
Belfort Bax has, in recent years, especially insisted on the
hardships inflicted by English law in such ways as these. There
can be no doubt that marriage, as at present constituted,
inflicts serious wrongs on the husband as well as on the wife.
Marriage is, therefore, not only not a contract in the true sense,[359]
but in the only sense in which it is a contract it is a contract of an
exceedingly bad kind. When the Canonists superseded the old conception of
marriage as a contract of purchase by their sacramental marriage, they
were in many respects effecting a real progress, and the return to the
idea of a contract, as soon as its temporary value as a protest has
ceased, proves altogether out of harmony with any advanced stage of
civilization. It was revived in days before the revolt against slavery had
been inaugurated. Personal contracts are out of harmony with our modern
civilization and our ideas of individual liberty. A man can no longer
contract himself as a slave nor sell his wife. Yet marriage, regarded as a
contract, is of precisely the same class as those transactions.[360] In
every high stage of civilization this fact is clearly recognized, and
young couples are not even allowed to contract themselves out in marriage
unconditionally. We see this, for instance, in the wise legislation of the
Romans. Even under the Christian Emperors that sound principle was
maintained and the lawyer Paulus wrote:[361] "Marriage was so free,
according to ancient opinion, that even agreements between the parties not
to separate from one another could have no validity." In so far as the
essence and not any accidental circumstance of the marital relationships
is made a contract, it is a contract of a nature which the two parties
concerned are not competent to make. Biologically and psychologically it
cannot be valid, and with the growth of a humane civilization it is
explicitly declared to be legally invalid.
For, there can be no doubt about it, the intimate and essential fact of
marriage--the relationship of sexual intercourse--is not and cannot be a
contract. It is not a contract but a fact; it cannot be effected by any
mere act of will on the part of the parties concerned; it cannot be
maintained by any mere act of will. To will such a contract is merely to
perform a worse than indecorous farce. Certainly many of the circumstances
of marriage are properly the subject of contract, to be voluntarily and
deliberately made by the parties to the contract. But the essential fact
of marriage--a love strong enough to render the most intimate of
relationships possible and desirable through an indefinite number of
years--cannot be made a matter for contract. Alike from the physical point
of view, and the psychical point of view, no binding contract--and a
contract is worthless if it is not binding--can possibly be made. And the
making of such pseudo-contracts concerning the future of a marriage,
before it has even been ascertained that the marriage can ever become a
fact at all, is not only impossible but absurd.
It is of course true that this impossibility, this absurdity, are never
visible to the contracting parties. They have applied to the question all
the very restricted tests that are conventionally permitted to them, and
the satisfactory results of these tests, together with the consciousness
of possessing an immense and apparently inexhaustible fund of loving
emotion, seem to them adequate to the fulfilment of the contract
throughout life, if not indeed eternity.
As a child of seven I chanced to be in a semi-tropical island of the
Pacific supplied with fruit, especially grapes, from the mainland, and a
dusky market woman always presented a large bunch of grapes to the little
English stranger. But a day came when the proffered bunch was firmly
refused; the superabundance of grapes had produced a reaction of disgust.
A space of nearly forty years was needed to overcome the repugnance to
grapes thus acquired. Yet there can be no doubt that if at the age of six
that little boy had been asked to sign a contract binding him to accept
grapes every day, to keep them always near him, to eat them and to enjoy
them every day, he would have signed that contract as joyously as any
radiant bridegroom or demure bride signs the register in the vestry. But
is a complex man or woman, with unknown capacities for changing or
deteriorating, and with incalculable aptitudes for inflicting torture and
arousing loathing, is such a creature more easy to be bound to than an
exquisite fruit? All the countries of the world in which the subtle
influence of the Canon law of Christendom still makes itself felt, have
not yet grasped a general truth which is well within the practical
experience of a child of seven.[362]
The notion that such a relationship as that of marriage can rest
on so fragile a basis as a pre-ordained contract has naturally
never prevailed widely in its extreme form, and has been unknown
altogether in many parts of the world. The Romans, as we know,
explicitly rejected it, and even at a comparatively early period
recognized the legality of marriage by _usus_, thus declaring in
effect that marriage must be a fact, and not a mere undertaking.
There has been a widespread legal tendency, especially where the
traditions of Roman law have retained any influence, to regard
the cohabitation of marriage as the essential fact of the
relationship. It was an old rule even under the Catholic Church
that marriage may be presumed from cohabitation (see, e.g.,
Zacchia, _Questionum Medico-legalium Opus_, edition of 1688, vol.
iii, p. 234). Even in England cohabitation is already one of the
presumptions in favor of the existence of marriage (though not
necessarily by itself regarded as sufficient), provided the woman
is of unblemished character, and does not appear to be a common
prostitute (Nevill Geary, _The Law of Marriage_, Ch. III). If,
however, according to Lord Watson's judicial statement in the
Dysart Peerage case, a man takes his mistress to a hotel or goes
with her to a baby-linen shop and speaks of her as his wife, it
is to be presumed that he is acting for the sake of decency, and
this furnishes no evidence of marriage. In Scotland the
presumption of marriage arises on much slighter grounds than in
England. This may be connected with the ancient and deep-rooted
custom in Scotland of marriage by exchange of consent (Geary, op.
cit. Ch. XVIII; cf., Howard, _Matrimonial Institutions_, vol. i,
p. 316).
In the Bredalbane case (Campbell _v._ Campbell, 1867), which was
of great importance because it involved the succession to the
vast estates of the Marquis of Bredalbane, the House of Lords
decided than even an adulterous connection may, on ceasing to be
adulterous, become matrimonial by the simple consent of the
parties, as evidenced by habit and repute, without any need for
the matrimonial character of the connection to be indicated by
any public act, nor any necessity to prove the specific period
when the consent was interchanged. This decision has been
confirmed in the Dysart case (Geary, loc. cit.; cf. C.G.
Garrison, "Limits of Divorce," _Contemporary Review_, Feb.,
1894). Similarly, as decided by Justice Kekewich in the Wagstaff
case in 1907, if a man leaves money to his "widow," on condition
that she never marries again, although he has never been married
to her, and though she has been legally married to another man,
the testator's intentions must be upheld. Garrison, in his
valuable discussion of this aspect of legal marriage (_loc.
cit._), forcibly insists that by English law marriage is a fact
and not a contract, and that where "conduct characterized by
connubial purpose and constancy" exists, there marriage legally
exists, marriage being simply "a name for an existing fact."
In the United States, marriage "by habit and repute" similarly
exists, and in some States has even been confirmed and extended
by statute (J.P. Bishop, _Commentaries_, vol. i, Ch. XV).
"Whatever the form of the ceremony, and even if all ceremony was
dispensed with," said Judge Cooley, of Michigan, in 1875 (in an
opinion accepted as authoritative by the Federal courts), "if the
parties agreed presently to take each other for husband and wife,
and from that time lived together professedly in that relation,
proof of these facts would be sufficient.... This has been the
settled doctrine of the American courts." (Howard, op. cit., vol.
iii, pp. 177 et seq. Twenty-three States sanction common-law
marriage, while eighteen repudiate, or are inclined to repudiate,
any informal agreement.)
This legal recognition by the highest judicial authorities, alike
in Great Britain and the United States, that marriage is
essentially a fact, and that no evidence of any form or ceremony
of marriage is required for the most complete legal recognition
of marriage, undoubtedly carries with it highly important
implications. It became clear that the reform of marriage is
possible even without change in the law, and that honorable
sexual relationships, even when entered into without any legal
forms, are already entitled to full legal recognition and
protection. There are, however, it need scarcely be added here,
other considerations which render reform along these lines
incomplete.
It thus tends to come about that with the growth of civilization the
conception of marriage as a contract falls more and more into discredit.
It is realized, on the one hand, that personal contracts are out of
harmony with our general and social attitude, for if we reject the idea of
a human being contracting himself as a slave, how much more we should
reject the idea of entering by contract into the still more intimate
relationship of a husband or a wife; on the other hand it is felt that the
idea of pre-ordained contracts on a matter over which the individual
himself has no control is quite unreal and when any strict rules of equity
prevail, necessarily invalid. It is true that we still constantly find
writers sententiously asserting their notions of the duties or the
privileges involved by the "contract" of marriage, with no more attempt to
analyze the meaning of the term "contract" in this connection than the
Protestant Reformers made, but it can scarcely be said that these writers
have yet reached the alphabet of the subject they dogmatize about.
The transference of marriage from the Church to the State which, in the
lands where it first occurred, we owe to Protestantism and, in the
English-speaking lands, especially to Puritanism, while a necessary stage,
had the unfortunate result of secularizing the sexual relationships. That
is to say, it ignored the transcendent element in love which is really the
essential part of such relationships, and it concentrated attention on
those formal and accidental parts of marriage which can alone be dealt
with in a rigid and precise manner, and can alone properly form the
subject of contracts. The Canon law, fantastic and impossible as it became
in many of its developments, at least insisted on the natural and actual
fact of marriage as, above all, a bodily union, while, at the same time,
it regarded that union as no mere secular business contract but a sacred
and exalted function, a divine fact, and the symbol of the most divine
fact in the world. We are returning to-day to the Canonist's conception of
marriage on a higher and freer plane, bringing back the exalted conception
of the Canon law, yet retaining the individualism which the Puritan
wrongly thought he could secure on the basis of mere secularization,
while, further, we recognize that the whole process belongs to the private
sphere of moral responsibility. As Hobhouse has well said, in tracing the
evolutionary history of the modern conception of marriage, the sacramental
idea of marriage has again emerged but on a higher plane; "from being a
sacrament in the magical, it has become one in the ethical, sense." We are
thus tending towards, though we have not yet legally achieved, marriage
made and maintained by consent, "a union between two free and responsible
persons in which the equal rights of both are maintained."[363]
It is supposed by some that to look upon sexual union as a
sacrament is necessarily to accept the ancient Catholic view,
embodied in the Canon law, that matrimony is indissoluble. That
is, however, a mistake. Even the Canonists themselves were never
able to put forward any coherent and consistent ground for the
indissolubility of matrimony which could commend itself
rationally, while Luther and Milton and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who
maintained the religious and sacred nature of sexual
union--though they were cautious about using the term sacrament
on account of its ecclesiastical implications--so far from
believing that its sanctity involved indissolubility, argued in
the reverse sense. This point of view may be defended even from a
strictly Protestant standpoint. "I take it," Mr. G.C. Maberly
says, "that the Prayer Book definition of a sacrament, 'the
outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,' is
generally accepted. In marriage the legal and physical unions are
the outward and visible signs, while the inward and spiritual
grace is the God-given love that makes the union of heart and
soul: and it is precisely because I take this view of marriage
that I consider the legal and physical union should be dissolved
whenever the spiritual union of unselfish, divine love and
affection has ceased. It seems to me that the sacramental view of
marriage compels us to say that those who continue the legal or
physical union when the spiritual union has ceased, are--to quote
again from the Prayer Book words applied to those who take the
outward sign of another sacrament when the inward and spiritual
grace is not present--'eating and drinking their own damnation.'"
If from the point we have now reached we look back at the question of
divorce we see that, as the modern aspects of the marriage relationship
becomes more clearly realized by the community, that question will be
immensely simplified. Since marriage is not a mere contract but a fact of
conduct, and even a sacred fact, the free participation of both parties is
needed to maintain it. To introduce the idea of delinquency and punishment
into divorce, to foster mutual recrimination, to publish to the world the
secrets of the heart or the senses, is not only immoral, it is altogether
out of place. In the question as to when a marriage has ceased to be a
marriage the two parties concerned can alone be the supreme judges; the
State, if the State is called in, can but register the sentence they
pronounce, merely seeing to it that no injustice is involved in the
carrying out of that sentence.[364]
In discussing in the previous chapter the direction in which sexual
morality tends to develop with the development of civilization we came to
the conclusion that in its main lines it involved, above all, personal
responsibility. A relationship fixed among savage peoples by social custom
which none dare break, and in a higher stage of culture by formal laws
which must be observed in the letter even if broken in the spirit, becomes
gradually transferred to the sphere of individual moral responsibility.
Such a transference is necessarily meaningless, and indeed impossible,
unless the increasing stringency of the moral bond is accompanied by the
decreasing stringency of the formal bond. It is only by the process of
loosening the artificial restraints that the natural restraints can exert
their full control. That process takes place in two ways, in part on the
basis of the indifference to formal marriage which has marked the masses
of the population everywhere and doubtless stretches back to the tenth
century before the domination of ecclesiastical matrimony began, and
partly by the progressive modification of marriage laws which were made
necessary by the needs of the propertied classes anxious to secure the
State recognition of their unions. The whole process is necessarily a
gradual and indeed imperceptible process. It is impossible to fix
definitely the dates of the stages by which the Church effected the
immense revolution by which it grasped, and eventually transferred to the
State, the complete control of marriage, for that revolution was effected
without the intervention of any law. It will be equally difficult to
perceive the transference of the control of marriage from the State to
the individuals concerned, and the more difficult because, as we shall
see, although the essential and intimately personal fact of marriage is
not a proper matter for State control, there are certain aspects of
marriage which touch the interests of the community so closely that the
State is bound to insist on their registration and to take an interest in
their settlement.
The result of dissolving the formal stringency of the marriage
relationship, it is sometimes said, would be a tendency to an immoral
laxity. Those who make this statement overlook the fact that laxity tends
to reach a maximum as a result of stringency, and that where the merely
external authority of a rigid marriage law prevails, there the extreme
excesses of license most flourish. It is also undoubtedly true, and for
the same reason, that any sudden removal of restraints necessarily
involves a reaction to the opposite extreme of license; a slave is not
changed at a stroke into an autonomous freeman. Yet we have to remember
that the marriage order existed for millenniums before any attempt was
made to mould it into arbitrary shapes by human legislation. Such
legislation, we have seen, was indeed the effort of the human spirit to
affirm more emphatically the demands of its own instincts.[365] But its
final result is to choke and impede rather than to further the instincts
which inspired it. Its gradual disappearance allows the natural order free
and proper scope.
The great truth that compulsion is not really a force on the side
of virtue, but on the side of vice, had been clearly realized by
the genius of Rabelais, when he said of his ideal social state,
the Abbey of Thelema, that there was but one clause in its rule:
Fay ce que vouldras. "Because," said Rabelais (Bk. i, Ch. VII),
"men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in
honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that
prompts them unto virtuous actions and withdraws them from vice.
These same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are
brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble
disposition by which they freely were inclined to virtue, to
shake off and break that bond of servitude." So that when a man
and a woman who had lived under the rule of Thelema married each
other, Rabelais tells us, their mutual love lasted undiminished
to the day of their death.
When the loss of autonomous freedom fails to lead to licentious
rebellion it incurs the opposite risk and tends to become a
flabby reliance on an external support. The artificial support of
marriage by State regulation then resembles the artificial
support of the body furnished by corset-wearing. The reasons for
and against adopting artificial support are the same in one case
as the other. Corsets really give a feeling of support; they
really furnish without trouble a fairly satisfactory appearance
of decorum; they are a real protection against various accidents.
But the price at which they furnish these advantages is serious,
and the advantages themselves only exist under unnatural
conditions. The corset cramps the form and the healthy
development of the organs; it enfeebles the voluntary muscular
system; it is incompatible with perfect grace and beauty; it
diminishes the sum of active energy. It exerts, in short, the
same kind of influence on physical responsibility as formal
marriage on moral responsibility.
It is too often forgotten, and must therefore be repeated, that
married people do not remain together because of any religious or
legal tie; that tie is merely the historical outcome of their
natural tendency to remain together, a tendency which is itself
far older than history. "Love would exist in the world to-day,
just as pure and just as enduring," says Shufeldt (_Medico-Legal
Journal_, Dec., 1897), "had man never invented 'marriage.' Truly
affined mates would have remained faithful to each other as long
as life lasted. It is only when men attempt to improve upon
nature that crime, disease, and unhappiness step in." "The
abolition of marriage in the form now practiced," wrote Godwin
more than a century ago (_Political Justice_, second edition,
1796, vol. i, p. 248), "will be attended with no evils. We are
apt to represent it to ourselves as the harbinger of brutal lust
and depravity. But it really happens in this, as in other cases,
that the positive laws which are made to restrain our vices
irritate and multiply them." And Professor Lester Ward, in
insisting on the strength of the monogamic sentiment in modern
society, truly remarks (_International Journal of Ethics_, Oct.,
1896) that the rebellion against rigid marriage bonds "is, in
reality, due to the very strengthening of the true bonds of
conjugal affection, coupled with a rational and altogether proper
determination on the part of individuals to accept, in so
important a matter, nothing less than the genuine article." "If
by a single stroke," says Professor Woods Hutchinson
(_Contemporary Review_, Sept., 1905), "all marriage ties now in
existence were struck off or declared illegal, eight-tenths of
all couples would be remarried within forty eight hours, and
seven-tenths could not be kept asunder with bayonets." An
experiment of this kind on a small scale was witnessed in 1909 in
an English village in Buckinghamshire. It was found that the
parish church had never been licensed for marriages, and that in
consequence all the people who had gone through the ceremony of
marriage in that church during the previous half century had
never been legally married. Yet, so far as could be ascertained,
not a single couple thus released from the legal compulsion of
marriage took advantage of the freedom bestowed. In the face of
such a fact it is obviously impossible to attach any moral value
to the form of marriage.
It is certainly inevitable that during a period of transition the natural
order is to some extent disturbed by the persistence, even though in a
weakened form, of external bonds which are beginning to be consciously
realized as inimical to the authoritative control of individual moral
responsibility. We can clearly trace this at the present time. A sensitive
anxiety to escape from external constraint induces an under-valuation of
the significance of personal constraint in the relationship of marriage.
Everyone is probably familiar with cases in which a couple will live
together through long years without entering the legal bond of marriage,
notwithstanding difficulties in their mutual relationship which would have
long since caused a separation or a divorce had they been legally married.
When the inherent difficulties of the marital relationship are complicated
by the difficulties due to external constraint, the development of
individual moral responsibility cuts two ways, and leads to results that
are not entirely satisfactory. This has been seen in the United States of
America and attention has often been called to it by thoughtful American
observers. It is, naturally, noted especially in women because it is in
women that the new growth of personal freedom and moral responsibility has
chiefly made itself felt. The first stirring of these new impulses,
especially when associated, as it often is, with inexperience and
ignorance, leads to impatience with the natural order, to a demand for
impossible conditions of existence, and to an inaptitude not only for the
arbitrary bondage of law but even for the wholesome and necessary bonds of
human social life. It is always a hard lesson for the young and idealistic
that in order to command Nature we must obey her; it can only be learnt
through contact with life and by the attainment of full human growth.
Dr. Felix Adler (in an address before the Society of Ethical
Culture of New York, Nov. 17, 1889) called attention to what he
regarded as the most deep-rooted cause of an undue prevalence of
divorce in America. "The false idea of individual liberty is
largely held in America," and when applied to family life it
often leads to an impatience with these duties which the
individual is either born into or has voluntarily accepted. "I am
constrained to think that the prevalence of divorce is to be
ascribed in no small degree to the influence of democratic
ideas--that is, of false democratic ideas--and our hope lies in
advancing towards a higher and truer democracy." A more recent
American writer, this time a woman, Anna A. Rogers ("Why American
Marriages Fail," _Atlantic Monthly_, Sept., 1907) speaks in the
same sense, though perhaps in too unqualified a manner. She
states that the frequency of divorce in America is due to three
causes: (1) woman's failure to realize that marriage is her work
in the world; (2) her growing individualism; (3) her lost art of
giving, replaced by a highly developed receptive faculty. The
American woman, this writer states, in discovering her own
individuality has not yet learnt how to manage it; it is still
"largely a useless, uneasy factor, vouchsafing her very little
more peace than it does those in her immediate surcharged
vicinity." Her circumstances tend to make of her "a curious
anomalous hybrid; a cross between a magnificent, rather
unmannerly boy, and a spoiled, exacting _demi-mondaine_, who
sincerely loves in this world herself alone." She has not yet
learnt that woman's supreme work in the world can only be
attained through the voluntary acceptance of the restraints of
marriage. The same writer points out that the fault is not alone
with American women, but also with American men. Their idolatry
of their women is largely responsible for that intolerance and
selfishness which causes so many divorces; "American women are,
as a whole, pampered and worshipped out of all reason." But the
men, who lend themselves to this, do not feel that they can treat
their wives with the same comradeship as the French treat their
wives, nor seek their advice with the same reliance; the American
woman is placed on an unreal pedestal. Yet another American
writer, Rafford Pyke ("Husbands and Wives," _Cosmopolitan_,
1902), points out that only a small proportion of American
marriages are really unhappy, these being chiefly among the more
cultured classes, in which the movement of expansion in women's
interests and lives is taking place; it is more often the wife
than the husband who is disappointed in marriage, and this is
largely due to her inability to merge, not necessarily
subordinate, her individuality in an equal union with his.
"Marriage to-day is becoming more and more dependent for its
success upon the adjustment of conditions that are psychical.
Whereas in former generations it was sufficient that the union
should involve physical reciprocity, in this age of ours the
union must involve a psychic reciprocity as well. And whereas,
heretofore, the community of interest was attained with ease, it
is now becoming far more difficult because of the tendency to
discourage a woman who marries from merging her separate
individuality in her husband's. Yet, unless she does this, how
can she have a complete and perfect interest in the life
together, and, for that matter, how can he have such an interest
either?"
Professor Münsterberg, the distinguished psychologist, in his
frank but appreciative study of American institutions, _The
Americans_, taking a broader outlook, points out that the
influence of women on morals in America has not been in every
respect satisfactory, in so far as it has tended to encourage
shallowness and superficiality. "The American woman who has
scarcely a shred of education," he remarks (p. 587), "looks in
vain for any subject on which she has not firm convictions
already at hand.... The arrogance of this feminine lack of
knowledge is the symptom of a profound trait in the feminine
soul, and points to dangers springing from the domination of
women in the intellectual life.... And in no other civilized land
are ethical conceptions so worm-eaten by superstitions."
We have seen that the modern tendency as regards marriage is towards its
recognition as a voluntary union entered into by two free, equal, and
morally responsible persons, and that that union is rather of the nature
of an ethical sacrament than of a contract, so that in its essence as a
physical and spiritual bond it is outside the sphere of the State's
action. It has been necessary to labor that point before we approach what
may seem to many not only a different but even a totally opposed aspect of
marriage. If the marriage union itself cannot be a matter for contract, it
naturally leads to a fact which must necessarily be a matter for implicit
or explicit contract, a matter, moreover, in which the community at large
has a real and proper interest: that is the fact of procreation.[366]
The ancient Egyptians--among whom matrimonial institutions were so elastic
and the position of woman so high--recognized a provisional and slight
marriage bond for the purpose of testing fecundity.[367] Among ourselves
the law makes no such paternal provision, leaving to young couples
themselves the responsibility of making any tests, a permission, we know,
they largely avail themselves of, usually entering the legal bonds of
marriage, however, before the birth of their child. That legal bond is a
recognition that the introduction of a new individual into the community
is not, like sexual union, a mere personal fact, but a social fact, a fact
in which the State cannot fail to be concerned. And the more we
investigate the tendency of the modern marriage movement the more we shall
realize that its attitude of freedom, of individual moral responsibility,
in the formation of sexual relationships, is compensated by an attitude of
stringency, of strict social oversight, in the matter of procreation. Two
people who form an erotic relationship are bound, when they reach the
conviction that their relationship is a real marriage, having its natural
end in procreation, to subscribe to a contract which, though it may leave
themselves personally free, must yet bind them both to their duties
towards their children.[368]
The necessity for such an undertaking is double, even apart from the fact
that it is in the highest interests of the parents themselves. It is
required in the interests of the child. It is required in the interests of
the State. A child can be bred, and well-bred, by one effective parent.
But to equip a child adequately for its entrance into life both parents
are usually needed. The State on its side--that is to say, the community
of which parents and child alike form part--is bound to know who these
persons are who have become sponsors for a new individual now introduced
into its midst. The most Individualistic State, the most Socialistic
State, are alike bound, if faithful to the interests, both biological and
economic, of their constituent members generally, to insist on the full
legal and recognized parentage of the father and mother of every child.
That is clearly demanded in the interests of the child; it is clearly
demanded also in the interests of the State.
The barrier which in Christendom has opposed itself to the natural
recognition of this fact, so injuring alike the child and the State, has
clearly been the rigidity of the marriage system, more especially as
moulded by the Canon law. The Canonists attributed a truly immense
importance to the _copula carnalis_, as they technically termed it. They
centred marriage strictly in the vagina; they were not greatly concerned
about either the presence or the absence of the child. The vagina, as we
know, has not always proved a very firm centre for the support of
marriage, and that centre is now being gradually transferred to the child.
If we turn from the Canonists to the writings of a modern like Ellen Key,
who so accurately represents much that is most characteristic and
essential in the late tendencies of marriage development, we seem to have
entered a new world, even a newly illuminated world. For "in the new
sexual morality, as in Corregio's _Notte_, the light emanates from the
child."[369]
No doubt this change is largely a matter of sentiment, of, as we sometimes
say, mere sentiment, although there is nothing so powerful in human
affairs as sentiment, and the revolution effected by Jesus, the later
revolution effected by Rousseau, were mainly revolutions in sentiment. But
the change is also a matter of the growing recognition of interests and
rights, and as such it manifests itself in law. We can scarcely doubt that
we are approaching a time when it will be generally understood that the
entrance into the world of every child, without exception, should be
preceded by the formation of a marriage contract which, while in no way
binding the father and mother to any duties, or any privileges, towards
each other, binds them both towards their child and at the same time
ensures their responsibility towards the State. It is impossible for the
State to obtain more than this, but it should be impossible for it to
demand less. A contract of such a kind "marries" the father and mother so
far as the parentage of the individual child is concerned, and in no other
respect; it is a contract which leaves entirely unaffected their past,
present, or future relations towards other persons, otherwise it would be
impossible to enforce it. In all parts of the world this elementary demand
of social morality is slowly beginning to be recognized, and as it affects
hundreds of thousands of infants[370] who are yearly branded as
"illegitimate" through no act of their own, no one can say that the
recognition has come too soon. As yet, indeed, it seems nowhere to be
complete.
Most attempts or proposals for the avoidance of illegitimate
births are concerned with the legalizing of unions of a less
binding degree than the present legal marriage. Such unions would
serve to counteract other evils. Thus an English writer, who has
devoted much study to sex questions, writes in a private letter:
"The best remedy for the licentiousness of celibate men and the
mental and physical troubles of continence in woman would be
found in a recognized honorable system of free unions and
trial-marriages, in which preventive intercourse is practiced
until the lovers were old enough to become parents, and possessed
of sufficient means to support a family. The prospect of a
loveless existence for young men and women of ardent natures is
intolerable and as terrible as the prospect of painful illness
and death. But I think the old order must change ere long."
In Teutonic countries there is a strongly marked current of
feeling in the direction of establishing legal unions of a lower
degree than marriage. They exist in Sweden, as also in Norway
where by a recent law the illegitimate child is entitled to the
same rights in relation to both parents as the legitimate child,
bearing the father's name and inheriting his property (_Die Neue
Generation_, July, 1909, p. 303). In France the well-known judge,
Magnard, so honorably distinguished for his attitude towards
cases of infanticide by young mothers, has said: "I heartily wish
that alongside the institution of marriage as it now exists we
had a free union constituted by simple declaration before a
magistrate and conferring almost the same family rights as
ordinary marriage." This wish has been widely echoed.
In China, although polygamy in the strict sense cannot properly
be said to exist, the interests of the child, the woman, and the
State are alike safeguarded by enabling a man to enter into a
kind of secondary marriage with the mother of his child. "Thanks
to this system," Paul d'Enjoy states (_La Revue_, Sept., 1905),
"which allows the husband to marry the woman he desires, without
being prevented by previous and undissolved unions, it is only
right to remark that there are no seduced and abandoned girls,
except such as no law could save from what is really innate
depravity; and that there are no illegitimate children except
those whose mothers are unhappily nearer to animals by their
senses than to human beings by their reason and dignity."
The new civil code of Japan, which is in many respects so
advanced, allows an illegitimate child to be "recognized" by
giving notice to the registrar; when a married man so recognizes
a child, it appears, the child may be adopted by the wife as her
own, though not actually rendered legitimate. This state of
things represents a transition stage; it can scarcely be said to
recognize the rights of the "recognized" child's mother. Japan,
it may be added, has adopted the principle of the automatic
legitimation by marriage of the children born to the couple
before marriage.
In Australia, where women possess a larger share than elsewhere
in making and administering the laws, some attention is beginning
to be given to the rights of illegitimate children. Thus in South
Australia, paternity may be proved before birth, and the father
(by magistrate's order) provides lodging for one month before and
after birth, as well as nurse, doctor, and clothing, furnishing
security that he will do so; after birth, at the magistrate's
decision, he pays a weekly sum for the child's maintenance. An
"illegitimate" mother may also be kept in a public institution at
the public expense for six months to enable her to become
attached to her child.
Such provisions are developed from the widely recognized right of
the unmarried woman to claim support for her child from its
father. In France, indeed, and in the legal codes which follow
the French example, it is not legally permitted to inquire into
the paternity of an illegitimate child. Such a law is, needless
to say, alike unjust to the mother, to the child, and to the
State. In Austria, the law goes to the opposite, though certainly
more reasonable, extreme, and permits even the mother who has had
several lovers to select for herself which she chooses to make
responsible for her child. The German code adopts an intermediate
course, and comes only to the aid of the unmarried mother who has
one lover. In all such cases, however, the aid given is
pecuniary only; it insures the mother no recognition or respect,
and (as Wahrmund has truly said in his _Ehe und Eherecht_) it is
still necessary to insist on "the unconditional sanctity of
motherhood, which is entitled, under whatever circumstances it
arises, to the respect and protection of society."
It must be added that, from the social point of view, it is not
the sexual union which requires legal recognition, but the child
which is the product of that union. It would, moreover, be
hopeless to attempt to legalize all sexual connection, but it is
comparatively easy to legalize all children.
There has been much discussion in the past concerning the particular form
which marriage ought to take. Many theorists have exercised their
ingenuity in inventing and preaching new and unusual marriage-arrangements
as panaceas for social ills; while others have exerted even greater energy
in denouncing all such proposals as subversive of the foundations of human
society. We may regard all such discussions, on the one side or the other,
as idle.
In the first place marriage customs are far too fundamental, far too
intimately blended with the primary substance of human and indeed animal
society, to be in the slightest degree shaken by the theories or the
practices of mere individuals, or even groups of individuals.
Monogamy--the more or less prolonged cohabitation of two individuals of
opposite sex--has been the prevailing type of sexual relationship among
the higher vertebrates and through the greater part of human history. This
is admitted even by those who believe (without any sound evidence) that
man has passed through a stage of sexual promiscuity. There have been
tendencies to variation in one direction or another, but at the lowest
stages and the highest stages, so far as can be seen, monogamy represents
the prevailing rule.
It must be said also, in the second place, that the natural prevalence of
monogamy as the normal type of sexual relationship by no means excludes
variations. Indeed it assumes them. "There is nothing precise in Nature,"
according to Diderot's saying. The line of Nature is a curve that
oscillates from side to side of the norm. Such oscillations inevitably
occur in harmony with changes in environmental conditions, and, no doubt,
with peculiarities of personal disposition. So long as no arbitrary and
merely external attempt is made to force Nature, the vital order is
harmoniously maintained. Among certain species of ducks when males are in
excess polyandric families are constituted, the two males attending their
female partner without jealousy, but when the sexes again become equal in
number the monogamic order is restored. The natural human deviations from
the monogamic order seem to be generally of this character, and largely
conditioned by the social and economic environment. The most common
variation, and that which most clearly possesses a biological foundation,
is the tendency to polygyny, which is found at all stages of culture,
even, in an unrecognized and more or less promiscuous shape, in the
highest civilization.[371] It must be remembered, however, that recognized
polygyny is not the rule even where it prevails; it is merely permissive;
there is never a sufficient excess of women to allow more than a few of
the richer and more influential persons to have more than one wife.[372]
It has further to be borne in mind that a certain elasticity of the formal
side of marriage while, on the one side, it permits variations from the
general monogamic order, where such are healthful or needed to restore a
balance in natural conditions, on the other hand restrains such variations
in so far as they are due to the disturbing influence of artificial
constraint. Much of the polygyny, and polyandry also, which prevails among
us to-day is an altogether artificial and unnatural form of polygamy.
Marriages which on a more natural basis would be dissolved cannot legally
be dissolved, and consequently the parties to them, instead of changing
their partners and so preserving the natural monogamic order, take on
other additional partners and so introduce an unnatural polygamy. There
will always be variations from the monogamic order and civilization is
certainly not hostile to sexual variation. Whether we reckon these
variations as legitimate or illegitimate, they will still take place; of
that we may be certain. The path of social wisdom seems to lie on the one
hand in making the marriage relationship flexible enough to reduce to a
minimum these deviations--not because such deviations are intrinsically
bad but because they ought not to be forced into existence--and on the
other hand in according to these deviations when they occur such a measure
of recognition as will deprive them of injurious influence and enable
justice to be done to all the parties concerned. We too often forget that
our failure to recognize such variations merely means that we accord in
such cases an illegitimate permission to perpetrate injustice. In those
parts of the world in which polygyny is recognized as a permissible
variation a man is legally held to his natural obligations towards all his
sexual mates and towards the children he has by those mates. In no part of
the world is polygyny so prevalent as in Christendom; in no part of the
world is it so easy for a man to escape the obligations incurred by
polygyny. We imagine that if we refuse to recognize the fact of polygyny,
we may refuse to recognize any obligations incurred by polygyny. By
enabling a man to escape so easily from the obligations of his polygamous
relationships we encourage him, if he is unscrupulous, to enter into them;
we place a premium on the immorality we loftily condemn.[373] Our polygyny
has no legal existence, and therefore its obligations can have no legal
existence. The ostrich, it was once imagined, hides its head in the sand
and attempts to annihilate facts by refusing to look at them; but there is
only one known animal which adopts this course of action, and it is called
Man.
Monogamy, in the fundamental biological sense, represents the natural
order into which the majority of sexual facts will always naturally fall
because it is the relationship which most adequately corresponds to all
the physical and spiritual facts involved. But if we realize that sexual
relationships primarily concern only the persons who enter into those
relationships, and if we further realize that the interest of society in
such relationships is confined to the children which they produce, we
shall also realize that to fix by law the number of women with whom a man
shall have sexual relationships, and the number of men with whom a woman
shall unite herself, is more unreasonable than it would be to fix by law
the number of children they shall produce. The State has a right to
declare whether it needs few citizens or many; but in attempting to
regulate the sexual relationships of its members the State attempts an
impossible task and is at the same time guilty of an impertinence.
There is always a tendency, at certain stages of civilization, to
insist on a merely formal and external uniformity, and a
corresponding failure to see not only that such uniformity is
unreal, but also that it has an injurious effect, in so far as it
checks beneficial variations. The tendency is by no means
confined to the sexual sphere. In England there is, for instance,
a tendency to make building laws which enjoin, in regard to
places of human habitation, all sorts of provisions that on the
whole are fairly beneficial, but which in practice act
injuriously, because they render many simple and excellent human
habitations absolutely illegal, merely because such habitations
fail to conform to regulations which, under some circumstances,
are not only unnecessary, but mischievous.
Variation is a fact that will exist whether we will or no; it can
only become healthful if we recognize and allow for it. We may
even have to recognize that it is a more marked tendency in
civilization than in more primitive social stages. Thus Gerson
argues (_Sexual-Probleme_, Sept., 1908, p. 538) that just as the
civilized man cannot be content with the coarse and monotonous
food which satisfies the peasant, so it is in sexual matters; the
peasant youth and girl in their sexual relationships are nearly
always monogamous, but civilized people, with their more
versatile and sensitive tastes, are apt to crave for variety.
Sénancour (_De l'Amour_, vol. ii, "Du Partage," p. 127) seems to
admit the possibility of marriage variations, as of sharing a
wife, provided nothing is done to cause rivalry, or to impair the
soul's candor. Lecky, near the end of his _History of European
Morals_, declared his belief that, while the permanent union of
two persons is the normal and prevailing type of marriage, it by
no means follows that, in the interests of society, it should be
the only form. Remy de Gourmont similarly (_Physique de l'Amour_,
p. 186), while stating that the couple is the natural form of
marriage and its prolonged continuance a condition of human
superiority, adds that the permanence of the union can only be
achieved with difficulty. So, also, Professor W. Thomas (_Sex and
Society_, 1907, p. 193), while regarding monogamy as subserving
social needs, adds: "Speaking from the biological standpoint
monogamy does not, as a rule, answer to the conditions of highest
stimulation, since here the problematical and elusive elements
disappear to some extent, and the object of attention has grown
so familiar in consciousness that the emotional reactions are
qualified. This is the fundamental explanation of the fact that
married men and women frequently become interested in others than
their partners in matrimony."
Pepys, whose unconscious self-dissection admirably illustrates so
many psychological tendencies, clearly shows how--by a logic of
feeling deeper than any intellectual logic--the devotion to
monogamy subsists side by side with an irresistible passion for
sexual variety. With his constantly recurring wayward attraction
to a long series of women he retains throughout a deep and
unchanging affection for his charming young wife. In the privacy
of his _Diary_ he frequently refers to her in terms of endearment
which cannot be feigned; he enjoys her society; he is very
particular about her dress; he delights in her progress in music,
and spends much money on her training; he is absurdly jealous
when he finds her in the society of a man. His subsidiary
relationships with other women recur irresistibly, but he has no
wish either to make them very permanent or to allow them to
engross him unduly. Pepys represents a common type of civilized
"monogamist" who is perfectly sincere and extremely convinced in
his advocacy of monogamy, as he understands it, but at the same
time believes and acts on the belief that monogamy by no means
excludes the need for sexual variation. Lord Morley's statement
(_Diderot_, vol. ii, p. 20) that "man is instinctively
polygamous," can by no means be accepted, but if we interpret it
as meaning that man is an instinctively monogamous animal with a
concomitant desire for sexual variation, there is much evidence
in its favor.
Women must be as free as men to mould their own amatory life.
Many consider, however, that such freedom on the part of women
will be, and ought to be, exercised within narrower limits (see,
e.g., Bloch, _Sexual Life of Our Time_, Ch. X). In part this
limitation is considered due to the greater absorption of a woman
in the task of breeding and rearing her child, and in part to a
less range of psychic activities. A man, as G. Hirth puts it,
expressing this view of the matter (_Wege zur Liebe_, p. 342),
"has not only room in his intellectual horizon for very various
interests, but his power of erotic expansion is much greater and
more differentiated than that of women, although he may lack the
intimacy and depth of a woman's devotion."
It may be argued that, since variations in the sexual order will
inevitably take place, whether or not they are recognized or
authorized, no harm is likely to be done by using the weight of
social and legal authority on the side of that form which is
generally regarded as the best, and, so far as possible, covering
the other forms with infamy. There are many obvious defects in
such an attitude, apart from the supremely important fact that to
cast infamy on sexual relationships is to exert a despicable
cruelty on women, who are inevitably the chief sufferers. Not the
least is the injustice and the hampering of vital energy which it
inflicts on the better and more scrupulous people to the
advantage of the worse and less scrupulous. This always happens
when authority exerts its power in favor of a form. When, in the
thirteenth century, Alexander III--one of the greatest and most
effective potentates who ever ruled Christendom--was consulted by
the Bishop of Exeter concerning subdeacons who persisted in
marrying, the Pope directed him to inquire into the lives and
characters of the offenders; if they were of regular habits and
staid morality, they were to be forcibly separated and the wives
driven out; if they were men of notoriously disorderly character,
they were to be permitted to retain their wives, if they so
desired (Lea, _History of Sacerdotal Celibacy_, third edition,
vol. i, p. 396). It was an astute policy, and was carried out by
the same Pope elsewhere, but it is easy to see that it was
altogether opposed to morality in every sense of the term. It
destroyed the happiness and the efficiency of the best men; it
left the worst men absolutely free. To-day we are quite willing
to recognize the evil result of this policy; it was dictated by a
Pope and carried out seven hundred years ago. Yet in England we
carry out exactly the same policy to-day by means of our
separation orders, which are scattered broadcast among the
population. None of the couples thus separated--and never
disciplined to celibacy as are the Catholic clergy of to-day--may
marry again; we, in effect, bid the more scrupulous among them to
become celibates, and to the less scrupulous we grant permission
to do as they like. This process is carried on by virtue of the
collective inertia of the community, and when it is supported by
arguments, if that ever happens, they are of an antiquarian
character which can only call forth a pitying smile.
It may be added that there is a further reason why the custom of
branding sexual variations from the norm as "immoral" is not so
harmless as some affect to believe: such variations appear to be
not uncommon among men and women of superlative ability whose
powers are needed unimpeded in the service of mankind. To attempt
to fit such persons into the narrow moulds which suit the
majority is not only an injustice to them as individuals, but it
is an offence against society, which may fairly claim that its
best members shall not be hampered in its service. The notion
that the person whose sexual needs differ from those of the
average is necessarily a socially bad person, is a notion
unsupported by facts. Every case must be judged on its own
merits.
Undoubtedly the most common variation from normal monogamy has in all
stages of human culture been polygyny or the sexual union of one man with
more than one woman. It has sometimes been socially and legally
recognized, and sometimes unrecognized, but in either case it has not
failed to occur. Polyandry, or the union of a woman with more than one
man, has been comparatively rare and for intelligible reasons: men have
most usually been in a better position, economically and legally, to
organize a household with themselves as the centre; a woman is, unlike a
man, by nature and often by custom unfitted for intercourse for
considerable periods at a time; a woman, moreover, has her thoughts and
affections more concentrated on her children. Apart from this the
biological masculine traditions point to polygyny much more than the
feminine traditions point to polyandry. Although it is true that a woman
can undergo a much greater amount of sexual intercourse than a man, it
also remains true that the phenomena of courtship in nature have made it
the duty of the male to be alert in offering his sexual attention to the
female, whose part it has been to suspend her choice coyly until she is
sure of her preference. Polygynic conditions have also proved
advantageous, as they have permitted the most vigorous and successful
members of a community to have the largest number of mates and so to
transmit their own superior qualities.
"Polygamy," writes Woods Hutchinson (_Contemporary Review_, Oct.,
1904), though he recognizes the advantages of monogamy, "as a
racial institution, among animals as among men, has many solid
and weighty considerations in its favor, and has resulted in
both human and pre-human times, in the production of a very high
type of both individual and social development." He points out
that it promotes intelligence, coöperation, and division of
labor, while the keen competition for women weeds out the weaker
and less attractive males.
Among our European ancestors, alike among Germans and Celts,
polygyny and other sexual forms existed as occasional variations.
Tacitus noted polygyny in Germany, and Cæsar found in Britain
that brothers would hold their wives in common, the children
being reckoned to the man to whom the woman had been first given
in marriage (see, e.g., Traill's _Social England_, vol. i, p.
103, for a discussion of this point). The husband's assistant,
also, who might be called in to impregnate the wife when the
husband was impotent, existed in Germany, and was indeed a
general Indo-Germanic institution (Schrader, _Reallexicon_, art.
"Zeugungshelfer"). The corresponding institution of the concubine
has been still more deeply rooted and widespread. Up to
comparatively modern times, indeed, in accordance with the
traditions of Roman law, the concubine held a recognized and
honorable position, below that of a wife but with definite legal
rights, though it was not always, or indeed usually, legal for a
married man to have a concubine. In ancient Wales, as well as in
Rome, the concubine was accepted and never despised (R.B. Holt,
"Marriage Laws of the Cymri," _Journal Anthropological
Institute_, Aug. and Nov., 1898, p. 155). The fact that when a
concubine entered the house of a married man her dignity and
legal position were less than those of the wife preserved
domestic peace and safeguarded the wife's interests. (A Korean
husband cannot take a concubine under his roof without his wife's
permission, but she rarely objects, and seems to enjoy the
companionship, says Louise Jordan Miln, _Quaint Korea_, 1895, p.
92.) In old Europe, we must remember, as Dufour points out in
speaking of the time of Charlemagne (_Histoire de la
Prostitution_, vol. iii, p. 226), "concubine" was an honorable
term; the concubine was by no means a mistress, and she could be
accused of adultery just the same as a wife. In England, late in
the thirteenth century, Bracton speaks of the _concubina
legitima_ as entitled to certain rights and considerations, and
it was the same in other parts of Europe, sometimes for several
centuries later (see Lea, _History of Sacerdotal Celibacy_, vol.
i, p. 230). The early Christian Church was frequently inclined to
recognize the concubine, at all events if attached to an
unmarried man, for we may trace in the Church "the wish to look
upon every permanent union of man or woman as possessing the
character of a marriage in the eyes of God, and, therefore, in
the judgment of the Church" (art. "Concubinage," Smith and
Cheetham, _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_). This was the
feeling of St. Augustine (who had himself, before his conversion,
had a concubine who was apparently a Christian), and the Council
of Toledo admitted an unmarried man who was faithful to a
concubine. As the law of the Catholic Church grew more and more
rigid, it necessarily lost touch with human needs. It was not so
in the early Church during the great ages of its vital growth. In
those ages even the strenuous general rule of monogamy was
relaxed when such relaxation seemed reasonable. This was so, for
instance, in the case of sexual impotency. Thus early in the
eighth century Gregory II, writing to Boniface, the apostle of
Germany, in answer to a question by the latter, replies that when
a wife is incapable from physical infirmity from fulfilling her
marital duties it is permissible for the husband to take a second
wife, though he must not withdraw maintenance from the first. A
little later Archbishop Egbert of York, in his _Dialogus de
Institutione Ecclesiastica_, though more cautiously, admits that
when one of two married persons is infirm the other, with the
permission of the infirm one, may marry again, but the infirm one
is not allowed to marry again during the other's life. Impotency
at the time of marriage, of course, made the marriage void
without the intervention of any ecclesiastical law. But Aquinas,
and later theologians, allow that an excessive disgust for a wife
justifies a man in regarding himself as impotent in relation to
her. These rules are, of course, quite distinct from the
permissions to break the marriage laws granted to kings and
princes; such permissions do not count as evidence of the
Church's rules, for, as the Council of Constantinople prudently
decided in 809, "Divine law can do nothing against Kings" (art.
"Bigamy," _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_). The law of
monogamy was also relaxed in cases of enforced or voluntary
desertion. Thus the Council of Vermerie (752) enacted that if a
wife will not accompany her husband when he is compelled to
follow his lord into another land, he may marry again, provided
he sees no hope of returning. Theodore of Canterbury (688),
again, pronounces that if a wife is carried away by the enemy and
her husband cannot redeem her, he may marry again after an
interval of a year, or, if there is a chance of redeeming her,
after an interval of five years; the wife may do the same. Such
rules, though not general, show, as Meyrick points out (art.
"Marriage," _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_), a willingness
"to meet particular cases as they arise."
As the Canon law grew rigid and the Catholic Church lost its
vital adaptibility, sexual variations ceased to be recognized
within its sphere. We have to wait for the Reformation for any
further movement. Many of the early Protestant Reformers,
especially in Germany, were prepared to admit a considerable
degree of vital flexibility in sexual relationships. Thus Luther
advised married women with impotent husbands, in cases where
there was no wish or opportunity for divorce, to have sexual
relations with another man, by preference the husband's brother;
the children were to be reckoned to the husband ("Die Sexuelle
Frage bei Luther," _Mutterschutz_, Sept., 1908).
In England the Puritan spirit, which so largely occupied itself
with the reform of marriage, could not fail to be concerned with
the question of sexual variations, and from time to time we find
the proposal to legalize polygyny. Thus, in 1658, "A Person of
Quality" published in London a small pamphlet dedicated to the
Lord Protector, entitled _A Remedy for Uncleanness_. It was in
the form of a number of queries, asking why we should not admit
polygamy for the avoidance of adultery and infanticide. The
writer inquires whether it may not "stand with a gracious spirit,
and be every way consistent with the principles of a man fearing
God and loving holiness, to have more women than one to his
proper use.... He that takes another man's ox or ass is doubtless
a transgressor; but he that puts himself out of the occasion of
that temptation by keeping of his own seems to be a right honest
and well-meaning man."
