[12] We see just the same formulas in the fifteenth century letters of the Stonor family (Stonor Letters and Papers, Camden Society), though in these letters we seem often to find a lighter and more playful touch than was common among the Pastons. I may refer here to Dr. Powell's learned and well written book (with which I was not acquainted when I wrote this chapter), English Domestic Relations 1487-1653 (Columbia University Press).
If we turn to France the relation of the wife to her husband was the same, or even more definitely dependent, for he occupied the place of father to her as well as of husband and sovereign, in this respect carrying on a tradition of Roman Law. She was her husband's "wife and subject"; she signed herself "Vostre humble obéissante fille et amye." If also we turn to the Book of the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry in Anjou, written at the end of the fourteenth century, we find a picture of the relations of women to men in marriage comparable to that presented in the Paston Letters, though of a different order. This book was, as we know, written for the instruction of his daughters by a Knight who seems to have been a fairly average man of his time in his beliefs, and in character, as he has been described, probably above it, "a man of the world, a Christian, a parent, and a gentleman." His book is full of interesting light on the customs and manners of his day, though it is mainly a picture of what the writer thought ought to be rather than what always was. Herein the Knight is sagacious and moderate, much of his advice is admirably sound for every age. He is less concerned with affirming the authority of husbands than with assuring the happiness and well-being of his dearly loved daughters. But he clearly finds this bound up with the recognition of the authority of the husband, and the demands he makes are fairly concordant with the relationships we see established among the Pastons. The Knight abounds in illustrations, from Lot's daughters down to his own time, for the example or the warning of his daughters. The ideal he holds up to them is strictly domestic and in a sense conventional. He puts the matter on practical rather than religious or legal grounds, and his fundamental assumption is "that no woman ought ever to thwart or refuse to obey the ordinance of her lord; that is, if she is either desirous to be mistress of his affections or to have peace and understanding in the house. For very evident reasons submission should begin on her part." One would like to know what duties the Knight inculcated on husbands, but the corresponding book he wrote for the guidance of his sons appears no longer to be extant.
On the whole, the fundamental traditions of our western world concerning the duties of husbands and wives are well summed up in what Pollock and Maitland term "that curious cabinet of antiquities, the marriage ritual of the English Church." Here we find that the husband promises to love and cherish the wife, but she promises not only to love and cherish but also to obey him, though, it may be noted, this point was not introduced into English marriage rites until the fourteenth century, when the wife promised to be "buxom" (which then meant submissive) and "bonair" (courteous and kind), while in some French and Spanish rites it has never been introduced at all. But we may take it to be generally implied. In the final address to the married couple the priest admonishes the bride that the husband is the head of the wife, and that her part is submission. In some more ancient and local rituals this point was further driven home, and on the delivery of the ring the bride knelt and kissed the bridegroom's right foot. In course of time this was modified, at all events in France, and she simply dropped the ring, so that her motion of stooping was regarded as for the purpose of picking it up. I note that change for it is significant of the ways in which we modify the traditions of the past, not quite abandoning them but pretending that they have other than the fundamental original motives. We see just the same thing in the use of the ring, which was in the first place a part of the bride-price, frequently accompanied by money, proof that the wife had been duly purchased. It was thus made easy to regard the ring as really a golden fetter. That idea soon became offensive, and the new idea was originated that the ring was a pledge of affection; thus, quite early in some countries, the husband, also wore a wedding ring.
The marriage order illustrated by the Paston Letters and the Book of the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry before the Reformation, and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer afterwards, has never been definitely broken; it is a part of our living tradition to-day. But during recent centuries it has been overlaid by the growth of new fashions and sentiments which have softened its hard outlines to the view. It has been disguised, notably during the eighteenth century, by the development of a new feeling of social equality, chiefly initiated in France, which, in an atmosphere of public intercourse largely regulated by women, made the ostentatious assertion of the husband's headship over his wife displeasing and even ridiculous. Then, especially in the nineteenth century, there began another movement, chiefly initiated in England and carried further in America, which affected the foundations of the husband's position from beneath. This movement consisted in a great number of legislative measures and judicial pronouncements and administrative orders—each small in itself and never co-ordinated—which taken altogether have had a cumulative effect in immensely increasing the rights of the wife independently of her husband or even in opposition to him. Thus at the present time the husband's authority has been overlaid by new social conventions from above and undermined by new legal regulations from below.