More than a century later (1780), an able, learned, and
distinguished London clergyman of high character (who had been a
lawyer before entering the Church), the Rev. Martin Madan, also
advocated polygamy in a book called _Thelyphthora; or, a Treatise
on Female Ruin_. Madan had been brought into close contact with
prostitution through a chaplaincy at the Lock Hospital, and, like
the Puritan advocate of polygamy, he came to the conclusion that
only by the reform of marriage is it possible to work against
prostitution and the evils of sexual intercourse outside
marriage. His remarkable book aroused much controversy and strong
feeling against the author, so that he found it desirable to
leave London and settle in the country. Projects of marriage
reform have never since come from the Church, but from
philosophers and moralists, though not rarely from writers of
definitely religious character. Sénancour, who was so delicate
and sensitive a moralist in the sexual sphere, introduced a
temperate discussion of polygamy into his _De l'Amour_ (vol. ii,
pp. 117-126). It seemed to him to be neither positively contrary
nor positively conformed to the general tendency of our present
conventions, and he concluded that "the method of conciliation,
in part, would be no longer to require that the union of a man
and a woman should only cease with the death of one of them."
Cope, the biologist, expressed a somewhat more decided opinion.
Under some circumstances, if all three parties agreed, he saw no
objection to polygyny or polyandry. "There are some cases of
hardship," he said, "which such permission would remedy. Such,
for instance, would be the case where the man or woman had become
the victim of a chronic disease; or, when either party should be
childless, and in other contingencies that could be imagined."
There would be no compulsion in any direction, and full
responsibility as at present. Such cases could only arise
exceptionally, and would not call for social antagonism. For the
most part, Cope remarks, "the best way to deal with polygamy is
to let it alone" (E.D. Cope, "The Marriage Problem," _Open
Court_, Nov. 15 and 22, 1888). In England, Dr. John Chapman, the
editor of the _Westminster Review_, and a close associate of the
leaders of the Radical movement in the Victorian period, was
opposed to State dictation as regards the form of marriage, and
believed that a certain amount of sexual variation would be
socially beneficial. Thus he wrote in 1884 (in a private letter):
"I think that as human beings become less selfish polygamy [i.e.,
polygyny], and even polyandry, in an ennobled form, will become
increasingly frequent."
James Hinton, who, a few years earlier, had devoted much thought
and attention to the sexual question, and regarded it as indeed
the greatest of moral problems, was strongly in favor of a more
vital flexibility of marriage regulations, an adaptation to human
needs such as the early Christian Church admitted. Marriage, he
declared, must be "subordinated to service," since marriage, like
the Sabbath, is made for man and not man for marriage. Thus in
case of one partner becoming insane he would permit the other
partner to marry again, the claim of the insane partner, in case
of recovery, still remaining valid. That would be a form of
polygamy, but Hinton was careful to point out that by "polygamy"
he meant "less a particular marriage-order than such an order as
best serves good, and which therefore must be essentially
variable. Monogamy may be good, even the only good order, if of
free choice; but a _law_ for it is another thing. The sexual
relationship must be a _natural_ thing. The true social life will
not be any fixed and definite relationship, as of monogamy,
polygamy, or anything else, but a perfect subordination of every
sexual relationship whatever to reason and human good."
Ellen Key, who is an enthusiastic advocate of monogamy, and who
believes that the civilized development of personal love removes
all danger of the growth of polygamy, still admits the existence
of variations. She has in mind such solutions of difficult
problems as Goethe had before him when he proposed at first in
his _Stella_ to represent the force of affection and tender
memories as too strong to admit of the rupture of an old bond in
the presence of a new bond. The problem of sexual variation, she
remarks, however (_Liebe und Ethik_, p. 12), has changed its form
under modern conditions; it is no longer a struggle between the
demand of society for a rigid marriage-order and the demand of
the individual for sexual satisfaction, but it has become the
problem of harmonizing the ennoblement of the race with
heightened requirements of erotic happiness. She also points out
that the existence of a partner who requires the other partner's
care as a nurse or as an intellectual companion by no means
deprives that other partner of the right to fatherhood or
motherhood, and that such rights must be safeguarded (Ellen Key,
_Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, pp. 166-168).
A prominent and extreme advocate of polygyny, not as a simple
rare variation, but as a marriage order superior to monogamy, is
to be found at the present day in Professor Christian von
Ehrenfels of Prague (see, e.g., his _Sexualethik_, 1908; "Die
Postulate des Lebens," _Sexual-Probleme_, Oct., 1908; and letter
to Ellen Key in her _Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 466). Ehrenfels
believes that the number of men inapt for satisfactory
reproduction is much larger than that of women, and that
therefore when these are left out of account, a polygynic
marriage order becomes necessary. He calls this
"reproduction-marriage" (Zeugungsehe), and considers that it will
entirely replace the present marriage order, to which it is
morally superior. It would be based on private contracts.
Ehrenfels holds that women would offer no objection, as a woman,
he believes, attaches less importance to a man as a wooer than as
the father of her child. Ehrenfels's doctrine has been seriously
attacked from many sides, and his proposals are not in the line
of our progress. Any radical modification of the existing
monogamic order is not to be expected, even if it were generally
recognized, which cannot be said to be the case, that it is
desirable. The question of sexual variations, it must be
remembered, is not a question of introducing an entirely new form
of marriage, but only of recognizing the rights of individuals,
in exceptional cases, to adopt such aberrant forms, and of
recognizing the corresponding duties of such individuals to
accept the responsibilities of any aberrant marriage forms they
may find it best to adopt. So far as the question of sexual
variations is more than this, it is, as Hinton argued, a
dynamical method of working towards the abolition of the perilous
and dangerous promiscuity of prostitution. A rigid marriage order
involves prostitution; a flexible marriage order largely--though
not, it may be, entirely--renders prostitution unnecessary. The
democratic morality of the present day, so far as the indications
at present go, is opposed to the encouragement of a _quasi_-slave
class, with diminished social rights, such as prostitutes always
constitute in a more or less marked degree. It is fairly evident,
also, that the rapidly growing influence of medical hygiene is on
the same side. We may, therefore, reasonably expect in the future
a slow though steady increase in the recognition, and even the
extension, of those variations of the monogamic order which have,
in reality, never ceased to exist.
It is lamentable that at this period of the world's history, nearly two
thousand years after the wise legislators of Rome had completed their
work, it should still be necessary to conclude that we are to-day only
beginning to place marriage on a reasonable and humane basis. I have
repeatedly pointed out how largely the Canon law has been responsible for
this arrest of development. One may say, indeed, that the whole attitude
of the Church, after it had once acquired complete worldly dominance,
must be held responsible. In the earlier centuries the attitude of
Christianity was, on the whole, admirable. It held aloft great ideals but
it refrained from enforcing those ideals at all costs; thus its ideals
remained genuine and could not degenerate into mere hypocritical empty
forms; much flexibility was allowed when it seemed to be for human good
and made for the avoidance of evil and injustice. But when the Church
attained temporal power, and when that power was concentrated in the hands
of Popes who subordinated moral and religious interests to political
interests, all the claims of reason and humanity were flung to the winds.
The ideal was no more a fact than it was before, but it was now treated as
a fact. Human relationships remained what they were before, as complicated
and as various, but henceforth one rigid pattern, admirable as an ideal
but worse than empty as a form, was arbitrarily set up, and all deviations
from it treated either as non-existent or damnable. The vitality was
crushed out of the most central human institutions, and they are only
to-day beginning to lift their heads afresh.
If--to sum up--we consider the course which the regulation of marriage has
run during the Christian era, the only period which immediately concerns
us, it is not difficult to trace the main outlines. Marriage began as a
private arrangement, which the Church, without being able to control, was
willing to bless, as it also blessed many other secular affairs of men,
making no undue attempt to limit its natural flexibility to human needs.
Gradually and imperceptibly, however, without the medium of any law,
Christianity gained the complete control of marriage, coördinated it with
its already evolved conceptions of the evil of lust, of the virtue of
chastity, of the mortal sin of fornication, and, having through the
influence of these dominating conceptions limited the flexibility of
marriage in every possible direction, it placed it on a lofty but narrow
pedestal as the sacrament of matrimony. For reasons which by no means lay
in the nature of the sexual relationships, but which probably seemed
cogent to sacerdotal legislators who assimilated it to ordination,
matrimony was declared indissoluble. Nothing was so easy to enter as the
gate of matrimony, but, after the manner of a mouse-trap, it opened
inwards and not outwards; once in there was no way out alive. The Church's
regulation of marriage while, like the celibacy of the clergy, it was a
success from the point of view of ecclesiastical politics, and even at
first from the point of view of civilization, for it at least introduced
order into a chaotic society, was in the long run a failure from the point
of view of society and morals. On the one hand it drifted into absurd
subtleties and quibbles; on the other, not being based on either reason or
humanity, it had none of that vital adaptability to the needs of life,
which early Christianity, while holding aloft austere ideals, still
largely retained. On the side of tradition this code of marriage law
became awkward and impracticable; on the biological side it was hopelessly
false. The way was thus prepared for the Protestant reintroduction of the
conception of marriage as a contract, that conception being, however,
brought forward less on its merits than as a protest against the
difficulties and absurdities of the Catholic Canon law. The contractive
view, which still largely persists even to-day, speedily took over much of
the Canon law doctrines of marriage, becoming in practice a kind of
reformed and secularized Canon law. It was somewhat more adapted to modern
needs, but it retained much of the rigidity of the Catholic marriage
without its sacramental character, and it never made any attempt to become
more than nominally contractive. It has been of the nature of an
incongruous compromise and has represented a transitional phase towards
free private marriage. We can recognize that phase in the tendency, well
marked in all civilized lands, to an ever increasing flexibility of
marriage. The idea, and even the fact, of marriage by consent and divorce
by failure of that consent, which we are now approaching, has never indeed
been quite extinct. In the Latin countries it has survived with the
tradition of Roman law; in the English-speaking countries it is bound up
with the spirit of Puritanism which insists that in the things that
concern the individual alone the individual himself shall be the supreme
judge. That doctrine as applied to marriage was in England magnificently
asserted by the genius of Milton, and in America it has been a leaven
which is still working in marriage legislation towards an inevitable goal
which is scarcely yet in sight. The marriage system of the future, as it
moves along its present course, will resemble the old Christian system in
that it will recognize the sacred and sacramental character of the sexual
relationship, and it will resemble the civil conception in that it will
insist that marriage, so far as it involves procreation, shall be publicly
registered by the State. But in opposition to the Church it will recognize
that marriage, in so far as it is purely a sexual relationship, is a
private matter the conditions of which must be left to the persons who
alone are concerned in it; and in opposition to the civil theory it will
recognize that marriage is in its essence a fact and not a contract,
though it may give rise to contracts, so long as such contracts do not
touch that essential fact. And in one respect it will go beyond either the
ecclesiastical conception or the civil conception. Man has in recent times
gained control of his own procreative powers, and that control involves a
shifting of the centre of gravity of marriage, in so far as marriage is an
affair of the State, from the vagina to the child which is the fruit of
the womb. Marriage as a state institution will centre, not around the
sexual relationship, but around the child which is the outcome of that
relationship. In so far as marriage is an inviolable public contract it
will be of such a nature that it will be capable of automatically covering
with its protection every child that is born into the world, so that every
child may possess a legal mother and a legal father. On the one side,
therefore, marriage is tending to become less stringent; on the other side
it is tending to become more stringent. On the personal side it is a
sacred and intimate relationship with which the State has no concern; on
the social side it is the assumption of the responsible public sponsorship
of a new member of the State. Some among us are working to further one of
these aspects of marriage, some to further the other aspect. Both are
indispensable to establish a perfect harmony. It is necessary to hold the
two aspects of marriage apart, in order to do equal justice to the
individual and to society, but in so far as marriage approaches its ideal
state those two aspects become one.
We have now completed the discussion of marriage as it presents itself to
the modern man born in what in mediæval days was called Christendom. It is
not an easy subject to discuss. It is indeed a very difficult subject, and
only after many years is it possible to detect the main drift of its
apparently opposing and confused currents when one is oneself in the midst
of them. To an Englishman it is, perhaps, peculiarly difficult, for the
Englishman is nothing if not insular; in that fact lie whatever virtues he
possesses, as well as their reverse sides.[374]
Yet it is worth while to attempt to climb to a height from which we can
view the stream of social tendency in its true proportions and estimate
its direction. It is necessary to do so if we value our mental peace in an
age when men's minds are agitated by many petty movements which have
nothing to do with their great temporal interests, to say nothing of their
eternal interests. When we have attained a wide vision of the solid
biological facts of life, when we have grasped the great historical
streams of tradition,--which together make up the map of human
affairs,--we can face serenely the little social transitions which take
place in our own age, as they have taken place in every age.
FOOTNOTES:
[312] Rosenthal, of Breslau, from the legal side, goes so far as to argue
("Grundfragen des Eheproblems," _Die Neue Generation_, Dec., 1908), that
the intention of procreation is essential to the conception of legal
marriage.
[313] J.A. Godfrey, _Science of Sex_, p. 119.
[314] E.D. Cope, "The Marriage Problem," _Open Court_, Nov., 1888.
[315] See _ante_, p. 395.
[316] Wächter, _Eheschiedungen_, pp. 95 et seq.; Esmein, _Marriage en
Droit Canonique_, vol. i, p. 6; Howard, _History of Matrimonial
Institutions_, vol. ii, p. 15. Howard (in agreement with Lecky) considers
that the freedom of divorce was only abused by a small section of the
Roman population, and that such abuse, so far as it existed, was not the
cause of any decline of Roman morals.
[317] The opinions of the Christian Fathers were very varied, and they
were sometimes doubtful about them; see, e.g., the opinions collected by
Cranmer and enumerated by Burnet, _History of Reformation_ (ed. Nares),
vol. ii, p. 91.
[318] Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, enacted a strict and
peculiar divorce law (allowing a wife to divorce her husband only when he
was a homicide, a poisoner, or a violator of sepulchres), which could not
be maintained. In 497, therefore, Anastasius decreed divorce by mutual
consent. This was abolished by Justinian, who only allowed divorce for
various specified causes, among them, however, including the husband's
adultery. These restrictions proved unworkable, and Justinian's successor
and nephew, Justin, restored divorce by mutual consent. Finally, in 870,
Leo the Philosopher returned to Justinian's enactment (see, e.g., Smith
and Cheetham, _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_, arts. "Adultery" and
"Marriage").
[319] The element of reverence in the early German attitude towards women
and the privileges which even the married woman enjoyed, so far as Tacitus
can be considered a reliable guide, seem to have been the surviving
vestiges of an earlier social state on a more matriarchal basis. They are
most distinct at the dawn of German history. From the first, however,
though divorce by mutual consent seems to have been possible, German
custom was pitiless to the married woman who was unfaithful, sterile, or
otherwise offended, though for some time after the introduction of
Christianity it was no offence for the German husband to commit adultery
(Westermarck, _Origin of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii, p. 453).
[320] "This form of marriage," says Hobhouse (op. cit., vol. i, p. 156),
"is intimately associated with the extension of marital power." Cf.
Howard, op. cit., vol. i, p. 231. The very subordinate position of the
mediæval German woman is set forth by Hagelstange, _Süddeutsches
Bauernleben in Mittelalter_, 1898, pp. 70 et seq.
[321] Howard, op. cit., vol. i, p. 259; Smith and Cheetham, _Dictionary of
Christian Antiquities_, art. _Arrhæ_. It would appear, however, that the
"bride-sale," of which Tacitus speaks, was not strictly the sale of a
chattel nor of a slave-girl, but the sale of the _mund_ or protectorship
over the girl. It is true the distinction may not always have been clear
to those who took part in the transaction. Similarly the Anglo-Saxon
betrothal was not so much a payment of the bride's price to her kinsmen,
although as a matter of fact, they might make a profit out of the
transaction, as a covenant stipulating for the bride's honorable treatment
as wife and widow. Reminiscences of this, remark Pollock and Maitland (op.
cit., vol. ii, p. 364), may be found in "that curious cabinet of
antiquities, the marriage ritual of the English Church."
[322] Howard, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 278-281, 386. The _Arrha_ crept into
Roman and Byzantine law during the sixth century.
[323] J. Wickham Legg, _Ecclesiological Essays_, p. 189. It may be added
that the idea of the subordination of the wife to the husband appeared in
the Christian Church at a somewhat early period, and no doubt
independently of Germanic influences; St. Augustine said (Sermo XXXVII,
cap. vi) that a good _materfamilias_ must not be ashamed to call herself
her husband's servant (_ancilla_).
[324] See, e.g., L. Gautier, _La Chevalerie_, Ch. IX.
[325] Howard, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 293 et seq.; Esmein, _op. cit._, vol.
i, pp. 25 et seq.; Smith and Cheetham, _Dictionary of Christian
Antiquities_ art. "Contract of Marriage."
[326] Any later changes in Catholic Canon law have merely been in the
direction of making matrimony still narrower and still more remote from
the practice of the world. By a papal decree of 1907, civil marriages and
marriages in non-Catholic places of worship are declared to be not only
sinful and unlawful (which they were before), but actually null and void.
[327] E.S.P. Haynes, _Our Divorce Law_, p. 3.
[328] It was the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century, which made
ecclesiastical rites essential to binding marriage; but even then
fifty-six prelates voted against that decision.
[329] Esmein, op. cit., vol. i, p. 91.
[330] It is sometimes said that the Catholic Church is able to diminish
the evils of its doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage by the number
of impediments to marriage it admits, thus affording free scope for
dispensations from marriage. This scarcely seems to be the case. Dr. P.J.
Hayes, who speaks with authority as Chancellor of the Catholic Archdiocese
of New York, states ("Impediments to Marriage in the Catholic Church,"
_North American Review_, May, 1905) that even in so modern and so mixed a
community as this there are few applications for dispensations on account
of impediments; there are 15,000 Catholic marriages per annum in New York
City, but scarcely five per annum are questioned as to validity, and these
chiefly on the ground of bigamy.
[331] The Canonists, say Pollock and Maitland (loc. cit.), "made a
capricious mess of the marriage law." "Seldom," says Howard (_op. cit._,
vol i, p. 340), "have mere theory and subtle quibbling had more disastrous
consequences in practical life than in the case of the distinction between
_sponsalia de præsenti_ and _de futuro_."
[332] Howard, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 386 et seq. On the whole, however,
Luther's opinion was that marriage, though a sacred and mysterious thing,
is not a sacrament; his various statements on the matter are brought
together by Strampff, _Luther über die Ehe_, pp. 204-214.
[333] Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 61 et seq.
[334] Probably as a result of the somewhat confused and incoherent
attitude of the Reformers, the Canon law of marriage, in a modified form,
really persisted in Protestant countries to a greater extent than in
Catholic countries; in France, especially, it has been much more
profoundly modified (Esmein, op. cit., vol. i, p. 33).
[335] The Quaker conception of marriage is still vitally influential.
"Why," says Mrs. Besant (_Marriage_, p. 19), "should not we take a leaf
out of the Quaker's book, and substitute for the present legal forms of
marriage a simple declaration publicly made?"
[336] Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 456. The actual practice in
Pennsylvania appears, however, to differ little from that usual in the
other States.
[337] Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 109. "It is, indeed, wonderful,"
Howard remarks, "that a great nation, priding herself on a love of equity
and social liberty, should thus for five generations tolerate an invidious
indulgence, rather than frankly and courageously to free herself from the
shackles of an ecclesiastical tradition."
[338] "The enforced continuance of an unsuccessful union is perhaps the
most immoral thing which a civilized society ever countenanced, far less
encouraged," says Godfrey (_Science of Sex_, p. 123). "The morality of a
union is dependent upon mutual desire, and a union dictated by any other
cause is outside the moral pale, however custom may sanction it, or
religion and law condone it."
[339] Adultery in most savage and barbarous societies is regarded, in the
words of Westermarck, as "an illegitimate appropriation of the exclusive
claims which the husband has acquired by the purchase of his wife, as an
offence against property;" the seducer is, therefore, punished as a thief,
by fine, mutilation, even death (_Origin of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii, pp.
447 et seq.; id., _History of Human Marriage_, p. 121). Among some peoples
it is the seducer who alone suffers, and not the wife.
[340] It is sometimes said in defence of the claim for damages for
seducing a wife that women are often weak and unable to resist masculine
advances, so that the law ought to press heavily on the man who takes
advantage of that weakness. This argument seems a little antiquated. The
law is beginning to accept the responsibility even of married women in
other respects, and can scarcely refuse to accept it for the control of
her own person. Moreover, if it is so natural for the woman to yield, it
is scarcely legitimate to punish the man with whom she has performed that
natural act. It must further be said that if a wife's adultery is only an
irresponsible feminine weakness, a most undue brutality is inflicted on
her by publicly demanding her pecuniary price from her lover. If, indeed,
we accept this argument, we ought to reintroduce the mediæval girdle of
chastity.
[341] Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 114.
[342] This rule is, in England, by no means a dead letter. Thus, in 1907,
a wife who had left her home, leaving a letter stating that her husband
was not the father of her child, subsequently brought an action for
divorce, which, as the husband made no defence, she obtained. But, the
King's Proctor having learnt the facts, the decree was rescinded. Then the
husband brought an action for divorce, but could not obtain it, having
already admitted his own adultery by leaving the previous case undefended.
He took the matter up to the Court of Appeal, but his petition was
dismissed, the Court being of opinion that "to grant relief in such a case
was not in the interest of public morality." The safest way in England to
render what is legally termed marriage absolutely indissoluble is for both
parties to commit adultery.
[343] Magnus Hirschfeld, _Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, Oct., 1908.
[344] H. Adner, "Die Richterliche Beurteilung der 'Zerrütteten' Ehe,"
_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. ii, Teil 8.
[345] Gross-Hoffinger, _Die Schichsale der Frauen und die Prostitution_,
1847; Bloch presents a full summary of the results of this inquiry in an
_Appendix_ to Ch. X of his _Sexual Life of Our Times_.
[346] Divorce in the United States is fully discussed by Howard, op. cit.,
vol. iii.
[347] H. Münsterberg, _The Americans_, p. 575. Similarly, Dr. Felix Adler,
in a study of "The Ethics of Divorce" (_The Ethical Record_, 1890, p.
200), although not himself an admirer of divorce, believes that the first
cause of the frequency of divorce in the United States is the high
position of women.
[348] In an important article, with illustrative cases, on "The
Neuro-psychical Element in Conjugal Aversion" (_Journal of Nervous and
Mental Diseases_, Sept., 1892) Smith Baker refers to the cases in which "a
man may find himself progressively becoming antipathetic, through
recognition of the comparatively less developed personality of the one to
whom he happens to be married. Marrying, perhaps, before he has learned to
accurately judge of character and its tendencies, he awakens to the fact
that he is honorably bound to live all his physiological life with, not a
real companion, but a mere counterfeit." The cases are still more
numerous, the same writer observes, in which the sexual appetite of the
wife fails to reveal itself except as the result of education and
practice. "This sort of natural-unnatural condition is the source of much
disappointment, and of intense suffering on the part of the woman as well
as of family dissatisfaction." Yet such causes for divorce are far too
complex to be stated in statute-books, and far too intimate to be pleaded
in courts of justice.
[349] Ten years ago, if not still, the United States came fourth in order
of frequency of divorce, after Japan, Denmark, and Switzerland.
[350] Lecky, the historian of European morals, has pointed out (_Democracy
and Liberty_, vol. ii, p. 172) the close connection generally between
facility of divorce and a high standard of sexual morality.
[351] So, e.g., Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_, vol. i, p. 237.
[352] In England this step was taken in the reign of Henry VII, when the
forcible marriage of women against their will was forbidden by statute (3
Henry VII, c. 2). Even in the middle of the seventeenth century, however,
the question of forcible marriage had again to be dealt with (_Inderwick_,
Interregnum, pp. 40 et seq.).
[353] Woods Hutchinson (_Contemporary Review_, Sept., 1905) argues that
when there is epilepsy, insanity, moral perversion, habitual drunkenness,
or criminal conduct of any kind, divorce, for the sake of the next
generation, should be not permissive but compulsory. Mere divorce,
however, would not suffice to attain the ends desired.
[354] Similarly in Germany, Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, who had suffered much
from marriage, whatever her own defects of character may have been, writes
at the end of _Meine Lebensbeichte_ that "as long as women have not the
courage to regulate, without State-interference or Church-interference,
relationships which concern themselves alone, they will not be free." In
place of this old decayed system of marriage so opposed to our modern
thoughts and feelings, she would have private contracts made by a lawyer.
In England, at a much earlier period, Charles Kingsley, who was an ardent
friend to women's movements, and whose feeling for womanhood amounted
almost to worship, wrote to J.S. Mill: "There will never be a good world
for women until the last remnant of the Canon law is civilized off the
earth."
[355] "No fouler institution was ever invented," declared Auberon Herbert
many years ago, expressing, before its time, a feeling which has since
become more common; "and its existence drags on, to our deep shame,
because we have not the courage frankly to say that the sexual relations
of husband and wife, or those who live together, concern their own selves,
and do not concern the prying, gloating, self-righteous, and intensely
untruthful world outside."
[356] Hobhouse, op. cit. vol. i, p. 237.
[357] The same conception of marriage as a contract still persists to some
extent also in the United States, whither it was carried by the early
Protestants and Puritans. No definition of marriage is indeed usually laid
down by the States, but, Howard says (op. cit., vol. ii, p. 395), "in
effect matrimony is treated as a relation partaking of the nature of both
status and contract."
[358] This point of view has been vigorously set forth by Paul and Victor
Margueritte, _Quelques Idées_.
[359] I may remark that this was pointed out, and its consequences
vigorously argued, many years ago by C.G. Garrison, "Limits of Divorce,"
_Contemporary Review_, Feb., 1894. "It may safely be asserted," he
concludes, "that marriage presents not one attribute or incident of
anything remotely resembling a contract, either in form, remedy,
procedure, or result; but that in all these aspects, on the contrary, it
is fatally hostile to the principles and practices of that division of the
rights of persons." Marriage is not contract, but conduct.
[360] See, e.g., P. and V. Margueritte, op. cit.
[361] As quoted by Howard, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 29.
[362] Ellen Key similarly (_Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 343) remarks that to
talk of "the duty of life-long fidelity" is much the same as to talk of
"the duty of life-long health." A man may promise, she adds, to do his
best to preserve his life, or his love; he cannot unconditionally
undertake to preserve them.
[363] Hobhouse, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 159, 237-9; cf. P. and V.
Margueritte, _Quelques Idées_.
[364] "Divorce," as Garrison puts it ("Limits of Divorce," _Contemporary
Review_, Feb., 1894), "is the judicial announcement that conduct once
connubial in character and purpose, has lost these qualities.... Divorce
is a question of fact, and not a license to break a promise."
[365] See, _ante_, p. 425.
[366] It has been necessary to discuss reproduction in the first chapter
of the present volume, and it will again be necessary in the concluding
chapter. Here we are only concerned with procreation as an element of
marriage.
[367] Nietzold, _Die Ehe in Ægypten zur Ptolemäisch-römischen Zeit_, 1903,
p. 3. This bond also accorded rights to any children that might be born
during its existence.
[368] See, e.g., Ellen Key, _Mutter und Kind_, p. 21. The necessity for
the combination of greater freedom of sexual relationships with greater
stringency of parental relationships was clearly realized at an earlier
period by another able woman writer, Miss J.H. Clapperton, in her notable
book, _Scientific Meliorism_, published in 1885. "Legal changes," she
wrote (p. 320), "are required in two directions, viz., towards greater
freedom as to marriage and greater strictness as to parentage. The
marriage union is essentially a private matter with which society has no
call and no right to interfere. Childbirth, on the contrary, is a public
event. It touches the interests of the whole nation."
[369] Ellen Key, _Liebe und Ehe_, p. 168; cf. the same author's _Century
of the Child_.
[370] In Germany alone 180,000 "illegitimate" children are born every
year, and the number is rapidly increasing; in England it is only 40,000
per annum, the strong feeling which often exists against such births in
England (as also in France) leading to the wide adoption of methods for
preventing conception.
[371] "Where are real monogamists to be found?" asked Schopenhauer in his
essay, "Ueber die Weibe." And James Hinton was wont to ask: "What is the
meaning of maintaining monogamy? Is there any chance of getting it, I
should like to know? Do you call English life monogamous?"
[372] "Almost everywhere," says Westermarck of polygyny (which he
discusses fully in Chs. XX-XXII of his _History of Human Marriage_) "it is
confined to the smaller part of the people, the vast majority being
monogamous." Maurice Gregory (_Contemporary Review_, Sept., 1906) gives
statistics showing that nearly everywhere the tendency is towards equality
in number of the sexes.
[373] In a polygamous land a man is of course as much bound by his
obligations to his second wife as to his first. Among ourselves the man's
"second wife" is degraded with the name of "mistress," and the worse he
treats her and her children the more his "morality" is approved, just as
the Catholic Church, when struggling to establish sacerdotal celibacy,
approved more highly the priest who had illegitimate relations with women
than the priest who decently and openly married. If his neglect induces a
married man's mistress to make known her relationship to him the man is
justified in prosecuting her, and his counsel, assured of general
sympathy, will state in court that "this woman has even been so wicked as
to write to the prosecutor's wife!"
[374] Howard, in his judicial _History of Matrimonial Institutions_ (vol.
ii. pp. 96 et seq.), cannot refrain from drawing attention to the almost
insanely wild character of the language used in England not so many years
ago by those who opposed marriage with a deceased wife's sister, and he
contrasts it with the much more reasonable attitude of the Catholic
Church. "Pictures have been drawn," he remarks, "of the moral anarchy such
marriages must produce, which are read by American, Colonial, and
Continental observers with a bewilderment that is not unmixed with
disgust, and are, indeed, a curious illustration of the extreme insularity
of the English mind." So recently as A.D. 1908 a bill was brought into the
British House of Lords proposing that desertion without cause for two
years shall be a ground for divorce, a reasonable and humane measure which
is law in most parts of the civilized world. The Lord Chancellor (Lord
Loreburn), a Liberal, and in the sphere of politics an enlightened and
sagacious leader, declared that such a proposal was "absolutely
impossible." The House rejected the proposal by 61 votes to 2. Even the
marriage decrees of the Council of Trent were not affirmed by such an
overwhelming majority. In matters of marriage legislation England has
scarcely yet emerged from the Middle Ages.
CHAPTER XI.
THE ART OF LOVE.
Marriage Not Only for Procreation--Theologians on the _Sacramentum
Solationis_--Importance of the _Art of Love_--The Basis of Stability in
Marriage and the Condition for Right Procreation--The Art of Love the
Bulwark Against Divorce--The Unity of Love and Marriage a Principle of
Modern Morality--Christianity and the Art of Love--Ovid--The Art of Love
Among Primitive Peoples--Sexual Initiation in Africa and Elsewhere--The
Tendency to Spontaneous Development of the Art of Love in Early
Life--Flirtation--Sexual Ignorance in Women--The Husband's Place in Sexual
Initiation--Sexual Ignorance in Men--The Husband's Education for
Marriage--The Injury Done by the Ignorance of Husbands--The Physical and
Mental Results of Unskilful Coitus--Women Understand the Art of Love
Better Than Men--Ancient and Modern Opinions Concerning Frequency of
Coitus--Variation in Sexual Capacity--The Sexual Appetite--The Art of Love
Based on the Biological Facts of Courtship--The Art of Pleasing Women--The
Lover Compared to the Musician--The Proposal as a Part of
Courtship--Divination in the Art of Love--The Importance of the
Preliminaries in Courtship--The Unskilful Husband Frequently the Cause of
the Frigid Wife--The Difficulty of Courtship--Simultaneous Orgasm--The
Evils of Incomplete Gratification in Women--Coitus Interruptus--Coitus
Reservatus--The Human Method of Coitus--Variations in Coitus--Posture in
Coitus--The Best Time for Coitus--The Influence of Coitus in Marriage--The
Advantages of Absence in Marriage--The Risks of Absence--Jealousy--The
Primitive Function of Jealousy--Its Predominance Among Animals, Savages,
etc., and in Pathological States--An Anti-Social Emotion--Jealousy
Incompatible with the Progress of Civilization--The Possibility of Loving
More Than One Person at a Time--Platonic Friendship--The Conditions Which
Make It Possible--The Maternal Element in Woman's Love--The Final
Development of Conjugal Love--The Problem of Love One of the Greatest of
Social Questions.
It will be clear from the preceding discussion that there are two elements
in every marriage so far as that marriage is complete. On the one hand
marriage is a union prompted by mutual love and only sustainable as a
reality, apart from its mere formal side, by the cultivation of such love.
On the other hand marriage is a method for propagating the race and
having its end in offspring. In the first aspect its aim is erotic, in the
second parental. Both these ends have long been generally recognized. We
find them set forth, for instance, in the marriage service of the Church
of England, where it is stated that marriage exists both for "the mutual
society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other," and
also for "the procreation of children." Without the factor of mutual love
the proper conditions for procreation cannot exist; without the factor of
procreation the sexual union, however beautiful and sacred a relationship
it may in itself be, remains, in essence, a private relationship,
incomplete as a marriage and without public significance. It becomes
necessary, therefore, to supplement the preceding discussion of marriage
in its general outlines by a final and more intimate consideration of
marriage in its essence, as embracing the art of love and the science of
procreation.
There has already been occasion from time to time to refer to
those who, starting from various points of view, have sought to
limit the scope of marriage and to suppress one or other of its
elements. (See e.g., _ante_, p. 135.)
In modern times the tendency has been to exclude the factor of
procreation, and to regard the relationship of marriage as
exclusively lying in the relationship of the two parties to each
other. Apart from the fact, which it is unnecessary again to call
attention to, that, from the public and social point of view, a
marriage without children, however important to the two persons
concerned, is a relationship without any public significance, it
must further be said that, in the absence of children, even the
personal erotic life itself is apt to suffer, for in the normal
erotic life, especially in women, sexual love tends to grow into
parental love. Moreover, the full development of mutual love and
dependence is with difficulty attained, and there is absence of
that closest of bonds, the mutual coöperation of two persons in
producing a new person. The perfect and complete marriage in its
full development is a trinity.
Those who seek to eliminate the erotic factor from marriage as
unessential, or at all events as only permissible when strictly
subordinated to the end of procreation, have made themselves
heard from time to time at various periods. Even the ancients,
Greeks and Romans alike, in their more severe moments advocated
the elimination of the erotic element from marriage, and its
confinement to extra-marital relationships, that is so far as men
were concerned; for the erotic needs of married women they had no
provision to make. Montaigne, soaked in classic traditions, has
admirably set forth the reasons for eliminating the erotic
interest from marriage: "One does not marry for oneself, whatever
may be said; a man marries as much, or more, for his posterity,
for his family; the usage and interest of marriage touch our race
beyond ourselves.... Thus it is a kind of incest to employ, in
this venerable and sacred parentage, the efforts and the
extravagances of amorous license" (_Essais_, Bk. i, Ch. XXIX; Bk.
iii, Ch. V). This point of view easily commended itself to the
early Christians, who, however, deliberately overlooked its
reverse side, the establishment of erotic interests outside
marriage. "To have intercourse except for procreation," said
Clement of Alexandria (_Pædagogus_, Bk. ii, Ch. X), "is to do
injury to Nature." While, however, that statement is quite true
of the lower animals, it is not true of man, and especially not
true of civilized man, whose erotic needs are far more developed,
and far more intimately associated with the finest and highest
part of the organism, than is the case among animals generally.
For the animal, sexual desire, except when called forth by the
conditions involved by procreative necessities, has no existence.
It is far otherwise in man, for whom, even when the question of
procreation is altogether excluded, sexual love is still an
insistent need, and even a condition of the finest spiritual
development. The Catholic Church, therefore, while regarding with
admiration a continence in marriage which excluded sexual
relations except for the end of procreation, has followed St.
Augustine in treating intercourse apart from procreation with
considerable indulgence, as only a venial sin. Here, however, the
Church was inclined to draw the line, and it appears that in 1679
Innocent XI condemned the proposition that "the conjugal act,
practiced for pleasure alone, is exempt even from venial sin."
Protestant theologians have been inclined to go further, and
therein they found some authority even in Catholic writers. John
à Lasco, the Catholic Bishop who became a Protestant and settled
in England during Edward VI's reign, was following many mediæval
theologians when he recognized the _sacramentum solationis_, in
addition to _proles_, as an element of marriage. Cranmer, in his
marriage service of 1549, stated that "mutual help and comfort,"
as well as procreation, enter into the object of marriage
(Wickham Legg, _Ecclesiological Essays_, p. 204; Howard,
_Matrimonial Institutions_, vol. i, p. 398). Modern theologians
speak still more distinctly. "The sexual act," says Northcote
(_Christianity and Sex Problems_, p. 55), "is a love act. Duly
regulated, it conduces to the ethical welfare of the individual
and promotes his efficiency as a social unit. The act itself and
its surrounding emotions stimulate within the organism the
powerful movements of a vast psychic life." At an earlier period
also, Schleiermacher, in his _Letters on Lucinde_, had pointed
out the great significance of love for the spiritual development
of the individual.
Edward Carpenter truly remarks, in _Love's Coming of Age_, that
sexual love is not only needed for physical creation, but also
for spiritual creation. Bloch, again, in discussing this question
(_The Sexual Life of Our Time_, Ch. VI) concludes that "love and
the sexual embrace have not only an end in procreation, they
constitute an end in themselves, and are necessary for the life,
development, and inner growth of the individual himself."
It is argued by some, who admit mutual love as a constituent part of
marriage, that such love, once recognized at the outset, may be taken for
granted, and requires no further discussion; there is, they believe, no
art of love to be either learnt or taught; it comes by nature. Nothing
could be further from the truth, most of all as regards civilized man.
Even the elementary fact of coitus needs to be taught. No one could take a
more austerely Puritanic view of sexual affairs than Sir James Paget, and
yet Paget (in his lecture on "Sexual Hypochondriasis") declared that
"Ignorance about sexual affairs seems to be a notable characteristic of
the more civilized part of the human race. Among ourselves it is certain
that the method of copulating needs to be taught, and that they to whom it
is not taught remain quite ignorant about it." Gallard, again, remarks
similarly (in his _Clinique des Maladies des Femmes_) that young people,
like Daphnis in Longus's pastoral, need a beautiful Lycenion to give them
a solid education, practical as well as theoretical, in these matters, and
he considers that mothers should instruct their daughters at marriage, and
fathers their sons. Philosophers have from time to time recognized the
gravity of these questions and have discoursed concerning them; thus
Epicurus, as Plutarch tells us,[375] would discuss with his disciples
various sexual matters, such as the proper time for coitus; but then, as
now, there were obscurantists who would leave even the central facts of
life to the hazards of chance or ignorance, and these presumed to blame
the philosopher.
There is, however, much more to be learnt in these matters than the mere
elementary facts of sexual intercourse. The art of love certainly includes
such primary facts of sexual hygiene, but it involves also the whole
erotic discipline of marriage, and that is why its significance is so
great, for the welfare and happiness of the individual, for the stability
of sexual unions, and indirectly for the race, since the art of love is
ultimately the art of attaining the right conditions for procreation.
"It seems extremely probable," wrote Professor E.D. Cope,[376] "that if
this subject could be properly understood, and become, in the details of
its practical conduct, a part of a written social science, the monogamic
marriage might attain a far more general success than is often found in
actual life." There can be no doubt whatever that this is the case. In the
great majority of marriages success depends exclusively upon the knowledge
of the art of love possessed by the two persons who enter into it. A
life-long monogamic union may, indeed, persist in the absence of the
slightest inborn or acquired art of love, out of religious resignation or
sheer stupidity. But that attitude is now becoming less common. As we have
seen in the previous chapter, divorces are becoming more frequent and more
easily obtainable in every civilized country. This is a tendency of
civilization; it is the result of a demand that marriage should be a real
relationship, and that when it ceases to be real as a relationship it
should also cease as a form. That is an inevitable tendency, involved in
our growing democratization, for the democracy seems to care more for
realities than for forms, however venerable. We cannot fight against it;
and we should be wrong to fight against it even if we could.
Yet while we are bound to aid the tendency to divorce, and to insist that
a valid marriage needs the wills of two persons to maintain it, it is
difficult for anyone to argue that divorce is in itself desirable. It is
always a confession of failure. Two persons, who, if they have been moved
in the slightest degree by the normal and regular impulse of sexual
selection, at the outset regarded each other as lovable, have, on one
side or the other or on both, proved not lovable. There has been a failure
in the fundamental art of love. If we are to counterbalance facility of
divorce our only sound course is to increase the stability of marriage,
and that is only possible by cultivating the art of love, the primal
foundation of marriage.
It is by no means unnecessary to emphasize this point. There are still
many persons who have failed to realize it. There are even people who seem
to imagine that it is unimportant whether or not pleasure is present in
the sexual act. "I do not believe mutual pleasure in the sexual act has
any particular bearing on the happiness of life," once remarked Dr. Howard
A. Kelly.[377] Such a statement means--if indeed it means anything--that
the marriage tie has no "particular bearing" on human happiness; it means
that the way must be freely opened to adultery and divorce. Even the most
perverse ascetic of the Middle Ages scarcely ventured to make a statement
so flagrantly opposed to the experiences of humanity, and the fact that a
distinguished gynecologist of the twentieth century can make it, with
almost the air of stating a truism, is ample justification for the
emphasis which it has nowadays become necessary to place on the art of
love. "Uxor enim dignitatis nomen est, non voluptatis," was indeed an
ancient Pagan dictum. But it is not in harmony with modern ideas. It was
not even altogether in harmony with Christianity. For our modern morality,
as Ellen Key well says, the unity of love and marriage is a fundamental
principle.[378]
The neglect of the art of love has not been a universal phenomenon; it is
more especially characteristic of Christendom. The spirit of ancient Rome
undoubtedly predisposed Europe to such a neglect, for with their rough
cultivation of the military virtues and their inaptitude for the finer
aspects of civilization the Romans were willing to regard love as a
permissible indulgence, but they were not, as a people, prepared to
cultivate it as an art. Their poets do not, in this matter, represent the
moral feeling of their best people. It is indeed a highly significant
fact that Ovid, the most distinguished Latin poet who concerned himself
much with the art of love, associated that art not so much with morality
as with immorality. As he viewed it, the art of love was less the art of
retaining a woman in her home than the art of winning her away from it; it
was the adulterer's art rather than the husband's art. Such a conception
would be impossible out of Europe, but it proved very favorable to the
growth of the Christian attitude towards the art of love.
Love as an art, as well as a passion, seems to have received
considerable study in antiquity, though the results of that study
have perished. Cadmus Milesius, says Suidas, wrote fourteen great
volumes on the passion of love, but they are not now to be found.
Rohde (_Das Griechische Roman_, p. 55) has a brief section on the
Greek philosophic writers on love. Bloch (_Beiträge zur
Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil I, p. 191) enumerates the ancient
women writers who dealt with the art of love. Montaigne
(_Essais_, liv. ii, Ch. V) gives a list of ancient classical lost
books on love. Burton (_Anatomy of Melancholy_, Bell's edition,
vol. iii, p. 2) also gives a list of lost books on love. Burton
himself dealt at length with the manifold signs of love and its
grievous symptoms. Boissier de Sauvages, early in the eighteenth
century, published a Latin thesis, _De Amore_, discussing love
somewhat in the same spirit as Burton, as a psychic disease to be
treated and cured.
The breath of Christian asceticism had passed over love; it was
no longer, as in classic days, an art to be cultivated, but only
a malady to be cured. The true inheritor of the classic spirit in
this, as in many other matters, was not the Christian world, but
the world of Islam. _The Perfumed Garden_ of the Sheik Nefzaoui
was probably written in the city of Tunis early in the sixteenth
century by an author who belonged to the south of Tunis. Its
opening invocation clearly indicates that it departs widely from
the conception of love as a disease: "Praise be to God who has
placed man's greatest pleasures in the natural parts of woman,
and has destined the natural parts of man to afford the greatest
enjoyments to woman." The Arabic book, _El Ktab_, or "The Secret
Laws of Love," is a modern work, by Omer Haleby Abu Othmân, who
was born in Algiers of a Moorish mother and a Turkish father.
For Christianity the permission to yield to the sexual impulse at all was
merely a concession to human weakness, an indulgence only possible when it
was carefully hedged and guarded on every side. Almost from the first the
Christians began to cultivate the art of virginity, and they could not so
dislocate their point of view as to approve of the art of love. All their
passionate adoration in the sphere of sex went out towards chastity.
Possessed by such ideals, they could only tolerate human love at all by
giving to one special form of it a religious sacramental character, and
even that sacramental halo imparted to love a quasi-ascetic character
which precluded the idea of regarding love as an art.[379] Love gained a
religious element but it lost a moral element, since, outside
Christianity, the art of love is part of the foundation of sexual
morality, wherever such morality in any degree exists. In Christendom love
in marriage was left to shift for itself as best it might; the art of love
was a dubious art which was held to indicate a certain commerce with
immorality and even indeed to be itself immoral. That feeling was
doubtless strengthened by the fact that Ovid was the most conspicuous
master in literature of the art of love. His literary reputation--far
greater than it now seems to us[380]--gave distinction to his position as
the author of the chief extant text-book of the art of love. With Humanism
and the Renaissance and the consequent realization that Christianity had
overlooked one side of life, Ovid's _Ars Amatoria_ was placed on a
pedestal it had not occupied before or since. It represented a step
forward in civilization; it revealed love not as a mere animal instinct or
a mere pledged duty, but as a complex, humane, and refined relationship
which demanded cultivation; "_arte regendus amor_." Boccaccio made a wise
teacher put Ovid's _Ars Amatoria_ into the hands of the young. In an age
still oppressed by the mediæval spirit, it was a much needed text-book,
but it possessed the fatal defect, as a text-book, of presenting the
erotic claims of the individual as divorced from the claims of good social
order. It never succeeded in establishing itself as a generally accepted
manual of love, and in the eyes of many it served to stamp the subject it
dealt with as one that lies outside the limits of good morals.
When, however, we take a wider survey, and inquire into the discipline for
life that is imparted to the young in many parts of the world, we shall
frequently find that the art of love, understood in varying ways, is an
essential part of that discipline. Summary, though generally adequate, as
are the educational methods of primitive peoples, they not seldom include
a training in those arts which render a woman agreeable to a man and a man
agreeable to a woman in the relationship of marriage, and it is often more
or less dimly realized that courtship is not a mere preliminary to
marriage, but a biologically essential part of the marriage relationship
throughout.
Sexual initiation is carried out very thoroughly in Azimba land,
Central Africa. H. Crawford Angus, the first European to visit
the Azimba people, lived among them for a year, and has described
the Chensamwali, or initiation ceremony, of girls. "At the first
sign of menstruation in a young girl, she is taught the mysteries
of womanhood, and is shown the different positions for sexual
intercourse. The vagina is handled freely, and if not previously
enlarged (which may have taken place at the harvest festival when
a boy and girl are allowed to 'keep house' during the day-time by
themselves, and when quasi-intercourse takes place) it is now
enlarged by means of a horn or corn-cob, which is inserted and
secured in place by bands of bark cloth. When all signs [of
menstruation] have passed, a public announcement of a dance is
given to the women in the village. At this dance no men are
allowed to be present, and it was only with a great deal of
trouble that I managed to witness it. The girl to be 'danced' is
led back from the bush to her mother's hut where she is kept in
solitude to the morning of the dance. On that morning she is
placed on the ground in a sitting position, while the dancers
form a ring around her. Several songs are then sung with
reference to the genital organs. The girl is then stripped and
made to go through the mimic performance of sexual intercourse,
and if the movements are not enacted properly, as is often the
case when the girl is timid and bashful, one of the older women
will take her place and show her how she is to perform. Many
songs about the relation between men and women are sung, and the
girl is instructed as to all her duties when she becomes a wife.
She is also instructed that during the time of her menstruation
she is unclean, and that during her monthly period she must close
her vulva with a pad of fibre used for the purpose. The object of
the dance is to inculcate to the girl the knowledge of married
life. The girl is taught to be faithful to her husband and to try
to bear children, and she is also taught the various arts and
methods of making herself seductive and pleasing to her husband,
and of thus retaining him in her power." (H. Crawford Angus, "The
Chensamwali," _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1898, Heft 6, p.
479).
In Abyssinia, as well as on the Zanzibar coast, according to
Stecker (quoted by Ploss-Bartels, _Das Weib_, Section 119) young
girls are educated in buttock movements which increase their
charm in coitus. These movements, of a rotatory character, are
called Duk-Duk. To be ignorant of Duk-Duk is a great disgrace to
a girl. Among the Swahili women of Zanzibar, indeed, a complete
artistic system of hip-movements is cultivated, to be displayed
in coitus. It prevails more especially on the coast, and a
Swahili woman is not counted a "lady" (bibi) unless she is
acquainted with this art. From sixty to eighty young women
practice this buttock dance together for some eight hours a day,
laying aside all clothing, and singing the while. The public are
not admitted. The dance, which is a kind of imitation of coitus,
has been described by Zache ("Sitten und Gebräuche der Suaheli,"
_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1899, Heft 2-3, p. 72). The more
accomplished dancers excite general admiration. During the latter
part of this initiation various feats are imposed, to test the
girl's skill and self-control. For instance, she must dance up to
a fire and remove from the midst of the fire a vessel full of
water to the brim, without spilling it. At the end of three
months the training is over, and the girl goes home in festival
attire. She is now eligible for marriage. Similar customs are
said to prevail in the Dutch East Indies and elsewhere.
The Hebrews had erotic dances, which were doubtless related to
the art of love in marriage, and among the Greeks, and their
disciples the Romans, the conception of love as an art which
needs training, skill, and cultivation, was still extant. That
conception was crushed by Christianity which, although it
sanctified the institution of matrimony, degraded that sexual
love which is normally the content of marriage.
In 1176 the question was brought before a Court of Love by a
baron and lady of Champagne, whether love is compatible with
marriage. "No," said the baron, "I admire and respect the sweet
intimacy of married couples, but I cannot call it love. Love
desires obstacles, mystery, stolen favors. Now husbands and wives
boldly avow their relationship; they possess each other without
contradiction and without reserve. It cannot then be love that
they experience." And after mature deliberation the ladies of the
Court of Love adopted the baron's conclusions (E. de la
Bedollière, _Histoire des Moeurs des Français_, vol. iii, p.
334). There was undoubtedly an element of truth in the baron's
arguments. Yet it may well be doubted whether in any
non-Christian country it would ever have been possible to obtain
acceptance for the doctrine that love and marriage are
incompatible. This doctrine was, however, as Ribot points out in
his _Logique des Sentiments_, inevitable, when, as among the
medieval nobility, marriage was merely a political or domestic
treaty and could not, therefore, be a method of moral elevation.
"Why is it," asked Rétif de la Bretonne, towards the end of the
eighteenth century, "that girls who have no morals are more
seductive and more loveable than honest women? It is because,
like the Greek courtesans to whom grace and voluptuousness were
taught, they have studied the art of pleasing. Among the foolish
detractors of my _Contemporaines_, not one guessed the
philosophic aim of nearly everyone of these tales, which is to
suggest to honest women the ways of making themselves loved. I
should like to see the institution of initiations, such as those
of the ancients.... To-day the happiness of the human species is
abandoned to chance; all the experience of women is individual,
like that of animals; it is lost with those women who, being
naturally amiable, might have taught others to become so.
Prostitutes alone make a superficial study of it, and the lessons
they receive are, for the most part, as harmful as those of
respectable Greek and Roman matrons were holy and honorable, only
tending to wantonness, to the exhaustion alike of the purse and
of the physical faculties, while the aim of the ancient matrons
was the union of husband and wife and their mutual attachment
through pleasure. The Christian religion annihilated the
Mysteries as infamous, but we may regard that annihilation as one
of the wrongs done by Christianity to humanity, as the work of
men with little enlightenment and bitter zeal, dangerous puritans
who were the natural enemies of marriage" (Rétif de la Bretonne,
_Monsieur Nicolas_, reprint of 1883, vol. x, pp. 160-3). It may
be added that Dühren (Dr. Iwan Bloch) regards Rétif as "a master
in the _Ars Amandi_," and discusses him from this point of view
in his _Rétif de la Bretonne_ (pp. 362-371).
Whether or not Christianity is to be held responsible, it cannot be
doubted that throughout Christendom there has been a lamentable failure to
recognize the supreme importance, not only erotically but morally, of the
art of love. Even in the great revival of sexual enlightenment now taking
place around us there is rarely even the faintest recognition that in
sexual enlightenment the one thing essentially necessary is a knowledge of
the art of love. For the most part, sexual instruction as at present
understood, is purely negative, a mere string of thou-shalt-nots. If that
failure were due to the conscious and deliberate recognition that while
the art of love must be based on physiological and psychological
knowledge, it is far too subtle, too complex, too personal, to be
formulated in lectures and manuals, it would be reasonable and sound. But
it seems to rest entirely on ignorance, indifference, or worse.
Love-making is indeed, like other arts, an art that is partly natural--"an
art that nature makes"--and therefore it is a natural subject for learning
and exercising in play. Children left to themselves tend, both playfully
and seriously, to practice love, alike on the physical and the psychic
sides.[381] But this play is on its physical side sternly repressed by
their elders, when discovered, and on its psychic side laughed at. Among
the well-bred classes it is usually starved out at an early age.
After puberty, if not before, there is another form in which the art of
love is largely experimented and practised, especially in England and
America, the form of flirtation. In its elementary manifestations flirting
is entirely natural and normal; we may trace it even in animals; it is
simply the beginning of courtship, at the early stage when courtship may
yet, if desired, be broken off. Under modern civilized conditions,
however, flirtation is often more than this. These conditions make
marriage difficult; they make love and its engagements too serious a
matter to be entered on lightly; they make actual sexual intercourse
dangerous as well as disreputable. Flirtation adapts itself to these
conditions. Instead of being merely the preliminary stage of normal
courtship, it is developed into a form of sexual gratification as complete
as due observation of the conditions already mentioned will allow. In
Germany, and especially in France where it is held in great abhorrence,
this is the only form of flirtation known; it is regarded as an
exportation from the United States and is denominated "flirtage." Its
practical outcome is held to be the "demi-vierge," who knows and has
experienced the joys of sex while yet retaining her hymen intact.
This degenerate form of flirtation, cultivated not as a part of
courtship, but for its own sake, has been well described by Forel
(_Die Sexuelle Frage_, pp. 97-101). He defines it as including
"all those expressions of the sexual instinct of one individual
towards another individual which excite the other's sexual
instinct, coitus being always excepted." In the beginning it may
be merely a provocative look or a simple apparently unintentional
touch or contact; and by slight gradations it may pass on to
caresses, kisses, embraces, and even extend to pressure or
friction of the sexual parts, sometimes leading to orgasm. Thus,
Forel mentions, a sensuous woman by the pressure of her garments
in dancing can produce ejaculation in her partner. Most usually
the process is that voluptuous contact and revery which, in
English slang, is called "spooning." From first to last there
need not be any explicit explanations, proposals, or declarations
on either side, and neither party is committed to any
relationship with the other beyond the period devoted to
flirtage. In one form, however, flirtage consists entirely in the
excitement of a conversation devoted to erotic and indecorous
topics. Either the man or the woman may take the active part in
flirtage, but in a woman more refinement and skill is required to
play the active part without repelling the man or injuring her
reputation. Indeed, much the same is true of men also, for women,
while they often like flirting, usually prefer its more refined
forms. There are infinite forms of flirtage, and while as a
preliminary part of courtship, it has its normal place and
justification, Forel concludes that "as an end in itself, and
never passing beyond itself, it is a phenomenon of degeneration."
From the French point of view, flirtage and flirtation generally
have been discussed by Madame Bentzon ("Family Life in America,"
_Forum_, March, 1896) who, however, fails to realize the natural
basis of flirtation in courtship. She regards it as a sin against
the law "Thou shalt not play with love," for it ought to have the
excuse of an irresistible passion, but she thinks it is
comparatively inoffensive in America (though still a
deteriorating influence on the women) on account of the
temperament, education, and habits of the people. It must,
however, be remembered that play has a proper relationship to all
vital activities, and that a reasonable criticism of flirtation
is concerned rather with its normal limitations than with its
right to exist (see the observations on the natural basis of
coquetry and the ends it subserves in "The Evolution of Modesty"
in volume i of these _Studies_).
While flirtation in its natural form--though not in the perverted form of
"flirtage"--has sound justification, alike as a method of testing a lover
and of acquiring some small part of the art of love, it remains an
altogether inadequate preparation for love. This is sufficiently shown by
the frequent inaptitude for the art of love, and even for the mere
physical act of love, so frequently manifested both by men and women in
the very countries where flirtation most flourishes.
This ignorance, not merely of the art of love but even of the physical
facts of sexual love, is marked not only in women, especially women of the
middle class, but also in men, for the civilized man, as Fritsch long ago
remarked, often knows less of the facts of the sexual life than a
milkmaid. It shows itself differently, however, in the two sexes.
Among women sexual ignorance ranges from complete innocence of the fact
that it involves any intimate bodily relationship at all to
misapprehensions of the most various kind; some think that the
relationship consists in lying side by side, many that intercourse takes
place at the navel, not a few that the act occupies the whole night. It
has been necessary in a previous chapter to discuss the general evils of
sexual ignorance; it is here necessary to refer to its more special evils
as regards the relationship of marriage. Girls are educated with the vague
idea that they will marry,--quite correctly, for the majority of them do
marry,--but the idea that they must be educated for the career that will
naturally fall to their lot is an idea which as yet has never seemed to
occur to the teachers of girls. Their heads are crammed to stupidity with
the knowledge of facts which it is no one's concern to know, but the
supremely important training for life they are totally unable to teach.
Women are trained for nearly every avocation under the sun; for the
supreme avocation of wifehood and motherhood they are never trained at
all!
It may be said, and with truth, that the present incompetent training of
girls is likely to continue so long as the mothers of girls are content to
demand nothing better. It may also be said, with even greater truth, that
there is much that concerns the knowledge of sexual relationships which
the mother herself may most properly impart to her daughter. It may
further be asserted, most unanswerably, that the art of love, with which
we are here more especially concerned, can only be learnt by actual
experience, an experience which our social traditions make it difficult
for a virtuous girl to acquire with credit. Without here attempting to
apportion the share of blame which falls to each cause, it remains
unfortunate that a woman should so often enter marriage with the worst
possible equipment of prejudices and misapprehensions, even when she
believes, as often happens, that she knows all about it. Even with the
best equipment, a woman, under present conditions, enters marriage at a
disadvantage. She awakes to the full realization of love more slowly than
a man, and, on the average, at a later age, so that her experiences of the
life of sex before marriage have usually been of a much more restricted
kind than her husband's.[382] So that even with the best preparation, it
often happens that it is not until several years after marriage that a
woman clearly realizes her own sexual needs and adequately estimates her
husband's ability to satisfy those needs. We cannot over-estimate the
personal and social importance of a complete preparation for marriage, and
the greater the difficulties placed in the way of divorce the more weight
necessarily attaches to that preparation.[383]
Everyone is probably acquainted with many cases of the extreme
ignorance of women on entering marriage. The following case
concerning a woman of twenty-seven, who had been asked in
marriage, is somewhat extreme, but not very exceptional. "She did
not feel sure of her affection and she asked a woman cousin
concerning the meaning of love. This cousin lent her Ellis
Ethelmer's pamphlet, _The Human Flower_. She learnt from this
that men desired the body of a woman, and this so appalled her
that she was quite ill for several days. The next time her lover
attempted a caress she told him that it was 'lust.' Since then
she has read George Moore's _Sister Teresa_, and the knowledge
that 'women can be as bad as men' has made her sad." The
"Histories" contained in the Appendices to previous volumes of
these _Studies_ reveal numerous instances of the deplorable
ignorance of young girls concerning the most central facts of the
sexual life. It is not surprising, under such circumstances, that
marriage leads to disillusionment or repulsion.
It is commonly said that the duty of initiating the wife into the
privileges and obligations of marriage properly belongs to the
husband. Apart, however, altogether from the fact that it is
unjust to a woman to compel her to bind herself in marriage
before she has fully realized what marriage means, it must also
be said that there are many things necessary for women to know
that it is unreasonable to expect a husband to explain. This is,
for instance, notably the case as regards the more fatiguing and
exhausting effects of coitus on a man as compared with a woman.
The inexperienced bride cannot know beforehand that the
frequently repeated orgasms which render her vigorous and radiant
exert a depressing effect on her husband, and his masculine pride
induces him to attempt to conceal that fact. The bride, in her
innocence, is unconscious that her pleasure is bought at her
husband's expense, and that what is not excess to her, may be a
serious excess to him. The woman who knows (notably, for
instance, a widow who remarries) is careful to guard her
husband's health in this respect, by restraining her own ardor,
for she realizes that a man is not willing to admit that he is
incapable of satisfying his wife's desires. (G. Hirth has also
pointed out how important it is that women should know before
marriage the natural limits of masculine potency, _Wege zur
Liebe_, p. 571.)
The ignorance of women of all that concerns the art of love, and their
total lack of preparation for the natural facts of the sexual life, would
perhaps be of less evil augury for marriage if it were always compensated
by the knowledge, skill, and considerateness of the husband. But that is
by no means always the case. Within the ordinary range we find, at all
events in England, the large group of men whose knowledge of women before
marriage has been mainly confined to prostitutes, and the important and
not inconsiderable group of men who have had no intimate intercourse with
women, their sexual experiences having been confined to masturbation or
other auto-erotic manifestations, and to flirtation. Certainly the man of
sensitive and intelligent temperament, whatever his training or lack of
training, may succeed with patience and consideration in overcoming all
the difficulties placed in the way of love by the mixture of ignorances
and prejudices which so often in woman takes the place of an education for
the erotic part of her life. But it cannot be said that either of these
two groups of men has been well equipped for the task. The training and
experience which a man receives from a prostitute, even under fairly
favorable conditions, scarcely form the right preparation for approaching
a woman of his own class who has no intimate erotic experiences.[384] The
frequent result is that he is liable to waver between two opposite courses
of action, both of them mistaken. On the one hand, he may treat his bride
as a prostitute, or as a novice to be speedily moulded into the sexual
shape he is most accustomed to, thus running the risk either of perverting
or of disgusting her. On the other hand, realizing that the purity and
dignity of his bride place her in an altogether different class from the
women he has previously known, he may go to the opposite extreme of
treating her with an exaggerated respect, and so fail either to arouse or
to gratify her erotic needs. It is difficult to say which of these two
courses of action is the more unfortunate; the result of both, however, is
frequently found to be that a nominal marriage never becomes a real
marriage.[385]
Yet there can be no doubt whatever that the other group of men, the men
who enter marriage without any erotic experiences, run even greater risks.
These are often the best of men, both as regards personal character and
mental power. It is indeed astonishing to find how ignorant, both
practically and theoretically, very able and highly educated men may be
concerning sexual matters.
"Complete abstinence during youth," says Freud (_Sexual-Probleme_,
March, 1908), "is not the best preparation for marriage in
a young man. Women divine this and prefer those of their
wooers who have already proved themselves to be men with
other women." Ellen Key, referring to the demand sometimes made
by women for purity in men (_Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 96), asks
whether women realize the effect of their admiration of the
experienced and confident man who knows women, on the shy and
hesitating youth, "who perhaps has been struggling hard for his
erotic purity, in the hope that a woman's happy smile will be the
reward of his conquest, and who is condemned to see how that
woman looks down on him with lofty compassion and gazes with
admiration at the leopard's spots." When the lover, in Laura
Marholm's _Was war es_? says to the heroine, "I have never yet
touched a woman," the girl "turns from him with horror, and it
seemed to her that a cold shudder went through her, a chilling
deception." The same feeling is manifested in an exaggerated form
in the passion often experienced by vigorous girls of eighteen to
twenty-four for old roués. (This has been discussed by Forel,
_Die Sexuelle Frage_, pp. 217 et seq.)
Other factors may enter in a woman's preference for the man who
has conquered other women. Even the most religious and moral
young woman, Valera remarks (_Doña Luz_, p. 205), likes to marry
a man who has loved many women; it gives a greater value to his
choice of her; it also offers her an opportunity of converting
him to higher ideals. No doubt when the inexperienced man meets
in marriage the equally inexperienced woman they often succeed in
adapting themselves to each other and a permanent _modus vivendi_
is constituted. But it is by no means so always. If the wife is
taught by instinct or experience she is apt to resent the
awkwardness and helplessness of her husband in the art of love.
Even if she is ignorant she may be permanently alienated and
become chronically frigid, through the brutal inconsiderateness
of her ignorant husband in carrying out what he conceives to be
his marital duties. (It has already been necessary to touch on
this point in discussing "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in vol.
iii of these _Studies_.) Sometimes, indeed, serious physical
injury has been inflicted on the bride owing to this ignorance of
the husband.
"I take it that most men have had pre-matrimonial
sex-relationships," a correspondent writes. "But I have known one
man at least who, up till the age of twenty, had not even a
rudimentary idea of sex matters. At twenty-nine, a few months
before marriage, he came to ask me how coitus was performed, and
displayed an ignorance that I could not believe to exist in the
mind of an otherwise intelligent man. He had evidently no
instinct to guide him, as the brutes have, and his reason was
unable to supply the necessary knowledge. It is very curious that
man should lose this instinctive knowledge. I have known another
man almost equally ignorant. He also came to me for advice in
marital duties. Both of these men masturbated, and they were
normally passionate." Such cases are not so very rare. Usually,
however, a certain amount of information has been acquired from
some for the most part unsatisfactory source, and the ignorance
is only partial, though not on that account less dangerous.
Balzac has compared the average husband to an orang-utan trying
to play the violin. "Love, as we instinctively feel, is the most
melodious of harmonies. Woman is a delicious instrument of
pleasure, but it is necessary to know its quivering strings,
study the pose of it, its timid keyboard, the changing and
capricious fingering. How many orangs--men, I mean, marry without
knowing what a woman is!... Nearly all men marry in the most
profound ignorance of women and of love" (Balzac, _Physiologie du
Mariage_, Meditation VII).
Neugebauer (_Monatsschrift für Geburtshülfe_, 1889, Bk. ix, pp.
221 et seq.) has collected over one hundred and fifty cases of
injury to women in coitus inflicted by the penis. The causes were
brutality, drunkenness of one or both parties, unusual position
in coitus, disproportion of the organs, pathological conditions
of the woman's organs (Cf. R.W. Taylor, _Practical Treatise on
Sexual Disorders_, Ch. XXXV). Blumreich also discusses the
injuries produced by violent coitus (Senator and Kaminer, _Health
and Disease in Relation to Marriage_, vol. ii, pp. 770-779). C.M.
Green (_Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, 13 Ap., 1893)
records two cases of rupture of vagina by sexual intercourse in
newly-married ladies, without evidence of any great violence.
Mylott (_British Medical Journal_, Sept. 16, 1899) records a
similar case occurring on the wedding night. The amount of force
sometimes exerted in coitus is evidenced by the cases, occurring
from time to time, in which intercourse takes place by the
urethra.
Eulenburg finds (_Sexuale Neuropathie_, p. 69) that vaginismus, a
condition of spasmodic contraction of the vulva and exaggerated
sensibility on the attempt to effect coitus, is due to forcible
and unskilful attempts at the first coitus. Adler (_Die
Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes_, p. 160) also
believes that the scarred remains of the hymen, together with
painful memories of a violent first coitus, are the most frequent
cause of vaginismus.
The occasional cases, however, of physical injury or of
pathological condition produced by violent coitus at the
beginning of marriage constitute but a very small portion of the
evidence which witnesses to the evil results of the prevalent
ignorance regarding the art of love. As regards Germany,
Fürbringer writes (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in
Relation to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 215): "I am perfectly satisfied
that the number of young married women who have a lasting painful
recollection of their first sexual intercourse exceeds by far the
number of those who venture to consult a doctor." As regards
England, the following experience is instructive: A lady asked
six married women in succession, privately, on the same day
concerning their bridal experiences. To all, sexual intercourse
had come as a shock; two had been absolutely ignorant about
sexual matters; the others had thought they knew what coitus was,
but were none the less shocked. These women were of the middle
class, perhaps above the average in intelligence; one was a
doctor.
Breuer and Freud, in their _Studien über Hysterie_ (p. 216),
pointed out that the bridal night is practically often a rape,
and that it sometimes leads to hysteria, which is not cured until
satisfying sexual relationships are established. Even when there
is no violence, Kisch (_Sexual Life of Woman_, Part II) regards
awkward and inexperienced coitus, leading to incomplete
excitement of the wife, as the chief cause of dyspareunia, or
absence of sexual gratification, although gross disproportion in
the size of the male and female organs, or disease in either
party, may lead to the same result. Dyspareunia, Kisch adds, is
astonishingly frequent, though sometimes women complain of it
without justification in order to arouse sympathy for themselves
as sacrifices on the altar of marriage; the constant sign is
absence of ejaculation on the woman's part. Kisch also observes
that wedding night deflorations are often really rapes. One young
bride, known to him, was so ignorant of the physical side of
love, and so overwhelmed by her husband's first attempt at
intercourse, that she fled from the house in the night, and
nothing would ever persuade her to return to her husband. (It is
worth noting that by Canon law, under such circumstances, the
Church might hold the marriage invalid. See Thomas Slater's
_Moral Theology_, vol. ii, p. 318, and a case in point, both
quoted by Rev. C.J. Shebbeare, "Marriage Law in the Church of
England," _Nineteenth Century_, Aug., 1909, p. 263.) Kisch
considers, also, that wedding tours are a mistake; since the
fatigue, the excitement, the long journeys, sight-seeing, false
modesty, bad hotel arrangements, often combine to affect the
bride unfavorably and produce the germs of serious illness. This
is undoubtedly the case.
The extreme psychic importance of the manner in which the act of
defloration is accomplished is strongly emphasized by Adler. He
regards it as a frequent cause of permanent sexual anæsthesia.
"This first moment in which the man's individuality attains its
full rights often decides the whole of life. The unskilled,
over-excited husband can then implant the seed of feminine
insensibility, and by continued awkwardness and coarseness
develop it into permanent anæsthesia. The man who takes
possession of his rights with reckless brutal masculine force
merely causes his wife anxiety and pain, and with every
repetition of the act increases her repulsion.... A large
proportion of cold-natured women represent a sacrifice by men,
due either to unconscious awkwardness, or, occasionally, to
conscious brutality towards the tender plant which should have
been cherished with peculiar art and love, but has been robbed of
the splendor of its development. All her life long, a wistful and
trembling woman will preserve the recollection of a brutal
wedding night, and, often enough, it remains a perpetual source
of inhibition every time that the husband seeks anew to gratify
his desires without adapting himself to his wife's desires for
love" (O. Adler, _Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des
Weibes_, pp. 159 et seq., 181 et seq.). "I have seen an honest
woman shudder with horror at her husband's approach," wrote
Diderot long ago in his essay "Sur les Femmes"; "I have seen her
plunge in the bath and feel herself never sufficiently washed
from the stain of duty." The same may still be said of a vast
army of women, victims of a pernicious system of morality which
has taught them false ideas of "conjugal duty" and has failed to
teach their husbands the art of love.
Women, when their fine natural instincts have not been hopelessly
perverted by the pruderies and prejudices which are so diligently
instilled into them, understand the art of love more readily than men.
Even when little more than children they can often completely take the cue
that is given to them. Much more than is the case with men, at all events
under civilized conditions, the art of love is with them an art that
Nature makes. They always know more of love, as Montaigne long since said,
than men can teach them, for it is a discipline that is born in their
blood.[386]
The extensive inquiries of Sanford Bell (loc. cit.) show that the
emotions of sex-love may appear as early as the third year. It
must also be remembered that, both physically and psychically,
girls are more precocious, more mature, than boys (see, e.g.,
Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth edition, pp. 34 _et
seq._, 200, etc.). Thus, by the time she has reached the age of
puberty a girl has had time to become an accomplished mistress of
the minor arts of love. That the age of puberty is for girls the
age of love seems to be widely recognized by the popular mind.
Thus in a popular song of Bresse a girl sings:--
"J'ai calculé mon âge,
J'ai quatorze à quinze ans.
Ne suis-je pas dans l'âge
D'y avoir un amant?"
This matter of the sexual precocity of girls has an important
bearing on the question of the "age of consent," or the age at
which it should be legal for a girl to consent to sexual
intercourse. Until within the last twenty-five years there has
been a tendency to set a very low age (even as low as ten) as the
age above which a man commits no offence in having sexual
intercourse with a girl. In recent years there has been a
tendency to run to the opposite and equally unfortunate extreme
of raising it to a very late age. In England, by the Criminal Law
Amendment Act of 1885, the age of consent was raised to sixteen
(this clause of the bill being carried in the House of Commons by
a majority of 108). This seems to be the reasonable age at which
the limit should be set and its extreme high limit in temperate
climates. It is the age recognized by the Italian Criminal Code,
and in many other parts of the civilized world. Gladstone,
however, was in favor of raising it to eighteen, and Howard, in
discussing this question as regards the United States
(_Matrimonial Institutions_, vol. iii, pp. 195-203), thinks it
ought everywhere to be raised to twenty-one, so coinciding with
the age of legal majority at which a woman can enter into
business or political relations. There has been, during recent
years, a wide limit of variation in the legislation of the
different American States on this point, the differences of the
two limits being as much as eight years, and in some important
States the act of intercourse with a girl under eighteen is
declared to be "rape," and punishable with imprisonment for life.
Such enactments as these, however, it must be recognized, are
arbitrary, artificial, and unnatural. They do not rest on a sound
biological basis, and cannot be enforced by the common sense of
the community. There is no proper analogy between the age of
legal majority which is fixed, approximately, with reference to
the ability to comprehend abstract matters of intelligence, and
the age of sexual maturity which occurs much earlier, both
physically and psychically, and is determined in women by a very
precise biological event: the completion of puberty in the onset
of menstruation. Among peoples living under natural conditions in
all parts of the world it is recognized that a girl becomes
sexually a woman at puberty; at that epoch she receives her
initiation into adult life and becomes a wife and a mother. To
declare that the act of intercourse with a woman who, by the
natural instinct of mankind generally, is regarded as old enough
for all the duties of womanhood, is a criminal act of rape,
punishable by imprisonment for life, can only be considered an
abuse of language, and, what is worse, an abuse of law, even if
we leave all psychological and moral considerations out of the
question, for it deprives the conception of rape of all that
renders it naturally and properly revolting.
The sound view in this question is clearly the view that it is
the girl's puberty which constitutes the criterion of the man's
criminality in sexually approaching her. In the temperate regions
of Europe and North America the average age of the appearance of
menstruation, the critical moment in the establishment of
complete puberty, is fifteen (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, _Man and
Woman_, Ch. XI; the facts are set forth at length in Kisch's
_Sexual Life of Woman_, 1909). Therefore it is reasonable that
the act of an adult man in having sexual connection with a girl
under sixteen, with or without her consent, should properly be a
criminal act, severely punishable. In those lands where the
average age of puberty is higher or lower, the age of consent
should be raised or lowered accordingly. (Bruno Meyer, arguing
against any attempt to raise the age of consent above sixteen,
considers that the proper age of consent is generally fourteen,
for, as he rightly insists, the line of division is between the
ripe and the unripe personality, and while the latter should be
strictly preserved from the sphere of sexuality, only voluntary,
not compulsory, influence should be brought to bear on the
former. _Sexual-Probleme_, Ap., 1909.)
If we take into our view the wider considerations of psychology,
morality, and law, we shall find ample justification for this
point of view. We have to remember that a girl, during all the
years of ordinary school life, is always more advanced, both
physically and psychically, than a boy of the same age, and we
have to recognize that this precocity covers her sexual
development; for even though it is true, on the average, that
active sexual desire is not usually aroused in women until a
somewhat later age, there is also truth in the observation of Mr.
Thomas Hardy (_New Review_, June, 1894): "It has never struck me
that the spider is invariably male and the fly invariably
female." Even, therefore, when sexual intercourse takes place
between a girl and a youth somewhat older than herself, she is
likely to be the more mature, the more self-possessed, and the
more responsible of the two, and often the one who has taken the
more active part in initiating the act. (This point has been
discussed in "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in vol. iii of these
_Studies_.) It must also be remembered that when a girl has once
reached the age of puberty, and put on all the manner and habits
as well as the physical development of a woman, it is no longer
possible for a man always to estimate her age. It is easy to see
that a girl has not yet reached the age of puberty; it is
impossible to tell whether a mature woman is under or over
eighteen; it is therefore, to say the least, unjust to make her
male partner's fate for life depend on the recognition of a
distinction which has no basis in nature. Such considerations
are, indeed, so obvious that there is no chance of carrying out
thoroughly in practice the doctrine that a man should be
imprisoned for life for having intercourse with a girl who is
over the age of sixteen. It is better, from the legal point of
view, to cast the net less widely and to be quite sure that it is
adapted to catch the real and conscious offender, who may be
punished without offending the common sense of the community.
(Cf. Bloch, _The Sexual Life of Our Time_, Ch. XXIV; he considers
that the "age of consent" should begin with the completion of the
sixteenth year.)
It may be necessary to add that the establishment of the "age of
consent" on this basis by no means implies that intercourse with
girls but little over sixteen should be encouraged, or even
socially and morally tolerated. Here, however, we are not in the
sphere of law. It is the natural tendency of the well-born and
well-nurtured girl under civilized conditions to hold herself in
reserve, and the pressure whereby that tendency is maintained and
furthered must be supplied by the whole of her environment,
primarily by the intelligent reflection of the girl herself when
she has reached the age of adolescence. To foster in a young
woman who has long passed the epoch of puberty the notion that
she has no responsibility in the guardianship of her own body and
soul is out of harmony with modern feeling, as well as
unfavorable to the training of women for the world. The States
which have been induced to adopt the high limit of the age of
consent have, indeed, thereby made an abject confession of their
inability to maintain a decent moral level by more legitimate
means; they may profitably serve as a warning rather than as an
example.
The knowledge of women cannot, however, replace, the ignorance of men,
but, on the contrary, merely serves to reveal it. For in the art of love
the man must necessarily take the initiative. It is he who must first
unseal the mystery of the intimacies and audacities which the woman's
heart may hold. The risk of meeting with even the shadow of contempt or
disgust is too serious to allow a woman, even a wife, to reveal the
secrets of love to a man who has not shown himself to be an
initiate.[387] Numberless are the jovial and contented husbands who have
never suspected, and will never know, that their wives carry about with
them, sometimes with silent resentment, the ache of mysterious _tabus_.
The feeling that there are delicious privacies and privileges which she
has never been asked to take, or forced to accept, often erotically
divorces a wife from a husband who never realizes what he has missed.[388]
The case of such husbands is all the harder because, for the most part,
all that they have done is the result of the morality that has been
preached to them. They have been taught from boyhood to be strenuous and
manly and clean-minded, to seek by all means to put out of their minds the
thought of women or the longing for sensuous indulgence. They have been
told on all sides that only in marriage is it right or even safe to
approach women. They have acquired the notion that sexual indulgence and
all that appertains to it is something low and degrading, at the worst a
mere natural necessity, at the best a duty to be accomplished in a direct,
honorable and straight-forward manner. No one seems to have told them that
love is an art, and that to gain real possession of a woman's soul and
body is a task that requires the whole of a man's best skill and insight.
It may well be that when a man learns his lesson too late he is inclined
to turn ferociously on the society that by its conspiracy of
pseudo-morality has done its best to ruin his life, and that of his wife.
In some of these cases husband or wife or both are finally attracted to a
third person, and a divorce enables them to start afresh with better
experience under happier auspices. But as things are at present that is a
sad and serious process, for many impossible. They are happier, as Milton
pointed out, whose trials of love before marriage "have been so many
divorces to teach them experience."
The general ignorance concerning the art of love may be gauged by the fact
that perhaps the question in this matter most frequently asked is the
crude question how often sexual intercourse should take place. That is a
question, indeed, which has occupied the founders of religion, the
law-givers, and the philosophers of mankind, from the earliest times.[389]
Zoroaster said it should be once in every nine days. The laws of Manes
allowed intercourse during fourteen days of the month, but a famous
ancient Hindu physician, Susruta, prescribed it six times a month, except
during the heat of summer when it should be once a month, while other
Hindu authorities say three or four times a month. Solon's requirement of
the citizen that intercourse should take place three times a month fairly
agrees with Zoroaster's. Mohammed, in the Koran, decrees intercourse once
a week. The Jewish Talmud is more discriminating, and distinguishes
between different classes of people; on the vigorous and healthy young
man, not compelled to work hard, once a day is imposed, on the ordinary
working man twice a week, on learned men once a week. Luther considered
twice a week the proper frequency of intercourse.
It will be observed that, as we might expect, these estimates tend to
allow a greater interval in the earlier ages when erotic stimulation was
probably less and erotic erethism probably rare, and to involve an
increased frequency as we approach modern civilization. It will also be
observed that variation occurs within fairly narrow limits. This is
probably due to the fact that these law-givers were in all cases men.
Women law-givers would certainly have shown a much greater tendency to
variation, since the variations of the sexual impulse are greater in
women.[390] Thus Zenobia required the approach of her husband once a
month, provided that impregnation had not taken place the previous month,
while another queen went very far to the other extreme, for we are told
that the Queen of Aragon, after mature deliberation, ordained six times a
day as the proper rule in a legitimate marriage.[391]
It may be remarked, in passing, that the estimates of the proper
frequency of sexual intercourse may always be taken to assume
that there is a cessation during the menstrual period. This is
especially the case as regards early periods of culture when
intercourse at this time is usually regarded as either dangerous
or sinful, or both. (This point has been discussed in the
"Phenomena of Periodicity" in volume i of these _Studies_.) Under
civilized conditions the inhibition is due to æsthetic reasons,
the wife, even if she desires intercourse, feeling a repugnance
to be approached at a time when she regards herself as
"disgusting," and the husband easily sharing this attitude. It
may, however, be pointed out that the æsthetic objection is very
largely the result of the superstitious horror of water which is
still widely felt at this time, and would, to some extent,
disappear if a more scrupulous cleanliness were observed. It
remains a good general rule to abstain from sexual intercourse
during the menstrual period, but in some cases there may be
adequate reason for breaking it. This is so when desire is
specially strong at this time, or when intercourse is physically
difficult at other times but easier during the relaxation of the
parts caused by menstruation. It must be remembered also that the
time when the menstrual flow is beginning to cease is probably,
more than any other period of the month, the biologically proper
time for sexual intercourse, since not only is intercourse
easiest then, and also most gratifying to the female, but it
affords the most favorable opportunity for securing
fertilization.
Schurig long since brought together evidence (_Parthenologia_,
pp. 302 et seq.) showing that coitus is most easy during
menstruation. Some of the Catholic theologians (like Sanchez, and
later, Liguori), going against the popular opinion, have
distinctly permitted intercourse during menstruation, though many
earlier theologians regarded it as a mortal sin. From the
medical side, Kossmann (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease
in Relation to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 249) advocates coitus not
only at the end of menstruation, but even during the latter part
of the period, as being the time when women most usually need it,
the marked disagreeableness of temper often shown by women at
this time, he says, being connected with the suppression,
demanded by custom, of a natural desire. "It is almost always
during menstruation that the first clouds appear on the
matrimonial horizon."
In modern times the physiologists and physicians who have expressed any
opinion on this subject have usually come very near to Luther's dictum.
Haller said that intercourse should not be much more frequent than twice a
week.[392] Acton said once a week, and so also Hammond, even for healthy
men between the ages of twenty-five and forty.[393] Fürbringer only
slightly exceeds this estimate by advocating from fifty to one hundred
single acts in the year.[394] Forel advises two or three times a week for
a man in the prime of manhood, but he adds that for some healthy and
vigorous men once a month appears to be excess.[395] Mantegazza, in his
_Hygiene of Love_, also states that, for a man between twenty and thirty,
two or three times a week represents the proper amount of intercourse, and
between the ages of thirty and forty-five, twice a week. Guyot recommends
every three days.[396]
It seems, however, quite unnecessary to lay down any general rules
regarding the frequency of coitus. Individual desire and individual
aptitude, even within the limits of health, vary enormously. Moreover, if
we recognize that the restraint of desire is sometimes desirable, and
often necessary for prolonged periods, it is as well to refrain from any
appearance of asserting the necessity of sexual intercourse at frequent
and regular intervals. The question is chiefly of importance in order to
guard against excess, or even against the attempt to live habitually close
to the threshold of excess. Many authorities are, therefore, careful to
point out that it is inadvisable to be too definite. Thus Erb, while
remarking that, for some, Luther's dictum represents the extreme maximum,
adds that others can go far beyond that amount with impunity, and he
considers that such variations are congenital.[397] Ribbing, again, while
expressing general agreement with Luther's rule, protests against any
attempt to lay down laws for everyone, and is inclined to say that as
often as one likes is a safe rule, so long as there are no bad
after-effects.[398]
It seems to be generally agreed that bad effects from excess in
coitus, when they do occur, are rare in women (see, e.g.,
Hammond, _Sexual Impotence_, p. 127). Occasionally, however, evil
effects occur in women. (The case, possibly to be mentioned in
this connection, has been recorded of a man whose three wives all
became insane after marriage, _Journal of Mental Science_, Jan.,
1879, p. 611.) In cases of sexual excess great physical
exhaustion, with suspicion and delusions, is often observed.
Hutchinson has recorded three cases of temporary blindness, all
in men, the result of sexual excess after marriage (_Archives of
Surgery_, Jan., 1893). The old medical authors attributed many
evil results to excess in coitus. Thus Schurig (_Spermatologia_,
1720, pp. 260 et seq.) brings together cases of insanity,
apoplexy, syncope, epilepsy, loss of memory, blindness, baldness,
unilateral perspiration, gout, and death attributed to this
cause; of death many cases are given, some in women, but one may
easily perceive that _post_ was often mistaken for _propter_.
There is, however, another consideration which can scarcely escape the
reader of the present work. Nearly all the estimates of the desirable
frequence of coitus are framed to suit the supposed physiological needs of
the husband,[399] and they appear usually to be framed in the same spirit
of exclusive attention to those needs as though the physiological needs of
the evacuation of the bowels or the bladder were in question. But sexual
needs are the needs of two persons, of the husband and of the wife. It is
not enough to ascertain the needs of the husband; it is also necessary to
ascertain the needs of the wife. The resultant must be a harmonious
adjustment of these two groups of needs. That consideration alone, in
conjunction with the wide variations of individual needs, suffices to
render any definite rules of very trifling value.
It is important to remember the wide limits of variation in
sexual capacity, as well as the fact that such variations in
either direction may be healthy and normal, though undoubtedly
when they become extreme variations may have a pathological
significance. In one case, for instance, a man has intercourse
once a month and finds this sufficient; he has no nocturnal
emissions nor any strong desires in the interval; yet he leads an
idle and luxurious life and is not restrained by any moral or
religious scruples; if he much exceeds the frequency which suits
him he suffers from ill-health, though otherwise quite healthy
except for a weak digestion. At the other extreme, a happily
married couple, between forty-five and fifty, much attached to
each other, had engaged in sexual intercourse every night for
twenty years, except during the menstrual period and advanced
pregnancy, which had only occurred once; they are hearty,
full-blooded, intellectual people, fond of good living, and they
attribute their affection and constancy to this frequent
indulgence in coitus; the only child, a girl, is not strong,
though fairly healthy.
The cases are numerous in which, on special occasions, it is
possible for people who are passionately attached to each other
to repeat the act of coitus, or at all events the orgasm, an
inordinate number of times within a few hours. This usually
occurs at the beginning of an intimacy or after a long
separation. Thus in one case a newly-married woman experienced
the orgasm fourteen times in one night, her husband in the same
period experiencing it seven times. In another case a woman who
had lived a chaste life, when sexual relationships finally began,
once experienced orgasm fourteen or fifteen times to her
partner's three times. In a case which, I have been assured may
be accepted as authentic, a young wife of highly erotic, very
erethic, slightly abnormal temperament, after a month's absence
from her husband, was excited twenty-six times within an hour and
a quarter; her husband, a much older man, having two orgasms
during this period; the wife admitted that she felt a "complete
wreck" after this, but it is evident that if this case may be
regarded as authentic the orgasms were of extremely slight
intensity. A young woman, newly married to a physically robust
man, once had intercourse with him eight times in two hours,
orgasm occurring each time in both parties. Guttceit (_Dreissig
Jahre Praxis_, vol. ii. p. 311), in Russia, knew many cases in
which young men of twenty-two to twenty-eight had intercourse
more than ten times in one night, though after the fourth time
there is seldom any semen. He had known some men who had
masturbated in early boyhood, and began to consort with women at
fifteen, yet remained sexually vigorous in old age, while he knew
others who began intercourse late and were losing force at forty.
Mantegazza, who knew a man who had intercourse fourteen times in
one day, remarks that the stories of the old Italian novelists
show that twelve times was regarded as a rare exception.
Burchard, Alexander VI's secretary, states that the Florentine
Ambassador's son, in Rome in 1489, "knew a girl seven times in
one hour" (J. Burchard, _Diarium_, ed. Thuasne, vol. i, p. 329).
Olivier, Charlemagne's knight, boasted, according to legend, that
he could show his virile power one hundred times in one night, if
allowed to sleep with the Emperor of Constantinople's daughter;
he was allowed to try, it is said, and succeeded thirty times
(Schultz, _Das Höfische Leben_, vol. i, p. 581).
It will be seen that whenever the sexual act is repeated
frequently within a short time it is very rarely indeed that the
husband can keep pace with the wife. It is true that the woman's
sexual energy is aroused more slowly and with more difficulty
than the man's, but as it becomes aroused its momentum increases.
The man, whose energy is easily aroused, is easily exhausted; the
woman has often scarcely attained her energy until after the
first orgasm is over. It is sometimes a surprise to a young
husband, happily married, to find that the act of sexual
intercourse which completely satisfies him has only served to
arouse his wife's ardor. Very many women feel that the repetition
of the act several times in succession is needed to, as they may
express it, "clear the system," and, far from producing
sleepiness and fatigue, it renders them bright and lively.
The young and vigorous woman, who has lived a chaste life,
sometimes feels when she commences sexual relationships as though
she really required several husbands, and needed intercourse at
least once a day, though later when she becomes adjusted to
married life she reaches the conclusion that her desires are not
abnormally excessive. The husband has to adjust himself to his
wife's needs, through his sexual force when he possesses it, and,
if not, through his skill and consideration. The rare men who
possess a genital potency which they can exert to the
gratification of women without injury to themselves have been, by
Professor Benedikt, termed "sexual athletes," and he remarks that
such men easily dominate women. He rightly regards Casanova as
the type of the sexual athlete (_Archives d'Anthropologie
Criminelle_, Jan., 1896). Näcke reports the case of a man whom he
regards as a sexual athlete, who throughout his life had
intercourse once or twice daily with his wife, or if she was
unwilling, with another woman, until he became insane at the age
of seventy-five (_Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, Aug.,
1908, p. 507). This should probably, however, be regarded rather
as a case of morbid hyperæsthesia than of sexual athleticism.
At this stage we reach the fundamental elements of the art of love. We
have seen that many moral practices and moral theories which have been
widely current in Christendom have developed traditions, still by no means
extinct among us, which were profoundly antagonistic to the art of love.
The idea grew up of "marital duties," of "conjugal rights."[400] The
husband had the right and the duty to perform sexual intercourse with his
wife, whatever her wishes in the matter might be, while the wife had the
duty and the right (the duty in her case being usually put first) to
submit to such intercourse, which she was frequently taught to regard as
something low and merely physical, an unpleasant and almost degrading
necessity which she would do well to put out of her thoughts as speedily
as possible. It is not surprising that such an attitude towards marriage
has been highly favorable to conjugal unhappiness, more especially that of
the wife,[401] and it has tended to promote adultery and divorce. We might
have been more surprised had it been otherwise.
The art of love is based on the fundamental natural fact of courtship; and
courtship is the effort of the male to make himself acceptable to the
female.[402] "The art of love," said Vatsyayana, one of the greatest of
authorities, "is the art of pleasing women." "A man must never permit
himself a pleasure with his wife," said Balzac in his _Physiologie du
Mariage_, "which he has not the skill first to make her desire." The whole
art of love is there. Women, naturally and instinctively, seek to make
themselves desirable to men, even to men whom they are supremely
indifferent to, and the woman who is in love with a man, by an equally
natural instinct, seeks to shape herself to the measure which individually
pleases him. This tendency is not really modified by the fundamental fact
that in these matters it is only the arts that Nature makes which are
truly effective. It is finally by what he is that a man arouses a woman's
deepest emotions of sympathy or of antipathy, and he is often pleasing her
more by displaying his fitness to play a great part in the world outside
than by any acquired accomplishments in the arts of courtship. When,
however, the serious and intimate play of physical love begins, the
woman's part is, even biologically, on the surface the more passive
part.[403] She is, on the physical side, inevitably the instrument in
love; it must be his hand and his bow which evoke the music.
In speaking of the art of love, however, it is impossible to disentangle
completely the spiritual from the physical. The very attempt to do so is,
indeed, a fatal mistake. The man who can only perceive the physical side
of the sexual relationship is, as Hinton was accustomed to say, on a level
with the man who, in listening to a sonata of Beethoven on the violin, is
only conscious of the physical fact that a horse's tail is being scraped
against a sheep's entrails.
The image of the musical instrument constantly recurs to those
who write of the art of love. Balzac's comparison of the
unskilful husband to the orang-utan attempting to play the violin
has already been quoted. Dr. Jules Guyot, in his serious and
admirable little book, _Bréviaire de l'Amour Expérimental_, falls
on to the same comparison: "There are an immense number of
ignorant, selfish, and brutal men who give themselves no trouble
to study the instrument which God has confided to them, and do
not so much as suspect that it is necessary to study it in order
to draw out its slightest chords.... Every direct contact, even
with the clitoris, every attempt at coitus [when the feminine
organism is not aroused], exercises a painful sensation, an
instinctive repulsion, a feeling of disgust and aversion. Any
man, any husband, who is ignorant of this fact, is ridiculous and
contemptible. Any man, any husband, who, knowing it, dares to
disregard it, has committed an outrage.... In the final
combination of man and woman, the positive element, the husband,
has the initiative and the responsibility for the conjugal life.
He is the minstrel who will produce harmony or cacophony by his
hand and his bow. The wife, from this point of view, is really
the many-stringed instrument who will give out harmonious or
discordant sounds, according as she is well or ill handled"
(Guyot, _Bréviaire_, pp. 99, 115, 138).
That such love corresponds to the woman's need there cannot be
any doubt. All developed women desire to be loved, says Ellen
Key, not "en mâle" but "en artiste" (_Liebe und Ehe_, p. 92).
"Only a man of whom she feels that he has also the artist's joy
in her, and who shows this joy through his timid and delicate
touch on her soul as on her body, can keep the woman of to-day.
She will only belong to a man who continues to long for her even
when he holds her locked in his arms. And when such a woman
breaks out: 'You want me, but you cannot caress me, you cannot
tell what I want,' then that man is judged." Love is indeed, as
Remy de Gourmont remarks, a delicate art, for which, as for
painting or music, only some are apt.
It must not be supposed that the demand on the lover and husband to
approach a woman in the same spirit, with the same consideration and
skilful touch, as a musician takes up his instrument is merely a demand
made by modern women who are probably neurotic or hysterical. No reader of
these _Studies_ who has followed the discussions of courtship and of
sexual selection in previous volumes can fail to realize that--although we
have sought to befool ourselves by giving an illegitimate connotation to
the word "brutal"--consideration and respect for the female is all but
universal in the sexual relationships of the animals below man; it is only
at the furthest remove from the "brutes," among civilized men, that sexual
"brutality" is at all common, and even there it is chiefly the result of
ignorance. If we go as low as the insects, who have been disciplined by
no family life, and are generally counted as careless and wanton, we may
sometimes find this attitude towards the female fully developed, and the
extreme consideration of the male for the female whom yet he holds firmly
beneath him, the tender preliminaries, the extremely gradual approach to
the supreme sexual act, may well furnish an admirable lesson.
This greater difficulty and delay on the part of women in responding to
the erotic excitation of courtship is really very fundamental and--as has
so often been necessary to point out in previous volumes of these
_Studies_--it covers the whole of woman's erotic life, from the earliest
age when coyness and modesty develop. A woman's love develops much more
slowly than a man's for a much longer period. There is real psychological
significance in the fact that a man's desire for a woman tends to arise
spontaneously, while a woman's desire for a man tends only to be aroused
gradually, in the measure of her complexly developing relationship to him.
Hence her sexual emotion is often less abstract, more intimately
associated with the individual lover in whom it is centred. "The way to my
senses is through my heart," wrote Mary Wollstonecraft to her lover Imlay,
"but, forgive me! I think there is sometimes a shorter cut to yours." She
spoke for the best, if not for the largest part, of her sex. A man often
reaches the full limit of his physical capacity for love at a single step,
and it would appear that his psychic limits are often not more difficult
to reach. This is the solid fact underlying the more hazardous statement,
so often made, that woman is monogamic and man polygamic.