Yet, it is important to realise, although the husband's domestic throne has been in appearance elegantly re-covered and in substance has become worm-eaten, it still stands and still retains its ancient shape and structure. There has never been a French Revolution in the home, and that Revolution itself, which modified society so extensively, scarcely modified the legal supremacy of the husband at all, even in France under the Code Napoléon and still less anywhere else. Interwoven with all the new developments, and however less obtrusive it may have become, the old tradition still continues among us. Since, also, the husband is, conventionally and in large measure really, the economic support of the home,—the work of the wife and even actual financial contributions brought by her not being supposed to affect that convention,—this state of things is held to be justified.
Thus when a man enters the home as a husband, to seat himself on the antique domestic throne and to play the part assigned to him of old, he is involuntarily, even unconsciously, following an ancient tradition and taking his place in a procession of husbands which began long ages before he was born. It thus comes about that a man, even after he is married, and a husband are two different persons, so that his wife who mainly knows him as a husband may be unable to form any just idea of what he is like as a man. As a husband he has stepped out of the path that belongs to him in the world, and taken on another part which has called out altogether different reactions, so he is sometimes a much more admirable person in one of these spheres—whichever it may be—than in the other.
We must not be surprised if the husband's position has sometimes developed those qualities which from the modern point of view are the less admirable. In this respect the sovereign husband resembles the Sovereign State. The Sovereign State, as it has survived from Renaissance days in our modern world, may be made up of admirable people, yet as a State they are forced into an attitude of helpless egoism which nowadays fails to commend itself to the outside world, and the tendency of scientific jurists to-day is to deal very critically with the old conception of the Sovereign State. It is so with the husband in the home. He was thrust by ancient tradition into a position of sovereignty which impelled him to play a part of helpless egoism. He was a celestial body in the home around which all the other inmates were revolving satellites. The hours of rising and retiring, the times of meals and their nature and substance, all the activities of the household—in which he himself takes little or no part—are still arranged primarily to suit his work, his play, and his tastes. This is an accepted matter of course, and not the result of any violent self-assertion on his part. It is equally an accepted matter of course that the wife should be constantly occupied in keeping this little solar system in easy harmonious movement, evolving from it, if she has the skill, the music of the spheres. She has no recognised independent personality of her own, nor even any right to go away by herself for a little change and recreation. Any work of her own, play of her own, tastes of her own, must be strictly subordinated, if not suppressed altogether.
In the old days, from which our domestic traditions proceed, little hardship was thus inflicted on the wife. Her rights and privileges were, indeed, far less than those of the modern woman, but for that very reason the home offered her a larger field; beneath the shelter of her husband the irresponsible wife might exert a maximum of influential activity with a minimum of rights and privileges of her own. To many men, even to-day, that state of things seems the realisation of an ideal.
Yet to women it seems increasingly less so, and of necessity since the cleavage between the position of woman in society and law, and the position of the wife in the sacramental bonds of wedlock, is daily becoming greater. To-day a woman, who possibly for ten years has been leading her own life of independent work, earning her own living, choosing her own conditions in accordance with her own needs, and selecting her own periods of recreation in accordance with her own tastes, whether or not this may have included the society of a man-friend—such a woman suddenly finds on marriage, and without any assertion of authority on her husband's part, that all the outward circumstances of her life are reversed and all her inner spontaneous movements arrested. There may be no signs of this on the surface of her conduct. She loves her husband too much to wish to hurt his feelings by explaining the situation, and she values domestic peace too much to risk friction by making unexpected claims. But beneath the surface there is often a profound discontent, and even in women who thought they had gained an insight into life, a sense of disillusion. Everyone knows this who is privileged to catch a glimpse into the hearts of women—often women of most distinguished intelligence as well as women of quite ordinary nature—who leave a life of spontaneous activity in the world to enter the home.[13]
[13] While this condition of things is sometimes to be found in the more distinguished minority and in well-to-do families, it is, of course, among the great labouring majority that it is most conspicuous. Mrs. Will Crooks, of Poplar, speaking to a newspaper reporter (Daily Chronicle, 17 Feb., 1919), truly remarked: "At present the average married woman's working day is a flagrant contradiction of all trade-union ideals. The poor thing is slaving all the time! What she needs—what she longs for—is just a little break or change now and again, an opportunity to get her mind off her work and its worries. If her husband's hours are reduced to eight, well that gives her a chance, doesn't it? The home and the children are, after all, as much his as hers. With his enlarged leisure he will now be able to take a fair share in home duties. I suggest that they take it turn and turn about—one night he goes out and she looks after the house and the children; the next night she goes out and he takes charge of things at home. She can sometimes go to the cinema, sometimes call on friends. Then, say once a week, they can both go out together, taking the children with them. That will be a little change and treat for everybody."