On the more physical side, Guttceit states that a month after
marriage not more than two women out of ten have experienced the
full pleasure of sexual intercourse, and it may not be for six
months, a year, or even till after the birth of several children,
that a woman experiences the full enjoyment of the physical
relationship, and even then only with a man she completely loves,
so that the conditions of sexual gratification are much more
complex in women than in men. Similarly, on the psychic side,
Ellen Key remarks (_Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 111): "It is
certainly true that a woman desires sexual gratification from a
man. But while in her this desire not seldom only appears after
she has begun to love a man enough to give her life for him, a
man often desires to possess a woman physically before he loves
her enough to give even his little finger for her. The fact that
love in a woman mostly goes from the soul to the senses and often
fails to reach them, and that in a man it mostly goes from the
senses to the soul and frequently never reaches that goal--this
is of all the existing differences between men and women that
which causes most torture to both." It will, of course, be
apparent to the reader of the fourth volume of these _Studies_ on
"Sexual Selection in Man" that the method of stating the
difference which has commended itself to Mary Wollstonecraft,
Ellen Key, and others, is not strictly correct, and the chastest
woman, after, for example, taking too hot a bath, may find that
her heart is not the only path through which her senses may be
affected. The senses are the only channels to the external world
which we possess, and love must come through these channels or
not at all. The difference, however, seems to be a real one, if
we translate it to mean that, as we have seen reason to believe
in previous volumes of these _Studies_, there are in women (1)
preferential sensory paths of sexual stimuli, such as,
apparently, a predominence of tactile and auditory paths as
compared with men; (2) a more massive, complex, and delicately
poised sexual mechanism; and, as a result of this, (3) eventually
a greater amount of nervous and cerebral sexual irradiation.
It must be remembered, at the same time, that while this
distinction represents a real tendency in sexual differentiation,
with an organic and not merely traditional basis, it has about it
nothing whatever that is absolute. There are a vast number of
women whose sexual facility, again by natural tendency and not
merely by acquired habits, is as marked as that of any man, if
not more so. In the sexual field, as we have seen in a previous
volume (_Analysis of the Sexual Impulse_), the range of
variability is greater in women than in men.
The fact that love is an art, a method of drawing music from an
instrument, and not the mere commission of an act by mutual consent, makes
any verbal agreement to love of little moment. If love were a matter of
contract, of simple intellectual consent, of question and answer, it would
never have come into the world at all. Love appeared as art from the
first, and the subsequent developments of the summary methods of reason
and speech cannot abolish that fundamental fact. This is scarcely realized
by those ill-advised lovers who consider that the first step in
courtship--and perhaps even the whole of courtship--is for a man to ask a
woman to be his wife. That is so far from being the case that it
constantly happens that the premature exhibition of so large a demand at
once and for ever damns all the wooer's chances. It is lamentable, no
doubt, that so grave and fateful a matter as that of marriage should so
often be decided without calm deliberation and reasonable forethought. But
sexual relationships can never, and should never, be merely a matter of
cold calculation. When a woman is suddenly confronted by the demand that
she should yield herself up as a wife to a man who has not yet succeeded
in gaining her affections she will not fail to find--provided she is
lifted above the cold-hearted motives of self-interest--that there are
many sound reasons why she should not do so. And having thus squarely
faced the question in cool blood and decided it, she will henceforth,
probably, meet that wooer with a tunic of steel enclosing her breast.
"Love must be _revealed_ by acts and not _betrayed_ by words. I
regard as abnormal the extraordinary method of a hasty avowal
beforehand; for that represents not the direct but the reflex
path of transmission. However sweet and normal the avowal may be
when once reciprocity has been realized, as a method of conquest
I consider it dangerous and likely to produce the reverse of the
result desired." I take these wise words from a thoughtful "Essai
sur l'Amour" (_Archives de Psychologie_, 1904) by a
non-psychological Swiss writer who is recording his own
experiences, and who insists much on the predominance of the
spiritual and mental element in love.
It is worthy of note that this recognition that direct speech is
out of place in courtship must not be regarded as a refinement of
civilization. Among primitive peoples everywhere it is perfectly
well recognized that the offer of love, and its acceptance or its
refusal, must be made by actions symbolically, and not by the
crude method of question and answer. Among the Indians of
Paraguay, who allow much sexual freedom to their women, but never
buy or sell love, Mantegazza states (_Rio de la Plata e
Tenerife_, 1867, p. 225) that a girl of the people will come to
your door or window and timidly, with a confused air, ask you, in
the Guarani tongue, for a drink of water. But she will smile if
you innocently offer her water. Among the Tarahumari Indians of
Mexico, with whom the initiative in courting belongs to the
women, the girl takes the first step through her parents, then
she throws small pebbles at the young man; if he throws them back
the matter is concluded (Carl Lumholtz, _Scribner's Magazine_,
Sept., 1894, p. 299). In many parts of the world it is the woman
who chooses her husband (see, e.g., M.A. Potter, _Sohrab and
Rustem_, pp. 169 et seq.), and she very frequently adopts a
symbolical method of proposal. Except when the commercial element
predominates in marriage, a similar method is frequently adopted
by men also in making proposals of marriage.
It is not only at the beginning of courtship that the act of love has
little room for formal declarations, for the demands and the avowals that
can be clearly defined in speech. The same rule holds even in the most
intimate relationships of old lovers, throughout the married life. The
permanent element in modesty, which survives every sexual initiation to
become intertwined with all the exquisite impudicities of love, combines
with a true erotic instinct to rebel against formal demands, against
verbal affirmations or denials. Love's requests cannot be made in words,
nor truthfully answered in words: a fine divination is still needed as
long as love lasts.
The fact that the needs of love cannot be expressed but must be
divined has long been recognized by those who have written of the
art of love, alike by writers within and without the European
Christian traditions. Thus Zacchia, in his great medico-legal
treatise, points out that a husband must be attentive to the
signs of sexual desire in his wife. "Women," he says, "when
sexual desire arises within them are accustomed to ask their
husbands questions on matters of love; they flatter and caress
them; they allow some part of their body to be uncovered as if by
accident; their breasts appear to swell; they show unusual
alacrity; they blush; their eyes are bright; and if they
experience unusual ardor they stammer, talk beside the mark, and
are scarcely mistress of themselves. At the same time their
private parts become hot and swell. All these signs should
convince a husband, however inattentive he may be, that his wife
craves for satisfaction" (_Zacchiæ Quæstionum Medico-legalium
Opus_, lib. vii, tit. iii, quæst. I; vol. ii, p. 624 in ed. of
1688).
The old Hindu erotic writers attributed great importance alike to
the man's attentiveness to the woman's erotic needs, and to his
skill and consideration in all the preliminaries of the sexual
act. He must do all that he can to procure her pleasure, says
Vatsyayana. When she is on her bed and perhaps absorbed in
conversation, he gently unfastens the knot of her lower garment.
If she protests he closes her mouth with kisses. Some authors,
Vatsyayana remarks, hold that the lover should begin by sucking
the nipples of her breasts. When erection occurs he touches her
with his hands, softly caressing the various parts of her body.
He should always press those parts of her body towards which she
turns her eyes. If she is shy, and it is the first time, he will
place his hands between her thighs which she will instinctively
press together. If she is young he will put his hands on her
breasts, and she will no doubt cover them with her own. If she is
mature he will do all that may seem fitting and agreeable to both
parties. Then he will take her hair and her chin between his
fingers and kiss them. If she is very young she will blush and
close her eyes. By the way in which she receives his caresses he
will divine what pleases her most in union. The signs of her
enjoyment are that her body becomes limp, her eyes close, she
loses all timidity, and takes part in the movements which bring
her most closely to him. If, on the other hand, she feels no
pleasure, she strikes the bed with her hands, will not allow the
man to continue, is sullen, even bites or kicks, and continues
the movements of coitus when the man has finished. In such cases,
Vatsyayana adds, it is his duty to rub the vulva with his hand
before union until it is moist, and he should perform the same
movements afterwards if his own orgasm has occurred first.
With regard to Indian erotic art generally, and more especially
Vatsyayana, who appears to have lived some sixteen hundred years
ago, information will be found in Valentino, "L'Hygiène conjugale
chez les Hindous," _Archives Générales de Médecine_, Ap. 25,
1905; Iwan Bloch, "Indische Medizin," Puschmann's _Handbuch der
Geschichte der Medizin_, vol. i; Heimann and Stephan, "Beiträge
zur Ehehygiene nach der Lehren des Kamasutram," _Zeitschaft für
Sexualwissenschaft_, Sept., 1908; also a review of Richard
Schmidt's German translation of the _Kamashastra_ of Vatsyayana
in _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1902, Heft 2. There has long
existed an English translation of this work. In the lengthy
preface to the French translation Lamairesse points out the
superiority of Indian erotic art to that of the Latin poets by
its loftier spirit, and greater purity and idealism. It is
throughout marked by respect for women, and its spirit is
expressed in the well-known proverb: "Thou shalt not strike a
woman even with a flower." See also Margaret Noble's _Web of
Indian Life_, especially Ch. III, "On the Hindu Woman as Wife,"
and Ch. IV, "Love Strong as Death."
The advice given to husbands by Guyot (_Bréviaire de l'Amour
Expérimental_, p. 422) closely conforms to that given, under very
different social conditions, by Zacchia and Vatsyayana. "In a
state of sexual need and desire the woman's lips are firm and
vibrant, the breasts are swollen, and the nipples erect. The
intelligent husband cannot be deceived by these signs. If they do
not exist, it is his part to provoke them by his kisses and
caresses, and if, in spite of his tender and delicate
excitations, the lips show no heat and the breasts no swelling,
and especially if the nipples are disagreeably irritated by
slight suction, he must arrest his transports and abstain from
all contact with the organs of generation, for he would certainly
find them in a state of exhaustion and disposed to repulsion. If,
on the contrary, the accessory organs are animated, or become
animated beneath his caresses, he must extend them to the
generative organs, and especially to the clitoris, which beneath
his touch will become full of appetite and ardor."
The importance of the preliminary titillation of the sexual
organs has been emphasized by a long succession alike of erotic
writers and physicians, from Ovid (_Ars Amatoria_ end of Bk. II)
onwards. Eulenburg (_Die Sexuale Neuropathie_, p. 79) considers
that titillation is sometimes necessary, and Adler, likewise
insisting on the preliminaries of psychic and physical courtship
(_Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes_, p. 188),
observes that the man who is gifted with insight and skill in
these matters possesses a charm which will draw sparks of
sensibility from the coldest feminine heart. The advice of the
physician is at one in this matter with the maxims of the erotic
artist and with the needs of the loving woman. In making love
there must be no haste, wrote Ovid:--
"Crede mihi, non est Veneris properanda voluptas,
Sed sensim tarda prolicienda mora."
"Husbands, like spoiled children," a woman has written, "too
often miss the pleasure which might otherwise be theirs, by
clamoring for it at the wrong time. The man who thinks this
prolonged courtship previous to the act of sex union wearisome,
has never given it a trial. It is the approach to the marital
embrace, as well as the embrace itself, which constitutes the
charm of the relation between the sexes."
It not seldom happens, remarks Adler (op. cit., p. 186), that the
insensibility of the wife must be treated--in the husband. And
Guyot, bringing forward the same point, writes (op. cit., p.
130): "If by a delay of tender study the husband has understood
his young bride, if he is able to realize for her the ineffable
happiness and dreams of youth, he will be beloved forever; he
will be her master and sovereign lord. If he has failed to
understand her he will fatigue and exhaust himself in vain
efforts, and finally class her among the indifferent and cold
women. She will be his wife by duty, the mother of his children.
He will take his pleasure elsewhere, for man is ever in pursuit
of the woman who experiences the genesic spasm. Thus the vague
and unintelligent search for a half who can unite in that
delirious finale is the chief cause of all conjugal dissolutions.
In such a case a man resembles a bad musician who changes his
violin in the hope that a new instrument will bring the melody he
is unable to play."
The fact that there is thus an art in love, and that sexual intercourse is
not a mere physical act to be executed by force of muscles, may help to
explain why it is that in so many parts of the world defloration is not
immediately effected on marriage.[404] No doubt religious or magic reasons
may also intervene here, but, as so often happens, they harmonize with the
biological process. This is the case even among uncivilized peoples who
marry early. The need for delay and considerate skill is far greater when,
as among ourselves, a woman's marriage is delayed long past the
establishment of puberty to a period when it is more difficult to break
down the psychic and perhaps even physical barriers of personality.
It has to be added that the art of love in the act of courtship is not
confined to the preliminaries to the single act of coitus. In a sense the
life of love is a continuous courtship with a constant progression. The
establishment of physical intercourse is but the beginning of it. This is
especially true of women. "The consummation of love," says Sénancour,[405]
"which is often the end of love with man is only the beginning of love
with woman, a test of trust, a gage of future pleasure, a sort of
engagement for an intimacy to come." "A woman's soul and body," says
another writer,[406] "are not given at one stroke at a given moment; but
only slowly, little by little, through many stages, are both delivered to
the beloved. Instead of abandoning the young woman to the bridegroom on
the wedding night, as an entrapped mouse is flung to the cat to be
devoured, it would be better to let the young bridal couple live side by
side, like two friends and comrades, until they gradually learn how to
develop and use their sexual consciousness." The conventional wedding is
out of place as a preliminary to the consummation of marriage, if only on
the ground that it is impossible to say at what stage in the endless
process of courtship it ought to take place.
A woman, unlike a man, is prepared by Nature, to play a skilful part in
the art of love. The man's part in courtship, which is that of the male
throughout the zoölogical series, may be difficult and hazardous, but it
is in a straight line, fairly simple and direct. The woman's part, having
to follow at the same moment two quite different impulses, is necessarily
always in a zigzag or a curve. That is to say that at every erotic moment
her action is the resultant of the combined force of her desire (conscious
or unconscious) and her modesty. She must sail through a tortuous channel
with Scylla on the one side and Charybdis on the other, and to avoid
either danger too anxiously may mean risking shipwreck on the other side.
She must be impenetrable to all the world, but it must be an
impenetrability not too obscure for the divination of the right man. Her
speech must be honest, but yet on no account tell everything; her actions
must be the outcome of her impulses, and on that very account be capable
of two interpretations. It is only in the last resort of complete intimacy
that she can become the perfect woman,
"Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought,
Nor Love her body from her soul."
For many a woman the conditions for that final erotic avatar--"that
splendid shamelessness which," as Rafford Pyke says, "is the finest thing
in perfect love"--never present themselves at all. She is compelled to be
to the end of her erotic life, what she must always be at the beginning, a
complex and duplex personality, naturally artful. Therewith she is better
prepared than man to play her part in the art of love.
The man's part in the art of love is, however, by no means easy. That is
not always realized by the women who complain of his lack of skill in
playing it. Although a man has not to cultivate the same natural duplicity
as a woman, it is necessary that he should possess a considerable power of
divination. He is not well prepared for that, because the traditional
masculine virtue is force rather than insight. The male's work in the
world, we are told, is domination, and it is by such domination that the
female is attracted. There is an element of truth in that doctrine, an
element of truth which may well lead astray the man who too exclusively
relies upon it in the art of love. Violence is bad in every art, and in
the erotic art the female desires to be won to love and not to be ordered
to love. That is fundamental. We sometimes see the matter so stated as if
the objection to force and domination in love constituted some quite new
and revolutionary demand of the "modern woman." That is, it need scarcely
be said, the result of ignorance. The art of love, being an art that
Nature makes, is the same now as in essentials it has always been,[407]
and it was well established before woman came into existence. That it has
not always been very skilfully played is another matter. And, so far as
the man is concerned, it is this very tradition of masculine predominance
which has contributed to the difficulty of playing it skilfully. The woman
admires the male's force; she even wishes herself to be forced to the
things that she altogether desires; and yet she revolts from any exertion
of force outside that narrow circle, either before the boundary of it is
reached or after the boundary is passed. Thus the man's position is really
more difficult than the women who complain of his awkwardness in love are
always ready to admit. He must cultivate force, not only in the world but
even for display in the erotic field; he must be able to divine the
moments when, in love, force is no longer force because his own will is
his partner's will; he must, at the same time, hold himself in complete
restraint lest he should fall into the fatal error of yielding to his own
impulse of domination; and all this at the very moment when his emotions
are least under control. We need scarcely be surprised that of the myriads
who embark on the sea of love, so few women, so very few men, come safely
into port.
It may still seem to some that in dwelling on the laws that guide the
erotic life, if that life is to be healthy and complete, we have wandered
away from the consideration of the sexual instinct in its relationship to
society. It may therefore be desirable to return to first principles and
to point out that we are still clinging to the fundamental facts of the
personal and social life. Marriage, as we have seen reason to believe, is
a great social institution; procreation, which is, on the public side, its
supreme function, is a great social end. But marriage and procreation are
both based on the erotic life. If the erotic life is not sound, then
marriage is broken up, practically if not always formally, and the process
of procreation is carried out under unfavorable conditions or not at all.
This social and personal importance of the erotic life, though, under the
influence of a false morality and an equally false modesty, it has
sometimes been allowed to fall into the background in stages of artificial
civilization, has always been clearly realized by those peoples who have
vitally grasped the relationships of life. Among most uncivilized races
there appear to be few or no "sexually frigid" women. It is little to the
credit of our own "civilization" that it should be possible for physicians
to-day to assert, even with the faintest plausibility, that there are some
25 per cent. of women who may thus be described.
The whole sexual structure of the world is built up on the general fact
that the intimate contact of the male and female who have chosen each
other is mutually pleasurable. Below this general fact is the more
specific fact that in the normal accomplishment of the act of sexual
consummation the two partners experience the acute gratification of
simultaneous orgasm. Herein, it has been said, lies the secret of love. It
is the very basis of love, the condition of the healthy exercise of the
sexual functions, and, in many cases, it seems probable, the condition
also of fertilization.
Even savages in a very low degree of culture are sometimes
patient and considerate in evoking and waiting for the signs of
sexual desire in their females. (I may refer to the significant
case of the Caroline Islanders, as described by Kubary in his
ethnographic study of that people and quoted in volume iv of
these _Studies_, "Sexual Selection in Man," Sect. III.) In
Catholic days theological influence worked wholesomely in the
same direction, although the theologians were so keen to detect
the mortal sin of lust. It is true that the Catholic insistence
on the desirability of simultaneous orgasm was largely due to the
mistaken notion that to secure conception it was necessary that
there should be "insemination" on the part of the wife as well as
of the husband, but that was not the sole source of the
theological view. Thus Zacchia discusses whether a man ought to
continue with his wife until she has the orgasm and feels
satisfied, and he decides that that is the husband's duty;
otherwise the wife falls into danger either of experiencing the
orgasm during sleep, or, more probably, by self-excitation, "for
many women, when their desires have not been satisfied by coitus,
place one thigh on the other, pressing and rubbing them together
until the orgasm occurs, in the belief that if they abstain from
using the hands they have committed no sin." Some theologians, he
adds, favor that belief, notably Hurtado de Mendoza and Sanchez,
and he further quotes the opinion of the latter that women who
have not been satisfied in coitus are liable to become hysterical
or melancholic (_Zacchiæ Quæstionum Medico-legalium Opus_, lib.
vii, tit. iii, quæst. VI). In the same spirit some theologians
seem to have permitted _irrumatio_ (without ejaculation), so long
as it is only the preliminary to the normal sexual act.
Nowadays physicians have fully confirmed the belief of Sanchez.
It is well recognized that women in whom, from whatever cause,
acute sexual excitement occurs with frequency without being
followed by the due natural relief of orgasm are liable to
various nervous and congestive symptoms which diminish their
vital effectiveness, and very possibly lead to a breakdown in
health. Kisch has described, as a cardiac neurosis of sexual
origin, a pathological tachycardia which is an exaggeration of
the physiological quick heart of sexual excitement. J. Inglis
Parsons (_British Medical Journal_, Oct. 22, 1904, p. 1062)
refers to the ovarian pain produced by strong unsatisfied sexual
excitement, often in vigorous unmarried women, and sometimes a
cause of great distress. An experienced Austrian gynæcologist
told Hirth (_Wege zur Heimat_, p. 613) that of every hundred
women who come to him with uterine troubles seventy suffered from
congestion of the womb, which he regarded as due to incomplete
coitus.
It is frequently stated that the evil of incomplete gratification
and absence of orgasm in women is chiefly due to male withdrawal,
that is to say _coitus interruptus_, in which the penis is
hastily withdrawn as soon as involuntary ejaculation is
impending; and it is sometimes said that the same widely
prevalent practice is also productive of slight or serious
results in the male (see, e.g., L.B. Bangs, _Transactions New
York Academy of Medicine_, vol. ix, 1893; D.S. Booth, "Coitus
Interruptus and Coitus Reservatus as Causes of Profound Neurosis
and Psychosis," _Alienist and Neurologist_, Nov., 1906; also,
_Alienist and Neurologist_, Oct., 1897, p. 588).
It is undoubtedly true that coitus interruptus, since it involves
sudden withdrawal on the part of the man without reference to the
stage of sexual excitation which his partner may have reached,
cannot fail to produce frequently an injurious nervous effect on
the woman, though the injurious effect on the man, who obtains
ejaculation, is little or none. But the practice is so widespread
that it cannot be regarded as necessarily involving this evil
result. There can, I am assured, be no doubt whatever that
Blumreich is justified in his statement (Senator and Kaminer,
_Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage_, vol. ii, p. 783)
that "interrupted coitus is injurious to the genital system of
those women only who are disturbed in their sensation of delight
by this form of cohabitation, in whom the orgasm is not produced,
and who continue for hours subsequently to be tormented by
feelings of an unsatisfied desire." Equally injurious effects
follow in normal coitus when the man's orgasm occurs too soon.
"These phenomena, therefore," he concludes, "are not
characteristic of interrupted coitus, but consequences of an
imperfectly concluded sexual cohabitation as such." Kisch,
likewise, in his elaborate and authoritative work on _The Sexual
Life of Woman_, also states that the question of the evil results
of _coitus interruptus_ in women is simply a question of whether
or not they receive sexual satisfaction. (Cf. also Fürbringer,
_Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage_, vol. i, pp. 232 _et
seq._) This is clearly the most reasonable view to take
concerning what is the simplest, the most widespread, and
certainly the most ancient of the methods of preventing
conception. In the Book of Genesis we find it practiced by Onan,
and to come down to modern times, in the sixteenth century it
seems to have been familiar to French ladies, who, according to
Brantôme, enjoined it on their lovers.
Coitus reservatus,--in which intercourse is maintained even for
very long periods, during which the woman may have orgasm several
times while the man succeeds in holding back orgasm,--so far from
being injurious to the woman, is probably the form of coitus
which gives her the maximum of gratification and relief. For most
men, however, it seems probable that this self-control over the
processes leading to the involuntary act of detumescence is
difficult to acquire, while in weak, nervous, and erethic persons
it is impossible. It is, however, a desirable condition for
completely adequate coitus, and in the East this is fully
recognized, and the aptitude carefully cultivated. Thus W.D.
Sutherland states ("Einiges über das Alltagsleben und die
Volksmedizin unter den Bauern Britischostindiens," _Münchener
Medizinische Wochenschrift_, No. 12, 1906) that the Hindu smokes
and talks during intercourse in order to delay orgasm, and
sometimes applies an opium paste to the glans of the penis for
the same purpose. (See also vol. iii of these _Studies_, "The
Sexual Impulse in Women.") Some authorities have, indeed, stated
that the prolongation of the act of coitus is injurious in its
effect on the male. Thus R.W. Taylor (_Practical Treatise on
Sexual Disorders_, third ed., p. 121) states that it tends to
cause atonic impotence, and Löwenfeld (_Sexualleben und
Nervenleiden_, p. 74) thinks that the swift and unimpeded
culmination of the sexual act is necessary in order to preserve
the vigor of the reflex reactions. This is probably true of
extreme and often repeated cases of indefinite prolongation of
pronounced erection without detumescence, but it is not true
within fairly wide limits in the case of healthy persons.
Prolonged _coitus reservatus_ was a practice of the complex
marriage system of the Oneida community, and I was assured by the
late Noyes Miller, who had spent the greater part of his life in
the community, that the practice had no sort of evil result.
_Coitus reservatus_ was erected into a principle in the Oneida
community. Every man in the community was theoretically the
husband of every woman, but every man was not free to have
children with every woman. Sexual initiation took place soon
after puberty in the case of boys, some years later in the case
of girls, by a much older person of the opposite sex. In
intercourse the male inserted his penis into the vagina and
retained it there for even an hour without emission, though
orgasm took place in the woman. There was usually no emission in
the case of the man, even after withdrawal, and he felt no need
of emission. The social feeling of the community was a force on
the side of this practice, the careless, unskilful men being
avoided by women, while the general romantic sentiment of
affection for all the women in the community was also a force.
Masturbation was unknown, and no irregular relations took place
with persons outside the community. The practice was maintained
for thirty years, and was finally abandoned, not on its demerits,
but in deference to the opinions of the outside world. Mr. Miller
admitted that the practice became more difficult in ordinary
marriage, which favors a more mechanical habit of intercourse.
The information received from Mr. Miller is supplemented in a
pamphlet entitled _Male Continence_ (the name given to _coitus
reservatus_ in the community), written in 1872 by the founder,
John Humphrey Noyes. The practice is based, he says, on the fact
that sexual intercourse consists of two acts, a social and a
propagative, and that if propagation is to be scientific there
must be no confusion of these two acts, and procreation must
never be involuntary. It was in 1844, he states, that this idea
occurred to him as a result of a resolve to abstain from sexual
intercourse in consequence of his wife's delicate health and
inability to bear healthy children, and in his own case he found
the practice "a great deliverance. It made a happy household." He
points out that the chief members of the Oneida community
"belonged to the most respectable families in Vermont, had been
educated in the best schools of New England morality and
refinement, and were, by the ordinary standards, irreproachable
in their conduct so far as sexual matters are concerned, till
they deliberately commenced, in 1846, the experiment of a new
state of society, on principles which they had been long maturing
and were prepared to defend before the World." In relation to
male continence, therefore, Noyes thought the community might
fairly be considered "the Committee of Providence to test its
value in actual life." He states that a careful medical
comparison of the statistics of the community had shown that the
rate of nervous disease in the community was considerably below
the average outside, and that only two cases of nervous disorder
had occurred which could be traced with any probability to a
misuse of male continence. This has been confirmed by Van de
Warker, who studied forty-two women of the community without
finding any undue prevalence of reproductive diseases, nor could
he find any diseased condition attributable to the sexual habits
of the community (cf. C. Reed, _Text-Book of Gynecology_, 1901,
p. 9).
Noyes believed that "male continence" had never previously been a
definitely recognized practice based on theory, though there
might have been occasional approximation to it. This is probably
true if the coitus is _reservatus_ in the full sense, with
complete absence of emission. Prolonged coitus, however,
permitting the woman to have orgasm more than once, while the man
has none, has long been recognized. Thus in the seventeenth
century Zacchia discussed whether such a practice is legitimate
(_Zacchiæ Quæstionum Opus_, ed. of 1688, lib. vii, tit. iii,
quæst. VI). In modern times it is occasionally practiced, without
any theory, and is always appreciated by the woman, while it
appears to have no bad effect on the man. In such a case it will
happen that the act of coitus may last for an hour and a quarter
or even longer, the maximum of the woman's pleasure not being
reached until three-quarters of an hour have passed; during this
period the woman will experience orgasm some four or five times,
the man only at the end. It may occasionally happen that a little
later the woman again experiences desire, and intercourse begins
afresh in the same way. But after that she is satisfied, and
there is no recurrence of desire.
It may be desirable at this point to refer briefly to the chief
variations in the method of effecting coitus in their
relationship to the art of love and the attainment of adequate
and satisfying detumescence.
The primary and essential characteristic of the specifically
human method of coitus is the fact that it takes place face to
face. The fact that in what is usually considered the typically
normal method of coitus the woman lies supine and the man above
her is secondary. Psychically, this front-to-front attitude
represents a great advance over the quadrupedal method. The two
partners reveal to each other the most important, the most
beautiful, the most expressive sides of themselves, and thus
multiply the mutual pleasure and harmony of the intimate act of
union. Moreover, this face-to-face attitude possesses a great
significance, in the fact that it is the outward sign that the
human couple has outgrown the animal sexual attitude of the
hunter seizing his prey in the act of flight, and content to
enjoy it in that attitude, from behind. The human male may be
said to retain the same attitude, but the female has turned
round; she has faced her partner and approached him, and so
symbolizes her deliberate consent to the act of union.
The human variations in the exercise of coitus, both individual
and national, are, however, extremely numerous. "To be quite
frank," says Fürbringer (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease
in Relation to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 213), "I can hardly think of
any combination which does not figure among my case-notes as
having been practiced by my patients." We must not too hastily
conclude that such variations are due to vicious training. That
is far from being the case. They often occur naturally and
spontaneously. Freud has properly pointed out (in the second
series of his _Beiträge zur Neurosenlehre_, "Bruchstück" etc.)
that we must not be too shocked even when the idea of _fellatio_
spontaneously presents itself to a woman, for that idea has a
harmless origin in the resemblance between the penis and the
nipple. Similarly, it may be added, the desire for
_cunnilinctus_, which seems to be much more often latently
present in women than is the desire for its performance in men,
has a natural analogy in the pleasure of suckling, a pleasure
which is itself indeed often erotically tinged (see vol. iv of
these _Studies_, "Sexual Selection in Man," Touch, Sect. III).
Every variation in this matter, remarks Remy de Gourmont
(_Physique de l'Amour_, p. 264) partakes of the sin of luxury,
and some of the theologians have indeed considered any position
in coitus but that which is usually called normal in Europe as a
mortal sin. Other theologians, however, regarded such variations
as only venial sins, provided ejaculation took place in the
vagina, just as some theologians would permit _irrumatio_ as a
preliminary to coitus, provided there was no ejaculation. Aquinas
took a serious view of the deviations from normal intercourse;
Sanchez was more indulgent, especially in view of his doctrine,
derived from the Greek and Arabic natural philosophers, that the
womb can attract the sperm, so that the natural end may be
attained even in unusual positions.
Whatever difference of opinion there may have been among ancient
theologians, it is well recognized by modern physicians that
variations from the ordinary method of coitus are desirable in
special cases. Thus Kisch points out (_Sterilität des Weibes_, p.
107) that in some cases it is only possible for the woman to
experience sexual excitement when coitus takes place in the
lateral position, or in the _a posteriori_ position, or when the
usual position is reversed; and in his _Sexual Life of Woman_,
also, Kisch recommends several variations of position for coitus.
Adler points out (op. cit., pp. 151, 186) the value of the same
positions in some cases, and remarks that such variations often
call forth latent sexual feelings as by a charm. Such cases are
indeed, by no means infrequent, the advantage of the unusual
position being due either to physical or psychic causes, and the
discovery of the right variation is sometimes found in a merely
playful attempt. It has occasionally happened, also, that when
intercourse has habitually taken place in an abnormal position,
no satisfaction is experienced by the woman until the normal
position is adopted. The only fairly common variation of coitus
which meets with unqualified disapproval is that in the erect
posture. (See e.g., Hammond, op. cit. pp. 257 et seq.)
Lucretius specially recommended the quadrupedal variation of
coitus (Bk. iv, 1258), and Ovid describes (end of Bk. iii of the
_Ars Amatoria_) what he regards as agreeable variations, giving
the preference, as the easiest and simplest method, to that in
which the woman lies half supine on her side. Perhaps, however,
the variation which is nearest to the normal attitude and which
has most often and most completely commended itself is that
apparently known to Arabic erotic writers as _dok el arz_, in
which the man is seated and his partner is astride his thighs,
embracing his body with her legs and his neck with her arms,
while he embraces her waist; this is stated in the Arabic
_Perfumed Garden_ to be the method preferred by most women.
The other most usual variation is the inverse normal position in
which the man is supine, and the woman adapts herself to this
position, which permits of several modifications obviously
advantageous, especially when the man is much larger than his
partner. The Christian as well as the Mahommedan theologians
appear, indeed, to have been generally opposed to this superior
position of the female, apparently, it would seem, because they
regarded the literal subjection of the male which it involves as
symbolic of a moral subjection. The testimony of many people
to-day, however, is decidedly in favor of this position, more
especially as regards the woman, since it enables her to obtain a
better adjustment and greater control of the process, and so
frequently to secure sexual satisfaction which she may find
difficult or impossible in the normal position.
The theologians seem to have been less unfavorably disposed to
the position normal among quadrupeds, _a posteriori_, though the
old Penitentials were inclined to treat it severely, the
Penitential of Angers prescribing forty days penance, and
Egbert's three years, if practiced habitually. (It is discussed
by J. Petermann, "Venus Aversa," _Sexual-Probleme_, Feb., 1909).
There are good reasons why in many cases this position should be
desirable, more especially from the point of view of women, who
indeed not infrequently prefer it. It must be always remembered,
as has already been pointed out, that in the progress from
anthropoid to man it is the female, not the male, whose method of
coitus has been revolutionized. While, however, the obverse human
position represents a psychic advance, there has never been a
complete physical readjustment of the female organs to the
obverse method. More especially, in Adler's opinion (op. cit.,
pp. 117-119), the position of the clitoris is such that, as a
rule, it is more easily excited by coitus from behind than from
in front. A more recent writer, Klotz, in his book, _Der Mensch
ein Vierfüssler_ (1908), even takes the too extreme position that
the quadrupedal method of coitus, being the only method that
insures due contact with the clitoris, is the natural human
method. It must, however, be admitted that the posterior mode of
coitus is not only a widespread, but a very important variation,
in either of its two most important forms: the Pompeiian method,
in which the woman bends forwards and the man approaches behind,
or the method described by Boccaccio, in which the man is supine
and the woman astride.
_Fellatio_ and _cunnilinctus_, while they are not strictly
methods of coitus, in so far as they do not involve the
penetration of the penis into the vagina, are very widespread as
preliminaries, or as vicarious forms of coitus, alike among
civilized and uncivilized peoples. Thus, in India, I am told that
_fellatio_ is almost universal in households, and regarded as a
natural duty towards the paterfamilias. As regards _cunnilinctus_
Max Dessoir has stated (_Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie_,
1894, Heft 5) that the superior Berlin prostitutes say that about
a quarter of their clients desire to exercise this, and that in
France and Italy the proportion is higher; the number of women
who find _cunnilinctus_ agreeable is without doubt much greater.
Intercourse _per anum_ must also be regarded as a vicarious form
of coitus. It appears to be not uncommon, especially among the
lower social classes, and while most often due to the wish to
avoid conception, it is also sometimes practiced as a sexual
aberration, at the wish either of the man or the woman, the anus
being to some extent an erogenous zone.
The ethnic variations in method of coitus were briefly discussed
in volume v of these _Studies_, "The Mechanism of Detumescence,"
Section II. In all civilized countries, from the earliest times,
writers on the erotic art have formally and systematically set
forth the different positions for coitus. The earliest writing of
this kind now extant seems to be an Egyptian papyrus preserved at
Turin of the date B.C. 1300; in this, fourteen different
positions are represented. The Indians, according to Iwan Bloch,
recognize altogether forty-eight different positions; the _Ananga
Ranga_ describes thirty-two main forms. The Mohammedan _Perfumed
Garden_ describes forty forms, as well as six different kinds of
movement during coitus. The Eastern books of this kind are, on
the whole, superior to those that have been produced by the
Western world, not only by their greater thoroughness, but by the
higher spirit by which they have often been inspired.
The ancient Greek erotic writings, now all lost, in which the
modes of coitus were described, were nearly all attributed to
women. According to a legend recorded by Suidas, the earliest
writer of this kind was Astyanassa, the maid of Helen of Troy.
Elephantis, the poetess, is supposed to have enumerated nine
different postures. Numerous women of later date wrote on these
subjects, and one book is attributed to Polycrates, the sophist.
Aretino--who wrote after the influence of Christianity had
degraded erotic matters perilously near to that region of
pornography from which they are only to-day beginning to be
rescued--in his _Sonnetti Lussuriosi_ described twenty-six
different methods of coitus, each one accompanied by an
illustrative design by Giulio Romano, the chief among Raphael's
pupils. Veniero, in his _Puttana Errante_, described thirty-two
positions. More recently Forberg, the chief modern authority, has
enumerated ninety positions, but, it is said, only forty-eight
can, even on the most liberal estimate, be regarded as coming
within the range of normal variation.
The disgrace which has overtaken the sexual act, and rendered it
a deed of darkness, is doubtless largely responsible for the fact
that the chief time for its consummation among modern civilized
peoples is the darkness of the early night in stuffy bedrooms
when the fatigue of the day's labors is struggling with the
artificial stimulation produced by heavy meals and alcoholic
drinks. This habit is partly responsible for the indifference or
even disgust with which women sometimes view coitus.
Many more primitive peoples are wiser. The New Guinea Papuans of
Astrolabe Bay, according to Vahness (_Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie_, 1900, Heft 5, p. 414), though it must be remembered
that the association of the sexual act with darkness is much
older than Christianity, and connected with early religious
notions (cf. Hesiod, _Works and Days_, Bk. II), always have
sexual intercourse in the open air. The hard-working women of the
Gebvuka and Buru Islands, again, are too tired for coitus at
night; it is carried out in the day time under the trees, and the
Serang Islanders also have coitus in the woods (Ploss and
Bartels, Das _Weib_, Bk. i, Ch. XVII).
It is obviously impracticable to follow these examples in modern
cities, even if avocation and climate permitted. It is also
agreed that sexual intercourse should be followed by repose.
There seems to be little doubt, however, that the early morning
and the daylight are a more favorable time than the early night.
Conception should take place in the light, said Michelet
(_L'Amour_, p. 153); sexual intercourse in the darkness of night
is an act committed with a mere female animal; in the day-time it
is union with a loving and beloved individual person.
This has been widely recognized. The Greeks, as we gather from
Aristophanes in the _Archarnians_, regarded sunrise as the
appropriate time for coitus. The South Slavs also say that dawn
is the time for coitus. Many modern authorities have urged the
advantages of early morning coitus. Morning, said Roubaud
(_Traité de l'Impuissance_, pp. 151-3) is the time for coitus,
and even if desire is greater in the evening, pleasure is greater
in the morning. Osiander also advised early morning coitus, and
Venette, in an earlier century, discussing "at what hour a man
should amorously embrace his wife" (_La Génération de l'Homme_,
Part II, Ch. V), while thinking it is best to follow inclination,
remarks that "a beautiful woman looks better by sunlight than by
candlelight." A few authorities, like Burdach, have been content
to accept the custom of night coitus, and Busch (_Das
Geschlechtsleben des Weibes_, vol. i, p. 214) was inclined to
think the darkness of night the most "natural" time, while
Fürbringer (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation
to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 217) thinks that early morning is
"occasionally" the best time.
To some, on the other hand, the exercise of sexual intercourse in
the sunlight and the open air seems so important that they are
inclined to elevate it to the rank of a religious exercise. I
quote from a communication on this point received from Australia:
"This shameful thing that must not be spoken of or done (except
in the dark) will some day, I believe, become the one religious
ceremony of the human race, in the spring. (Oh, what springs!)
People will have become very sane, well-bred, aristocratic (all
of them aristocrats), and on the whole opposed to rites and
superstitions, for they will have a perfect knowledge of the
past. The coition of lovers in the springtime will be the one
religious ceremony they will allow themselves. I have a vision
sometimes of the holy scene, but I am afraid it is too beautiful
to describe. 'The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is
ineffably beautiful, too fair to be remembered,' wrote the chaste
Thoreau. Verily human beauty, joy, and love will reach their
divinest height during those inaugural days of springtide
coupling. When the world is one Paradise, the consummation of the
lovers, the youngest and most beautiful, will take place in
certain sacred valleys in sight of thousands assembled to witness
it. For days it will take place in these valleys where the sun
will rise on a dream of passionate voices, of clinging human
forms, of flowers and waters, and the purple and gold of the
sunrise are reflected on hills illumined with pansies. [I know
not if the writer recalled George Chapman's "Enamelled pansies
used at nuptials still"], and repeated on golden human flesh and
human hair. In these sacred valleys the subtle perfume of the
pansies will mingle with the divine fragrance of healthy naked
young women and men in the spring coupling. You and I shall not
see that, but we may help to make it possible." This rhapsody (an
unconscious repetition of Saint-Lambert's at Mlle. Quinault's
table in the eighteenth century) serves to illustrate the revolt
which tends to take place against the unnatural and artificial
degradation of the sexual act.
In some parts of the world it has seemed perfectly natural and
reasonable that so great and significant an act as that of coitus
should be consecrated to the divinity, and hence arose the custom
of prayer before sexual intercourse. Thus Zoroaster ordained that
a married couple should pray before coitus, and after the act
they should say together: "O, Sapondomad, I trust this seed to
thee, preserve it for me, for it is a man." In the Gorong
Archipelago it is customary also for husband and wife to pray
together before the sexual act (Ploss and Bartels, _Das Weib_,
Bd. i, Ch. XVII). The civilized man, however, has come to regard
his stomach as the most important of his organs, and he utters
his conventional grace, not before love, but only before food.
Even the degraded ritual vestiges of the religious recognition of
coitus are difficult to find in Europe. We may perhaps detect it
among the Spaniards, with their tenacious instinct for ritual, in
the solemn etiquette with which, in the seventeenth century, it
was customary, according to Madame d'Aulnoy, for the King to
enter the bedchamber of the Queen: "He has on his slippers, his
black mantle over his shoulder, his shield on one arm, a bottle
hanging by a cord over the other arm (this bottle is not to drink
from, but for a quite opposite purpose, which you will guess).
With all this the King must also have his great sword in one hand
and a dark lantern in the other. In this way he must enter,
alone, the Queen's chamber" (Madame d'Aulnoy, _Relation du Voyage
d'Espagne_, 1692, vol. iii, p. 221).
In discussing the art of love it is necessary to give a primary place to
the central fact of coitus, on account of the ignorance that widely
prevails concerning it, and the unfortunate prejudices which in their
fungous broods flourish in the noisome obscurity around it. The traditions
of the Christian Church, which overspread the whole of Europe, and set up
for worship a Divine Virgin and her Divine Son, both of whom it
elaborately disengaged from personal contact with sexuality effectually
crushed any attempt to find a sacred and avowable ideal in married love.
Even the Church's own efforts to elevate matrimony were negatived by its
own ideals. That influence depresses our civilization even to-day. When
Walt Whitman wrote his "Children of Adam" he was giving imperfect
expression to conceptions of the religious nature of sexual love which
have existed wholesomely and naturally in all parts of the world, but had
not yet penetrated the darkness of Christendom where they still seemed
strange and new, if not terrible. And the refusal to recognize the
solemnity of sex had involved the placing of a pall of blackness and
disrepute on the supreme sexual act itself. It was shut out from the
sunshine and excluded from the sphere of worship.
The sexual act is important from the point of view of erotic art, not only
from the ignorance and prejudices which surround it, but also because it
has a real value even in regard to the psychic side of married life.
"These organs," according to the oft-quoted saying of the old French
physician, Ambrose Paré, "make peace in the household." How this comes
about we see illustrated from time to time in Pepys's Diary. At the same
time, it is scarcely necessary to say, after all that has gone before,
that this ancient source of domestic peace tends to be indefinitely
complicated by the infinite variety in erotic needs, which become ever
more pronounced with the growth of civilization.[408]
The art of love is, indeed, only beginning with the establishment of
sexual intercourse. In the adjustment of that relationship all the forces
of nature are so strongly engaged that under completely favorable
conditions--which indeed very rarely occur in our civilization--the
knowledge of the art and a possible skill in its exercise come almost of
themselves. The real test of the artist in love is in the skill to carry
it beyond the period when the interests of nature, having been really or
seemingly secured, begin to slacken. The whole art of love, it has been
well said, lies in forever finding something new in the same person. The
art of love is even more the art of retaining love than of arousing it.
Otherwise it tends to degenerate towards the Shakespearian lust,
"Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated,"
though it must be remembered that even from the most strictly natural
point of view the transitions of passion are not normally towards
repulsion but towards affection.[409]
The young man and woman who are brought into the complete unrestraint of
marriage after a prolonged and unnatural separation, during which desire
and the satisfactions of desire have been artificially disconnected, are
certainly not under the best conditions for learning the art of love. They
are tempted by reckless and promiscuous indulgence in the intimacies of
marriage to fling carelessly aside all the reasons that make that art
worth learning. "There are married people," as Ellen Key remarks, "who
might have loved each other all their lives if they had not been
compelled, every day and all the year, to direct their habits, wills, and
inclinations towards each other."
All the tendencies of our civilized life are, in personal matters, towards
individualism; they involve the specialization, and they ensure the
sacredness, of personal habits and even peculiarities. This individualism
cannot be broken down suddenly at the arbitrary dictation of a tradition,
or even by the force of passion from which the restraints have been
removed. Out of deference to the conventions and prejudices of their
friends, or out of the reckless abandonment of young love, or merely out
of a fear of hurting each other's feelings, young couples have often
plunged prematurely into an unbroken intimacy which is even more
disastrous to the permanency of marriage than the failure ever to reach a
complete intimacy at all. That is one of the chief reasons why most
writers on the moral hygiene of marriage nowadays recommend separate beds
for the married couple, if possible separate bedrooms, and even sometimes,
with Ellen Key, see no objection to their living in separate houses.
Certainly the happiest marriages have often involved the closest and most
unbroken intimacy, in persons peculiarly fitted for such intimacy. It is
far from true that, as Bloch has affirmed, familiarity is fatal to love.
It is deadly to a love that has no roots, but it is the nourishment of the
deeply-rooted love. Yet it remains true that absence is needed to maintain
the keen freshness and fine idealism of love. "Absence," as Landor said,
"is the invisible and incorporeal mother of ideal beauty." The married
lovers who are only able to meet for comparatively brief periods between
long absences have often experienced in these meetings a life-long
succession of honeymoons.[410]
There can be no question that as presence has its risks for love, so also
has absence. Absence like presence, in the end, if too prolonged, effaces
the memory of love, and absence, further, by the multiplied points of
contact with the world which it frequently involves, introduces the
problem of jealousy, although, it must be added, it is difficult indeed to
secure a degree of association which excludes jealousy or even the
opportunities for motives of jealousy. The problem of jealousy is so
fundamental in the art of love that it is necessary at this point to
devote to it a brief discussion.
Jealousy is based on fundamental instincts which are visible at the
beginning of animal life. Descartes defined jealousy as "a kind of fear
related to a desire to preserve a possession." Every impulse of
acquisition in the animal world is stimulated into greater activity by the
presence of a rival who may snatch beforehand the coveted object. This
seems to be a fundamental fact in the animal world; it has been a
life-conserving tendency, for, it has been said, an animal that stood
aside while its fellows were gorging themselves with food, and experienced
nothing but pure satisfaction in the spectacle, would speedily perish. But
in this fact we have the natural basis of jealousy.[411]
It is in reference to food that this impulse appears first and most
conspicuously among animals. It is a well-known fact that association
with other animals induces an animal to eat much more than when kept by
himself. He ceases to eat from hunger but eats, as it has been put, in
order to preserve his food from rivals in the only strong box he knows.
The same feeling is transferred among animals to the field of sex. And
further in the relations of dogs and other domesticated animals to their
masters the emotion of jealousy is often very keenly marked.[412]
Jealousy is an emotion which is at its maximum among animals, among
savages,[413] among children,[414] in the senile, in the degenerate, and
very specially in chronic alcoholics.[415] It is worthy of note that the
supreme artists and masters of the human heart who have most consummately
represented the tragedy of jealousy clearly recognized that it is either
atavistic or pathological; Shakespeare made his Othello a barbarian, and
Tolstoy made the Pozdnischeff of his _Kreutzer Sonata_ a lunatic. It is an
anti-social emotion, though it has been maintained by some that it has
been the cause of chastity and fidelity. Gesell, for instance, while
admitting its anti-social character and accumulating quotations in
evidence of the torture and disaster it occasions, seems to think that it
still ought to be encouraged in order to foster sexual virtues. Very
decided opinions have been expressed in the opposite sense. Jealousy, like
other shadows, says Ellen Key, belongs only to the dawn and the setting of
love, and a man should feel that it is a miracle, and not his right, if
the sun stands still at the zenith.[416]
Even therefore if jealousy has been a beneficial influence at the
beginning of civilization, as well as among animals,--as may probably be
admitted, though on the whole it seems rather to be the by-product of a
beneficial influence than such an influence itself,--it is still by no
means clear that it therefore becomes a desirable emotion in more advanced
stages of civilization. There are many primitive emotions, like anger and
fear, which we do not think it desirable to encourage in complex civilized
societies but rather seek to restrain and control, and even if we are
inclined to attribute an original value to jealousy, it seems to be among
these emotions that it ought to be placed.
Miss Clapperton, in discussing this problem (_Scientific
Meliorism_, pp. 129-137), follows Darwin (_Descent of Man_, Part
I, Ch. IV) in thinking that jealousy led to "the inculcation of
female virtue," but she adds that it has also been a cause of
woman's subjection, and now needs to be eliminated. "To rid
ourselves as rapidly as may be of jealousy is essential;
otherwise the great movement in favor of equality of sex will
necessarily meet with checks and grave obstruction."
Ribot (_La Logique des Sentiments_, pp. 75 et seq.; _Essai sur
les Passions_, pp. 91, 175), while stating that subjectively the
estimate of jealousy must differ in accordance with the ideal of
life held, considers that objectively we must incline to an
unfavorable estimate "Even a brief passion is a rupture in the
normal life; it is an abnormal, if not a pathological state, an
excrescence, a parasitism."