It is not to be supposed that in this presentation of the situation in the home, as it is to-day visible to those who are privileged to see beneath the surface, any accusation is brought against the husband. He is no more guilty of an unreasonable conservatism than the wife is guilty of an unreasonable radicalism. Each of them is the outcome of a tradition. The point is that the events of the past hundred years have produced a discrepancy in the two lines of tradition, with a resultant lack of harmony, independent of the goodwill of either husband or wife.
Olive Schreiner, in her Woman and Labour, has eloquently set forth the tendency to parasitism which civilisation produces in women; they no longer exercise the arts and industries which were theirs in former ages, and so they become economically dependent on men, losing their energies and aptitudes, and becoming like those dull parasitic animals which live as blood-suckers of their host. That picture, which was of course never true of all women, is now ceasing to be true of any but a negligible minority; it presents, moreover, a parasitism limited to the economic side of life. For if the wife has often been a lazy gold-sucking parasite on her husband in the world, the husband has yet oftener been a helpless service-absorbing parasite on his wife in the home. There is, that is to say, not only an economic parasitism, with no adequate return for financial support, but a still more prevalent domestic parasitism, with an absorption of services for which no return would be adequate. There are many helpful husbands in the home, but there are a larger number who are helpless and have never been trained to be anything else but helpless, even by their wives, who would often detest a rival in household work and management. The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation that make it enjoyable. He cannot keep it in order and cleanliness and regulated movement, he seldom knows how to buy the things that are needed for its upkeep, nor how to prepare and cook and present a decent meal; he cannot even attend to his own domestic needs. It is the wife's consolation that most husbands are not always at home.
"In ministering to the wants of the family, the woman has reduced man to a state of considerable dependency on her in all domestic affairs, just as she is dependent on him for bodily protection. In the course of ages this has gone so far as to foster a peculiar helplessness on the part of the man, which manifests itself in a somewhat childlike reliance of the husband on the wife. In fact it may be said that the husband is, to all intents and purposes, incapable of maintaining himself without the aid of a woman." This passage will probably seem to many readers to apply quite fairly well to men as they exist to-day in most of those lands which we consider at the summit of our civilisation. Yet it was not written of civilisation, or of white men, but of the Bantu tribes of East Africa,[14] complete Negroes who, while far from being among the lowest savages, belong to a culture which is only just emerging from cannibalism, witchcraft, and customary bloodshed. So close a resemblance between the European husband and the Negro husband significantly suggests how remarkable has been the arrest of development in the husband's customary status during a vast period of the world's history.
[14] Hon. C. Dundas, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, Vol. 45, 1915, p. 302.
It is in the considerable group of couples where the husband's work separates him but little from the home that the pressure on the wife is most severe, and without the relief and variety secured by his frequent absence. She has perhaps led a life of her own before marriage, she knows how to be economically independent; now they occupy a small dwelling, they have, maybe, one or two small children, they can only afford one helper in the work or none at all, and in this busy little hive the husband and wife are constantly tumbling over each other. It is small wonder if the wife feels a deep discontent beneath her willing ministrations and misses the devotion of the lover in the perpetual claims of the husband.
But the difficulty is not settled if she persuades him to take a room outside. He is devoted to his wife and his home, with good reason, for the wife makes the home and he is incapable of making a home. His new domestic arrangements sink into careless and sordid disorder, and he is conscious of profound discomfort. His wife soon realises that it is a choice between his return to the home and complete separation. Most wives never get even as far as this attempt at solution of the difficulty and hide their secret discontent.