Forel (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, Ch. V) speaks very strongly in the
same sense, and considers that it is necessary to eliminate
jealousy by non-procreation of the jealous. Jealousy is, he
declares, "the worst and unfortunately the most deeply-rooted of
the 'irradiations,' or, better, the 'contrast-reactions,' of
sexual love inherited from our animal ancestors. An old German
saying, 'Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft die mit Eifer sucht was
Leider schafft,' says by no means too much.... Jealousy is a
heritage of animality and barbarism; I would recall this to those
who, under the name of 'injured honor,' attempt to justify it and
place it on a high pedestal. An unfaithful husband is ten times
more to be wished for a woman than a jealous husband.... We often
hear of 'justifiable jealousy.' I believe, however, that there is
no justifiable jealousy; it is always atavistic or else
pathological; at the best it is nothing more than a brutal
animal stupidity. A man who, by nature, that is by his hereditary
constitution, is jealous is certain to poison his own life and
that of his wife. Such men ought on no account to marry. Both
education and selection should work together to eliminate
jealousy as far as possible from the human brain."
Eric Gillard in an article on "Jealousy" (_Free Review_, Sept.,
1896), in opposition to those who believe that jealousy "makes
the home," declares that, on the contrary, it is the chief force
that unmakes the home. "So long as egotism waters it with the
tears of sentiment and shields it from the cold blasts of
scientific inquiry, so long will it thrive. But the time will
come when it will be burned in the Garden of Love as a noxious
weed. Its mephitic influence in society is too palpable to be
overlooked. It turns homes that might be sanctuaries of love into
hells of discord and hate; it causes suicides, and it drives
thousands to drink, reckless excesses, and madness. Makes the
home! One of your married men friends sees a probable seducer in
every man who smiles at his wife; another is jealous of his
wife's women acquaintances; a third is wounded because his wife
shows so much attention to the children. Some of the women you
know display jealousy of every other woman, of their husband's
acquaintances, and some, of his very dog. You must be completely
monopolized or you do not thoroughly love. You must admire no one
but the person with whom you have immured yourself for life. Old
friendships must be dissolved, new friendships must not be
formed, for fear of invoking the beautiful emotion that 'makes
the home.'"
Even if jealousy in matters of sex could be admitted to be an emotion
working on the side of civilized progress, it must still be pointed out
that it merely acts externally; it can have little or no real influence;
the jealous person seldom makes himself more lovable by his jealousy and
frequently much less lovable. The main effect of his jealousy is to
increase, and not seldom to excite, the causes for jealousy, and at the
same time to encourage hypocrisy.
All the circumstances, accompaniments, and results of domestic
jealousy in their completely typical form, are well illustrated
by a very serious episode in the history of the Pepys household,
and have been fully and faithfully set down by the great diarist.
The offence--an embrace of his wife's lady-help, as she might now
be termed--was a slight one, but, as Pepys himself admits, quite
inexcusable. He is writing, being in his thirty-sixth year, on
the 25th of Oct., 1668 (Lord's Day). "After supper, to have my
hair combed by Deb, which occasioned the greatest sorrow to me
that ever I knew in this world, for my wife, coming up suddenly,
did find me embracing the girl.... I was at a wonderful loss upon
it, and the girl also, and I endeavored to put it off, but my
wife was struck mute and grew angry.... Heartily afflicted for
this folly of mine.... So ends this month," he writes a few days
later, "with some quiet to my mind, though not perfect, after the
greatest falling out with my poor wife, and through my folly with
the girl, that ever I had, and I have reason to be sorry and
ashamed of it, and more to be troubled for the poor girl's sake.
Sixth November. Up, and presently my wife up with me, which she
professedly now do every day to dress me, that I may not see
Willet [Deb], and do eye me, whether I cast my eye upon her, or
no, and do keep me from going into the room where she is. Ninth
November. Up, and I did, by a little note which I flung to Deb,
advise her that I did continue to deny that ever I kissed her,
and so she might govern herself. The truth is that I did
adventure upon God's pardoning me this lie, knowing how heavy a
thing it would be for me, to the ruin of the poor girl, and next
knowing that if my wife should know all it would be impossible
for her ever to be at peace with me again, and so our whole lives
would be uncomfortable. The girl read, and as I bid her returned
me the note, flinging it to me in passing by." Next day, however,
he is "mightily troubled," for his wife has obtained a confession
from the girl of the kissing. For some nights Mr. and Mrs. Pepys
are both sleepless, with much weeping on either side. Deb gets
another place, leaving on the 14th of November, and Pepys is
never able to see her before she leaves the house, his wife
keeping him always under her eye. It is evident that Pepys now
feels strongly attracted to Deb, though there is no evidence of
this before she became the subject of the quarrel. On the 13th of
November, hearing she was to leave next day, he writes: "The
truth is I have a good mind to have the maidenhead of this girl."
He was, however, the "more troubled to see how my wife is by this
means likely forever to have her hand over me, and that I shall
forever be a slave to her--that is to say, only in matters of
pleasure." At the same time his love for his wife was by no means
diminished, nor hers for him. "I must here remark," he says,
"that I have lain with my moher [i.e., _muger_, wife] as a
husband more times since this falling out than in, I believe,
twelve months before. And with more pleasure to her than in all
the time of our marriage before." The next day was Sunday. On
Monday Pepys at once begins to make inquiries which will put him
on the track of Deb. On the 18th he finds her. She gets up into
the coach with him, and he kisses her and takes liberties with
her, at the same time advising her "to have a care of her honor
and to fear God," allowing no one else to do what he has done; he
also tells her how she can find him if she desires. Pepys now
feels that everything is settled satisfactorily, and his heart
is full of joy. But his joy is short-lived, for Mrs. Pepys
discovers this interview with Deb on the following day. Pepys
denies it at first, then confesses, and there is a more furious
scene than ever. Pepys is now really alarmed, for his wife
threatens to leave him; he definitely abandons Deb, and with
prayers to God resolves never to do the like again. Mrs. Pepys is
not satisfied, however, till she makes her husband write a letter
to Deb, telling her that she is little better than a whore, and
that he hates her, though Deb is spared this, not by any
stratagem of Pepys, but by the considerateness of the friend to
whom the letter was entrusted for delivery. Moreover, Mrs. Pepys
arranges with her husband that, in future, whenever he goes
abroad he shall be accompanied everywhere by his clerk. We see
that Mrs. Pepys plays with what appears to be triumphant skill
and success the part of the jealous and avenging wife, and digs
her little French heels remorselessly into her prostrate husband
and her rival. Unfortunately, we do not know what the final
outcome was, for a little later, owing to trouble with his
eyesight, Pepys was compelled to bring his Diary to an end. It is
evident, however, when we survey the whole of this perhaps
typical episode, that neither husband nor wife were in the
slightest degree prepared for the commonplace position into which
they were thrown; that each of them appears in a painful,
undignified, and humiliating light; that as a result of it the
husband acquires almost a genuine and strong affection for the
girl who is the cause of the quarrel; and finally that, even
though he is compelled, for the time at all events, to yield to
his wife, he remains at the end exactly what he was at the
beginning. Nor had husband or wife the very slightest wish to
leave each other; the bond of marriage remained firm, but it had
been degraded by insincerity on one side and the jealous endeavor
on the other to secure fidelity by compulsion.
Apart altogether, however, from the question of its effectiveness, or even
of the misery that it causes to all concerned, it is evident that jealousy
is incompatible with all the tendencies of civilization. We have seen that
a certain degree of variation is involved in the sexual relationship, as
in all other relationships, and unless we are to continue to perpetuate
many evils and injustices, that fact has to be faced and recognized. We
have also seen that the line of our advance involves a constant increase
in moral responsibility and self-government, and that, in its turn,
implies not only a high degree of sincerity but also the recognition that
no person has any right, or indeed any power, to control the emotions and
actions of another person. If our sun of love stands still at midday,
according to Ellen Key's phrase, that is a miracle to be greeted with awe
and gratitude, and by no means a right to be demanded. The claim of
jealousy falls with the claim of conjugal rights.
It is quite possible, Bloch remarks (_The Sexual Life of Our
Time_, Ch. X), to love more than one person at the same time,
with nearly equal tenderness, and to be honestly able to assure
each of the passion felt for her or him. Bloch adds that the vast
psychic differentiation involved by modern civilization increases
the possibility of this double love, for it is difficult for
anyone to find his complement in a single person, and that this
applies to women as well as to men.
Georg Hirth likewise points out (_Wege zur Heimat_, pp. 543-552)
that it is important to remember that women, as well as men, can
love two persons at the same time. Men flatter themselves, he
remarks, with the prejudice that the female heart, or rather
brain, can only hold one man at a time, and that if there is a
second man it is by a kind of prostitution. Nearly all erotic
writers, poets, and novelists, even physicians and psychologists,
belong to this class, he says; they look on a woman as property,
and of course two men cannot "possess" a woman. (Regarding
novelists, however, the remark may be interpolated that there are
many exceptions, and Thomas Hardy, for instance, frequently
represents a woman as more or less in love with two men at the
same time.) As against this desire to depreciate women's psychic
capacity, Hirth maintains that a woman is not necessarily obliged
to be untrue to one man because she has conceived a passion for
another man. "Today," Hirth truly declares, "only love and
justice can count as honorable motives in marriage. The modern
man accords to the beloved wife and life-companion the same
freedom which he himself took before marriage, and perhaps still
takes in marriage. If she makes no use of it, as is to be
hoped--so much the better! But let there be no lies, no
deception; the indispensable foundation of modern marriage is
boundless sincerity and friendship, the deepest trust,
affectionate devotion, and consideration. This is the best
safeguard against adultery.... Let him, however, who is,
nevertheless, overtaken by the outbreak of it console himself
with the undoubted fact that of two real lovers the most
noble-minded and deep-seeing _friend_ will always have the
preference." These wise words cannot be too deeply meditated. The
policy of jealousy is only successful--when it is successful--in
the hands of the man who counts the external husk of love more
precious than the kernel.
It seems to some that the recognition of variations in sexual
relationships, of the tendency of the monogamic to overpass its
self-imposed bounds, is at best a sad necessity, and a lamentable fall
from a high ideal. That, however, is the reverse of the truth. The great
evil of monogamy, and its most seriously weak point, is its tendency to
self-concentration at the expense of the outer world. The devil always
comes to a man in the shape of his wife and children, said Hinton. The
family is a great social influence in so far as it is the best instrument
for creating children who will make the future citizens; but in a certain
sense the family is an anti-social influence, for it tends to absorb
unduly the energy that is needed for the invigoration of society. It is
possible, indeed, that that fact led to the modification of the monogamic
system in early developing periods of human history, when social expansion
and cohesion were the primary necessities. The family too often tends to
resemble, as someone has said, the secluded collection of grubs sometimes
revealed in their narrow home when we casually raise a flat stone in our
gardens. Great as are the problems of love, and great as should be our
attention to them, it must always be remembered that love is not a little
circle that is complete in itself. It is the nature of love to irradiate.
Just as family life exists mainly for the social end of breeding the
future race, so family love has its social ends in the extension of
sympathy and affection to those outside it, and even in ends that go
beyond love altogether.[417]
The question is debated from time to time as to how far it is possible for
men and women to have intimate friendships with each other outside the
erotic sphere.[418] There can be no doubt whatever that it is perfectly
possible for a man and a woman to experience for each other a friendship
which never intrudes into the sexual sphere. As a rule, however, this only
happens under special conditions, and those are generally conditions which
exclude the closest and most intimate friendship. If, as we have seen,
love may be defined as a synthesis of lust and friendship, friendship
inevitably enters into the erotic sphere. Just as sexual emotion tends to
merge into friendship, so friendship between persons of opposite sex, if
young, healthy, and attractive, tends to involve sexual emotion. The two
feelings are too closely allied for an artificial barrier to be
permanently placed between them without protest. Men who offer a woman
friendship usually find that it is not received with much satisfaction
except as the first installment of a warmer emotion, and women who offer
friendship to a man usually find that he responds with an offer of love;
very often the "friendship" is from the first simply love or flirtation
masquerading under another name.
"In the long run," a woman writes (in a letter published in
_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. i, Heft 7), "the senses become
discontented at their complete exclusion. And I believe that a
man can only come into the closest mutual association with a
woman by whom, consciously or unconsciously, he is physically
attracted. He cannot enter into the closest psychic intercourse
with a woman with whom he could not imagine himself in physical
intercourse. His prevailing wish is for the possession of a
woman, of the whole woman, her soul as well as her body. And a
woman also cannot imagine an intimate relation to a man in which
the heart and the body, as well as the mind, are not involved.
(Naturally I am thinking of people with sound nerves and healthy
blood.) Can a woman carry on a Platonic relation with a man from
year to year without the thought sometimes coming to her: 'Why
does he never kiss me? Have I no charm for him?' And in the most
concealed corner of her heart will it not happen that she uses
that word 'kiss' in the more comprehensive sense in which the
French sometimes employ it?" There is undoubtedly an element of
truth in this statement. The frontier between erotic love and
friendship is vague, and an intimate psychic intercourse that is
sternly debarred from ever manifesting itself in a caress, or
other physical manifestation of tender intimacy, tends to be
constrained, and arouses unspoken and unspeakable thoughts and
desires which are fatal to any complete friendship.
Undoubtedly the only perfect "Platonic friendships" are those which have
been reached through the portal of a preliminary erotic intimacy. In such
a case bad lovers, when they have resolutely traversed the erotic stage,
may become exceedingly good friends. A satisfactory friendship is
possible between brother and sister because they have been physically
intimate in childhood, and all erotic curiosities are absent. The most
admirable "Platonic friendship" may often be attained by husband and wife
in whom sympathy and affection and common interests have outlived passion.
In nearly all the most famous friendships of distinguished men and
women--as we know in some cases and divine in others--an hour's passion,
in Sainte-Beuve's words, has served as the golden key to unlock the most
precious and intimate secrets of friendship.[419]
The friendships that have been entered through the erotic portal possess
an intimacy and retain a spiritually erotic character which could not be
attained on the basis of a normal friendship between persons of the same
sex. This is true in a far higher degree of the ultimate relationship,
under fortunate circumstances, of husband and wife in the years after
passion has become impossible. They have ceased to be passionate lovers
but they have not become mere friends and comrades. More especially their
relationship takes on elements borrowed from the attitude of child to
parent, of parent to child. Everyone from his first years retains
something of the child which cannot be revealed to all the world; everyone
acquires something of the guardian paternal or maternal spirit. Husband
and wife are each child to the other, and are indeed parent and child by
turn. And here still the woman retains a certain erotic supremacy, for she
is to the last more of a child than it is ever easy for the man to be, and
much more essentially a mother than he is a father.
Groos (_Der Æsthetische Genuss_, p. 249) has pointed out that
"love" is really made up of both sexual instinct and parental
instinct.
"So-called happy marriages," says Professor W. Thomas (_Sex and
Society_, p. 246), "represent an equilibrium reached through an
extension of the maternal interest of the woman to the man,
whereby she looks after his personal needs as she does after
those of the children--cherishing him, in fact, as a child--or
in an extension to woman on the part of man of the nurture and
affection which is in his nature to give to pets and all helpless
(and preferably dumb) creatures."
"When the devotion in the tie between mother and son," a woman
writes, "is added to the relation of husband and wife, the union
of marriage is raised to the high and beautiful dignity it
deserves, and can attain in this world. It comprehends sympathy,
love, and perfect understanding, even of the faults and
weaknesses of both sides." "The foundation of every true woman's
love," another woman writes, "is a mother's tenderness. He whom
she loves is a child of larger growth, although she may at the
same time have a deep respect for him." (See also, for similar
opinion of another woman of distinguished intellectual ability,
footnote at beginning of "The Psychic State in Pregnancy" in
volume v of these _Studies_.)
It is on the basis of these elemental human facts that the
permanently seductive and inspiring relationships of sex are
developed, and not by the emergence of personalities who combine
impossibly exalted characteristics. "The task is extremely
difficult," says Kisch in his _Sexual Life of Woman_, "but a
clever and virtuous modern wife must endeavor to combine in her
single personality the sensuous attractiveness of an Aspasia, the
chastity of a Lucrece, and the intellectual greatness of a
Cornelia." And in an earlier century we are told in the novel of
_La Tia Fingida_, which has sometimes been attributed to
Cervantes, that "a woman should be an angel in the street, a
saint in church, beautiful at the window, honest in the house,
and a demon in bed." The demands made of men by women, on the
other hand, have been almost too lofty to bear definite
formulation at all. "Ninety-nine out of a hundred loving women,"
says Helene Stöcker, "certainly believe that if a thousand other
men have behaved ignobly, and forsaken, ill-used, and deceived
the woman they love, the man they love is an exception, marked
out from all other men; that is the reason they love him." It may
be doubted, however, if the great lovers have ever stood very far
above the ordinary level of humanity by their possession of
perfection. They have been human, and their art of love has not
always excluded the possession of human frailties; perfection,
indeed, even if it could be found, would furnish a bad soil for
love to strike deep roots in.
It is only when we realize the highly complex nature of the elements which
make up erotic love that we can understand how it is that that love can
constitute so tremendous a revelation and exert so profound an influence
even in men of the greatest genius and intellect and in the sphere of
their most spiritual activity. It is not merely passion, nor any conscious
skill in the erotic art,--important as these may be,--that would serve to
account for Goethe's relationship to Frau von Stein, or Wagner's to
Mathilde Wesendonck, or that of Robert and Elizabeth Browning to each
other.[420]
It may now be clear to the reader why it has been necessary in a
discussion of the sexual impulse in its relationship to society to deal
with the art of love. It is true that there is nothing so intimately
private and personal as the erotic affairs of the individual. Yet it is
equally true that these affairs lie at the basis of the social life, and
furnish the conditions--good or bad as the case may be--of that
procreative act which is a supreme concern of the State. It is because the
question of love is of such purely private interest that it tends to be
submerged in the question of breed. We have to realize, not only that the
question of love subserves the question of breed, but also that love has a
proper, a necessary, even a socially wholesome claim, to stand by itself
and to be regarded for its own worth.
In the profoundly suggestive study of love which the
distinguished sociologist Tarde left behind at his death
(_Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, loc. cit.), there are
some interesting remarks on this point: "Society," he says, "has
been far more, and more intelligently, preoccupied with the
problem of answering the 'question of breed' than the 'question
of love.' The first problem fills all our civil and commercial
codes. The second problem has never been clearly stated, or
looked in the face, not even in antiquity, still less since the
coming of Christianity, for merely to offer the solutions of
marriage and prostitution is manifestly inadequate. Statesmen
have only seen the side on which it touches population. Hence
the marriage laws. Sterile love they profess to disdain. Yet it
is evident that, though born as the serf of generation, love
tends by civilization to be freed from it. In place of a simple
method of procreation it has become an end, it has created itself
a title, a royal title. Our gardens cultivate flowers that are
all the more charming because they are sterile; why is the double
corolla of love held more infamous than the sterilized flowers of
our gardens?" Tarde replies that the reason is that our
politicians are merely ambitious persons thirsting for power and
wealth, and even when they are lovers they are Don Juans rather
than Virgils. "The future," he continues, "is to the Virgilians,
because if the ambition of power, the regal wealth of American or
European millionarism, once seemed nobler, love now more and more
attracts to itself the best and highest parts of the soul, where
lies the hidden ferment of all that is greatest in science and
art, and more and more those studious and artist souls multiply
who, intent on their peaceful activities, hold in horror the
business men and the politicians, and will one day succeed in
driving them back. That assuredly will be the great and capital
revolution of humanity, an active psychological revolution: the
recognized preponderance of the meditative and contemplative, the
lover's side of the human soul, over the feverish, expansive,
rapacious, and ambitious side. And then it will be understood
that one of the greatest of social problems, perhaps the most
arduous of all, has been the problem of love."
FOOTNOTES:
[375] _Quæstionum Convivalium_, lib. iii, quæstio 6.
[376] E.D. Cope, "The Marriage Problem," _Open Court_, Nov. 1888.
[377] Columbus meeting of the American Medical Association, 1900.
[378] Ellen Key, _Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 24.
[379] In an admirable article on Friedrich Schlegel's _Lucinde_
(_Mutterschutz_, 1906, Heft 5), Heinrich Meyer-Benfey, in pointing out
that the Catholic sacramental conception of marriage licensed love, but
failed to elevate it, regards _Lucinde_, with all its defects, as the
first expression of the unity of the senses and the soul, and, as such,
the basis of the new ethics of love. It must, however, be said that four
hundred years earlier Pontano had expressed this same erotic unity far
more robustly and wholesomely than Schlegel, though the Latin verse in
which he wrote, fresh and vital as it is, remained without influence.
Pontano's _Carmina_, including the "De Amore Conjugali," have at length
been reprinted in a scholarly edition by Soldati.
[380] From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries Ovid was, in
reality, the most popular and influential classic poet. His works played a
large part in moulding Renaissance literature, not least in England, where
Marlowe translated his _Amores_, and Shakespeare, during the early years
of his literary activity, was greatly indebted to him (see, e.g., Sidney
Lee, "Ovid and Shakespeare's Sonnets," _Quarterly Review_, Ap., 1909).
[381] This has already been discussed in Chapter II.
[382] By the age of twenty-five, as G. Hirth remarks (_Wege zur Heimat_,
p. 541), an energetic and sexually disposed man in a large city has, for
the most part, already had relations with some twenty-five women, perhaps
even as many as fifty, while a well-bred and cultivated woman at that age
is still only beginning to realize the slowly summating excitations of
sex.
[383] In his study of "Conjugal Aversion" (_Journal Nervous and Mental
Disease_, Sept., 1892) Smith Baker points out the value of adequate sexual
knowledge before marriage in lessening the risks of such aversion.
[384] "It may be said to the honor of men," Adler truly remarks (op. cit.,
p. 182), "that it is perhaps not often their conscious brutality that is
at fault in this matter, but merely lack of skill and lack of
understanding. The husband who is not specially endowed by nature and
experience for psychic intercourse with women, is not likely, through his
earlier intercourse with Venus vulgivaga, to bring into marriage any
useful knowledge, psychic or physical."
[385] "The first night," writes a correspondent concerning his marriage,
"she found the act very painful and was frightened and surprised at the
size of my penis, and at my suddenly getting on her. We had talked very
openly about sex things before marriage, and it never occurred to me that
she was ignorant of the details of the act. I imagined it would disgust
her to talk about these things; but I now see I should have explained
things to her. Before marrying I had come to the conclusion that the
respect owed to one's wife was incompatible with any talk that might seem
indecent, and also I had made a resolve not to subject her to what I
thought then were dirty tricks, even to be naked and to have her naked. In
fact, I was the victim of mock modesty; it was an artificial reaction from
the life I had been living before marriage. Now it seems to me to be
natural, if you love a woman, to do whatever occurs to you and to her. If
I had not felt it wrong to encourage such acts between us, there might
have been established a sexual sympathy which would have bound me more
closely to her."
[386] Montaigne, _Essais_, Bk. iii, Ch. V. It is a significant fact that,
even in the matter of information, women, notwithstanding much ignorance
and inexperience, are often better equipped for marriage than men. As
Fürbringer remarks (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation
to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 212), although the wife is usually more chaste at
marriage than the husband, yet "she is generally the better informed
partner in matters pertaining to the married state, in spite of occasional
astonishing confessions."
[387] "She never loses her self-respect nor my respect for her," a man
writes in a letter, "simply because we are desperately in love with one
another, and everything we do--some of which the lowest prostitute might
refuse to do--seems but one attempt after another to translate our passion
into action. I never realized before, not that to the pure all things are
pure, indeed, but that to the lover nothing is indecent. Yes, I have
always felt it, to love her is a liberal education." It is obviously only
the existence of such an attitude as this that can enable a pure woman to
be passionate.
[388] "To be really understood," as Rafford Pyke well says, "to say what
she likes, to utter her innermost thoughts in her own way, to cast aside
the traditional conventions that gall her and repress her, to have someone
near her with whom she can be quite frank, and yet to know that not a
syllable of what she says will be misinterpreted or mistaken, but rather
felt just as she feels it all--how wonderfully sweet is this to every
woman, and how few men are there who can give it to her!"
[389] In more recent times it has been discussed in relation to the
frequency of spontaneous nocturnal emissions. See "The Phenomena of Sexual
Periodicity," Sect. II, in volume i of these _Studies_, and cf. Mr.
Perry-Coste's remarks on "The Annual Rhythm," in Appendix B of the same
volume.
[390] See "The Sexual Impulse in Women," vol. iii of these _Studies_.
[391] Zenobia's practice is referred to by Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, ed.
Bury, vol. i, p. 302. The Queen of Aragon's decision is recorded by the
Montpellier jurist, Nicolas Bohier (Boerius) in his _Decisiones_, etc.,
ed. of 1579, p. 563; it is referred to by Montaigne, _Essais_, Bk. iii,
Ch. V.
[392] Haller, _Elementa Physiologiæ_, 1778, vol. vii, p. 57.
[393] Hammond, _Sexual Impotence_, p. 129.
[394] Fürbringer, Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation to
Marriage_, vol. i, p. 221.
[395] Forel, _Die Sexuelle Frage_, p. 80.
[396] Guyot, _Bréviaire de l'Amour Expérimental_, p. 144.
[397] Erb, Ziemssen's _Handbuch_, Bd. xi, ii, p. 148. Guttceit also
considered that the very wide variations found are congenital and natural.
It may be added that some believe that there are racial variations. Thus
it has been stated that the genital force of the Englishman is low, and
that of the Frenchman (especially Provençal, Languedocian, and Gascon)
high, while Löwenfeld believes that the Germanic race excels the French in
aptitude to repeat the sex act frequently. It is probable that little
weight attaches to these opinions, and that the chief differences are
individual rather than racial.
[398] Ribbing, _L'Hygiène Sexualle_, p. 75. Kisch, in his _Sexual Life of
Woman_, expresses the same opinion.
[399] Mohammed, who often displayed a consideration for women very rare in
the founders of religions, is an exception. His prescription of once a
week represented the right of the wife, quite independently of the number
of wives a man might possess.
[400] How fragile the claim of "conjugal rights" is, may be sufficiently
proved by the fact that it is now considered by many that the very term
"conjugal rights" arose merely by a mistake for "conjugal rites." Before
1733, when legal proceedings were in Latin, the term used was _obsequies_,
and "rights," instead of "rites," seems to have been merely a typesetter's
error (see _Notes and Queries_, May 16, 1891; May 6, 1899). This
explanation, it should be added, only applies to the consecrated term, for
there can be no doubt that the underlying idea has an existence quite
independent of the term.
[401] "In most marriages that are not happy," it is said in Rafford Pyke's
thoughtful paper on "Husbands and Wives" (_Cosmopolitan_, 1902), "it is
the wife rather than the husband who is oftenest disappointed."
[402] See "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse," in vol. iii of these
_Studies_.
[403] It is well recognized by erotic writers, however, that women may
sometimes take a comparatively active part. Thus Vatsyayana says that
sometimes the woman may take the man's position, and with flowers in her
hair and smiles mixed with sighs and bent head, caressing him and pressing
her breasts against him, say: "You have been my conqueror; it is my turn
to make you cry for mercy."
[404] Thus among the Swahili it is on the third day after marriage that
the bridegroom is allowed, by custom, to complete defloration, according
to Zache, _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1899, II-III, p. 84.
[405] _De l'Amour_, vol. ii, p. 57.
[406] Robert Michels, "Brautstandsmoral," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_,
Jahrgang I, Heft 12.
[407] I may refer once more to the facts brought together in volume iii of
these _Studies_, "The Analysis of the Sexual Impulse."
[408] This has been pointed out, for instance, by Rutgers, "Sexuelle
Differenzierung," _Die Neue Generation_, Dec., 1908.
[409] Thus, among the Eskimo, who practice temporary wife-exchange,
Rasmussen states that "a man generally discovers that his own wife is, in
spite of all, the best."
[410] "I have always held with the late Professor Laycock," remarks
Clouston (_Hygiene of Mind_, p. 214), "who was a very subtle student of
human nature, that a married couple need not be always together to be
happy, and that in fact reasonable absences and partings tend towards
ultimate and closer union." That the prolongation of passion is only
compatible with absence scarcely needs pointing out; as Mary
Wollstonecraft long since said (_Rights of Woman_, original ed., p. 61),
it is only in absence or in misfortune that passion is durable. It may be
added, however, that in her love-letters to Imlay she wrote: "I have ever
declared that two people who mean to live together ought not to be long
separated."
[411] "Viewed broadly," says Arnold L. Gesell, in his interesting study of
"Jealousy" (_American Journal of Psychology_, Oct., 1906), "jealousy seems
such a necessary psychological accompaniment to biological behavior,
amidst competitive struggle, that one is tempted to consider it
genetically among the oldest of the emotions, synonymous almost with the
will to live, and to make it scarcely less fundamental than fear or anger.
In fact, jealousy readily passes into anger, and is itself a brand of
fear.... In sociability and mutual aid we see the other side of the
shield; but jealousy, however anti-social it may be, retains a function in
zoölogical economy: viz., to conserve the individual as against the group.
It is Nature's great corrective for the purely social emotions."
[412] Many illustrations are brought together in Gesell's study of
"Jealousy."
[413] Jealousy among lower races may be disguised or modified by tribal
customs. Thus Rasmussen (_People of the Polar North_, p. 65) says in
reference to the Eskimo custom of wife-exchange: "A man once told me that
he only beat his wife when she would not receive other men. She would have
nothing to do with anyone but him--and that was her only failing!"
Rasmussen elsewhere shows that the Eskimo are capable of extreme jealousy.
[414] See, e.g., Moll, _Sexualleben des Kindes_, p. 158; cf., Gesell's
"Study of Jealousy."
[415] Jealousy is notoriously common among drunkards. As K. Birnbaum
points out ("Das Sexualleben der Alkokolisten," _Sexual-Probleme_, Jan.,
1909), this jealousy is, in most cases, more or less well-founded, for the
wife, disgusted with her husband, naturally seeks sympathy and
companionship elsewhere. Alcoholic jealousy, however, goes far beyond its
basis of support in fact, and is entangled with delusions and
hallucinations. (See e.g., G. Dumas, "La Logique d'un Dément," _Revue
Philosophique_, Feb., 1908; also Stefanowski, "Morbid Jealousy," _Alienist
and Neurologist_, July, 1893.)
[416] Ellen Key, _Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 335.
[417] Schrempf points out ("Von Stella zu Klärchen," _Mutterschutz_, 1906,
Heft 7, p. 264) that Goethe strove to show in _Egmont_ that a woman is
repelled by the love of a man who knows nothing beyond his love to her,
and that it is easy for her to devote herself to the man whose aims lie in
the larger world beyond herself. There is profound truth in this view.
[418] A discussion on "Platonic friendship" of this kind by several
writers, mostly women, whose opinions were nearly equally divided, may be
found, for instance, in the _Lady's Realm_, March, 1900.
[419] There are no doubt important exceptions. Thus Mérimée's famous
friendship with Mlle. Jenny Dacquin, enshrined in the _Lettres à une
Inconnue_, was perhaps Platonic throughout on Mérimée's side, Mlle.
Dacquin adapting herself to his attitude. Cf. A. Lefebvre, _La Célèbre
Inconnue de Mérimée_, 1908.
[420] The love-letters of all these distinguished persons have been
published. Rosa Mayreder (_Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit_, pp. 229 _et
seq._) discusses the question of the humble and absolute manner in which
even men of the most masculine and impetuous genius abandon themselves to
the inspiration of the beloved woman. The case of the Brownings, who have
been termed "the hero and heroine of the most wonderful love-story that
the world knows of," is specially notable; (Ellen Key has written of the
Brownings from this point of view in _Menschen_, and reference may be made
to an article on the Brownings' love-letters in the _Edinburgh Review_,
April, 1899). It is scarcely necessary to add that an erotic relationship
may mean very much to persons of high intellectual ability, even when its
issue is not happy; of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most intellectually
distinguished of women, it may be said that the letters which enshrine her
love to the worthless Imlay are among the most passionate and pathetic
love-letters in English.
CHAPTER XII.
THE SCIENCE OF PROCREATION.
The Relationship of the Science of Procreation to the Art of Love--Sexual
Desire and Sexual Pleasure as the Conditions of Conception--Reproduction
Formerly Left to Caprice and Lust--The Question of Procreation as a
Religious Question--The Creed of Eugenics--Ellen Key and Sir Francis
Galton--Our Debt to Posterity--The Problem of Replacing Natural
Selection--The Origin and Development of Eugenics--The General Acceptance
of Eugenical Principles To-day--The Two Channels by Which Eugenical
Principles are Becoming Embodied in Practice--The Sense of Sexual
Responsibility in Women--The Rejection of Compulsory Motherhood--The
Privilege of Voluntary Motherhood--Causes of the Degradation of
Motherhood--The Control of Conception--Now Practiced by the Majority of
the Population in Civilized Countries--The Fallacy of "Racial
Suicide"--Are Large Families a Stigma of Degeneration?--Procreative
Control the Outcome of Natural and Civilized Progress--The Growth of
Neo-Malthusian Beliefs and Practices--Facultative Sterility as Distinct
from Neo-Malthusianism--The Medical and Hygienic Necessity of Control of
Conception--Preventive Methods--Abortion--The New Doctrine of the Duty to
Practice Abortion--How Far is this Justifiable?--Castration as a Method of
Controlling Procreation--Negative Eugenics and Positive Eugenics--The
Question of Certificates for Marriage--The Inadequacy of Eugenics by Act
of Parliament--The Quickening of the Social Conscience in Regard to
Heredity--Limitations to the Endowment of Motherhood--The Conditions
Favorable to Procreation--Sterility--The Question of Artificial
Fecundation--The Best Age of Procreation--The Question of Early
Motherhood--The Best Time for Procreation--The Completion of the Divine
Cycle of Life.
We have seen that the art of love has an independent and amply justifiable
right to existence apart, altogether, from procreation. Even if we still
believed--as all men must once have believed and some Central Australians
yet believe[421]--that sexual intercourse has no essential connection with
the propagation of the race it would have full right to existence. In its
finer manifestations as an art it is required in civilization for the full
development of the individual, and it is equally required for that
stability of relationships which is nearly everywhere regarded as a demand
of social morality.
When we now turn to the second great constitutional factor of marriage,
procreation, the first point we encounter is that the art of love here
also has its place. In ancient times the sexual congruence of any man with
any woman was supposed to be so much a matter of course that all questions
of love and of the art of love could be left out of consideration. The
propagative act might, it was thought, be performed as impersonally, as
perfunctorily, as the early Christian Fathers imagined it had been
performed in Paradise. That view is no longer acceptable. It fails to
commend itself to men, and still less to women. We know that in
civilization at all events--and it is often indeed the same among
savages--erethism is not always easy between two persons selected at
random, nor even when they are more specially selected. And we also know,
on the authority of very distinguished gynæcologists, that it is not in
very many cases sufficient even to effect coitus, it is also necessary to
excite orgasm, if conception is to be achieved.
Many primitive peoples, as well as the theologians of the Middle
Ages, have believed that sexual excitement on the woman's part is
necessary to conception, though they have sometimes mixed up that
belief with false science and mere superstition. The belief
itself is supported by some of the most cautious and experienced
modern gynæcologists. Thus, Matthews Duncan (in his lectures on
_Sterility in Women_) argued that the absence of sexual desire in
women, and the absence of pleasure in the sexual act, are
powerful influences making for sterility. He brought forward a
table based on his case-books, showing that of nearly four
hundred sterile women, only about one-fourth experienced sexual
desire, while less than half experienced pleasure in the sexual
act. In the absence, however, of a corresponding table concerning
fertile women, nothing is hereby absolutely proved, and, at most,
only a probability established.
Kisch, more recently (in his _Sexual Life of Woman_), has dealt
fully with this question, and reaches the conclusion that it is
"extremely probable" that the active erotic participation of the
woman in coitus is an important link in the chain of conditions
producing conception. It acts, he remarks, in either or both of
two ways, by causing reflex changes in the cervical secretions,
and so facilitating the passage of the spermatozoa, and by
causing reflex erectile changes in the cervix itself, with slight
descent of the uterus, so rendering the entrance of the semen
easier. Kisch refers to the analogous fact that the first
occurrence of menstruation is favored by sexual excitement.
Some authorities go so far as to assert that, until voluptuous
excitement occurs in women, no impregnation is possible. This
statement seems too extreme. It is true that the occurrence of
impregnation during sleep, or in anæsthesia, cannot be opposed to
it, for we know that the unconsciousness of these states by no
means prevents the occurrence of complete sexual excitement. We
cannot fail, however, to connect the fact that impregnation
frequently fails to occur for months and even years after
marriage, with the fact that sexual pleasure in coitus on the
wife's part also frequently fails to occur for a similar period.
"Of all human instincts," Pinard has said,[422] "that of reproduction is
the only one which remains in the primitive condition and has received no
education. We procreate to-day as they procreated in the Stone Age. The
most important act in the life of man, the sublimest of all acts since it
is that of his reproduction, man accomplishes to-day with as much
carelessness as in the age of the cave-man." And though Pinard himself, as
the founder of puericulture, has greatly contributed to call attention to
the vast destinies that hang on the act of procreation, there still
remains a lamentable amount of truth in this statement. "Future
generations," writes Westermarck in his great history of moral ideas,[423]
"will probably with a kind of horror look back at a period when the most
important, and in its consequences the most far-reaching, function which
has fallen to the lot of man was entirely left to individual caprice and
lust."
We are told in his _Table Talk_, that the great Luther was accustomed to
say that God's way of making man was very foolish ("sehr närrisch"), and
that if God had deigned to take him into His counsel he would have
strongly advised Him to make the whole human race, as He made Adam, "out
of earth." And certainly if applied to the careless and reckless manner in
which procreation in Luther's day, as still for the most part in our own,
was usually carried out there was sound common sense in the Reformer's
remarks. If that is the way procreation is to be carried on, it would be
better to create and mould every human being afresh out of the earth; in
that way we could at all events eliminate evil heredity. It was, however,
unjust to place the responsibility on God. It is men and women who breed
the people that make the world good or bad. They seek to put the evils of
society on to something outside themselves. They see how large a
proportion of human beings are defective, ill-conditioned, anti-social,
incapable of leading a whole and beautiful human life. In old theological
language it was often said that such were "children of the Devil," and
Luther himself was often ready enough to attribute the evil of the world
to the direct interposition of the Devil. Yet these ill-conditioned people
who clog the wheels of society are, after all, in reality the children of
Man. The only Devil whom we can justly invoke in this matter is Man.
The command "Be fruitful and multiply," which the ancient Hebrews put into
the mouth of their tribal God, was, as Crackanthorpe points out,[424] a
command supposed to have been uttered when there were only eight persons
in the world. If the time should ever again occur when the inhabitants of
the world could be counted on one's fingers, such an injunction, as
Crackanthorpe truly observes, would again be reasonable. But we have to
remember that to-day humanity has spawned itself over the world in
hundreds and even thousands of millions of creatures, a large proportion
of whom, as is but too obvious, ought never to have been born at all, and
the voice of Jehovah is now making itself heard through the leaders of
mankind in a very different sense.
It is not surprising that as this fact tends to become generally
recognized, the question of the procreation of the race should gain a new
significance, and even tend to take on the character of a new religious
movement. Mere morality can never lead us to concern ourselves with the
future of the race, and in the days of old, men used to protest against
the tendency to subordinate the interests of religion to the claims of
"mere morality." There was a sound natural instinct underlying that
protest, so often and so vigorously made by Christianity, and again
revived to-day in a more intelligent form. The claim of the race is the
claim of religion. We have to beware lest we subordinate that claim to our
moralities. Moralities are, indeed, an inevitable part of our social order
from which we cannot escape; every community must have its _mores_. But we
are not entitled to make a fetich of our morality, sacrificing to it the
highest interests entrusted to us. The nations which have done so have
already signed their own death-warrant.[425] From this point of view, the
whole of Christianity, rightly considered, with its profound conviction of
the necessity for forethought and preparation for the life hereafter, has
been a preparation for eugenics, a schoolmaster to discipline within us a
higher ideal than itself taught, and we cannot therefore be surprised at
the solidity of the basis on which eugenical conceptions of life are
developing.
The most distinguished pioneers of the new movement of devotion
to the creation of the race seem independently to have realized
its religious character. This attitude is equally marked in Ellen
Key and Francis Galton. In her _Century of the Child_ (English
translation, 1909), Ellen Key entirely identifies herself with
the eugenic movement. "It is only a question of time," she
elsewhere writes (_Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 445), "when the
attitude of society towards a sexual union will depend not on the
form of the union, but on the value of the children created. Men
and women will then devote the same religious earnestness to the
psychic and physical perfectioning of this sexual task as
Christians have devoted to the salvation of their souls."
Sir Francis Galton, writing a few years later, but without doubt
independently, in 1905, on "Restrictions in Marriage," and
"Eugenics as a Factor in Religion" (_Sociological Papers_ of the
Sociological Society, vol. ii, pp. 13, 53), remarks: "Religious
precepts, founded on the ethics and practice of older days,
require to be reinterpreted, to make them conform to the needs of
progressive nations. Ours are already so far behind modern
requirements that much of our practice and our profession cannot
be reconciled without illegitimate casuistry. It seems to me
that few things are more needed by us in England than a revision
of our religion, to adapt it to the intelligence and needs of
this present time.... Evolution is a grand phantasmagoria, but it
assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge
that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small
measure, capable of guiding its course. Man has the power of
doing this largely, so far as the evolution of humanity is
concerned; he has already affected the quality and distribution
of organic life so widely that the changes on the surface of the
earth, merely through his disforestings and agriculture, would be
recognizable from a distance as great as that of the moon.
Eugenics is a virile creed, full of hopefulness, and appealing to
many of the noblest feelings of our nature."
As will always happen in every great movement, a few fanatics
have carried into absurdity the belief in the supreme religious
importance of procreation. Love, apart from procreation, writes
one of these fanatics, Vacher de Lapouge, in the spirit of some
of the early Christian Fathers (see _ante_ p. 509), is an
aberration comparable to sadism and sodomy. Procreation is the
only thing that matters, and it must become "a legally prescribed
social duty" only to be exercised by carefully selected persons,
and forbidden to others, who must, by necessity, be deprived of
the power of procreation, while abortion and infanticide must,
under some circumstances, become compulsory. Romantic love will
disappear by a process of selection, as also will all religion
except a new form of phallic worship (G. Vacher de Lapouge, "Die
Crisis der Sexuellen Moral," _Politisch Anthropologische Revue_,
No. 8, 1908). It is sufficient to point out that love is, and
always must be, the natural portal to generation. Such excesses
of procreative fanaticism cannot fail to occur, and they render
the more necessary the emphasis which has here been placed on the
art of love.
"What has posterity done for me that I should do anything for posterity?"
a cynic is said to have asked. The answer is very simple. The human race
has done everything for him. All that he is, and can be, is its creation;
all that he can do is the result of its laboriously accumulated
traditions. It is only by working towards the creation of a still better
posterity, that he can repay the good gifts which the human race has
brought him.[426] Just as, within the limits of this present life, many
who have received benefits and kindnesses they can never repay to the
actual givers, find a pleasure in vicariously repaying the like to
others, so the heritage we have received from our ascendents we can never
repay, save by handing it on in a better form to our descendants.
It is undoubtedly true that the growth of eugenical ideals has not been,
for the most part, due to religious feeling. It has been chiefly the
outcome of a very gradual, but very comprehensive, movement towards social
amelioration, which has been going on for more than a century, and which
has involved a progressive effort towards the betterment of all the
conditions of life. The ideals of this movement were proclaimed in the
eighteenth century, they began to find expression early in the nineteenth
century, in the initiation of the modern system of sanitation, in the
growth of factory legislation, in all the movements which have been borne
onwards by socialism hand in hand with individualism. The inevitable
tendency has been slowly towards the root of the matter; it began to be
seen that comparatively little can be effected by improving the conditions
of life of adults; attention began to be concentrated on the child, on the
infant, on the embryo in its mother's womb, and this resulted in the
fruitful movement of puericulture inspired by Pinard, and finally the
problem is brought to its source at the point of procreation, and the
regulation of sexual selection between stocks and between individuals as
the prime condition of life. Here we have the science of eugenics which
Sir Francis Galton has done so much to make a definite, vital, and
practical study, and which in its wider bearings he defines as "the
science which deals with those social eugenics that influence, mentally or
physically, the racial qualities of future generations." In its largest
aspect, eugenics is, as Galton has elsewhere said, man's attempt "to
replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and
not less effective."
In the last chapter of his _Memories of My Life_ (1908), on "Race
Improvement," Sir Francis Galton sets forth the origin and
development of his conception of the science of eugenics. The
term, "eugenics," he first used in 1884, in his _Human Faculty_,
but the conception dates from 1865, and even earlier. Galton has
more recently discussed the problems of eugenics in papers read
before the Sociological Society (_Sociological Papers_, vols. i
and ii, 1905), in the Herbert Spencer Lecture on "Probability the
Foundation of Eugenics," (1907), and elsewhere. Galton's numerous
memoirs on this subject have now been published in a collected
form by the Eugenics Education Society, which was established in
1907, to further and to popularize the eugenical attitude towards
social questions; _The Eugenics Review_ is published by this
Society. On the more strictly scientific side, eugenic studies
are carried on in the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of
London, established by Sir Francis Galton, and now working in
connection with Professor Karl Pearson's biometric laboratory, in
University College. Much of Professor Pearson's statistical work
in this and allied directions, is the elaboration of ideas and
suggestions thrown out by Galton. See, e.g., Karl Pearson's
Robert Boyle Lecture, "The Scope and Importance to the State of
the Science of National Eugenics" (1907). _Biometrika_, edited by
Karl Pearson in association with other workers, contains numerous
statistical memoirs on eugenics. In Germany, the _Archiv für
Rassen und Gesellschafts-biologie_, and the
_Politisch-Anthropologische Revue_, are largely occupied with
various aspects of such subjects, and in America, _The Popular
Science Monthly_ from time to time, publishes articles which have
a bearing on eugenics.
At one time there was a tendency to scoff, or to laugh, at the eugenic
movement. It was regarded as an attempt to breed men as men breed animals,
and it was thought a sufficiently easy task to sweep away this new
movement with the remark that love laughs at bolts and bars. It is now
beginning to be better understood. None but fanatics dream of abolishing
love in order to effect pairing by rule. It is merely a question of
limiting the possible number of mates from whom each may select a partner,
and that, we must remember, has always been done even by savages, for, as
it has been said, "eugenics is the oldest of the sciences." The question
has merely been transformed. Instead of being limited mechanically by
caste, we begin to see that the choice of sexual mates must be limited
intelligently by actual fitness. Promiscuous marriages have never been the
rule; the possibility of choice has always been narrow, and the most
primitive peoples have exerted the most marked self-restraint. It is not
so merely among remote races but among our own European ancestors.
Throughout the whole period of Catholic supremacy the Canon law
multiplied the impediments to matrimony, as by ordaining that
consanguinity to the fourth degree (third cousins), as well as spiritual
relationship, is an impediment, and by such arbitrary prohibitions limited
the range of possible mates at least as much as it would be limited by the
more reasonable dictates of eugenic considerations.
At the present day it may be said that the principle of the voluntary
control of procreation, not for the selfish ends of the individual, but in
order to extinguish disease, to limit human misery, and to raise the
general level of humanity by substituting the ideal of quality for the
vulgar ideal of mere quantity, is now generally accepted, alike by medical
pathologists, embryologists and neurologists, and by sociologists and
moralists.
It would be easy to multiply quotations from distinguished
authorities on this point. Thus, Metchnikoff points out (_Essais
Optimistes_, p. 419) that orthobiosis seems to involve the
limitation of offspring in the fight against disease. Ballantyne
concludes his great treatise on _Antenanal Pathology_ with the
statement that "Eugenics" or well-begetting, is one of the
world's most pressing problems. Dr. Louise Robinovitch, the
editor of the _Journal of Mental Pathology_, in a brilliant and
thoughtful paper, read before the Rome Congress of Psychology in
1905, well spoke in the same sense: "Nations have not yet
elevated the energy of genesic function to the dignity of an
energy. Other energies known to us, even of the meanest grade,
have long since been wisely utilized, and their activities based
on the principle of the strictest possible economy. This economic
utilization has been brought about, not through any enforcement
of legislative restrictions, but through steadily progressive
human intelligence. Economic handling of genesic function will,
like the economic function of other energies, come about through
a steady and progressive intellectual development of nations."
"There are circumstances," says C.H. Hughes, ("Restricted
Procreation," _Alienist and Neurologist_, May, 1908), "under
which the propagation of a human life may be as gravely criminal
as the taking of a life already begun."