This is the situation which to-day is becoming intensified and extended on a vast scale. The habit and the taste for freedom, adventure, and economic independence is becoming generated among millions of women who once meekly trod the ancient beaten paths, and we must not be so foolish as to suppose that they can suddenly renounce those habits and tastes at the threshold of marriage. Moreover, it is becoming clear to men and to women alike, and for the first time, that the world can be remoulded, and that the claims for better conditions of work, for a higher standard of life, and for the attainment of leisure, which previously had only feebly been put forward, may now be asserted drastically. We see therefore to-day a great revolutionary movement, mainly on the part of men in the world of Labour, and we see a corresponding movement, however less ostentatious, mainly on the part of women, in the world of the Home.
It may seem to some that this new movement of upheaval in the sphere of the Home is merely destructive. Timid souls have felt the like in every period of transition, and with as little reason. Just as we realise that the movement now in progress in the world of Labour for a higher standard of life and for, as it has been termed, a larger "leisure-ration," represents a wholesome revolt against the crushing conditions of prolonged monotonous work—the most deadening of all work—and a real advance towards those ideals of democracy which are still so remote, so it is with the movement in the Home. That also is the claim for a new and fairer allotment of responsibility, of larger opportunities for freedom and leisure. If in the home the husband is still to be regarded as the capitalist and the wife as the labourer, then at all events it has to be recognised that he owes her not only the satisfaction of her physical needs of food and shelter and clothing, but the opportunity to satisfy the personal spontaneous claims of her own individual nature. Just as the readjustment of Labour is really only an approach to the long recognised ideals of Democracy, so the readjustment of the Home, far from being subversive or revolutionary, is merely an approximation to the long recognised ideals of marriage.
How in practice, one may finally ask, is this readjustment of the home likely to be carried out?
In the first place we are justified in believing that in the future home men will no longer be so helpless, so domestically parasitic, as in the past. This change is indeed already coming about. It is an inestimable benefit throughout life for a man to have been forcibly lifted out of the routine comforts and feminine services of the old-fashioned home and to be thrown into an alien and solitary environment, face to face with Nature and the essential domestic human needs (in my own case I owe an inestimable debt to the chance that thus flung me into the Australian bush in early life), and one may note that the Great War has had, directly and indirectly, a remarkable influence in this direction, for it not only compelled women to exercise many enlarging and fortifying functions commonly counted as pertaining to men, it also compelled men, deprived of accustomed feminine services, to develop a new independent ability for organising domesticity, and that ability, even though it is not permanently exercised in rendering domestic services, must yet always make clear the nature of domestic problems and tend to prevent the demand for unnecessary domestic services.
But there is another quite different and more general line along which we may expect this problem to be largely solved. That is by the simplification and organisation of domestic life. If that process were carried to the full extent that is now becoming possible a large part of the problem before us would be at once solved. A great promise for the future of domestic life is held out by the growing adoption of birth-control, by which the wife and mother is relieved from that burden of unduly frequent and unwanted maternity which in the past so often crushed her vitality and destroyed her freshness. But many minor agencies are helpful. To supply heat, light, and motive power even to small households, to replace the wasteful, extravagant, and often inefficient home-cookery by meals cooked outside, as well as to facilitate the growing social habit of taking meals in spacious public restaurants, under more attractive, economical, and wholesome conditions than can usually be secured within the narrow confines of the home, to contract with specially trained workers from outside for all those routines of domestic drudgery which are often so inefficiently and laboriously carried on by the household-worker, whether mistress or servant, and to seek perpetually by new devices to simplify, which often means to beautify, all the everyday processes of life—to effect this in any comprehensive degree is to transform the home from the intolerable burden it is sometimes felt to be into a possible haven of peace and joy.[15] The trouble in the past, and even to-day, has been, not in any difficulty in providing the facilities but in prevailing people to adopt them. Thus in England, even under the stress of the Great War, there was among the working population a considerable disinclination—founded on stupid conservatism and a meaningless pride—to take advantage of National Kitchens and National Restaurants, notwithstanding the superiority of the meals in quality, cheapness, and convenience, to the workers' home meals, so that many of these establishments, even while still fostered by the Government, had speedily to close their doors. Ancient traditions, that have now become not only empty but mischievous, in these matters still fetter the wife even more than the husband. We cannot regulate even the material side of life without cultivating that intelligence in the development of which civilisation so largely consists.