From the general biological, as well as from the sociological
side, the acceptance of the same standpoint is constantly
becoming more general, for it is recognized as the inevitable
outcome of movements which have long been in progress.
"Already," wrote Haycraft (_Darwinism and Race Progress_, p.
160), referring to the law for the prevention of cruelty to
children, "public opinion has expressed itself in the public
rule that a man and woman, in begetting a child, must take upon
themselves the obligation and responsibility of seeing that that
child is not subjected to cruelty and hardship. It is but one
step more to say that a man and a woman shall be under obligation
not to produce children, when it is certain that, from their want
of physique, they will have to undergo suffering, and will keep
up but an unequal struggle with their fellows." Professor J.
Arthur Thomson, in his volume on _Heredity_ (1908), vigorously
and temperately pleads (p. 528) for rational methods of eugenics,
as specially demanded in an age like our own, when the unfit have
been given a better chance of reproduction than they have ever
been given in any other age. Bateson, again, referring to the
growing knowledge of heredity, remarks (_Mendel's Principles of
Heredity_, 1909, p. 305): "Genetic knowledge must certainly lead
to new conceptions of justice, and it is by no means impossible
that, in the light of such knowledge, public opinion will welcome
measures likely to do more for the extinction of the criminal and
the degenerate than has been accomplished by ages of penal
enactment." Adolescent youths and girls, said Anton von Menger,
in his last book, the pregnant _Neue Sittenlehre_ (1905), must be
taught that the production of children, under certain
circumstances, is a crime; they must also be taught the voluntary
restraint of conception, even in health; such teaching, Menger
rightly added, is a necessary preliminary to any legislation in
this direction.
Of recent years, many books and articles have been devoted to the
advocacy of eugenic methods. Mention may be made, for instance,
of _Population and Progress_ (1907), by Montague Crackanthorpe,
President of the Eugenics Education Society. See also, Havelock
Ellis, "Eugenics and St. Valentine," _Nineteenth Century and
After_, May, 1906. It may be mentioned that nearly thirty years
ago, Miss J.H. Clapperton, in her _Scientific Meliorism_ (1885,
Ch. XVII), pointed out that the voluntary restraint of
procreation by Neo-Malthusian methods, apart from merely
prudential motives, there clearly recognized, is "a new key to
the social position," and a necessary condition for "national
regeneration." Professor Karl Pearson's _Groundwork of Eugenics_,
(1909) is, perhaps, the best brief introduction to the subject.
Mention may also be made of Dr. Saleeby's _Parenthood and Race
Culture_ (1909), written in a popular and enthusiastic manner.
How widely the general principles of eugenics are now accepted as
the sound method of raising the level of the human race, was well
shown at a meeting of the Sociological Society, in 1905, when,
after Sir Francis Galton had read papers on the question, the
meeting heard the opinions of numerous sociologists, economists,
biologists, and well-known thinkers in various lands, who were
present, or who had sent communications. Some twenty-one
expressed more or less unqualified approval, and only three or
four had objections to offer, mostly on matters of detail
(_Sociological Papers_, published by the Sociological Society,
vol. ii, 1905).
If we ask by what channels this impulse towards the control of procreation
for the elevation of the race is expressing itself in practical life, we
shall scarcely fail to find that there are at least two such channels: (1)
the growing sense of sexual responsibility among women as well as men, and
(2) the conquest of procreative control which has been achieved in recent
years, by the general adoption of methods for the prevention of
conception.
It has already been necessary in a previous chapter to discuss the
far-reaching significance of woman's personal responsibility as an element
in the modification of the sexual life of modern communities. Here it need
only be pointed out that the autonomous authority of a woman over her own
person, in the sexual sphere, involves on her part a consent to the act of
procreation which must be deliberate. We are apt to think that this is a
new and almost revolutionary demand; it is, however, undoubtedly a
natural, ancient, and recognized privilege of women that they should not
be mothers without their own consent. Even in the Islamic world of the
_Arabian Nights_, we find that high praise is accorded to the "virtue and
courage" of the woman who, having been ravished in her sleep, exposed, and
abandoned on the highway, the infant that was the fruit of this
involuntary union, "not wishing," she said, "to take the responsibility
before Allah of a child that had been born without my consent."[427] The
approval with which this story is narrated clearly shows that to the
public of Islam it seemed entirely just and humane that a woman should not
have a child, except by her own deliberate will. We have been accustomed
to say in later days that the State needs children, and that it is the
business and the duty of women to supply them. But the State has no more
right than the individual to ravish a woman against her will. We are
beginning to realize that if the State wants children it must make it
agreeable to women to produce them, as under natural and equitable
conditions it cannot fail to be. "The women will solve the question of
mankind," said Ibsen in one of his rare and pregnant private utterances,
"and they will do it as mothers." But it is unthinkable that any question
should ever be solved by a helpless, unwilling, and involuntary act which
has not even attained to the dignity of animal joy.
It is sometimes supposed, and even assumed, that the demand of
women that motherhood must never be compulsory, means that they
are unwilling to be mothers on any terms. In a few cases that may
be so, but it is certainly not the case as regards the majority
of sane and healthy women in any country. On the contrary, this
demand is usually associated with the desire to glorify
motherhood, if not, indeed, even with the thought of extending
motherhood to many who are to-day shut out from it. "It seems to
me," wrote Lady Henry Somerset, some years ago ("The Welcome
Child," _Arena_, April, 1895), "that life will be dearer and
nobler the more we recognize that there is no indelicacy in the
climax and crown of creative power, but, rather, that it is the
highest glory of the race. But if voluntary motherhood is the
crown of the race, involuntary compulsory motherhood is the very
opposite.... Only when both man and woman have learned that the
most sacred of all functions given to women must be exercised by
the free will alone, can children be born into the world who have
in them the joyous desire to live, who claim that sweetest
privilege of childhood, the certainty that they can expand in the
sunshine of the love which is their due." Ellen Key, similarly,
while pointing out (_Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, pp. 14, 265) that the
tyranny of the old Protestant religious spirit which enjoined on
women unlimited submission to joyless motherhood within "the
whited sepulchre of marriage" is now being broken, exalts the
privileges of voluntary motherhood, while admitting that there
may be a few exceptional cases in which women may withdraw
themselves from motherhood for the sake of the other demands of
their personality, though, "as a general rule, the woman who
refuses motherhood in order to serve humanity, is like a soldier
who prepares himself on the eve of battle for the forthcoming
struggle by opening his veins." Helene Stöcker, likewise, reckons
motherhood as one of the demands, one of the growing demands
indeed, which women now make. "If, to-day," she says (in the
Preface to _Liebe und die Frauen_, 1906), "all the good things of
life are claimed even for women--intellectual training, pecuniary
independence, a happy vocation in life, a respected social
position--and at the same time, as equally matter-of-course, and
equally necessary, marriage and child, that demand no longer
sounds, as it sounded a few years ago, the voice of a preacher in
the wilderness."
The degradation to which motherhood has, in the eyes of many,
fallen, is due partly to the tendency to deprive women of any
voice in the question, and partly to what H.G. Wells calls
(_Socialism and the Family_, 1906) "the monstrous absurdity of
women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and
rearing children, in their spare time, as it were, while they
'earn their living' by contributing some half mechanical element
to some trivial industrial product." It would be impracticable,
and even undesirable, to insist that married women should not be
allowed to work, for a work in the world is good for all. It is
estimated that over thirty per cent. of the women workers in
England are married or widows (James Haslam, _Englishwoman_,
June, 1909), and in Lancashire factories alone, in 1901, there
were 120,000 married women employed. But it would be easily
possible for the State to arrange, in its own interests, that a
woman's work at a trade should always give way to her work as a
mother. It is the more undesirable that married women should be
prohibited from working at a profession, since there are some
professions for which a married woman, or, rather, a mother, is
better equipped than an unmarried woman. This is notably the case
as regards teaching, and it would be a good policy to allow
married women teachers special privileges in the shape of
increased free time and leave of absence. While in many fields of
knowledge an unmarried woman may be a most excellent teacher, it
is highly undesirable that children, and especially girls, should
be brought exclusively under the educational influence of
unmarried teachers.
The second great channel through which the impulse towards the control of
procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life
is by the general adoption, by the educated classes of all countries--and
it must be remembered that, in this matter at all events, all classes are
gradually beginning to become educated--of methods for the prevention of
conception except when conception is deliberately desired. It is no longer
permissible to discuss the validity of this control, for it is an
accomplished fact and has become a part of our modern morality. "If a
course of conduct is habitually and deliberately pursued by vast
multitudes of otherwise well-conducted people, forming probably a majority
of the whole educated class of the nation," as Sidney Webb rightly puts
it, "we must assume that it does not conflict with their actual code of
morality."[428]
There cannot be any doubt that, so far as England is concerned,
the prevention of conception is practiced, from prudential or
other motives, by the vast majority of the educated classes. This
fact is well within the knowledge of all who are intimately
acquainted with the facts of English family life. Thus, Dr. A.W.
Thomas writes (_British Medical Journal_, Oct. 20, 1906, p.
1066): "From my experience as a general practitioner, I have no
hesitation in saying that ninety per cent. of young married
couples of the comfortably-off classes use preventives." As a
matter of fact, this rough estimate appears to be rather under
than over the mark. In the very able paper already quoted, in
which Sidney Webb shows that "the decline in the birthrate
appears to be much greater in those sections of the population
which give proofs of thrift and foresight," that this decline is
"principally, if not entirely, the result of deliberate
volition," and that "a volitional regulation of the marriage
state is now ubiquitous throughout England and Wales, among,
apparently, a large majority of the population," the results are
brought forward of a detailed inquiry carried out by the Fabian
Society. This inquiry covered 316 families, selected at random
from all parts of Great Britain, and belonging to all sections of
the middle class. The results are carefully analyzed, and it is
found that seventy-four families were unlimited, and two hundred
and forty-two voluntarily limited. When, however, the decade
1890-99 is taken by itself as the typical period, it is found
that of 120 marriages, 107 were limited, and only thirteen
unlimited, while of these thirteen, five were childless at the
date of the return. In this decade, therefore, only seven
unlimited fertile marriages are reported, out of a total of 120.
What is true of Great Britain is true of all other civilized
countries, in the highest degree true of the most civilized
countries, and it finds expression in the well-known phenomenon
of the decline of the birthrate. In modern times, this movement
of decline began in France, producing a slow but steady
diminution in the annual number of births, and in France the
movement seems now to be almost, or quite, arrested. But it has
since taken place in all other progressive countries, notably in
the United States, in Canada, in Australia, and in New Zealand,
as well as in Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy, Spain, Switzerland,
Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. In England, it has
been continuous since 1877. Of the great countries, Russia is
the only one in which it has not yet taken place, and among the
masses of the Russian population we find less education, more
poverty, a higher deathrate, and a greater amount of disease,
than in any other great, or even small, civilized country.
It is sometimes said, indeed, that the decline of the birthrate
is not entirely due to the voluntary control of procreation. It
is undoubtedly true that certain other elements, common under
civilized conditions, such as the postponement of marriage in
women to a comparatively late age, tend to diminish the size of
the family. But when all such allowances have been made, the
decline is still found to be real and large. This has been shown,
for instance, by the statistical analyses made by Arthur
Newsholme and T.H.C. Stevenson, and by G. Yule, both published in
_Journal Royal Statistical Society_, April, 1906.
Some have supposed that, since the Catholic Church forbids
incomplete sexual intercourse, this movement for the control of
procreation will involve a relatively much greater increase among
Catholic than among non-Catholic populations. This, however, is
only correct under certain conditions. It is quite true that in
Ireland there has been no fall in the birthrate, and that the
fall is but little marked in those Lancashire towns which possess
a large Irish element. But in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and other
mainly Catholic countries, the decline in the birthrate is duly
taking place. What has happened is that the Church--always alive
to sexual questions--has realized the importance of the modern
movement, and has adapted herself to it, by proclaiming to her
more ignorant and uneducated children that incomplete intercourse
is a deadly sin, while at the same time refraining from making
inquiries into this matter among her more educated members. The
question was definitely brought up for Papal judgment, in 1842,
by Bishop Bouvier of Le Mans, who stated the matter very clearly,
representing to the Pope (Gregory XVI) that the prevention of
conception was becoming very common, and that to treat it as a
deadly sin merely resulted in driving the penitent away from
confession. After mature consideration, the Curia Sacra
Poenitentiaria replied by pointing out, as regards the common
method of withdrawal before emission, that since it was due to
the wrong act of the man, the woman who has been forced by her
husband to consent to it, has committed no sin. Further, the
Bishop was reminded of the wise dictum of Liguori, "the most
learned and experienced man in these matters," that the confessor
is not usually called upon to make inquiry upon so delicate a
matter as the _debitum conjugale_, and, if his opinion is not
asked, he should be silent (Bouvier, _Dissertatio in sextum
Decalogi præceptum; supplementum ad Tractatum de Matrimonio_.
1849, pp. 179-182; quoted by Hans Ferdy, _Sexual-Probleme_, Aug.,
1908, p. 498). We see, therefore, that, among Catholic as well as
among non-Catholic populations, the adoption of preventive
methods of conception follows progress and civilization, and
that the general practice of such methods by Catholics (with the
tacit consent of the Church) is merely a matter of time.
From time to time many energetic persons have noisily demanded that a stop
should be put to the decline of the birthrate, for, they argue, it means
"race suicide." It is now beginning to be realized, however, that this
outcry was a foolish and mischievous mistake. It is impossible to walk
through the streets of any great city, full of vast numbers of persons
who, obviously, ought never to have been born, without recognizing that
the birthrate is as yet very far above its normal and healthy limit. The
greatest States have often been the smallest so far as mere number of
citizens is concerned, for it is quality not quantity that counts. And
while it is true that the increase of the best types of citizens can only
enrich a State, it is now becoming intolerable that a nation should
increase by the mere dumping down of procreative refuse in its midst. It
is beginning to be realized that this process not only depreciates the
quality of a people but imposes on a State an inordinate financial burden.
It is now well recognized that large families are associated with
degeneracy, and, in the widest sense, with abnormality of every
kind. Thus, it is undoubtedly true that men of genius tend to
belong to very large families, though it may be pointed out to
those who fear an alarming decrease of genius from the tendency
to the limitation of the family, that the position in the family
most often occupied by the child of genius is the firstborn. (See
Havelock Ellis, _A Study of British Genius_, pp. 115-120). The
insane, the idiotic, imbecile, and weak-minded, the criminal, the
epileptic, the hysterical, the neurasthenic, the tubercular, all,
it would appear, tend to belong to large families (see e.g.,
Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 110; Toulouse, _Les Causes de la
Folie_, p. 91; Harriet Alexander, "Malthusianism and Degeneracy,"
_Alienist and Neurologist_, Jan., 1901). It has, indeed, been
shown by Heron, Pearson, and Goring, that not only the
eldest-born, but also the second-born, are specially liable to
suffer from pathological defect (insanity, criminality,
tuberculosis). There is, however, it would seem, a fallacy in the
common interpretation of this fact. According to Van den Velden
(as quoted in _Sexual-Probleme_, May, 1909, p. 381), this
tendency is fully counterbalanced by the rising mortality of
children from the firstborn onward. The greater pathological
tendency of the earlier children is thus simply the result of a
less stringent selection by death. So far as they show any really
greater pathological tendency, apart from this fallacy, it is
perhaps due to premature marriage. There is another fallacy in
the frequent statement that the children in small families are
more feeble than those in large families. We have to distinguish
between a naturally small family, and an artificially small
family. A family which is small merely as the result of the
feeble procreative energy of the parents, is likely to be a
feeble family; a family which is small as the result of the
deliberate control of the parents, shows, of course, no such
tendency.
These considerations, it will be seen, do not modify the tendency
of the large family to be degenerate. We may connect this
phenomenon with the disposition, often shown by nervously unsound
and abnormal persons, to believe that they have a special
aptitude to procreate fine children. "I believe that everyone has
a special vocation," said a man to Marro (_La Pubertà_, p. 459);
"I find that it is my vocation to beget superior children." He
begat four,--an epileptic, a lunatic, a dipsomaniac, and a
valetudinarian,--and himself died insane. Most people have come
across somewhat similar, though perhaps less marked, cases of
this delusion. In a matter of such fateful gravity to other human
beings, no one can safely rely on his own unsupported
impressions.
The demand of national efficiency thus corresponds with the demand of
developing humanitarianism, which, having begun by attempting to
ameliorate the conditions of life, has gradually begun to realize that it
is necessary to go deeper and to ameliorate life itself. For while it is
undoubtedly true that much may be done by acting systematically on the
conditions of life, the more searching analysis of evil environmental
conditions only serves to show that in large parts they are based in the
human organism itself and were not only pre-natal, but pre-conceptional,
being involved in the quality of the parental or ancestral organisms.
Putting aside, however, all humanitarian considerations, the serious error
of attempting to stem the progress of civilization in the direction of
procreative control could never have occurred if the general tendencies of
zoölogical evolution had been understood, even in their elements. All
zoölogical progress is from the more prolific to the less prolific; the
higher the species the less fruitful are its individual members. The same
tendency is found within the limits of the human species, though not in an
invariable straight line; the growth of civilization involves a
diminution in fertility. This is by no means a new phenomenon; ancient
Rome and later Geneva, "the Protestant Rome," bear witness to it; no doubt
it has occurred in every high centre of moral and intellectual culture,
although the data for measuring the tendency no longer exist. When we take
a sufficiently wide and intelligent survey, we realize that the tendency
of a community to slacken its natural rate of increase is an essential
phenomenon of all advanced civilization. The more intelligent nations have
manifested the tendency first, and in each nation the more educated
classes have taken the lead, but it is only a matter of time to bring all
civilized nations, and all social classes in each nation, into line.[429]
This movement, we have to remember--in opposition to the ignorant outcry
of certain would-be moralists and politicians--is a beneficent movement.
It means a greater regard to the quality than to the quantity of the
increase; it involves the possibility of combating successfully the evils
of high mortality, disease, overcrowding, and all the manifold misfortunes
which inevitably accompany a too exuberant birthrate. For it is only in a
community which increases slowly that it is possible to secure the
adequate economic adjustment and environmental modifications necessary for
a sane and wholesome civic and personal life.[430] If those persons who
raise the cry of "race suicide" in face of the decline of the birthrate
really had the knowledge and intelligence to realize the manifold evils
which they are invoking they would deserve to be treated as criminals.
On the practical side a knowledge of the possibility of preventing
conception has, doubtless, never been quite extinct in civilization and
even in lower stages of culture, though it has mostly been utilized for
ends of personal convenience or practiced in obedience to conventional
social rules which demanded chastity, and has only of recent times been
made subservient to the larger interests of society and the elevation of
the race. The theoretical basis of the control of procreation, on its
social and economic, as distinct from its eugenic, aspects, may be said to
date from Malthus's famous _Essay on Population_, first published in 1798,
an epoch-marking book,--though its central thesis is not susceptible of
actual demonstration,--since it not only served as the starting-point of
the modern humanitarian movement for the control of procreation, but also
furnished to Darwin (and independently to Wallace also) the fruitful idea
which was finally developed into the great evolutionary theory of natural
selection.
Malthus, however, was very far from suggesting that the control of
procreation, which he advocated for the benefit of mankind, should be
exercised by the introduction of preventive methods into sexual
intercourse. He believed that civilization involved an increased power of
self-control, which would make it possible to refrain altogether from
sexual intercourse, when such self-restraint was demanded in the interests
of humanity. Later thinkers realized, however, that, while it is
undoubtedly true that civilization involves greater forethought and
greater self-control, we cannot anticipate that those qualities should be
developed to the extent demanded by Malthus, especially when the impulse
to be controlled is of so powerful and explosive a nature.
James Mill was the pioneer in advocating Neo-Malthusian methods, though he
spoke cautiously. In 1818, in the article "Colony" in the supplement to
the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, after remarking that the means of checking
the unrestricted increase of the population constitutes "the most
important practical problem to which the wisdom of the politician and
moralist can be applied," he continued: "If the superstitions of the
nursery were discarded, and the principle of utility kept steadily in
view, a solution might not be very difficult to be found." Four years
later, James Mill's friend, the Radical reformer, Francis Place, more
distinctly expressed the thought that was evidently in Mill's mind. After
enumerating the facts concerning the necessity of self-control in
procreation and the evils of early marriage, which he thinks ought to be
clearly taught, Place continues: "If a hundredth, perhaps a thousandth
part of the pains were taken to teach these truths, that are taken to
teach dogmas, a great change for the better might, in no considerable
space of time, be expected to take place in the appearance and the habits
of the people. If, above all, it were once clearly understood that it was
not disreputable for married persons to avail themselves of such
precautionary means as would, without being injurious to health, or
destructive of female delicacy, prevent conception, a sufficient check
might at once be given to the increase of population beyond the means of
subsistence; vice and misery, to a prodigious extent, might be removed
from society, and the object of Mr. Malthus, Mr. Godwin, and of every
philanthropic person, be promoted, by the increase of comfort, of
intelligence, and of moral conduct, in the mass of the population. The
course recommended will, I am fully persuaded, at some period be pursued
by the people even if left to themselves."[431]
It was not long before Place's prophetic words began to be realized, and
in another half century the movement was affecting the birthrate of all
civilized lands, though it can scarcely yet be said that justice has been
done to the pioneers who promoted it in the face of much persecution from
the ignorant and superstitious public whom they sought to benefit. In
1831, Robert Dale Owen, the son of Robert Owen, published his _Moral
Physiology_, setting forth the methods of preventing conception. A little
later the brothers George and Charles Drysdale (born 1825 and 1829), two
ardent and unwearying philanthropists, devoted much of their energy to the
propagation of Neo-Malthusian principles. George Drysdale, in 1854,
published his _Elements of Social Science_, which during many years had
an enormous circulation all over Europe in eight different languages. It
was by no means in every respect a scientific or sound work, but it
certainly had great influence, and it came into the hands of many who
never saw any other work on sexual topics. Although the Neo-Malthusian
propagandists of those days often met with much obloquy, their cause was
triumphantly vindicated in 1876, when Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant,
having been prosecuted for disseminating Neo-Malthusian pamphlets, the
charge was dismissed, the Lord Chief Justice declaring that so ill-advised
and injudicious a charge had probably never before been made in a court of
justice. This trial, even by its mere publicity and apart from its issue,
gave an enormous impetus to the Neo-Malthusian movement. It is well known
that the steady decline in the English birthrate begun in 1877, the year
following the trial. There could be no more brilliant illustration of the
fact, that what used to be called "the instruments of Providence" are
indeed unconscious instruments in bringing about great ends which they
themselves were far from either intending or desiring.
In 1877, Dr. C.R. Drysdale founded the Malthusian League, and
edited a periodical, _The Malthusian_, aided throughout by his
wife, Dr. Alice Drysdale Vickery. He died in 1907. (The noble and
pioneering work of the Drysdales has not yet been adequately
recognized in their own country; an appreciative and
well-informed article by Dr. Hermann Rohleder, "Dr. C.R.
Drysdale, Der Hauptvortreter der Neumalthusianische Lehre,"
appeared in the _Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, March,
1908). There are now societies and periodicals in all civilized
countries for the propagation of Neo-Malthusian principles, as
they are still commonly called, though it would be desirable to
avoid the use of Malthus's name in this connection. In the
medical profession, the advocacy of preventive methods of sexual
intercourse, not on social, but on medical and hygienic grounds,
began same thirty years ago, though in France, at an earlier
date, Raciborski advocated the method of avoiding the
neighborhood of menstruation. In Germany, Dr. Mensinga, the
gynæcologist, is the most prominent advocate, on medical and
hygienic grounds, of what he terms "facultative sterility," which
he first put forward about 1889. In Russia, about the same time,
artificial sterility was first openly advocated by the
distinguished gynæcologist, Professor Ott, at the St. Petersburg
Obstetric and Gynæcological Society. Such medical
recommendations, in particular cases, are now becoming common.
There are certain cases in which a person ought not to marry at
all; this is so, for instance, when there has been an attack of
insanity; it can never be said with certainty that a person who
has had one attack of insanity will not have another, and persons
who have had such attacks ought not, as Blandford says (Lumleian
Lectures on Insanity, _British Medical Journal_, April 20, 1895),
"to inflict on their partner for life, the anxiety, and even
danger, of another attack." There are other and numerous cases in
which marriage may be permitted, or may have already taken place,
under more favorable circumstances, but where it is, or has
become, highly desirable that there should be no children. This
is the case when a first attack of insanity occurs after
marriage, the more urgently if the affected party is the wife,
and especially if the disease takes the form of puerperal mania.
"What can be more lamentable," asks Blandford (loc. cit.), "than
to see a woman break down in childbed, recover, break down again
with the next child, and so on, for six, seven, or eight
children, the recovery between each being less and less, until
she is almost a chronic maniac?" It has been found, moreover, by
Tredgold (_Lancet_, May 17, 1902), that among children born to
insane mothers, the mortality is twice as great as the ordinary
infantile mortality, in even the poorest districts. In cases of
unions between persons with tuberculous antecedents, also, it is
held by many (e.g., by Massalongo, in discussing tuberculosis and
marriage at the Tuberculosis Congress, at Naples, in 1900) that
every precaution should be taken to make the marriage childless.
In a third class of cases, it is necessary to limit the children
to one or two; this happens in some forms of heart disease, in
which pregnancy has a progressively deteriorating effect on the
heart (Kisch, _Therapeutische Monatsheft_, Feb., 1898, and
_Sexual Life of Woman_; Vinay, _Lyon Medical_, Jan. 8, 1889); in
some cases of heart disease, however, it is possible that, though
there is no reason for prohibiting marriage, it is desirable for
a woman not to have any children (J.F. Blacker, "Heart Disease in
Relation to Pregnancy," _British Medical Journal_, May 25, 1907).
In all such cases, the recommendation of preventive methods of
intercourse is obviously an indispensable aid to the physician in
emphasizing the supremacy of hygienic precautions. In the absence
of such methods, he can never be sure that his warnings will be
heard, and even the observance of his advice would be attended
with various undesirable results. It sometimes happens that a
married couple agree, even before marriage, to live together
without sexual relations, but, for various reasons, it is seldom
found possible or convenient to maintain this resolution for a
long period.
It is the recognition of these and similar considerations which has
led--though only within recent years--on the one hand, as we have seen, to
the embodiment of the control of procreation into the practical morality
of all civilized nations, and, on the other hand, to the assertion, now
perhaps without exception, by all medical authorities on matters of sex
that the use of the methods of preventing conception is under certain
circumstances urgently necessary and quite harmless.[432] It arouses a
smile to-day when we find that less than a century ago it was possible for
an able and esteemed medical author to declare that the use of "various
abominable means" to prevent conception is "based upon a most presumptuous
doubt in the conservative power of the Creator."[433]
The adaptation of theory to practice is not yet complete, and we could not
expect that it should be so, for, as we have seen, there is always an
antagonism between practical morality and traditional morality. From time
to time flagrant illustrations of this antagonism occur.[434] Even in
England, which played a pioneering part in the control of procreation,
attempts are still made--sometimes in quarters where we have a right to
expect a better knowledge--to cast discredit on a movement which, since
it has conquered alike scientific approval and popular practice, it is now
idle to call in question.
It would be out of place to discuss here the various methods which are
used for the control of procreation, or their respective merits and
defects. It is sufficient to say that the condom or protective sheath,
which seems to be the most ancient of all methods of preventing
conception, after withdrawal, is now regarded by nearly all authorities
as, when properly used, the safest, the most convenient, and the most
harmless method.[435] This is the opinion of Krafft-Ebing, of Moll, of
Schrenck-Notzing, of Löwenfeld, of Forel, of Kisch, of Fürbringer, to
mention only a few of the most distinguished medical authorities.[436]
There is some interest in attempting to trace the origin and
history of the condom, though it seems impossible to do so with
any precision. It is probable that, in a rudimentary form, such
an appliance is of great antiquity. In China and Japan, it would
appear, rounds of oiled silk paper are used to cover the mouth of
the womb, at all events, by prostitutes. This seems the simplest
and most obvious mechanical method of preventing conception, and
may have suggested the application of a sheath to the penis as a
more effectual method. In Europe, it is in the middle of the
sixteenth century, in Italy, that we first seem to hear of such
appliances, in the shape of linen sheaths, adapted to the shape
of the penis; Fallopius recommended the use of such an appliance.
Improvements in the manufacture were gradually devised; the cæcum
of the lamb was employed, and afterwards, isinglass. It appears
that a considerable improvement in the manufacture took place in
the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and this improvement was
generally associated with England. The appliance thus became
known as the English cape or mantle, the "capote anglaise," or
the "redingote anglaise," and, under the latter name, is referred
to by Casanova, in the middle of the eighteenth century
(Casanova, _Mémoires_, ed. Garnier, vol. iv, p. 464); Casanova
never seems, however, to have used these redingotes himself, not
caring, he said, "to shut myself up in a piece of dead skin in
order to prove that I am perfectly alive." These capotes--then
made of goldbeaters' skin--were, also, it appears, known at an
earlier period to Mme. de Sévigné, who did not regard them with
favor, for, in one of her letters, she refers to them as
"cuirasses contre la volupté et toiles d'arraignée contre le
mal." The name, "condom," dates from the eighteenth century,
first appearing in France, and is generally considered to be that
of an English physician, or surgeon, who invented, or, rather,
improved the appliance. Condom is not, however, an English name,
but there is an English name, Condon, of which "condom" may well
be a corruption. This supposition is strengthened by the fact
that the word sometimes actually was written "condon." Thus, in
lines quoted by Bachaumont, in his _Diary_ (Dec. 15, 1773), and
supposed to be addressed to a former ballet dancer who had become
a prostitute, I find:--
"Du _condon_ cependant, vous connaissez l'usage,
* * * * *
"Le _condon_, c'est la loi, ma fille, et les prophètes!"
The difficulty remains, however, of discovering any Englishman of
the name of Condon, who can plausibly be associated with the
condom; doubtless he took no care to put the matter on record,
never suspecting the fame that would accrue to his invention, or
the immortality that awaited his name. I find no mention of any
Condon in the records of the College of Physicians, and at the
College of Surgeons, also, where, indeed, the old lists are very
imperfect, Mr. Victor Plarr, the librarian, after kindly making a
search, has assured me that there is no record of the name. Other
varying explanations of the name have been offered, with more or
less assurance, though usually without any proofs. Thus, Hyrtl
(_Handbuch der Topographischen Anatomic_, 7th ed., vol. ii, p.
212) states that the condom was originally called gondom, from
the name of the English discoverer, a Cavalier of Charles II's
Court, who first prepared it from the amnion of the sheep; Gondom
is, however, no more an English name than Condom. There happens
to be a French town, in Gascony, called Condom, and Bloch
suggests, without any evidence, that this furnished the name; if
so, however, it is improbable that it would have been unknown in
France. Finally, Hans Ferdy considers that it is derived from
"condus"--that which preserves--and, in accordance with his
theory, he terms the condom a condus.
The early history of the condom is briefly discussed by various
writers, as by Proksch, _Die Vorbauung der Venerischen
Krankheiten_, p. 48; Bloch, _Sexual Life of Our Time_, Chs. XV
and XXVIII; Cabanès, _Indiscretions de l'Histoire_, p. 121, etc.
The control of procreation by the prevention of conception has, we have
seen, become a part of the morality of civilized peoples. There is another
method, not indeed for preventing conception, but for limiting offspring,
which is of much more ancient appearance in the world, though it has at
different times been very differently viewed and still arouses widely
opposing opinions. This is the method of abortion.
While the practice of abortion has by no means, like the practice of
preventing conception, become accepted in civilization, it scarcely
appears to excite profound repulsion in a large proportion of the
population of civilized countries. The majority of women, not excluding
educated and highly moral women, who become pregnant against their wish
contemplate the possibility of procuring abortion without the slightest
twinge of conscience, and often are not even aware of the usual
professional attitude of the Church, the law, and medicine regarding
abortion. Probably all doctors have encountered this fact, and even so
distinguished and correct a medico-legist as Brouardel stated[437] that he
had been not infrequently solicited to procure abortion, for themselves or
their wet-nurses, by ladies who looked on it as a perfectly natural thing,
and had not the least suspicion that the law regarded the deed as a crime.
It is not, therefore, surprising that abortion is exceedingly common in
all civilized and progressive countries. It cannot, indeed, unfortunately,
be said that abortion has been conducted in accordance with eugenic
considerations, nor has it often been so much as advocated from the
eugenic standpoint. But in numerous classes of cases of undesired
pregnancy, occurring in women of character and energy, not accustomed to
submit tamely to conditions they may not have sought, and in any case
consider undesirable, abortion is frequently resorted to. It is usual to
regard the United States as a land in which the practice especially
flourishes, and certainly a land in which the ideal of chastity for
unmarried women, of freedom for married women, of independence for all, is
actively followed cannot fail to be favorable to the practice of abortion.
But the way in which the prevalence of abortion is proclaimed in the
United States is probably in large part due to the honesty of the
Americans in setting forth, and endeavoring to correct, what, rightly or
wrongly, they regard as social defects, and may not indicate any real
pre-eminence in the practice. Comparative statistics are difficult, and it
is certainly true that abortion is extremely common in England, in France,
and in Germany. It is probable that any national differences may be
accounted for by differences in general social habits and ideals. Thus in
Germany, where considerable sexual freedom is permitted to unmarried women
and married women are very domesticated, abortion may be less frequent
than in France where purity is stringently demanded from the young girl,
while the married woman demands freedom for work and for pleasure. But
such national differences, if they exist, are tending to be levelled down,
and charges of criminal abortion are constantly becoming more common in
Germany; though this increase, again, may be merely due to greater zeal in
pursuing the offence.
Brouardel (op. cit., p. 39) quotes the opinion that, in New York,
only one in every thousand abortions is discovered. Dr. J.F.
Scott (_The Sexual Instinct_, Ch. VIII), who is himself strongly
opposed to the practice, considers that in America, the custom of
procuring abortion has to-day reached "such vast proportions as
to be almost beyond belief," while "countless thousands" of cases
are never reported. "It has increased so rapidly in our day and
generation," Scott states, "that it has created surprise and
alarm in the minds of all conscientious persons who are informed
of the extent to which it is carried." (The assumption that those
who approve of abortion are necessarily not "conscientious
persons" is, as we shall see, mistaken.) The change has taken
place since 1840. The Michigan Special Committee on Criminal
Abortion reported in 1881 that, from correspondence with nearly
one hundred physicians, it appeared that there came to the
knowledge of the profession seventeen abortions to every one
hundred pregnancies; to these, the committee believe, may be
added as many more that never came to the physician's knowledge.
The committee further quoted, though without endorsement, the
opinion of a physician who believed that a change is now coming
over public feeling in regard to the abortionist, who is
beginning to be regarded in America as a useful member of
society, and even a benefactor.
In England, also, there appears to have been a marked increase of
abortion during recent years, perhaps specially marked among the
poor and hard-working classes. A writer in the _British Medical
Journal_ (April 9, 1904, p. 865) finds that abortion is
"wholesale and systematic," and gives four cases occurring in his
practice during four months, in which women either attempted to
produce abortion, or requested him to do so; they were married
women, usually with large families, and in delicate health, and
were willing to endure any suffering, if they might be saved from
further child-bearing. Abortion is frequently effected, or
attempted, by taking "Female Pills," which contain small portions
of lead, and are thus liable to produce very serious symptoms,
whether or not they induce abortion. Professor Arthur Hall, of
Sheffield, who has especially studied this use of lead ("The
Increasing Use of Lead as an Abortifacient," _British Medical
Journal_, March 18, 1905), finds that the practice has lately
become very common in the English Midlands, and is gradually, it
appears, widening its circle. It occurs chiefly among married
women with families, belonging to the working class, and it tends
to become specially prevalent during periods of trade depression
(cf. G. Newman, _Infant Mortality_, p. 81). Women of better
social class resort to professional abortionists, and sometimes
go over to Paris.
In France, also, and especially in Paris, there has been a great
increase during recent years in the practice of abortion. (See
e.g., a discussion at the Paris Société de Médecine Légale,
_Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, May, 1907.) Doléris has
shown (_Bulletin de la Société d'Obstétrique_, Feb., 1905) that
in the Paris Maternités the percentage of abortions in
pregnancies doubled between 1898 and 1904, and Doléris estimates
that about half of these abortions were artificially induced. In
France, abortion is mainly carried on by professional
abortionists. One of these, Mme. Thomas, who was condemned to
penal servitude, in 1891, acknowledged performing 10,000
abortions during eight years; her charge for the operation was
two francs and upwards. She was a peasant's daughter, brought up
in the home of her uncle, a doctor, whose medical and obstetrical
books she had devoured (A. Hamon, _La France en 1891_, pp.
629-631). French public opinion is lenient to abortion,
especially to women who perform the operation on themselves; not
many cases are brought into court, and of these, forty per cent.
are acquitted (Eugène Bausset, _L'Avortement Criminel_, Thèse de
Paris, 1907). The professional abortionist is, however, usually
sent to prison.
In Germany, also, abortion appears to have greatly increased
during recent years, and the yearly number of cases of criminal
abortion brought into the courts was, in 1903, more than double
as many as in 1885. (See, also, Elisabeth Zanzinger, _Geschlecht
und Gesellschaft_, Bd. II, Heft 5; and _Sexual-Probleme_, Jan.,
1908, p. 23.)
In view of these facts it is not surprising that the induction of abortion
has been permitted and even encouraged in many civilizations. Its
unqualified condemnation is only found in Christendom, and is due to
theoretical notions. In Turkey, under ordinary circumstances, there is no
punishment for abortion. In the classic civilization of Greece and Rome,
likewise, abortion was permitted though with certain qualifications and
conditions. Plato admitted the mother's right to decide on abortion but
said that the question should be settled as early as possible in
pregnancy. Aristotle, who approved of abortion, was of the same opinion.
Zeno and the Stoics regarded the foetus as the fruit of the womb, the soul
being acquired at birth; this was in accordance with Roman law which
decreed that the foetus only became a human being at birth.[438] Among the
Romans abortion became very common, but, in accordance with the
patriarchal basis of early Roman institutions, it was the father, not the
mother, who had the right to exercise it. Christianity introduced a new
circle of ideas based on the importance of the soul, on its immortality,
and the necessity of baptism as a method of salvation from the results of
inherited sin. We already see this new attitude in St. Augustine who,
discussing whether embryos that died in the womb will rise at the
resurrection, says "I make bold neither to affirm nor to deny, although I
fail to see why, if they are not excluded from the number of the dead,
they should not attain to the resurrection of the dead."[439] The
criminality of abortion was, however, speedily established, and the early
Christian Emperors, in agreement with the Church, edicted many fantastic
and extreme penalties against abortion. This tendency continued under
ecclesiastical influence, unrestrained, until the humanitarian movement of
the eighteenth century, when Beccaria, Voltaire, Rousseau and other great
reformers succeeded in turning the tide of public opinion against the
barbarity of the laws, and the penalty of death for abortion was finally
abolished.[440]
Medical science and practice at the present day--although it can scarcely
be said that it speaks with an absolutely unanimous voice--on the whole
occupies a position midway between that of the classic lawyers and that of
the later Christian ecclesiastics. It is, on the whole, in favor of
sacrificing the foetus whenever the interests of the mother demand such a
sacrifice. General medical opinion is not, however, prepared at present to
go further, and is distinctly disinclined to aid the parents in exerting
an unqualified control over the foetus in the womb, nor is it yet disposed
to practice abortion on eugenic grounds. It is obvious, indeed, that
medicine cannot in this matter take the initiative, for it is the primary
duty of medicine to save life. Society itself must assume the
responsibility of protecting the race.
Dr. S. Macvie ("Mother _versus_ Child," _Transactions Edinburgh
Obstetrical Society_, vol. xxiv, 1899) elaborately discusses the
respective values of the foetus and the adult on the basis of
life-expectancy, and concludes that the foetus is merely
"a parasite performing no function whatever," and that "unless
the life-expectancy of the child covers the years in which its
potentiality is converted into actuality, the relative values of
the maternal and foetal life will be that of actual as against
potential." This statement seems fairly sound. Ballantyne
(_Manual of Antenatal Pathology: The Foetus_, p. 459)
endeavors to make the statement more precise by saying that "the
mother's life has a value, because she is what she is, while the
foetus only has a possible value, on account of what it may
become."
Durlacher, among others, has discussed, in careful and cautious
detail, the various conditions in which the physician should, or
should not, induce abortion in the interests of the mother ("Der
Künstliche Abort," _Wiener Klinik_, Aug. and Sept., 1906); so
also, Eugen Wilhelm ("Die Abtreibung und das Recht des Arztes zur
Vernichtung der Leibesfrucht," _Sexual-Probleme_, May and June,
1909). Wilhelm further discusses whether it is desirable to alter
the laws in order to give the physician greater freedom in
deciding on abortion. He concludes that this is not necessary,
and might even act injuriously, by unduly hampering medical
freedom. Any change in the law should merely be, he considers, in
the direction of asserting that the destruction of the foetus is
not abortion in the legal sense, provided it is indicated by the
rules of medical science. With reference to the timidity of some
medical men in inducing abortion, Wilhelm remarks that, even in
the present state of the law, the physician who conscientiously
effects abortion, in accordance with his best knowledge, even if
mistakenly, may consider himself safe from all legal penalties,
and that he is much more likely to come in conflict with the law
if it can be proved that death followed as a result of his
neglect to induce abortion.
Pinard, who has discussed the right to control the foetal
life (_Annales de Gynécologie_, vols. lii and liii, 1899 and
1900), inspired by his enthusiastic propaganda for the salvation
of infant life, is led to the unwarranted conclusion that no one
has the rights of life and death over the foetus; "the infant's
right to his life is an imprescriptible and sacred right, which
no power can take from him." There is a mistake here, unless
Pinard deliberately desires to place himself, like Tolstoy, in
opposition to current civilized morality. So far from the infant
having any "imprescriptible right to life," even the adult has,
in human societies, no such inalienable right, and very much less
the foetus, which is not strictly a human being at all. We assume
the right of terminating the lives of those individuals whose
anti-social conduct makes them dangerous, and, in war, we
deliberately terminate, amid general applause and enthusiasm, the
lives of men who have been specially selected for this purpose on
account of their physical and general efficiency. It would be
absurdly inconsistent to say that we have no rights over the
lives of creatures that have, as yet, no part in human society at
all, and are not so much as born. We are here in presence of a
vestige of ancient theological dogma, and there can be little
doubt that, on the theoretical side at all events, the
"imprescriptible right" of the embryo will go the same way as the
"imprescriptible right" of the spermatozöon. Both rights are
indeed "imprescriptible."
Of recent years a new, and, it must be admitted, somewhat unexpected,
aspect of this question of abortion has been revealed. Hitherto it has
been a question entirely in the hands of men, first, following the Roman
traditions, in the hands of Christian ecclesiastics, and later, in those
of the professional castes. Yet the question is in reality very largely,
and indeed mainly, a woman's question, and now, more especially in
Germany, it has been actively taken up by women. The Gräfin Gisela
Streitberg occupies the pioneering place in this movement with her book
_Das Recht zur Beiseitigung Keimenden Lebens_, and was speedily followed,
from 1897 onwards, by a number of distinguished women who occupy a
prominent place in the German woman's movement, among others Helene
Stöcker, Oda Olberg, Elisabeth Zanzinger, Camilla Jellinek. All these
writers insist that the foetus is not yet an independent human being, and
that every woman, by virtue of the right over her own body, is entitled to
decide whether it shall become an independent human being. At the Woman's
Congress held in the autumn of 1905, a resolution was passed demanding
that abortion should only be punishable when effected by another person
against the wish of the pregnant women herself.[441] The acceptance of
this resolution by a representative assembly is interesting proof of the
interest now taken by women in the question, and of the strenuous attitude
they are tending to assume.
Elisabeth Zanzinger ("Verbrechen gegen die Leibesfrucht,"
_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. II, Heft 5, 1907) ably and
energetically condemns the law which makes abortion a crime. "A
woman herself is the only legitimate possessor of her own body
and her own health.... Just as it is a woman's private right, and
most intimate concern, to present her virginity as her best gift
to the chosen of her heart, so it is certainly a pregnant woman's
own private concern if, for reasons which seem good to her, she
decides to destroy the results of her action." A woman who
destroys the embryo which might become a burden to the community,
or is likely to be an inferior member of society, this writer
urges, is doing a service to the community, which ought to reward
her, perhaps by granting her special privileges as regards the
upbringing of her other children. Oda Olberg, in a thoughtful
paper ("Ueber den Juristischen Schutz des Keimenden Lebens," _Die
Neue Generation_, June, 1908), endeavors to make clear all that
is involved in the effort to protect the developing embryo
against the organism that carries it, to protect a creature, that
is, against itself and its own instincts. She considers that most
of the women who terminate their pregnancies artificially would
only have produced undesirables, for the normal, healthy, robust
woman has no desire to effect abortion. "There are women who are
psychically sterile, without being physically so, and who possess
nothing of motherhood but the ability to bring forth. These, when
they abort, are simply correcting a failure of Nature." Some of
them, she remarks, by going on to term, become guilty of the far
worse offence of infanticide. As for the women who desire
abortion merely from motives of vanity, or convenience, Oda
Olberg points out that the circles in which these motives rule
are quite able to limit their children without having to resort
to abortion. She concludes that society must protect the young
life in every way, by social hygiene, by laws for the protection
of the workers, by spreading a new morality on the basis of the
laws of heredity. But we need no law to protect the young
creature against its own mother, for a thousand natural forces
are urging the mother to protect her own child, and we may be
sure that she will not disobey these forces without very good
reasons. Camilla Jellinek, again (_Die Strafrechtsreform_, etc.,
Heidelberg, 1909), in a powerful and well-informed address before
the Associated German Frauenvereine, at Breslau, argues in the
same sense.
The lawyers very speedily came to the assistance of the women in
this matter, the more readily, no doubt, since the traditions of
the greatest and most influential body of law already pointed, on
one side at all events, in the same direction. It may, indeed, be
claimed that it was from the side of law--and in Italy, the
classic land of legal reform--that this new movement first begun.
In 1888, Balestrini published, at Turin, his _Aborto,
Infanticidio ed Esposizione d'Infante_, in which he argued that
the penalty should be removed from abortion. It was a very able
and learned book, inspired by large ideas and a humanitarian
spirit, but though its importance is now recognized, it cannot be
said that it attracted much attention on publication.
It is especially in Germany that, during recent years, lawyers
have followed women reformers, by advocating, more or less
completely, the abolition of the punishment for abortion. So
distinguished an authority as Von Liszt, in a private letter to
Camilla Jellinek (op. cit.), states that he regards the
punishment of abortion as "very doubtful," though he considers
its complete abolition impracticable; he thinks abortion might be
permitted during the early months of pregnancy, thus bringing
about a return of the old view. Hans Gross states his opinion
(_Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie_, Bd. XII, p. 345) that the
time is not far distant when abortion will no longer be punished.
Radbruch and Von Lilienthal speak in the same sense. Weinberg has
advocated a change in the law (_Mutterschutz_, 1905, Heft 8),
and Kurt Hiller (_Die Neue Generation_, April, 1909), also from
the legal side, argues that abortion should only be punishable
when effected by a married woman, without the knowledge and
consent of her husband.
The medical profession, which took the first step in modern times in the
authorization of abortion, has not at present taken any further step. It
has been content to lay down the principle that when the interests of the
mother are opposed to those of the foetus, it is the latter which must be
sacrificed. It has hesitated to take the further step of placing abortion
on the eugenic basis, and of claiming the right to insist on abortion
whenever the medical and hygienic interests of society demand such a step.
This attitude is perfectly intelligible. Medicine has in the past been
chiefly identified with the saving of lives, even of worthless and worse
than worthless lives; "Keep everything alive! Keep everything alive!"
nervously cried Sir James Paget. Medicine has confined itself to the
humble task of attempting to cure evils, and is only to-day beginning to
undertake the larger and nobler task of preventing them.
"The step from killing the child in the womb to murdering a
person when out of the womb, is a dangerously narrow one," sagely
remarks a recent medical author, probably speaking for many
others, who somehow succeed in blinding themselves to the fact
that this "dangerously narrow step" has been taken by mankind,
only too freely, for thousands of years past, long before
abortion was known in the world.
Here and there, however, medical authors of repute have advocated
the further extension of abortion, with precautions, and under
proper supervision, as an aid to eugenic progress. Thus,
Professor Max Flesch (_Die Neue Generation_, April, 1909) is in
favor of a change in the law permitting abortion (provided it is
carried out by the physician) in special cases, as when the
mother's pregnancy has been due to force, when she has been
abandoned, or when, in the interests of the community, it is
desirable to prevent the propagation of insane, criminal,
alcoholic, or tuberculous persons.
In France, a medical man, Dr. Jean Darricarrère, has written a
remarkable novel, _Le Droit d'Avortement_ (1906), which advocates
the thesis that a woman always possesses a complete right to
abortion, and is the supreme judge as to whether she will or not
undergo the pain and risks of childbirth. The question is, here,
however, obviously placed not on medical, but on humanitarian and
feminist grounds.
We have seen that, alike on the side of practice and of theory, a great
change has taken place during recent years in the attitude towards
abortion. It must, however, clearly be recognized that, unlike the control
of procreation by methods for preventing conception, facultative abortion
has not yet been embodied in our current social morality. If it is
permissible to interpolate a personal opinion, I may say that to me it
seems that our morality is here fairly reasonable.[442] I am decidedly of
opinion that an unrestricted permission for women to practice abortion in
their own interests, or even for communities to practice it in the
interests of the race, would be to reach beyond the stage of civilization
we have at present attained. As Ellen Key very forcibly argues, a
civilization which permits, without protest, the barbarous slaughter of
its carefully selected adults in war has not yet won the right to destroy
deliberately even its most inferior vital products in the womb. A
civilization guilty of so reckless a waste of life cannot safely be
entrusted with this judicial function. The blind and aimless anxiety to
cherish the most hopeless and degraded forms of life, even of unborn life,
may well be a weakness, and since it often leads to incalculable
suffering, even a crime. But as yet there is an impenetrable barrier
against progress in this direction. Before we are entitled to take life
deliberately for the sake of purifying life, we must learn how to preserve
it by abolishing such destructive influences--war, disease, bad industrial
conditions--as are easily within our social power as civilized
nations.[443]
There is, further, another consideration which seems to me to carry
weight. The progress of civilization is in the direction of greater
foresight, of greater prevention, of a diminished need for struggling with
the reckless lack of prevision. The necessity for abortion is precisely
one of those results of reckless action which civilization tends to
diminish. While we may admit that in a sounder state of civilization a few
cases might still occur when the induction of abortion would be desirable,
it seems probable that the number of such cases will decrease rather than
increase. In order to do away with the need for abortion, and to
counteract the propaganda in its favor, our main reliance must be placed,
on the one hand, on increased foresight in the determination of conception
and increased knowledge of the means for preventing conception,[444] and
on the other hand, on a better provision by the State for the care of
pregnant women, married and unmarried alike, and a practical recognition
of the qualified mother's claim on society.[445] There can be little doubt
that, in many a charge of criminal abortion, the real offence lies at the
door of those who have failed to exercise their social and professional
duty of making known the more natural and harmless methods for preventing
conception, or else by their social attitude have made the pregnant
woman's position intolerable. By active social reform in these two
directions, the new movement in favor of abortion may be kept in check,
and it may even be found that by stimulating such reform that movement has
been beneficial.
We have seen that the deliberate restraint of conception has become a part
of our civilized morality, and that the practice and theory of facultative
abortion has gained a footing among us. There remains a third and yet more
radical method of controlling procreation, the method of preventing the
possibility of procreation altogether by the performance of castration or
other slighter operation having a like inhibitory effect on reproduction.
The other two methods only effect a single act of union or its results,
but castration affects all subsequent acts of sexual union and usually
destroys the procreative power permanently.
Castration for various social and other purposes is an ancient and
widespread practice, carried out on men and on animals. There has,
however, been on the whole a certain prejudice against it when applied to
men. Many peoples have attached a very sacred value to the integrity of
the sexual organs. Among some primitive peoples the removal of these
organs has been regarded as a peculiarly ferocious insult, only to be
carried out in moments of great excitement, as after a battle. Medicine
has been opposed to any interference with the sexual organs. The oath
taken by the Greek physicians appears to prohibit castration: "I will not
cut."[446] In modern times a great change has taken place, the castration
of both men and women is commonly performed in diseased conditions; the
same operation is sometimes advocated and occasionally performed in the
hope that it may remove strong and abnormal sexual impulses. And during
recent years castration has been invoked in the cause of negative
eugenics, to a greater extent, indeed, on account of its more radical
character, than either the prevention of conception or abortion.
The movement in favor of castration appears to have begun in the United
States, where various experiments have been made in embodying it in law.
It was first advocated merely as a punishment for criminals, and
especially sexual offenders, by Hammond, Everts, Lydston and others. From
this point of view, however, it seems to be unsatisfactory and perhaps
illegitimate. In many cases castration is no punishment at all, and indeed
a positive benefit. In other cases, when inflicted against the subject's
will, it may produce very disturbing mental effects, leading in already
degenerate or unbalanced persons to insanity, criminality, and anti-social
tendencies generally, much more dangerous than the original state.
Eugenic considerations, which were later brought forward, constitute a
much sounder argument for castration; in this case the castration is
carried out, by no means in order to inflict a barbarous and degrading
punishment, but, with the subject's consent, in order to protect the
community from the risk of useless or mischievous members.
The fact that castration can no longer be properly considered a
punishment, is shown by the possibility of deliberately seeking
the operation simply for the sake of convenience, as a preferable
and most effective substitute for the adoption of preventive
methods in sexual intercourse. I am only at present acquainted
with one case in which this course has been adopted. This subject
is a medical man (of Puritan New England ancestry) with whose
sexual history, which is quite normal, I have been acquainted for
a long time past. His present age is thirty-nine. A few years
since, having a sufficiently large family, he adopted preventive
methods of intercourse. The subsequent events I narrate in his
own words: "The trouble, forethought, etc., rendered necessary by
preventive measures, grew more and more irksome to me as the
years passed by, and finally, I laid the matter before another
physician, and on his assurances, and after mature deliberation
with my wife, was operated on some time since, and rendered
sterile by having the vas deferens on each side exposed through a
slit in the scrotum, then tied in two places with silk and
severed between the ligatures. This was done under cocaine
infiltrative anæsthesia, and was not so extremely painful, though
what pain there was (dragging the cord out through the slit,
etc.) seemed very hard to endure. I was not out of my office a
single day, nor seriously disturbed in any way. In six days all
stitches in the scrotum were removed, and in three weeks I
abandoned the suspensory bandage that had been rendered necessary
by the extreme sensitiveness of the testicles and cord.
"The operation has proved a most complete success in every way.
Sexual functions are _absolutely unaffected in any way
whatsoever_. There is no sense of discomfort or uneasiness in the
sexual tract, and what seems strangest of all to me, is the fact
that the semen, so far as one can judge by ordinary means of
observation, is undiminished in quantity and unchanged in
character. (Of course, the microscope would reveal its fatal
lack.)
"My wife is delighted at having fear banished from our love, and,
taken all in all, it certainly seems as if life would mean more
to us both. Incidentally, the health of both of us seems better
than usual, particularly so in my wife's case, and this she
attributes to a soothing influence that is attained by allowing
the seminal fluid to be deposited in a perfectly normal manner,
and remain in contact with the vaginal secretions until it
naturally passes off.
"This operation being comparatively new, and, as yet, not often
done on others than the insane, criminal, etc., I thought it
might be of interest to you. If I shed even the faintest ray of
light on this greatest of all human problems ... I shall be glad
indeed."
Such a case, with its so far satisfactory issue, certainly
deserves to be placed on record, though it may well be that at
present it will not be widely imitated.
The earliest advocacy of castration, which I have met with as a part of
negative eugenics, for the specific "purpose of prophylaxis as applied to
race improvement and the protection of society," is by Dr. F.E. Daniel, of
Texas, and dates from 1893.[447] Daniel mixed up, however, somewhat
inextricably, castration as a method of purifying the race, a method which
can be carried out with the concurrence of the individual operated on,
with castration as a punishment, to be inflicted for rape, sodomy,
bestiality, pederasty and even habitual masturbation, the method of its
performance, moreover, to be the extremely barbarous and primitive method
of total ablation of the sexual organs. In more recent years somewhat more
equitable, practical, and scientific methods of castration have been
advocated, not involving the removal of the sexual glands or organs, and
not as a punishment, but simply for the sake of protecting the community
and the race from the burden of probably unproductive and possibly
dangerous members. Näcke has, from 1899 onwards, repeatedly urged the
social advantages of this measure.[448] The propagation of the inferior
elements of society, Näcke insists, brings unhappiness into the family and
is a source of great expense to the State. He regards castration as the
only effective method of prevention, and concludes that it is, therefore,
our duty to adopt it, just as we have adopted vaccination, taking care to
secure the consent of the subject himself or his guardian, of the civil
authorities, and, if necessary, of a committee of experts. Professor
Angelo Zuccarelli of Naples has also, from 1899 onwards, emphasized the
importance of castration in the sterilization of the epileptic, the insane
of various classes, the alcoholic, the tuberculous, and instinctive
criminals, the choice of cases for operation to be made by a commission of
experts who would examine school-children, candidates for public
employments, or persons about to marry.[449] This movement rapidly gained
ground, and in 1905 at the annual meeting of Swiss alienists it was
unanimously agreed that the sterilization of the insane is desirable, and
that it is necessary that the question should be legally regulated. It is
in Switzerland, indeed, that the first steps have been taken in Europe to
carry out castration as a measure of social prophylaxis. The sixteenth
yearly report (1907) of the Cantonal asylum at Wil describes four cases of
castration, two in men and two in women, performed--with the permission of
the patients and the civil authorities--for social reasons; both women had
previously had illegitimate children who were a burden on the community,
and all four patients were sexually abnormal; the operation enabled the
patients to be liberated and to work, and the results were considered in
every respect satisfactory to all concerned.[450]
The introduction of castration as a method of negative eugenics
has been facilitated by the use of new methods of performing it
without risk, and without actual removal of the testes or
ovaries. For men, there is the simple method of vasectomy, as
recommended by Näcke and many others. For women, there is the
corresponding, and almost equally simple and harmless method of
Kehrer, by section and ligation of the Fallopian tubes through
the vagina, as recommended by Kisch, or Rose's very similar
procedure, easily carried out in a few minutes by an experienced
hand, as recommended by Zuccarelli.
It has been found that repeated exposure to the X-rays produces
sterility in both sexes, alike in animals and men, and X-ray
workers have to adopt various precautions to avoid suffering from
this effect. It has been suggested that the application of the
X-rays would be a good substitute for castration; it appears that
the effects of the application are only likely to last a few
years, which, in some doubtful cases, might be an advantage. (See
_British Medical Journal_, Aug. 13, 1904; ib., March 11, 1905;
ib., July 6, 1907.)
It is scarcely possible, it seems to me, to view castration as a method of
negative eugenics with great enthusiasm. The recklessness, moreover, with
which it is sometimes proposed to apply it by law--owing no doubt to the
fact that it is not so obviously repulsive as the less radical procedure
of abortion--ought to render us very cautious. We must, too, dismiss the
idea of castration as a punishment; as such it is not merely barbarous but
degrading and is unlikely to have a beneficial effect. As a method of
negative eugenics it should never be carried out except with the subject's
consent. The fact that in some cases it might be necessary to enforce
seclusion in the absence of castration would doubtless be a fact exerting
influence in favor of such consent; but the consent is essential if the
subject of the operation is to be safeguarded from degradation. A man who
has been degraded and embittered by an enforced castration might not be
dangerous to posterity, but might very easily become a dangerous member of
the society in which he actually lived. With due precautions and
safeguards, castration may doubtless play a certain part in the elevation
and improvement of the race.[451]
The methods we have been considering, in so far as they limit the
procreative powers of the less healthy and efficient stocks in a
community, are methods of eugenics. It must not, however, be supposed that
they are the whole of eugenics, or indeed that they are in any way
essential to a eugenic scheme. Eugenics is concerned with the whole of the
agencies which elevate and improve the human breed; abortion and
castration are methods which may be used to this end, but they are not
methods of which everyone approves, nor is it always clear that the ends
they effect would not better be attained by other methods; in any case
they are methods of negative eugenics. There remains the field of positive
eugenics, which is concerned, not with the elimination of the inferior
stocks but with ascertaining which are the superior stocks and with
furthering their procreative power.
While the necessity of refraining from procreation is no longer a bar to
marriage, the question of whether two persons ought to marry each other
still remains in the majority of cases a serious question from the
standpoint of positive as well as of negative eugenics, for the normal
marriage cannot fail to involve children, as, indeed, its chief and most
desirable end. We have to consider not merely what are the stocks or the
individuals that are unfit to breed, but also what are these stocks or
individuals that are most fit to breed, and under what conditions
procreation may best be effected. The present imperfection of our
knowledge on these questions emphasizes the need for care and caution in
approaching their consideration.
It may be fitting, at this point, to refer to the experiment of
the Oneida Community in establishing a system of scientific
propagation, under the guidance of a man whose ability and
distinction as a pioneer are only to-day beginning to be
adequately recognized. John Humphrey Noyes was too far ahead of
his own day to be recognized at his true worth; at the most, he
was regarded as the sagacious and successful founder of a sect,
and his attempts to apply eugenics to life only aroused ridicule
and persecution, so that he was, unfortunately, compelled by
outside pressure to bring a most instructive experiment to a
premature end. His aim and principle are set forth in an _Essay
on Scientific Propagation_, printed some forty years ago, which
discusses problems that are only now beginning to attract the
attention of the practical man, as within the range of social
politics. When Noyes turned his vigorous and practical mind to
the question of eugenics, that question was exclusively in the
hands of scientific men, who felt all the natural timidity of the
scientific man towards the realization of his proposals, and who
were not prepared to depart a hair's breadth from the
conventional customs of their time. The experiment of Noyes, at
Oneida, marked a new stage in the history of eugenics; whatever
might be the value of the experiment--and a first experiment
cannot well be final--with Noyes the questions of eugenics passed
beyond the purely academic stage in which, from the time of
Plato, they had peacefully reposed. "It is becoming clear," Noyes
states at the outset, "that the foundations of scientific society
are to be laid in the scientific propagation of human beings." In
doing this, we must attend to two things: blood (or heredity) and
training; and he puts blood first. In that, he was at one with
the most recent biometrical eugenists of to-day ("the nation has
for years been putting its money on 'Environment,' when
'Heredity' wins in a canter," as Karl Pearson prefers to put it),
and at the same time revealed the breadth of his vision in
comparison with the ordinary social reformer, who, in that day,
was usually a fanatical believer in the influence of training and
surroundings. Noyes sets forth the position of Darwin on the
principles of breeding, and the step beyond Darwin, which had
been taken by Galton. He then remarks that, when Galton comes to
the point where it is necessary to advance from theory to the
duties the theory suggests, he "subsides into the meekest
conservatism." (It must be remembered that this was written at an
early stage in Galton's work.) This conclusion was entirely
opposed to Noyes' practical and religious temperament. "Duty is
plain; we say we ought to do it--we want to do it; but we cannot.
The law of God urges us on; but the law of society holds us back.
The boldest course is the safest. Let us take an honest and
steady look at the law. It is only in the timidity of ignorance
that the duty seems impracticable." Noyes anticipated Galton in
regarding eugenics as a matter of religion.
Noyes proposed to term the work of modern science in propagation
"Stirpiculture," in which he has sometimes been followed by
others. He considered that it is the business of the
stirpiculturist to keep in view both quantity and quality of
stocks, and he held that, without diminishing quantity, it was
possible to raise the quality by exercising a very stringent
discrimination in selecting males. At this point, Noyes has been
supported in recent years by Karl Pearson and others, who have
shown that only a relatively small portion of a population is
needed to produce the next generation, and that, in fact, twelve
per cent. of one generation in man produces fifty per cent. of
the next generation. What we need to ensure is that this small
reproducing section of the population shall be the best adapted
for the purpose. "The _quantity_ of production will be in direct
proportion to the number of fertile females," as Noyes saw the
question, "and the _value_ produced, so far as it depends on
selection, will be nearly in inverse proportion to the number of
fertilizing males." In this matter, Noyes anticipated Ehrenfels.
The two principles to be held in mind were, "Breed from the
best," and "Breed in-and-in," with a cautious and occasional
introduction of new strains. (It may be noted that Reibmayr, in
his recent _Entwicklungsgeschichte des Genics und Talentes_,
argues that the superior races, and superior individuals, in the
human species, have been produced by an unconscious adherence to
exactly these principles.) "By segregating superior families, and
by breeding these in-and-in, superior varieties of human beings
might be produced, which would be comparable to the thoroughbreds
in all the domestic races." He illustrates this by the early
history of the Jews.
Noyes finally criticises the present method, or lack of method,
in matters of propagation. Our marriage system, he states,
"leaves mating to be determined by a general scramble." By
ignoring, also, the great difference between the sexes in
reproductive power, it "restricts each man, whatever may be his
potency and his value, to the amount of production of which one
woman, chosen blindly, may be capable." Moreover, he continues,
"practically it discriminates against the best, and in favor of
the worst; for, while the good man will be limited by his
conscience to what the law allows, the bad man, free from moral
check, will distribute his seed beyond the legal limits, as
widely as he dares." "We are safe every way in saying that there
is no possibility of carrying the two precepts of scientific
propagation into an institution which pretends to no
discrimination, allows no suppression, gives no more liberty to
the best than to the worst, and which, in fact, must inevitably
discriminate the wrong way, so long as the inferior classes are
most prolific and least amenable to the admonitions of science
and morality." In modifying our sexual institutions, Noyes
insists there are two essential points to remember: the
preservation of liberty, and the preservation of the home. There
must be no compulsion about human scientific propagation; it must
be autonomous, directed by self-government, "by the free choice
of those who love science well enough to 'make themselves eunuchs
for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake.'" The home, also, must be
preserved, since "marriage is the best thing for man as he is;"
but it is necessary to enlarge the home, for, "if all could learn
to love other children than their own, there would be nothing to
hinder scientific propagation in the midst of homes far better
than any that now exist."
This memorable pamphlet contains no exposition of the precise
measures adopted by the Oneida Community to carry out these
principles. The two essential points were, as we know, "male
continence" (see _ante_ p. 553), and the enlarged family, in
which all the men were the actual or potential mates of all the
women, but no union for propagation took place, except as the
result of reason and deliberate resolve. "The community," says
H.J. Seymour, one of the original members (_The Oneida
Community_, 1894, p. 5), "was a _family_, as distinctly separated
from surrounding society as ordinary households. The tie that
bound it together was as permanent, and at least as sacred, as
that of marriage. Every man's care, and the whole of the common
property, was pledged for the maintenance and protection of the
women, and the support and education of the children." It is not
probable that the Oneida Community presented in detail the model
to which human society generally will conform. But even at the
lowest estimate, its success showed, as Lord Morely has pointed
out (_Diderot_, vol. ii, p. 19), "how modifiable are some of
these facts of existing human character which are vulgarly deemed
to be ultimate and ineradicable," and that "the discipline of the
appetites and affections of sex," on which the future of
civilization largely rests, is very far from an impossibility.
In many respects, the Oneida Community was ahead of its
time,--and even of ours,--but it is interesting to note that, in
the matter of the control of conception, our marriage system has
come into line with the theory and practice of Oneida; it cannot,
indeed, be said that we always control conception in accordance
with eugenic principles, but the fact that such control has now
become a generally accepted habit of civilization, to some extent
deprives Noyes' criticism of our marriage system of the force it
possessed half a century ago. Another change in our customs--the
advocacy, and even the practice, of abortion and
castration--would not have met with his approval; he was strongly
opposed to both, and with the high moral level that ruled his
community, neither was necessary to the maintenance of the
stirpiculture that prevailed.
The Oneida Community endured for the space of one generation, and
came to an end in 1879, by no means through a recognition of
failure, but by a wise deference to external pressure. Its
members, many of them highly educated, continued to cherish the
memory of the practices and ideals of the Community. Noyes Miller
(the author of _The Strike of a Sex_, and _Zugassant's
Discovery_) to the last, looked with quiet confidence to the time
when, as he anticipated, the great discovery of Noyes would be
accepted and adopted by the world at large. Another member of the
Community (Henry J. Seymour) wrote of the Community long
afterwards that "It was an anticipation and imperfect miniature
of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth."
Perhaps the commonest type of proposal or attempt to improve the
biological level of the race is by the exclusion of certain classes of
degenerates from marriage, or by the encouragement of better classes of
the community to marry. This seems to be, at present, the most popular
form of eugenics, and in so far as it is not effected by compulsion but is
the outcome of a voluntary resolve to treat the question of the creation
of the race with the jealous care and guardianship which so tremendously
serious, so godlike, a task involves, it has much to be said in its favor
and nothing against it.
But it is quite another matter when the attempt is made to regulate such
an institution as marriage by law. In the first place we do not yet know
enough about the principles of heredity and the transmissibility of
pathological states to enable us to formulate sound legislative proposals
on this basis. Even so comparatively simple a matter as the relationship
of tuberculosis to heredity can scarcely be said to be a matter of common
agreement, even if it can yet be claimed that we possess adequate material
on which to attain a common agreement. Supposing, moreover, that our
knowledge on all these questions were far more advanced than it is, we
still should not have attained a position in which we could lay down
general propositions regarding the desirability or the undesirability of
certain classes of persons procreating. The question is necessarily an
individual question, and it can only be decided when all the circumstances
of the individual case have been fairly passed in review.
The objection to any legislative and compulsory regulation of the right to
marry is, however, much more fundamental than the consideration that our
knowledge is at present inadequate. It lies in the extraordinary
confusion, in the minds of those who advocate such legislation, between
legal marriage and procreation. The persons who fall into such confusion
have not yet learnt the alphabet of the subject they presume to dictate
about, and are no more competent to legislate than a child who cannot tell
A from B is competent to read.
Marriage, in so far as it is the partnership for mutual help and
consolation of two people who in such partnership are free, if they
please, to exercise sexual union, is an elementary right of every person
who is able to reason, who is guilty of no fraud or concealment, and who
is not likely to injure the partner selected, for in that case society is
entitled to interfere by virtue of its duty to protect its members. But
the right to marry, thus understood, in no way involves the right to
procreate. For while marriage _per se_ only affects the two individuals
concerned, and in no way affects the State, procreation, on the other
hand, primarily affects the community which is ultimately made up of
procreated persons, and only secondarily affects the two individuals who
are the instruments of procreation. So that just as the individual couple
has the first right in the question of marriage, the State has the first
right in the question of procreation. The State is just as incompetent to
lay down the law about marriage as the individual is to lay down the law
about procreation.
That, however, is only one-half of the folly committed by those who would
select the candidates for matrimony by statute. Let us suppose--as is not
indeed easy to suppose--that a community will meekly accept the abstract
prohibitions of the statute book and quietly go home again when the
registrar of marriages informs them that they are shut out from legal
matrimony by the new table of prohibited degrees. An explicit prohibition
to procreate within marriage is an implicit permission to procreate
outside marriage. Thus the undesirable procreation, instead of being
carried out under the least dangerous conditions, is carried out under the
most dangerous conditions, and the net result to the community is not a
gain but a loss.
What seems usually to happen, in the presence of a formal legislative
prohibition against the marriage of a particular class, is a combination
of various evils. In part the law becomes a dead letter, in part it is
evaded by skill and fraud, in part it is obeyed to give rise to worse
evils. This happened, for instance, in the Terek district of the Caucasus
where, on the demand of a medical committee, priests were prohibited from
marrying persons among whose relatives or ancestry any cases of leprosy
had occurred. So much and such various mischief was caused by this order
that it was speedily withdrawn.[452]
If we remember that the Catholic Church was occupied for more than a
thousand years in the attempt to impose the prohibition of marriage on its
priesthood,--an educated and trained body of men, who had every spiritual
and worldly motive to accept the prohibition, and were, moreover, brought
up to regard asceticism as the best ideal in life,[453]--we may realize
how absurd it is to attempt to gain the same end by mere casual
prohibitions issued to untrained people with no motives to obey such
prohibitions, and no ideals of celibacy.
The hopelessness and even absurdity of effecting the eugenic improvement
of the race by merely placing on the statute book prohibitions to certain
classes of people to enter the legal bonds of matrimony as at present
constituted, reveals the weakness of those who undervalue the eugenic
importance of environment. Those who affirm that heredity is everything
and environment nothing seem strangely to forget that it is precisely the
lower classes--those who are most subjected to the influence of bad
environment--who procreate most copiously, most recklessly, and most
disastrously. The restraint of procreation, and a concomitant regard for
heredity, increase _pari passu_ with improvement of the environment and
rise in social well-being. If even already it can be said that probably
fifty per cent. of sexual intercourse--perhaps the most procreatively
productive moiety--takes place outside legal marriage, it becomes obvious
that statutory prohibition to the unfit classes to refrain from legal
marriage merely involves their joining the procreating classes outside
legal matrimony. It is also clear that if we are to neglect the factor of
environment, and leave the lower social classes to the ignorance and
recklessness which are the result of such environment, the only practical
method of eugenics left open is that by castration and abortion. But this
method--if applied on a wholesale scale as it would need to be[454] and
without reference to the consent of the individual--is entirely opposed
to modern democratic feeling. Thus those short-sighted eugenists who
overlook the importance of environment are overlooking the only practical
channel through which their aims can be realized. Attention to procreation
and attention to environment are not, as some have supposed, antagonistic,
but they play harmoniously into each other's hands. The care for
environment leads to a restraint on reckless procreation, and the
restraint of procreation leads to improved environment.
Legislation on marriage, to be effectual, must be enacted in the home, in
the school, in the doctor's consulting room. Force is helpless here; it is
education that is needed, not merely instruction, but the education of the
conscience and will, and the training of the emotions.
Legal action may come in to further this process of education, though it
cannot replace it. Thus it is very desirable that when there has been a
concealment of serious disease by a party to a marriage such concealment
should be a ground for divorce. Epilepsy may be taken as typical of the
diseases which should be a bar to procreation, and their concealment
equivalent to an annulment of marriage.[455] In the United States the
Supreme Court of Errors of Connecticut laid it down in 1906 that the
Superior Court has the power to pass a decree of divorce when one of the
parties has concealed the existence of epilepsy. This weighty deliverence,
it has been well said,[456] marks a forward step in human progress. There
are many other seriously pathological conditions in which divorce should
be pronounced, or indeed, occur automatically, except when procreation has
been renounced, for in that case the State is no longer concerned in the
relationship, except to punish any fraud committed by concealment.
The demand that a medical certificate of health should be
compulsory on marriage, has been especially made in France. In
1858, Diday, of Lyons, proposed, indeed, that all persons,
without exception, should be compelled to possess a certificate
of health and disease, a kind of sanitary passport. In 1872,
Bertillon (Art. "Demographic," _Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des
Sciences Médicales_) advocated the registration, at marriage, of
the chief anthropological and pathological traits of the
contracting parties (height, weight, color of hair and eyes,
muscular force, size of head, condition of vision, hearing, etc.,
deformities and defects, etc.), not so much, however, for the end
of preventing undesirable marriages, as to facilitate the study
and comparison of human groups at particular periods. Subsequent
demands, of a more limited and partial character, for legal
medical certificates as a condition of marriage, have been made
by Fournier (_Syphilis et Mariage_, 1890), Cazalis (_Le Science
et le Mariage_, 1890), and Jullien (_Blenorrhagie et Mariage_,
1898). In Austria, Haskovec, of Prague ("Contrat Matrimonial et
L'Hygiène Publique," _Comptes-rendus Congrès International de
Médecine_, Lisbon, 1906, Section VII, p. 600), argues that, on
marriage, a medical certificate should be presented, showing that
the subject is exempt from tuberculosis, alcoholism, syphilis,
gonorrhoea, severe mental, or nervous, or other degenerative
state, likely to be injurious to the other partner, or to the
offspring. In America, Rosenberg and Aronstam argue that every
candidate for marriage, male or female, should undergo a strict
examination by a competent board of medical examiners, concerning
(1) Family and Past History (syphilis, consumption, alcoholism,
nervous, and mental diseases), and (2) Status Presens (thorough
examination of all the organs); if satisfactory, a certificate of
matrimonial eligibility would then be granted. It is pointed out
that a measure of this kind would render unnecessary the acts
passed by some States for the punishment by fine, or
imprisonment, of the concealment of disease. Ellen Key also
considers (_Liebe und Ehe_, p. 436) that each party at marriage
should produce a certificate of health. "It seems to me just as
necessary," she remarks, elsewhere (_Century of the Child_, Ch.
I), "to demand medical testimony concerning capacity for
marriage, as concerning capacity for military service. In the one
case, it is a matter of giving life; in the other, of taking it,
although certainly the latter occasion has hitherto been
considered as much the more serious."
The certificate, as usually advocated, would be a private but
necessary legitimation of the marriage in the eyes of the civil
and religious authorities. Such a step, being required for the
protection alike of the conjugal partner and of posterity, would
involve a new legal organization of the matrimonial contract.
That such demands are so frequently made, is a significant sign
of the growth of moral consciousness in the community, and it is
good that the public should be made acquainted with the urgent
need for them. But it is highly undesirable that they should, at
present, or, perhaps, ever, be embodied in legal codes. What is
needed is the cultivation of the feeling of individual
responsibility, and the development of social antagonism towards
those individuals who fail to recognize their responsibility. It
is the reality of marriage, and not its mere legal forms, that it
is necessary to act upon.
The voluntary method is the only sound way of approach in this matter.
Duclaux considered that the candidate for marriage should possess a
certificate of health in much the same way as the candidate for life
assurance, the question of professional secrecy, as well as that of
compulsion, no more coming into one question than into the other. There is
no reason why such certificates, of an entirely voluntary character,
should not become customary among those persons who are sufficiently
enlightened to realize all the grave personal, family, and social issues
involved in marriage. The system of eugenic certification, as originated
and developed by Galton, will constitute a valuable instrument for raising
the moral consciousness in this matter. Galton's eugenic certificates
would deal mainly with the natural virtues of superior hereditary
breed--"the public recognition of a natural nobility"--but they would
include the question of personal health and personal aptitude.[457]
To demand compulsory certificates of health at marriage is indeed to begin
at the wrong end. It would not only lead to evasions and antagonisms but
would probably call forth a reaction. It is first necessary to create an
enthusiasm for health, a moral conscience in matters of procreation,
together with, on the scientific side, a general habit of registering the
anthropological, psychological, and pathological data concerning the
individual, from birth onwards, altogether apart from marriage. The
earlier demands of Diday and Bertillon were thus not only on a sounder but
also a more practicable basis. If such records were kept from birth for
every child, there would be no need for special examination at marriage,
and many incidental ends would be gained. There is difficulty at present
in obtaining such records from the moment of birth, and, so far as I am
aware, no attempts have yet been made to establish their systematic
registration. But it is quite possible to begin at the beginning of school
life, and this is now done at many schools and colleges in England,
America, and elsewhere, more especially as regards anthropological,
physiological, and psychological data, each child being submitted to a
thorough and searching anthropometric examination, and thus furnished with
a systematic statement of his physical condition.[458] This examination
needs to be standardized and generalized, and repeated at fixed intervals.
"Every individual child," as is truly stated by Dr. Dukes, the Physician
to Rugby School, "on his entrance to a public school should be as
carefully and as thoroughly examined as if it were for life insurance." If
this procedure were general from an early age, there would be no hardship
in the production of the record at marriage, and no opportunity for fraud.
The _dossier_ of each person might well be registered by the State, as
wills already are, and, as in the case of wills, become freely open to
students when a century had elapsed. Until this has been done during
several centuries our knowledge of eugenics will remain rudimentary.
There can be little doubt that the eugenic attitude towards
marriage, and the responsibility of the individual for the future
of the race, is becoming more recognized. It is constantly
happening that persons, about to marry, approach the physician in
a state of serious anxiety on this point. Urquhart, indeed
(_Journal of Mental Science_, April, 1907, p. 277), believes that
marriages are seldom broken off on this ground; this seems,
however, too pessimistic a view, and even when the marriage is
not broken off the resolve is often made to avoid procreation.
Clouston, who emphasizes (_Hygiene of the Mind_, p. 74) the
importance of "inquiries by each of the parties to the
life-contract, by their parents and their doctors, as to
heredity, temperament, and health," is more hopeful of the
results than Urquhart. "I have been very much impressed, of late
years," he writes (_Journal of Mental Science_, Oct., 1907, p.
710), "with the way in which this subject is taking possession of
intelligent people, by the number of times one is consulted by
young men and young women, proposing to marry, or by their
fathers or mothers. I used to have the feeling in the back of my
mind, when I was consulted, that it did not matter what I said,
it would not make any difference. But it is making a difference;
and I, and others, could tell of scores of marriages which were
put off in consequence of psychiatric medical advice."
Ellen Key, also, refers to the growing tendency among both men
and women, to be influenced by eugenic consideration in forming
partnerships for life (_Century of the Child_, Ch. I). The
recognition of the eugenic attitude towards marriage, the
quickening of the social and individual conscience in matters of
heredity, as also the systematic introduction of certification
and registration, will be furthered by the growing tendency to
the socialization of medicine, and, indeed, in its absence would
be impossible. (See e.g., Havelock Ellis, _The Nationalization of
Health_.) The growth of the State Medical Organization of Health
is steady and continuous, and is constantly covering a larger
field. The day of the private practitioner of medicine--who was
treated, as Duclaux (_L'Hygiène Sociale_, p. 263) put it, "like a
grocer, whose shop the customer may enter and leave as he
pleases, and when he pleases"--will, doubtless, soon be over. It
is now beginning to be felt that health is far too serious a
matter, not only from the individual but also from the social
point of view, to be left to private caprice. There is, indeed, a
tendency, in some quarters, to fear that some day society may
rush to the opposite extreme, and bow before medicine with the
same unreasoning deference that it once bowed before theology.
That danger is still very remote, nor is it likely, indeed, that
medicine will ever claim any authority of this kind. The spirit
of medicine has, notoriously, been rather towards the assertion
of scepticism than of dogma, and the fanatics in this field will
always be in a hopelessly small minority.
The general introduction of authentic personal records covering all
essential data--hereditary, anthropometric and pathological--cannot fail
to be a force on the side of positive as well as of negative eugenics, for
it would tend to promote the procreation of the fit as well as restrict
that of the unfit, without any legislative compulsion. With the growth of
education a regard for such records as a preliminary to marriage would
become as much a matter of course as once was the regard to the
restrictions imposed by Canon law, and as still is a regard to money or to
caste. A woman can usually refrain from marrying a man with no money and
no prospects; a man may be passionately in love with a woman of lower
class than himself but he seldom marries her. It needs but a clear general
perception of all that is involved in heredity and health to make eugenic
considerations equally influential.
A discriminating regard to the quality of offspring will act beneficially
on the side of positive eugenics by substituting the pernicious tendency
to put a premium on excess of childbirth by the more rational method of
putting a premium on the quality of the child. It has been one of the most
unfortunate results of the mania for protesting against that decline of
the birthrate which is always and everywhere the result of civilization,
that there has been a tendency to offer special social or pecuniary
advantages to the parents of large families. Since large families tend to
be degenerate, and to become a tax on the community, since rapid
pregnancies in succession are not only a serious drain on the strength of
the mother but are now known to depreciate seriously the quality of the
offspring, and since, moreover, it is in large families that disease and
mortality chiefly prevail, all the interests of the community are against
the placing of any premium on large families, even in the case of parents
of good stock. The interests of the State are bound up not with the
quantity but with the quality of its citizens, and the premium should be
placed not on the families that reach a certain size but on the individual
children that reach a certain standard; the attainment of this standard
could well be based on observations made from birth to the fifth year. A
premium on this basis would be as beneficial to a State as that on the
merely numerical basis is pernicious.
This consideration applies with still greater force to the proposals for
the "systematic endowment of motherhood" of which we hear more and more.
So moderate and judicious a social reformer as Mr. Sidney Webb writes: "We
shall have to face the problem of the systematic endowment of motherhood,
and place this most indispensable of all professions upon an honorable
economic basis. At present it is ignored as an occupation, unremunerated,
and in no way honored by the State."[459] True as this statement is, it
must always be remembered that an indispensable preliminary to any
proposal for the endowment of motherhood by the State is a clear
conception of the kind of motherhood which the State requires. To endow
the reckless and indiscriminate motherhood which we see around us, to
encourage, that is, by State aid, the production of citizens a large
proportion of whom the State, if it dared, would like to destroy as unfit,
is too ridiculous a proposal to deserve discussion.[460] The only sound
reason, indeed, for the endowment of motherhood is that it would enable
the State, in its own interests, to further the natural selection of the
fit.
As to the positive qualities which the State is entitled to endow in its
encouragement of motherhood, it is still too early to speak with complete
assurance. Negative eugenics tends to be ahead of positive eugenics; it is
easier to detect bad stocks than to be quite sure of good stocks. Both on
the scientific side and on the social side, however, we are beginning to
attain a clearer realization of the end to be attained and a more precise
knowledge of the methods of attaining it.[461]
Even when we have gained a fairly clear conception of the stocks and the
individuals which we are justified in encouraging to undertake the task of
producing fit citizens for the State, the problems of procreation are by
no means at an end. Before we can so much as inquire what are the
conditions under which selected individuals may best procreate, there is
still the initial question to be decided whether those individuals are
both fertile and potent, for this is not guaranteed by the fact that they
belong to good stocks, nor is even the fact that a man and a woman are
fertile with other persons any positive proof that they will be fertile
with each other. Among the large masses of the population who do not seek
to make their unions legal until those unions have proved fertile, this
difficulty is settled in a simple and practical manner. The question is,
however, a serious and hazardous one, in the present state of the marriage
law in most countries, for those classes which are accustomed to bind
themselves in legal marriage without any knowledge of their potency and
fertility with each other. The matter is mostly left to chance, and as
legal marriage cannot usually be dissolved on the ground that there are no
offspring, even although procreation is commonly declared to be the chief
end of marriage, the question assumes much gravity. The ordinary range of
sterility is from seven to fifteen per cent. of all marriages, and in a
very large proportion of these it is a source of great concern. This could
be avoided, in some measure, by examination before marriage, and almost
altogether by ordaining that, as it is only through offspring that a
marriage has any concern for the State, a legal marriage could be
dissolved, after a certain period, at the will of either of the parties,
in the absence of such offspring.
It was formerly supposed that when a union proved infertile, it
was the wife who was at fault. That belief is long since
exploded, but, even yet, a man is generally far more concerned
about his potency, that is, his ability to perform the mechanical
act of coitus, than about his fertility, that is, his ability to
produce living spermatozoa, though the latter condition is a much
more common source of sterility. "Any man," says Arthur Cooper
(_British Medical Journal_, May 11, 1907), "who has any sexual
defect or malformation, or who has suffered from any disease or
injury of the genito-urinary organs, even though comparatively
trivial or one-sided, and although his copulative power may be
unimpaired, should be looked upon as possibly sterile, until some
sort of evidence to the contrary has been obtained." In case of a
sterile marriage, the possible cause should first be investigated
in the husband, for it is comparatively easy to examine the
semen, and to ascertain if it contains active spermatozoa.
Prinzing, in a comprehensive study of sterile marriages ("Die
Sterilen Ehen," _Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft_, 1904, Heft
1 and 2), states that in two-fifths of sterile marriages the man
is at fault; one-third of such marriages are the result of
venereal diseases in the husband himself, or transmitted to the
wife. Gonorrhoea is not now considered so important a cause of
sterility as it was a few years ago; Schenk makes it responsible
for only about thirteen per cent. sterile marriages (cf. Kisch,
_The Sexual Life of Woman_). Pinkus (_Archiv für Gynäkologie_,
1907) found that of nearly five hundred cases in which he
examined both partners, in 24.4 per cent. cases, the sterility
was directly due to the husband, and in 15.8 per cent. cases,
indirectly due, because caused by gonorrhoea with which he had
infected his wife.
When sterility is due to a defect in the husband's spermatozoa,
and is not discovered, as it usually might be, before marriage,
the question of impregnating the wife by other methods has
occasionally arisen. Divorce on the ground of sterility is not
possible, and, even if it were, the couple, although they wish to
have a child, have not usually any wish to separate. Under these
circumstances, in order to secure the desired end, without
departing from widely accepted rules of morality, the attempt is
occasionally made to effect artificial fecundation by injecting
the semen from a healthy male. Attempts have been made to effect
artificial fecundation by various distinguished men, from John
Hunter to Schwalbe, but it is nearly always very difficult to
effect, and often impossible. This is easy to account for, if we
recall what has already been pointed out (_ante_ p. 577)
concerning the influence of erotic excitement in the woman in
securing conception; it is obviously a serious task for even the
most susceptible woman to evoke erotic enthusiasm _à propos_ of a
medical syringe. Schwalbe, for instance, records a case
(_Deutsche Medizinisches Wochenschrift_, Aug., 1908, p. 510) in
which,--in consequence of the husband's sterility and the wife's
anxiety, with her husband's consent, to be impregnated by the
semen of another man,--he made repeated careful attempts to
effect artificial fecundation; these attempts were, however,
fruitless, and the three parties concerned finally resigned
themselves to the natural method of intercourse, which was
successful. In another case, recorded by Schwalbe, in which the
husband was impotent but not sterile, six attempts were made to
effect artificial fecundation, and further efforts abandoned on
account of the disgust of all concerned.
Opinion, on the whole, has been opposed to the practice of
artificial fecundation, even apart from the question of the
probabilities of success. Thus, in France, where there is a
considerable literature on the subject, the Paris Medical
Faculty, in 1885, after some hesitation, refused Gérard's thesis
on the history of artificial fecundation, afterwards published
independently. In 1883, the Bordeaux legal tribunal declared that
artificial fecundation was illegitimate, and a social danger. In
1897, the Holy See also pronounced that the practice is unlawful
("Artificial Fecundation before the Inquisition," _British
Medical Journal_, March 5, 1898). Apart, altogether, from this
attitude of medicine, law, and Church, it would certainly seem
that those who desire offspring would do well, as a rule, to
adopt the natural method, which is also the best, or else to
abandon to others the task of procreation, for which they are not
adequately equipped.
When we have ascertained that two individuals both belong to sound and
healthy stocks, and, further, that they are themselves both apt for
procreation, it still remains to consider the conditions under which they
may best effect procreation.[462] There arises, for instance, the
question, often asked, What is the best age for procreation?
The considerations which weigh in answering this question are of two
different orders, physiological, and social or moral. That is to say, that
it is necessary, on the one hand, that physical maturity should have been
fully attained, and the sexual cells completely developed; while, on the
other hand, it is necessary that the man shall have become able to support
a family, and that both partners shall have received a training in life
adequate to undertake the responsibilities and anxieties involved in the
rearing of children. While there have been variations at different times,
it scarcely appears that, on the whole, the general opinion as to the best
age for procreation has greatly varied in Europe during many centuries.
Hesiod indeed said that a woman should marry about fifteen and a man about
thirty,[463] but obstetricians have usually concluded that, in the
interests alike of the parents and their offspring, the procreative life
should not begin in women before twenty and in men before
twenty-five.[464] After thirty in women and after thirty-five or forty in
men it seems probable that the best conditions for procreation begin to
decline.[465] At the present time, in England and several other civilized
countries, the tendency has been for the age of marriage to fall at an
increasingly late age, on the average some years later than that usually
fixed as the most favorable age for the commencement of the procreative
life. But, on the whole, the average seldom departs widely from the
accepted standard, and there seems no good reason why we should desire to
modify this general tendency.
At the same time, it by no means follows that wide variations,
under special circumstances, may not only be permissible, but
desirable. The male is capable of procreating, in some cases,
from about the age of thirteen until far beyond eighty, and at
this advanced age, the offspring, even if not notable for great
physical robustness, may possess high intellectual qualities.
(See e.g., Havelock Ellis, _A Study of British Genius_, pp. 120
et seq.) The range of the procreative age in women begins earlier
(sometimes at eight), though it usually ceases by fifty, or
earlier, in only rare cases continuing to sixty or beyond. Cases
have been reported of pregnancy, or childbirth, at the age of
fifty-nine (e.g., _Lancet_, Aug. 5, 1905, p. 419). Lepage
(_Comptes-rendus Société d'Obstétrique de Paris_, Oct., 1903)
reports a case of a primipara of fifty-seven; the child was
stillborn. Kisch (_Sexual Life of Woman_, Part II) refers to
cases of pregnancy in elderly women, and various references are
given in _British Medical Journal_, Aug. 8, 1903, p. 325.
Of more importance is the question of early pregnancy. Several
investigators have devoted their attention to this question.
Thus, Spitta (in a Marburg Inaugural Dissertation, 1895) reviewed
the clinical history of 260 labors in primiparæ of 18 and under,
as observed at the Marburg Maternity. He found that the general
health during pregnancy was not below the average of pregnant
women, while the mortality of the child at birth and during the
following weeks was not high, and the mortality of the mother was
by no means high. Picard (in a Paris thesis, 1903) has studied
childbirth in thirty-eight mothers below the age of sixteen. He
found that, although the pelvis is certainly not yet fully
developed in very young girls, the joints and bones are much more
yielding than in the adult, so that parturition, far from being
more difficult, is usually rapid and easy. The process of labor
itself, is essentially normal in these cases, and, even when
abnormalities occur (low insertion of the placenta is a common
anomaly) it is remarkable that the patients do not suffer from
them in the way common among older women. The average weight of
the child was three kilogrammes, or about 6 pounds, 9 ounces; it
sometimes required special care during the first few days after
birth, perhaps because labor in these cases is sometimes slow.
The recovery of the mother was, in every case, absolutely normal,
and the fact that these young mothers become pregnant again more
readily than primiparæ of a more mature age, further contributes
to show that childbirth below the age of sixteen is in no way
injurious to the mother. Gache (_Annales de Gynécologie et
d'Obstétrique_, Dec., 1904) has attended ninety-one labors of
mothers under seventeen, in the Rawson Hospital, Buenos Ayres;
they were of so-called Latin race, mostly Spanish or Italian.
Gache found that these young mothers were by no means more
exposed than others to abortion or to other complications of
pregnancy. Except in four cases of slightly contracted pelvis,
delivery was normal, though rather longer than in older
primiparæ. Damage to the soft parts was, however, rare, and, when
it occurred, in every case rapidly healed. The average weight of
the child was 3,039 grammes, or nearly 6¾ pounds. It may be noted
that most observers find that very early pregnancies occur in
women who begin to menstruate at an unusually early age, that is,
some years before the early pregnancy occurs.
It is clear, however, that young mothers do remarkably well,
while there is no doubt whatever that they bear unusually fine
infants. Kleinwächter, indeed, found that the younger the mother,
the bigger the child. It is not only physically that the children
of young mothers are superior. Marro has found (_Pubertà_, p.
257) that the children of mothers under 21 are superior to those
of older mothers both in conduct and intelligence, provided the
fathers are not too old or too young. The detailed records of
individual cases confirm these results, both as regards mother
and child. Thus, Milner (_Lancet_, June 7, 1902) records a case
of pregnancy in a girl of fourteen; the labor pains were very
mild, and delivery was easy. E.B. Wales, of New Jersey, has
recorded the history (reproduced in _Medical Reprints_, Sept. 15,
1890) of a colored girl who became pregnant at the age of eleven.
She was of medium size, rather tall and slender, but well
developed, and began to menstruate at the age of ten. She was in
good health and spirits during pregnancy, and able to work.
Delivery was easy and natural, not notably prolonged, and
apparently not unduly painful, for there were no moans or
agitation. The child was a fine, healthy boy, weighing not less
than eleven pounds. Mother and child both did well, and there was
a great flow of milk. Whiteside Robertson (_British Medical
Journal_, Jan. 18, 1902) has recorded a case of pregnancy at the
age of thirteen, in a Colonial girl of British origin in Cape
Colony, which is notable from other points of view. During
pregnancy, she was anæmic, and appeared to be of poor development
and doubtfully normal pelvic conformation. Yet delivery took
place naturally, at full term, without difficulty or injury, and
the lying-in period was in every way satisfactory. The baby was
well-proportioned, and weighed 7½ pounds. "I have rarely seen a
primipara enjoy easier labor," concluded Robertson, "and I have
never seen one look forward to the happy realization of
motherhood with greater satisfaction."
The facts brought forward by obstetricians concerning the good
results of early pregnancy, as regards both mother and child,
have not yet received the attention they deserve. They are,
however, confirmed by many general tendencies which are now
fairly well recognized. The significant fact is known, for
instance, that in mothers over thirty, the proportion of
abortions and miscarriages is twice as great as in mothers
between the ages of fifteen and twenty, who also are superior in
this respect to mothers between the ages of twenty and thirty
(_Statistischer Jahrbuch_, Budapest, 1905). It was, again, proved
by Matthews Duncan, in his Goulstonian lecture, that the chances
of sterility in a woman increase with increase of age. It has,
further, been shown (Kisch, _Sexual Life of Woman_, Part II) that
the older a woman at marriage, the greater the average interval
before the first delivery, a tendency which seems to indicate
that it is the very young woman who is in the condition most apt
for procreation; Kisch is not, indeed, inclined to think that
this applies to women below twenty, but the fact, observed by
other obstetricians, that mothers under eighteen tend to become
pregnant again at an unusually short interval, goes far to
neutralize the exception made by Kisch. It may also be pointed
out that, among children of very young mothers, the sexes are
more nearly equal in number than is the case with older mothers.