[15] This aspect of the future of domesticity was often set forth by Mrs. Havelock Ellis, The New Horizon in Love and Life, 1921.
Intelligence, and even something more than intelligence, is needed along the third line of progress towards the modernised home. Simplification and organisation can effect nothing in the desired transformation if they merely end in themselves. They are only helpful in so far as they economise energy, offer a more ample leisure, and extend the opportunities for that play of the intellect, that liberation of the emotions with accompanying discipline of the primitive instincts, which are needed not only for the development of civilisation in general, but in particular of the home. Domineering egotism, the assertion of greedy possessive rights, are out of place in the modern home. They are just as mischievous when exhibited by the wife as by the husband. We have seen, as we look back, the futility in the end of the ancient structure of the home, however reasonable it was at the beginning, under our different modern social conditions, and for women to attempt nowadays to reintroduce the same structure, merely reversed would be not only mischievous but silly. That spirit of narrow exclusiveness and self centred egoism—even if it were sometimes an égoisme à deux—evoked, half a century ago, the scathing sarcasm of James Hinton, who never wearied of denouncing the "virtuous and happy homes" which he saw as "floating blotches of verdure on a sea of filth." Such outbursts seem extravagant, but they were the extravagance of an idealist at the vision which, as a physician in touch with realities, he had, seen beneath the surface of the home.
It is well to insist on the organisation of the mechanical and material side of life. Some leaders of women movements feel this so strongly that they insist on nothing else. In old days it was conventionally supposed that women's sphere was that of the feelings; the result has been that women now often take ostentatious pleasure in washing their hands of feelings and accusing men of "sentiment." But that wrongly debased word stands for the whole superstructure of life on the basis of material organisation, for all the finer and higher parts of our nature, for the greater part of civilisation.[16] The elaboration of the mechanical side of life by itself may merely serve to speed up the pace of life instead of expanding leisure, to pile up the weary burden of luxury, and still further to dissipate the energy of life in petty or frivolous channels.[17] To bring order into the region of soulless machinery running at random, to raise the super-structure of a genuinely human civilisation, is not a task which either men or women can afford to fling contemptuously to the opposite sex. It concerns them both equally and can only be carried out by both equally, working side by side in the most intimate spirit of mutual comprehension, confiding trust, and the goodwill to conquer the demon of jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.
[16] "The growth of the sentiments," remarks an influential psychologist of our own time (W. McDougall, Social Psychology, p. 160), "is of the utmost importance for the character and conduct of individuals and of societies; it is the organisation of the affective and conative life. In the absence of sentiments our emotional life would be a mere chaos, without order, consistency, or continuity of any kind; and all our social relations and conduct, being based on the emotions and their impulses would be correspondingly chaotic, unpredictable, and unstable.... Again, our judgments of value and of merit are rooted in our sentiments; and our moral principles have the same source, for they are formed by our judgments of moral value."
[17] The destructive effects of the mechanisation of modern life have lately been admirably set forth, and with much precise illustration, by Dr. Austin Freeman, Social Decay and Regeneration.