This would seem to indicate that we are here in presence of a
normal equilibrium which will decrease as the age of the mother
is progressively disturbed in an abnormal direction.
The facility of parturition at an early age, it may be noted,
corresponds to an equal facility in physical sexual intercourse,
a fact that is often overlooked. In Russia, where marriage still
takes place early, it was formerly common when the woman was only
twelve or thirteen, and Guttceit (_Dreissig Jahre Praxis_, vol.
i, p. 324) says that he was assured by women who married at this
age that the first coitus presented no especial difficulties.
There is undoubtedly, at the present time, a considerable amount
of prejudice against early motherhood. In part, this is due to a
failure to realize that women are sexually much more precocious
than men, physically as well as psychically (see _ante_ p. 35).
The difference is about five years. This difference has been
virtually recognized for thousands of years, in the ancient
belief that the age of election for procreation is about twenty,
or less, for women, but about twenty-five for men; and it has
more lately been affirmed by the discovery that, while the male
is never capable of generation before thirteen, the female may,
in occasional instances, become pregnant at eight. (Some of the
recorded examples are quoted by Kisch.) In part, also, there is
an objection to the assumption of responsibilities so serious as
those of motherhood by a young girl, and there is the very
reasonable feeling that the obligations of a permanent marriage
tie ought not to be undertaken at an early age. On the other
hand, apart from the physical advantages, as regards both mother
and infant, on the side of early pregnancies, it is an advantage
for the child to have a young mother, who can devote herself
sympathetically and unreservedly to its interests, instead of
presenting the pathetic spectacle we so often witness in the
middle-aged woman who turns to motherhood when her youth and
mental flexibility are gone, and her habits and tastes have
settled into other grooves; it has sometimes been a great
blessing even to the very greatest men, like Goethe, to have had
a youthful mother. It would also, in many cases, be a great
advantage for the woman herself if she could bring her
procreative life to an end well before the age of twenty-five, so
that she could then, unhampered by child-bearing and mature in
experience, be free to enter on such wider activities in the
world as she might be fitted for.
Such an arrangement of the procreative life of women would,
obviously, only be a variation, and would probably be unsuited
for the majority. Every case must be judged on its own merits.
The best age for procreation will probably continue to be
regarded as being, for most women, around the age of twenty. But
at a time like the present, when there is an unfortunate
tendency for motherhood to be unduly delayed, it becomes
necessary to insist on the advantages, in many cases, of early
motherhood.
There are other conditions favorable or unfavorable to procreation which
it is now unnecessary to discuss in detail, since they have already been
incidentally dealt with in previous volumes of these _Studies_. There is,
for instance, the question of the time of year and the time of the
menstrual cycle which may most properly be selected for procreation.[466]
The best period is probably that when sexual desire is strongest, which is
the period when conception would appear, as a matter of fact, most often
to occur. This would be in spring or early summer,[467] and immediately
after (or shortly before) the menstrual period. The Chinese have observed
that the last day of menstruation and the two following
days--corresponding to the period of oestrus--constitute the most
favorable time for fecundation, and Bossi, of Genoa, has found that the
great majority of successes in both natural and artificial fecundation
occur at this period.[468] Soranus, as well as the Talmud, assigned the
period about menstruation as the best for impregnation, and Susruta, the
Indian physician, said that at this time pregnancy most readily occurs
because then the mouth of the womb is open, like the flower of the
water-lily to the sunshine.
We have now at last reached the point from which we started, the moment of
conception, and the child again lies in its mother's womb. There remains
no more to be said. The divine cycle of life is completed.
FOOTNOTES:
[421] Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 330.
[422] Academy of Medicine of Paris, March 31, 1908.
[423] _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii, p. 405.
[424] _Population and Progress_, p. 41.
[425] Cf. Reibmayr, _Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genics_, Bd.
II, p. 31.
[426] "The debt that we owe to those who have gone before us," says
Haycraft (_Darwinism and Race Progress_, p. 160), "we can only repay to
those who come after us."
[427] Mardrus, _Les Mille Nuits_, vol. xvi, p. 158.
[428] Sidney Webb, _Popular Science Monthly_, 1906, p. 526 (previously
published in the _London Times_, Oct. 11, 16, 1906). In Ch. IX of the
present volume it has already been necessary to discuss the meaning of the
term, "morality."
[429] Thus, in Paris, in 1906, in the rich quarters, the birthrate per
1,000 inhabitants was 19.09; in well-to-do quarters, 22.51; and in poor
quarters, 29.70. Here we see that, while the birthrate falls and rises
with social class, even among the poor and least restrained class the
birthrate is still but little above the general average for England, where
prevention is widespread, and very considerably lower than the average
(now rapidly falling) in Germany. It is evident that even among the poor
class there is a process of leveling up to the higher classes in this
matter.
[430] I have developed these points more in detail in two articles in the
_Independent Review_, November, 1903, and April, 1904. See also, Bushee,
"The Declining Birthrate and Its Causes," _Popular Science Monthly_, Aug.,
1903.
[431] Francis Place, _Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of
Population_, 1822, p. 165.
[432] See, e.g., a weighty chapter in the _Sexualleben und Nervenleiden_
of Löwenfeld, one of the most judicious authorities on sexual pathology.
Twenty-five years ago, as many will remember, the medical student was
usually taught that preventive methods of intercourse led to all sorts of
serious results. At that time, however, reckless and undesirable methods
of prevention seem to have been more prevalent than now.
[433] Michael Ryan, _Philosophy of Marriage_, p. 9. To enable "the
conservative power of the Creator" to exert itself on the myriads of
germinal human beings secreted during his life-time by even one man, would
require a world full of women, while the corresponding problem as regards
a woman is altogether too difficult to cope with. The process by which
life has been built up, far from being a process of universal
conservation, has been a process of stringent selection and vast
destruction; the progress effected by civilization merely lies in making
this blind process intelligent.
[434] Thus, in Belgium, in 1908 (_Sexual-Probleme_, Feb., 1909, p. 136), a
physician (Dr. Mascaux) who had been prominent in promoting a knowledge of
preventive methods of conception, was condemned to three months
imprisonment for "offense against morality!" In such a case, Dr. Helene
Stöcker comments (_Die Neue Generation_, Jan., 1909, p. 7), "morality" is
another name for ignorance, timidity, hypocrisy, prudery, coarseness, and
lack of conscience. It must be remembered, however, in explanation of this
iniquitous judgment, that for some years past the clerical party has been
politically predominant in Belgium.
[435] It has been objected that the condom cannot be used by the very
poorest, on account of its cost, but Hans Ferdy, in a detailed paper
(_Sexual-Probleme_, Dec., 1908), shows that the use of the condom can be
brought within the means of the very poorest, if care is taken to preserve
it under water when not in use. Nyström (_Sexual Probleme_, Nov., 1908, p.
736) has issued a leaflet for the benefit of his patients and others,
recommending the condom, and explaining its use.
[436] Thus, Kisch, in his _Sexual Life of Woman_, after discussing fully
the various methods of prevention, decides in favor of the condom.
Fürbringer similarly (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation
to Marriage_, vol. i, pp. 232 et seq.) concludes that the condom is
"relatively the most perfect anti-conceptual remedy." Forel (_Die Sexuelle
Frage_, pp. 457 et seq.) also discusses the question at length; any
æsthetic objection to the condom, Forel adds (p. 544), is due to the fact
that we are not accustomed to it; "eye-glasses are not specially æsthetic,
but the poetry of life does not suffer excessively from their use, which,
in many cases, cannot be dispensed with."
[437] _L'Avortement_, p. 43.
[438] There are some disputed points in Roman law and practice concerning
abortion; they are discussed in Balestrini's valuable book, _Aborto_, pp.
30 et seq.
[439] Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, Bk. XXII, Ch. XIII.
[440] The development of opinion and law concerning abortion has been
traced by Eugène Bausset, _L'Avortement Criminel_, Thèse de Paris, 1907.
For a summary of the practices of different peoples regarding abortion,
see W.G. Sumner, _Folkways_, Ch. VIII.
[441] _Die Neue Generation_, May, 1908, p. 192. It may be added that in
England the attachment of any penalty at all to abortion, practiced in the
early months of pregnancy (before "quickening" has taken place), is merely
a modern innovation.
[442] Even Balestrini, who is opposed to the punishment of abortion, is no
advocate of it. "Whenever abortion becomes a social custom," he remarks
(op. cit., p. 191), "it is the external manifestation of a people's
decadence, and far too deeply rooted to be cured by the mere attempt to
suppress the external manifestation."
[443] Cf. Ellen Key, _Century of the Child_, Ch. I. Hirth (_Wege zur
Heimat_, p. 526) is likewise opposed to the encouragement of abortion,
though he would not actually punish the pregnant woman who induces
abortion. I would especially call attention to an able and cogent article
by Anna Pappritz ("Die Vernichtung des Keimenden Lebens,"
_Sexual-Probleme_, July, 1909) who argues that the woman is not the sole
guardian of the embryo she bears, and that it is not in the interests of
society, nor even in her own interests, that she should be free to destroy
it at will. Anna Pappritz admits that the present barbarous laws in regard
to abortion must be modified, but maintains that they should not be
abolished. She proposes (1) a greatly reduced punishment for abortion; (2)
this punishment to be extended to the father, whether married or unmarried
(a provision already carried out in Norway, both for abortion and
infanticide); (3) permission to the physician to effect abortion when
there is good reason to suspect hereditary degeneration, as well as when
the woman has been impregnated by force.
[444] Cf. Dr. Max Hirsch, _Sexual-Probleme_, Jan., 1908, p. 23.
[445] Bausset (op. cit.) sets forth various social measures for the care
of pregnant and child-bearing women, which would tend to lessen criminal
abortion.
[446] Gomperz, _Greek Thinkers_, vol. i, p. 564.
[447] F.E. Daniel, President of the State Medical Association of Texas,
"Should Insane Criminals or Sexual Perverts be Allowed to Procreate?"
_Medico-legal Journal_, Dec., 1893; id., "The Cause and Prevention of
Rape," _Texas Medical Journal_, May, 1904.
[448] P. Näcke, "Die Kastration bei gewissen Klassen von Degenerirten als
ein Wirksamer Socialer Schutz," _Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie_, Bd.
III, 1899, p. 58; id. "Kastration in Gewissen Fällen von
Geisteskrankheit," _Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift_, 1905, No.
29.
[449] Angelo Zuccarelli, "Asessualizzazione o sterilizzazione dei
Degenerati," _L'Anomalo_, 1898-99, No. 6; id., "Sur la nécessité et sur
les Moyens d'empêcher la Réproduction des Hommes les plus Dégénérés,"
International Congress Criminal Anthropology, Amsterdam, 1901.
[450] Näcke, _Neurologisches Centralblatt_, March 1, 1909. The
original account of these operations is reproduced in the
_Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift_, No. 2, 1909, with an
approving comment by the editor, Dr. Bresler. As regards castration in
America, see Flood, "Castration of Idiot Children," _American Journal
Psychology_, Jan., 1899; also, _Alienist and Neurologist_, Aug., 1909, p.
348.
[451] It is probable that castration may prove especially advantageous in
the case of the feeble-minded. "In Somersetshire," says Tredgold ("The
Feeble-Mind as a Social Danger," _Eugenics Review_, July, 1909), "I found
that out of a total number of 167 feeble-minded women, nearly two-fifths
(61) had given birth to children, for the most part illegitimate.
Moreover, it is not uncommon, but, rather the rule, for these poor girls
to be admitted into the workhouse maternity wards again and again, and the
average number of offspring to each one of them is probably three or four,
although even six is not uncommon." In his work on _Mental Deficiency_
(pp. 288-292) the same author shows that propagation by the mentally
deficient is, in England, "both a terrible and extensive evil."
[452] This example is brought forward by Ledermann, "Skin Diseases and
Marriage," in Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation to
Marriage_.
[453] I may here again refer to Lea's instructive _History of Sacerdotal
Celibacy_.
[454] In England, 35,000 applicants for admission to the navy are annually
rejected, and although the physical requirements for enlistment in the
army are nowadays extremely moderate, it is estimated by General Maurice
that at least sixty per cent. of recruits and would-be recruits are
dismissed as unfit. (See e.g., William Coates, "The Duty of the Medical
Profession in the Prevention of National Deterioration," _British Medical
Journal_, May 1, 1909.) It can scarcely be claimed that men who are not
good enough for the army are good enough for the great task of creating
the future race.
[455] The recognition of epilepsy as a bar to procreation is not recent.
There is said to be a record in the archives of the town of Luçon in which
epilepsy was adjudged to be a valid reason for the cancellation of a
betrothal (_British Medical Journal_, Feb. 14, 1903, p. 383).
[456] _British Medical Journal_, April 14, 1906. In California and some
other States, it appears that deceit regarding health is a ground for the
annulment of marriage.
[457] Sir F. Galton, _Inquiries Into Human Faculty_, Everyman's Library
edition, pp. 211 et seq.; cf. Galton's collected _Essays in Eugenics_,
recently published by the Eugenics Education Society.
[458] For some account of the methods and results of the work in schools,
see Bertram C.A. Windle, "Anthropometric Work in Schools," _Medical
Magazine_, Feb., 1894.
[459] The most notable steps in this direction have been taken in Germany.
For an account of the experiment at Karlsruhe, see _Die Neue Generation_,
Dec., 1908.
[460] Wiethknudsen (as quoted in _Sexual-Probleme_, Dec., 1908, p. 837)
speaks strongly, but not too strongly, concerning the folly of any
indiscriminate endowment of procreation.
[461] On the scientific side, in addition to the fruitful methods of
statistical biometrics, which have already been mentioned, much promise
attaches to work along the lines initiated by Mendel; see W. Bateson,
_Mendel's Principles of Heredity_, 1909; also, W.H. Lock, _Recent Progress
in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution_, and R.C. Punnett,
_Mendelism_, 1907 (American edition, with interesting preface by Gaylord
Wilshire, from the Socialistic point of view, 1909).
[462] The study of the right conditions for procreation is very ancient.
In modern times we find that even the very first French medical book in
the vulgar tongue, the _Régime du Corps_, written by Alebrand of Florence
(who was physician to the King of France), in 1256, is largely devoted to
this matter, concerning which it gives much sound advice. See J.B.
Soalhat, _Les Idées de Maistre Alebrand de Florence sur la Puériculture_,
Thèse de Paris, 1908.
[463] Hesiod, _Works and Days_, II, 690-700.
[464] This has long been the accepted opinion of medical authorities, as
may be judged by the statements brought together two centuries ago by
Schurig, _Parthenologia_, pp. 22-25.
[465] The statement that, on the average, the best age for procreation in
men is before, rather than after, forty, by no means assumes the existence
of any "critical" age in men analogous to the menopause in women. This is
sometimes asserted, but there is no agreement in regard to it. Restif de
la Bretonne (_Monsieur Nicolas_, vol. x, p. 176) said that at the age of
forty delicacy of sentiment begins to go. Fürbringer believes (Senator and
Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 222)
that there is a decisive turn in a man's life in the sixth decade, or the
middle of the fifth, when desire and potency diminish. J.F. Sutherland
also states (_Comptes-rendus Congrès International de Médecine_, 1900,
Section de Psychiatrie, p. 471) that there is, in men, about the
fifty-fifth year, a change analogous to the menopause in women, but only
in a certain proportion of men. It would appear that in most men the
decline of sexual feeling and potency is very gradual, and at first
manifests itself in increased power of control.
[466] See, in vol. i, the study of "The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity."
[467] Among animals, also, spring litters are often said to be the best.
[468] Bossi's results are summarized in _Archives d'Anthropologie
Criminelle_, Sept., 1891. Alebrand of Florence, the French King's
physician in the thirteenth century, also advised intercourse a day after
the end of menstruation.
POSTSCRIPT.
"The work that I was born to do is done," a great poet wrote when at last
he had completed his task. And although I am not entitled to sing any
_Nunc dimittis_, I am well aware that the task that has occupied the best
part of my life can have left few years and little strength for any work
that comes after. It is more than thirty years ago since the first resolve
to write the work now here concluded began to shape itself, still dimly
though insistently; the period of study and preparation occupied over
fifteen years, ending with the publication of _Man and Woman_, put forward
as a prolegomenon to the main work which, in the writing and publication,
has occupied the fifteen subsequent years.
It was perhaps fortunate for my peace that I failed at the outset to
foresee all the perils that beset my path. I knew indeed that those who
investigate severely and intimately any subject which men are accustomed
to pass by on the other side lay themselves open to misunderstanding and
even obloquy. But I supposed that a secluded student who approached vital
social problems with precaution, making no direct appeal to the general
public, but only to the public's teachers, and who wrapped up the results
of his inquiries in technically written volumes open to few, I supposed
that such a student was at all events secure from any gross form of attack
on the part of the police or the government under whose protection he
imagined that he lived. That proved to be a mistake. When only one volume
of these _Studies_ had been written and published in England, a
prosecution, instigated by the government, put an end to the sale of that
volume in England, and led me to resolve that the subsequent volumes
should not be published in my own country. I do not complain. I am
grateful for the early and generous sympathy with which my work was
received in Germany and the United States, and I recognize that it has had
a wider circulation, both in English and the other chief languages of the
world, than would have been possible by the modest method of issue which
the government of my own country induced me to abandon. Nor has the effort
to crush my work resulted in any change in that work by so much as a
single word. With help, or without it, I have followed my own path to the
end.
For it so happens that I come on both sides of my house from stocks of
Englishmen who, nearly three hundred years ago, had encountered just these
same difficulties and dangers before. In the seventeenth century, indeed,
the battle was around the problem of religion, as to-day it is around the
problem of sex. Since I have of late years realized this analogy I have
often thought of certain admirable and obscure men who were driven out,
robbed, and persecuted, some by the Church because the spirit of
Puritanism moved within them, some by the Puritans because they clung to
the ideals of the Church, yet both alike quiet and unflinching, both alike
fighting for causes of freedom or of order in a field which has now for
ever been won. That victory has often seemed of good augury to the perhaps
degenerate child of these men who has to-day sought to maintain the causes
of freedom and of order in another field.
It sometimes seems, indeed, a hopeless task to move the pressure of inert
prejudices which are at no point so obstinate as this of sex. It may help
to restore the serenity of our optimism if we would more clearly realize
that in a very few generations all these prejudices will have perished and
be forgotten. He who follows in the steps of Nature after a law that was
not made by man, and is above and beyond man, has time as well as eternity
on his side, and can afford to be both patient and fearless. Men die, but
the ideas they seek to kill live. Our books may be thrown to the flames,
but in the next generation those flames become human souls. The
transformation is effected by the doctor in his consulting room, by the
teacher in the school, the preacher in the pulpit, the journalist in the
press. It is a transformation that is going on, slowly but surely, around
us.
I am well aware that many will not feel able to accept the estimate of the
sexual situation as here set forth, more especially in the final volume.
Some will consider that estimate too conservative, others too
revolutionary. For there are always some who passionately seek to hold
fast to the past; there are always others who passionately seek to snatch
at what they imagine to be the future. But the wise man, standing midway
between both parties and sympathizing with each, knows that we are ever in
the stage of transition. The present is in every age merely the shifting
point at which past and future meet, and we can have no quarrel with
either. There can be no world without traditions; neither can there be any
life without movement. As Heracleitus knew at the outset of modern
philosophy, we cannot bathe twice in the same stream, though, as we know
to-day, the stream still flows in an unending circle. There is never a
moment when the new dawn is not breaking over the earth, and never a
moment when the sunset ceases to die. It is well to greet serenely even
the first glimmer of the dawn when we see it, not hastening towards it
with undue speed, nor leaving the sunset without gratitude for the dying
light that once was dawn.
In the moral world we are ourselves the light-bearers, and the cosmic
process is in us made flesh. For a brief space it is granted to us, if we
will, to enlighten the darkness that surrounds our path. As in the ancient
torch-race, which seemed to Lucretius to be the symbol of all life, we
press forward torch in hand along the course. Soon from behind comes the
runner who will outpace us. All our skill lies in giving into his hand the
living torch, bright and unflickering, as we ourselves disappear in the
darkness.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
INDEX OF AUTHORS.
Abdias
Achery
Acton
Adam, Mme.
Adler, Felix
Adler, O.
Adner
Aguilaniedo
Alebrand
Alexander, Dr. H.
Alexandre, Alcide
Allée, A.
Allen, L.M.
Allen, Mary W.
Ambrose, St.
Amélineau
Ammon
Amram, D.W.
Angela de Fulginio
Angus, H.C.
Anstie
Aquinas
Ardu
Arendt, Henrietta
Aretino
Aristotle
Aronstam
Ascarilla
Aschaffenburg
Astengo
Astor, Mary
Astruc
Athanasius
Athenæus
Audry
Augagneur
Augustine, St.
Aurientis
Ayala
Bacchimont
Bachaumont
Badley, J.H.
Baelz
Baer, K.M.
Baker, Smith
Balestrini
Ballantyne, Dr.
Ballantyne, Miss H.
Balls-Headley
Balzac
Bangs, L.B.
Bartels, Max
Basedow
Basil, St.
Bateson
Baumgarten
Bausset
Bax, Belfort
Bazan, Emilia Pardo
Beadnell, C.M.
Beddoes
Bedollière
Bell, Sanford
Benecke
Benedikt
Bentzon, Mme.
Bérault, G.
Berg, Leo
Bernard, St.
Berry, F.
Bertherand
Bertillon
Besant, Mrs.
Beza
Bierhoff
Birnbaum
Bishop, G.P.
Bishop, Mrs.
Blacker
Blake, William
Blandford
Blaschko
Bloch, Iwan
Bluhm, Agnes
Blumreich
Boccaccio
Bohier
Bois, Jules
Boissier, de Sauvages
Bollinger
Bölsche
Bonger
Bongi, S.
Bonhoeffer
Boniface, St.
Bonnifield
Bonstetten
Booth, C.
Booth, D.S.
Bossi
Bouchacourt
Bougainville
Bourget
Bouvier
Boyle, F.
Brachet
Braun, Lily
Brénier de Montmorand
Brénot, H.
Breuer
Brieux
Brinton
Brouardel
Brougham Lord
Brown, Dr. Charlotte
Bruns, Ivo
Brynmor-Jones
Bucer
Budge, A.W.
Buffon
Bulkley, D.
Büller
Bumm
Bunge
Burchard
Burdach
Buret
Burnet
Burton, Sir R.
Burton, Robert
Busch
Bushee
Butler, G.
Butterfield
Byers
Cabanis
Caird, Mona
Callari
Calvin
Calza
Canudo
Capitaine
Caron
Carpenter, Edward
Casanova
Caspari
Cataneus
Cattell, J. McKeen
Caufeynon
Cazalis
Chaignon
Chambers, E.K.
Chambers, W.G.
Chapman, G.
Chapman, J.
Cheetham
Cheng, Mme.
Cheyne
Child, May
Chotzen, M.
Chrysostom
Cicero
Ciuffo
Clapperton, Miss
Clappier
Clarke
Clement of Alexandria
Clement E.
Cleveland, C.
Clouston
Coates, W.
Codrington, R.W.
Coghlan
Colombey
Coltman
Commenge
Cook, G.W.
Cook, Capt. J.
Cooper, A.
Cope, E.D.
Correa, Roman
Coryat
Crackanthorpe
Cranmer
Crawley, A.E.
Crocker
Curr
Gushing, W.
Cyples
Daniel, F.E.
Dareste
Dargun
Darmesteter, J.
Darricarrère
Darwin
Daudet, A.
D'Aulnoy, Mme.
Daya, W.
Debreyne
D'Enjoy, Paul
Dens
Deodhar, Mrs. Kashibai
Descartes
Despine
Després
Dessoir, Max
Diaz de Isla
Diday
Diderot
Digby, Sir K.
Dill
Dluska, Mme.
Dodd, Catherine
Doléris
Donaldson, Principal
Donnay
Drysdale, C.R.
Drysdale, G.
Duclaux
Dühren, _see_ Bloch, Iwan.
Dufour, P.
Dukes
Dulaure
Dulberg
Dumas, G.
Duncan, Matthews
Dunnett
Dunning
Dupouey
Durkheim
Durlacher
Dyer, I.
Edgar, J. Clifton
Egbert, S.
Ehrenfels, C. von
Elliot, G.F.S.
Ellis, Sir A.B.
Ellis, Havelock
Ellis, William
Elmy, Ben., _see_ Ethelmer, Ellis.
Enderlin, Max
Engelmann
Ennius
Enzensberger
Erb
Erhard, F.
Escherich
Esmein
Espy de Metz
Ethelmer, Ellis
Eulenburg
Evans, Mrs. Grainger
Farnell
Farrer, R.T.
Federow
Ferdy, H.
Féré
Ferrand
Ferrero, G.
Ferriani
Fiaschi
Fiaux
Fielding
Finger
Fischer, W.
Fitchett
Flesch, Max
Flogel
Flood
Forberg
Forel
Fornasari
Fothergill, J.M.
Fouquet
Fournier
Fox, G.
Fracastorus
Fraser, Mrs.
Frazer, J.G.
Freeman
French, H.C.
Freud
Friedjung
Friedländer
Fuchs, N.
Funk, W.
Fürbringer
Fürth, Henriette
Gache
Gaedeken
Gallard
Galton, Sir F.
Gardiner, J.S.
Garrison, C.G.
Gaultier, J. de
Gautier, L.
Geary, N.
Gennep, A. Van
Gérard
Gerhard, Adele
Gerhard, W.
Gerson, A.
Gesell
Gibb, W.T.
Gibbon
Giles, A.E.
Giles, H.A.
Gillard, E.
Gillen
Gilles de la Tourette
Ginnell
Giuffrida-Ruggeri
Glück, L.
Godard
Godfrey, J.A.
Godwin, W.
Goethe
Gomperz
Goncourt
Goodchild, F.M.
Goring
Gottheil
Gottschling
Gourmont, Remy de
Graef, R. de
Graf, A.
Grandin
Green, C.M.
Gregory the Great
Gregory of Nazianzen
Gregory of Nyssa
Gregory of Tours
Gregory M.
Griesinger
Gross
Gross, H.
Grosse
Gulick, L.H.
Gurlitt, L.
Gury
Guttceit
Guyau
Guyot
Gyurkovechky
Haddon, A.C.
Hagelstange
Hale
Hall, A.
Hall, Stanley
Hall, W.
Haller
Hamilton, A.
Hammer
Hammond, W.A.
Hamon, A.
Hard, Hedwig
Hardy, Thomas
Harris, A.
Harrison, F.
Hartland, E.S.
Harwood, W.L.
Haskovec
Haslam, J.
Hausmeister, P.
Havelburg
Hawkesworth
Haycraft
Hayes, P.J.
Haynes, E.S.P.
Hegar
Heidenhain, A.
Heidingsfeld
Heimann
Hellmann
Hellpach
Helme, T.A.
Helvétius
Herbert, Auberon
Herman, G.
Hermant, A.
Herodotus
Heron
Hesiod
Hiller
Hinton
Hirsch, Max
Hirschfeld, Magnus
Hirth, G.
Hobhouse, L.T.
Hobson, J.A.
Hoffmann, E.
Holbach
Holder, A.B.
Holmes, T.
Holt, R.B.
Hopkins, Ellice
Hort
Houzel
Howard, G.B.
Howitt, A.W.
Hudrey-Menos, J.
Hughes, C.H.
Humboldt, W. Von
Hutchinson, Sir J.
Hutchinson, Woods
Hyde, J.N.
Hyrtl
Inderwick
Ivens, F.
Jacobi, Mary P.
Jacobsohn, L.
Janet
Janke
Jastrow, M.
Jeannel
Jellinek, C.
Jentsch, K.
Jerome, H.
John of Salisbury
Jones, Sir W.
Jullien
Kaan
Kalbeck
Karin, Karina
Keller, G.
Kelly, H.A.
Kennedy, Helen
Key, Ellen
Keyes, E.L.
Kiernan
Kind, A.
Kingsley, C.
Kirk, E.B.
Kisch
Klotz
Knott, J.
Kossmann
Kowalewsky, Sophie
Krafft-Ebing
Krauss, F.S.
Krukenberg, Frau
Kubary
Kullberg
Kurella
Lacroix, P.
Lafargue, Paul
La Jeunesse, E.
Lallemand
Lambkin
Lancaster
Landor
Landret
Langsdorf
Lapie
Laplace
Lasco, John à
Lauvergne
Laycock
Lea
Lecky
Lederer
Ledermann
Lee, Sidney
Lefebvre, A.
Legg, J.W.
Lemonnier, C.
Lenkei
Lepage
Letourneux
Lévy-Bruhl
Lewis, Denslow
Lewitt
Leyboff
Lilienthal
Lindsey, B.B.
Lippert
Lischnewska, Maria
Liszt
Livingstone, W.P.
Lock, W.H.
Logan
Lombroso
Löwenfeld
Lowndes
Lucas, Clement
Lucretius
Lumholtz
Luther
Lydston
Lyttelton, E.
Maberly, G.C.
MacMurchy, Dr. Helen
Macvie
Madam, M.
Maeterlinck
Magruder, J.
Maillard-Brune
Maine
Maitland
Malthus
Mandeville, B.
Mannhardt
Mantegazza, A.
Mantegazza, P.
Marçais
Marchesini
Marcuse, J.
Marcuse, M.
Margueritte, P.
Margueritte, V.
Marholm, L.
Marro
Martindale, Miss
Martineau
Marx, V.
Massalongo
Masson
Mathews, A.
Mathews, R.H.
Matignon
Maudsley
Maurice, General
Mayor
Mayreder, Rosa
McBride, G.H.
McCleary, G.F.
McIlquham
Melancthon
Menger, A. von
Menjago
Mensinga
Meredith, G.
Mérimée
Merrick
Metchnikoff
Meyer-Benfey, H.
Meyer, Bruno
Meyer, E.H.
Meyrick
Michelet
Michels, R.
Migne
Mill, J.
Mill, J.S.
Millais, J.G.
Miller, Noyes
Miln, L.J.
Milner
Milton
Möbius
Molinari, G. de
Moll
Mönkemöller
Montaigne
Montesquieu
Montmorency
Mookerji
Moore, Samson
Morasso
More, Sir T.
Moreau, Christophe
Morley, Lord
Morley, Margaret
Morris, William
Morrow
Mortimer, G.
Moryson, Fynes
Mott, F.W.
Multatuli
Münsterberg
Murray, Gilbert
Mylott
Näcke
Naumann, F.
Nefzaoui
Neisser
Neugebauer
Newman, G.
Newsholme, A.
Niessen, Max von
Nietzold
Nietzsche
Niven
Noble, M.
Noggerath
Northcote, Rev. H.
Notthaft
Noyes, J.H.
Nyström
Obersteiner
Obici
Odo of Cluny
Oefele
Okamura
Olberg, Oda
Omer, Haleby
Ostwald, H.
Ott
Ovid
Owen, R.D.
Paget, Sir J.
Palladius
Pappritz, Anna
Parent-Duchâtelet
Paré
Parsons, E.C.
Parsons, J.
Patmore, C.
Paton, Noel
Paul, Dr. H.
Paulucci de Calboli
Paulus
Pearson, K.
Péchin
Pepys
Pernet
Perruc
Perry-Coste
Petermann, J.
Petrie, Flinders
Picard
Pike
Pinard
Pinkus
Pinloche
Place, Francis
Plato
Plarr, V.
Plautus
Playfair, Sir W.S.
Ploss
Plutarch
Pole, M.T.
Pollack, Flora
Pollock, Sir F.
Potter, M.A.
Potton
Power, D'Arcy
Powys
Prat
Price, J.
Prevost, M.
Prinzing
Probst-Biraben
Proksch
Pudor
Punnett
Pyke, Rafford
Querlon, Meusnier de
Quirós, C. Bernaldo de
Rabelais
Rabutaux
Raciborski
Radbruch
Ramdohr
Ramsay, Sir W.M.
Rasmussen
Ratramnus
Redlich
Reed, C.
Régnier, H. de
Reibmayr
Reinhard
Remo, P.
Remondino
Renan
Renooz, Céline
Renouf, C.
Renouvier
Restif de la Bretonne
Reuss
Reuther, F.
Revillout
Rhys, Sir J.
Ribbing
Ribot
Rich, H.
Richard, C.
Richard, E.
Richmond, Mrs. Ennis
Ritter, Dr. Mary
Robert, U.
Robertson, W.
Robinovitch, L.
Rogers, Anna
Rohde
Rohleder
Rolfincius
Rosenberg
Rosenthal
Rousseau
Routh
Rudeck
Rufinus Tyrannius
Ruggles, W.
Rüling, Anna
Ruskin
Russell, Mrs. Bertrand
Rust, H.
Rutgers
Ryan, M.
Ryckère, E. de
Sabine, J.K.
Sacher-Masoch, Wanda von
Sainte-Beuve
Saleeby
Salimbene
Salvat
Sanborn, Lura
Sanchez, T.
Sandoz, F.
Sanger
Sarraute-Lourié, Mme.
Schäfenacker
Schaudinn
Schlegel, F.
Schmid, Marie von
Schmidt, R.
Schneider, C.K.
Schopenhauer
Schrader, O.
Schrank
Schreiber, Adele
Schreiner, Olive
Schrempf
Schrenck-Notzing
Schroeder, E.A.
Schroeder, T.
Schultz, Alwyn
Schultze-Malkowsky, E.
Schurig
Schurtz, H.
Schwalbe
Scott, Colin
Scott, J.F.
Ségur
Seligmann
Sellman, W.A.B.
Sénancour
Seneca
Séropian
Sévigné, Mme. de
Seymour, H.J.
Shakespeare
Shaw, G.B.
Shebbeare, Rev. C.J.
Shelley
Sherwell
Shufeldt
Sidgwick, H.
Sidis, Boris
Sieroshevski
Simmel
Simon, Helene
Sinclair, Sir W.
Smith, Robertson
Soalhat
Somerset, Lady Henry
Sommer, R.
Soranus
Spencer, Baldwin
Spencer, Herbert
Spitta
Stanmore, Lord
Stefanowski
Stefánsson
Stevenson, R.L.
Stevenson, T.H.C.
Stöcker, Helene
Strampff
Stratz, C.H.
Streitberg, Gräfin
Ströhmberg
Sturge, Miss
Suidas
Sullivan, W.C.
Sumner, W.G.
Susruta
Sutherland, J.F.
Sutherland, W.D.
Sykes, J.F.J.
Tait, W.
Talbot, E.S.
Tammeo
Tarde
Tarnowsky, Pauline
Taylor, R.W.
Tenney
Tennyson
Terman, L.M.
Tertullian
Theresa, W.
Thomas, A.W.
Thomas, N.W.
Thomas, Prof. W.
Thomson, J.A.
Thoreau
Thuasne
Tilt
Tobler
Todhunter
Tolstoy
Tout, C. Hill
Traill
Tredgold
Trewby
Troll-Borostyáni I. von
Trollope, A.
Turnbull
Ulpian
Ungewitter
Unna
Urquhart
Vacher de Lapouge
Valentino
Valera
Vanderkiste
Varendonck
Vatsyayana
Vaux, Rev. J.E.
Velden, Van den
Velten
Venette
Veniero
Vickery, A. Drysdale
Vinay
Vinci, L. de
Vines, Miss
Virchow
Vitrey
Voltaire
Vries, de
Wächter
Wagner, C.
Wahrmund
Wales, E.B.
Walter, J. von
Ward, Lester
Wardlaw, R.
Warker, Van de
Warren, M.A.
Wasserschleben
Watkins
Webb, Sidney
Weinberg
Weininger
Welander
Welch, F.H.
Wells, H.G.
Werthauer
Wessmann
Westermarck
Wharton
Wheeler, C.B.
Wheeler, Mrs.
Whitaker, Nellie C.
Whitman, Walt
Wiedow
Wilcox, Ella W.
Wilhelm
William of Malmsbury
Williams, Dawson
Williams, Hugh
Williams, W. Roger
Windle, C.A.
Wollstonecraft, M.
Yule, G. Adney
Zacchia
Zache
Zanzinger, E.
Zeno
Zoroaster
Zuccarelli
INDEX OF SUBJECTS.
Abortion,
arguments against
modern advocates of
the practice of
Abstinence,
alleged evil results of
alleged good results of
as a preparation for marriage
criticism of conception of
intermediate views of
moral results of
sexual, in relation to chastity
the problems of
Abyssinia,
prostitution in
sexual initiation in
Achilleus and Nereus,
legend of
Adultery
Africa,
chastity on West Coast of
Alcohol,
as a sexual stimulant
in pregnancy
in relation to the orgy
Alexander VI and courtesans
Ambil anak Marriage
America,
divorce in
marriage in
prostitution in
American Indians,
appreciate asceticism
sexual initiation among
their Sabbath orgies
words for love among
Aphrodite Pandemos
Art in relation to sexual impulse
Asceticism among early Christians
appreciated by savages
definition of
in religion
later degeneracy of
value of
Ascetics,
attitude towards sex of mediæval
Aspasia
Athletics for women
Aucassin et Nicolette
Australia,
marriage system in
saturnalian festivals in
sexual initiation in
Auvergne,
story of the Two Lovers of
Azimba Land,
sexual initiation in
Babies,
children's theories on the origin of
Babylonia,
high status of women in
religious prostitution in
Bawenda,
sexual initiation among
Beena marriage
Beethoven
Behn, Aphra
Belgium,
prostitution in
Bestial,
human sexual impulse not
Bible in relation to sexual education
Biometrics
Birth,
civilized tendency to premature
Birthrate,
decline of
Blindness in relation to gonorrhoea
Botany in sexual education
Bredalbane case
Breed _versus_ nurture
Bride-price
Brothel,
decay of
in ancient Rome
in the East
mediæval
modern defence of
modern regulation of
origin of
Bundling
Burmah,
prostitution in
Canon law,
defects of
its importance
origin of
persistence of its traditions
sound kernel of
Carlyle
Carnival,
origin of
Castration,
modern developments of
the practice of
Chastity among early Christians
definition of
girdle of
in modern Fiji
in what sense a virtue
modern attitude towards
Protestant attitude towards
romantic literature of
the function of
Child,
as foundation of marriage
characteristics of eldest born
its need of two parents
Childhood,
sexual activity in
sexual teaching in
China,
divorce in
prostitution in
Chivalry on position of women,
influence of
Christianity,
attitude towards chastity
attitude towards lust
attitude towards nakedness
failed to recognize importance of art of love
its influence on position of women
on marriage
mixed attitude towards sexual impulse
towards prostitution
towards seduction
Civilization and prostitution
and the sexual impulse
Coitus,
_a posteriori_
best time for
during pregnancy
ethnic variations in
excess in
injuries due to unskilful
_interruptus_
morbid horror of
needs to be taught
prayer before
proper frequency of
religious significance of
_reservatus_
Collusion,
doctrine of
Conception,
conditions of
prevention of
Concubine
Condom
Conjugal rights or rites
Consent,
age of
Consultation de Nourrisson
Contract,
marriage as a
Corinth,
prostitution at
Country life and sexuality
Courtesan,
origin of term
Courtship,
the art of
Criminality in relation to prostitution
Cyprus,
prostitution at
Dancing,
hygienic value of
as an orgy
D'Aragona, Tullia
Divorce,
by mutual consent
causes for
in ancient Rome
in ancient Wales
in China
in England
in France
in Germany
in Japan
in Russia
in Switzerland
in United States
Milton's views on
modern tendency of
Protestant attitude towards
question of damages for
reform of
tendency of legislation regarding
transmission of venereal disease as a cause for
Drama,
modern function of the
Dysmenorrhoea
Economic factor,
of marriage
of prostitution
Education in matters of sex
for women
Egypt,
high status of women in
Eldest born child,
characteristics of
England,
marriage in
prostitution in
Erotic element in marriage
Eskimo,
divorce among
sexual initiation among
Eugenics
false ideas of
foundation by Galton
importance of environment in relation to
in relation to castration
Noyes a pioneer in
positive
wide acceptance of principle of
Excretory centers as affecting estimate of sexual impulse
Exogamy,
origin of
Families and degeneracy,
large
Father in relation to family
Fecundation,
artificial
Festivals,
seasonal
Fidus
Fiji,
chastity in
Flirtation
Fools, Feast of
Fornication,
theological doctrine of
France,
divorce in
prostitution in
Franco, Veronica
Gallantry,
the ancient conception of
Geisha, the
General paralysis and syphilis
Genius,
in relation to chastity
in relation to love
Germany,
divorce in
marriage in
prostitution in
Gestation,
length of
Girdle of chastity
Girls,
interest in sex matters
masculine ideals of
Girls,
sex education of
their need of sexual knowledge
Gnostic elements in early Christian literature
Goddesses in forefront of primitive pantheons
Gonorrhoea,
nature and results of
_And see_ Venereal Diseases.
Goutte de Lait
Greeks,
origin of their drama
prudery among
rarity of ideal sexual love among
their attitude towards nakedness
their conception of the orgy
their erotic writings
Group-marriage
Gynæcocracy,
alleged primitive
Hetairæ
Hindu attitude towards sex
Holland,
prostitution in
Homosexuality among prostitutes
Huddersfield scheme
Hysteria
Ideals of girls,
masculine
Illegitimacy
in Germany
Imperia
Impotency in popular estimation
Impurity,
disastrous results of teaching feminine
early Christian views of
India,
story of The Betrothed of
sacred prostitution in
Individualism and Socialism
Infantile mortality
in relation to suckling by mother
in relation to syphilis
Infantile sexuality
Insanity and prostitution
Intellectual work in relation to sexual activity in men
in women
Ireland,
divorce in
high status of women in ancient
Italy,
prostitution in
Jamaica,
results of free sexual unions in
Japan,
attitude towards love in
automatic legitimation of children in
divorce in
prostitution in
Jealousy
Jesus
Jews,
as parents
prostitution among ancient
status of women among
Judas Thomas's Acts
Kadishtu
Kant
Korea,
prostitution in
Lactation
Lectures on sexual hygiene
Lenclos, Ninon de
Love an essential part of marriage
art of
definition of
difficulties of art of
for more than one person
future development of
how far an illusion
in childhood
in relation to chastity
inevitable mystery of
its value for life
testimonies to immense importance of
Lust,
in relation to love
theological conception of
Lydian prostitution
Mahommedanism and prostitution
and sanctity of sex
its regard for chastity
Male continence
Malthus
Mammary activity in infancy
Manuals of sexual hygiene
Maoris,
results of loss of old faith among
Marriage,
advantages of early
ambil anak
and prostitution
as a contract
as a fact
as a sacrament
as an ethical sacrament
beena
by capture
certificates for
criticism of
evolution of
for a term of years
from legal point of view
in early Christian times
in old English law
in relation to eugenics
in relation to morals
in Rome
independent of forms
inferior forms of
love as a factor of
modern tendencies in regard to
objections to early
objects of
procreation as a factor of
Protestant attitude towards
trial
variations in order of
Masturbation among prostitutes
anxiety of boys about
in relation to sexual abstinence
Matriarchy,
alleged primitive
Matrilineal descent
Mendelism
Mendes,
the rite at
Menstruation,
brought on by sexual excitement
coitus during
hygiene of
instruction regarding
Missionaries' attempt to impose European customs
Modesty consistent with nakedness
Monogamy
Montanist element in early Christian literature
Morality,
meaning of the term
Motherhood,
early age of
endowment of
Mothers,
duty to instruct daughters
duty to suckle infant
responsibility for their own procreative acts
schools for
the sexual teachers of children
Mylitta,
prostitution at temple of
Mystery in matters of sex, evil of
Nakedness,
an alleged sexual stimulant
as a prime tonic of life
consistent with modesty
educational value of
hygienic value of
in literature and art
in mediæval Europe
in relation to sexual education
its moral value
its spiritual value
modern attitude towards
Neo-Malthusianism
Neurasthenia,
sexual
Newton
New Zealand,
result of decay of _tapu_ in
sexual freedom in ancient
Night-courtship customs
Notification of Births Act
venereal diseases
Nurture _versus_ breed
Nutrition compared to reproduction
Obscenity,
early Christian views of
Orgy,
among savages
in classic times
in mediæval Christianity
its religious origin
modern need of
Oneida Community
Ouled-Nail prostitution
Ovarian irritation
Ovid
Penitentials, the
Physician,
alleged duty to prescribe sexual intercourse
as a social reformer
his place in sexual hygiene
Platonic friendship
Poetry in relation to sexual impulse
Polygamy
Precocity,
sexual
Pregnancy,
among primitive peoples
coitus during
early
hygiene of
Premature birth
Procreation,
best age for
best season for
control of
its place in marriage
methods of control of
the science of
Promiscuity,
theory of primitive
Prostitutes,
as artists
as guardians of the home
at the Renaissance
attitudes towards bully
in Austria
in classic times
in France
in Italy
injustice of social attitude towards
number of servants who become
psychic and physical characteristics
tendency to homosexuality
their motives for adopting avocation
their sexual temperament
under Christianity
Prostitution,
among savages
as affected by Christianity
as an equivalent of criminality
causes of
civilizational value of
decay of State regulation of
definition of
economic factor of
essentially unsatisfactory nature of
in modern times
in relation to marriage
in the East
moral justification of
need for humanizing
on the stage
origin and development of
present social attitude towards
regulation of
religious
rise of secular
to acquire marriage portion
Protestantism,
attitude towards prostitution
Prudery in ancient times
Puberty,
initiation at, among savages
sexual education at
sexual hygiene at
Puericulture
Puritans,
attitude towards unchastity
towards marriage
Quaker conception of marriage
Rape,
cannot be committed by husband on wife
wedding night often a
Religious prostitution
Renaissance,
prostitutes at the
Reproduction compared to nutrition
Responsibility in matters of sex,
personal
Rest,
during pregnancy, importance of
during menstruation
Ring,
origin of wedding
Robert of Arbrissel
Romantic literature of chastity
love, late origin of
Rome,
attitude towards nakedness in ancient
conception of the orgy in
marriage in
prostitution in
status of women in
Russia,
divorce in
sexual freedom in
Sabbath orgy
Sacrament,
marriage as a
Sacred prostitution
Sale-marriage
Savages,
prostitution among
rarity of love among
sexual education among
Scandinavian method of dealing with venereal diseases
School,
its place in sexual education
Schools for mothers
Seduction,
early Church's attitude towards
Servants frequently become prostitutes
Sexual abstinence
Sexual anæsthesia,
a cause of
Sexual education
among savages
and coitus
and nakedness
Sexual hygiene and art
and literature
and religion
at puberty
at school
in childhood
in relation to sexual abstinence
Sexual innocence,
value of
Sexual morality
Sexual neurasthenia
Sexual physiology in education
Sexual precocity
Shakespeare in relation to sexual education
Slavs,
sexual freedom among
Socialism and individualism
Spain,
prostitution in
Stage,
prostitution on the
State,
its interest in children
nurseries
Sterility in relation to gonorrhoea
Stirpiculture
causes of
Stork legend of origin of babies
Suckling in relation to puericulture
Swahili,
sexual education among
Switzerland,
divorce in
prostitution in
Syphilis,
its prevalence
nature and results of
of the innocent
questions of the origin of
_And see_ Venereal Diseases.
Tahiti,
chastity and unchastity in old
Teachers and sexual hygiene
Teutonic custom,
influence on position of women
influence on marriage
Theatre,
as a beneficial form of the orgy
early Christian attitude towards
Thekla,
legend of
Town life and sexuality
Trappists,
régime of
Trent, Council of
Trial-marriage
Urban life and sexuality
Uterine fibroids
Vaginismus
Vasectomy
Venereal diseases,
conquest of the
free treatment of
need of enlightenment concerning
notification of
personal responsibility for
punishment for transmission of
Venice,
prostitution in
Virgin,
intercourse with as a cure for syphilis
original meaning of the term
Virginity,
why valued
Wagner's music dramas
Wales,
divorce in ancient
White slavery
Wife-purchase among ancient Germans
in modern times
Woman movement
Women,
alleged tendency to dissimulation
among the Jews
and sexual abstinence
erotic characteristics of
ignorance of art of love
in Arabia
in Babylonia
in Egypt
in modern Europe
in relation to divorce
in relation to free sexual unions
in Rome
inequality before the law
moral equality with men
must not be compulsory mothers
not attracted to innocent men
position as affected by Teutonic custom
procreative age of
their high status in ancient Ireland
their need of economic independence
their need of personal responsibility
their need of sexual knowledge
understand love better than men
Yakuts,
attitude towards virginity
Yuman Indians,
sexual initiation among
Zoölogy and sexual education
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