This task, it may finally be added, is always an adventure. However well organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks. We may smile, therefore, when it is remarked that the future developments of the home are risky. Birds in the air and fishes in the sea, quite as much as our own ancestors on the earth, have always found life full of risks. It was the greatest risk of all when they insisted on continuing on the old outworn ways and so became extinct. If the home is an experiment and a risky experiment, one can only say that life is always like that. We have to see to it that in this central experiment, on which our happiness so largely depends, all our finest qualities are mobilised. Even the smallest homes under the new conditions cannot be built to last with small minds and small hearts. Indeed the discipline of the home demands not only the best intellectual qualities that are available, but often involves—and in men as well as in women—a spiritual training fit to make sweeter and more generous saints than any cloister. The greater the freedom, the more complete the equality of husband and wife, the greater the possibilities of discipline and development. In view of the rigidities and injustices of the law, many couples nowadays dispense with legal marriage, and form their own private contract; that method has sometimes proved more favourable to the fidelity and permanence of love than external compulsion; it assists the husband to remain the lover, and it is often the lover more than the husband that the modern woman needs; but it has always to be remembered that in the present condition of law and social opinion a slur is cast on the children of such unions. No doubt, however, marriage and the home will undergo modifications, which will tend to make these ancient institutions a little more flexible and to permit a greater degree of variation to meet special circumstances. We can occupy ourselves with no more essential task, whether as regards ourselves or the race, than to make more beautiful the House of Life for the dwelling of Love.
What is the part of woman, one is sometimes asked, in the sex act? Must it be the wife's concern in the marital embrace to sacrifice her own wishes from a sense of love and duty towards her husband? Or is the wife entitled to an equal mutual interest and joy in this act with her husband? It seems a simple problem. In so fundamental a relationship, which goes back to the beginning of sex in the dawn of life, it might appear that we could leave Nature to decide. Yet it is not so. Throughout the history of civilisation, wherever we can trace the feelings and ideas which have prevailed on this matter and the resultant conduct, the problem has existed, often to produce discord, conflict, and misery. The problem still exists to-day and with as important results as in the past.
In Nature, before the arrival of Man, it can scarcely be said indeed that any difficulty existed. It was taken for granted at that time that the female had both the right to her own body, and the right to a certain amount of enjoyment in the use of it. It often cost the male a serious amount of trouble—though he never failed to find it worth while—to explain to her the point where he may be allowed to come in, and to persuade her that he can contribute to her enjoyment. So it generally is throughout Nature, before we reach Man, and, though it is not invariably obvious, we often find it even among the unlikeliest animals. As is well known, it is most pronounced among the birds, who have in some species carried the erotic art,—and the faithful devotion which properly accompanied the erotic art as being an essential part of it,—to the highest point. We have here the great natural fact of courtship. Throughout Nature, wherever we meet with animals of a high type, often indeed when they are of a lowly type—provided they have not been rendered unnatural by domestication—every act of sexual union is preceded by a process of courtship. There is a sound physiological reason for this courtship, for in the act of wooing and being wooed the psychic excitement gradually generated in the brains of the two partners acts as a stimulant to arouse into full activity the mechanism which ensures sexual union and aids ultimate impregnation. Such courtship is thus a fundamental natural fact.
It is as a natural fact that we still find it in full development among a large number of peoples of the lower races whom we are accustomed to regard as more primitive than ourselves. New conditions, it is true, soon enter to complicate the picture presented by savage courtship. The economic element of bargaining, destined to prove so important, comes in at an early stage. And among peoples leading a violent life, and constantly fighting, it has sometimes happened, though not always, that courtship also has been violent. This is not so frequent as was once supposed. With better knowledge it was found that the seeming brutality once thought to take the place of courtship among various peoples in a low state of culture was really itself courtship, a rough kind of play agreeable to both parties and not depriving the feminine partner of her own freedom of choice. This was notably the case as regards so-called "marriage by capture." While this is sometimes a real capture, it is more often a mock capture; the lover perhaps pursues the beloved on horseback, but she is as fleet and as skilful as he is, cannot be captured unless she wishes to be captured, and in addition, as among the Kirghiz, she may be armed with a formidable whip; so that "marriage by capture," far from being a hardship imposed on women is largely a concession to their modesty and a gratification of their erotic impulses. Even when the chief part of the decision rests with masculine force courtship is still not necessarily or usually excluded, for the exhibition of force by a lover,—and this is true for civilised as well as for savage women,—is itself a source of pleasurable stimulation, and when that is so the essence of courtship may be attained even more successfully by the forceful than by the humble lover.
The evolution of society, however, tended to overlay and sometimes even to suppress those fundamental natural tendencies. The position of the man as the sole and uncontested head of the family, the insistence on paternity and male descent, the accompanying economic developments, and the tendency to view a woman less as a self-disposing individual than as an object of barter belonging to her father, the consequent rigidity of the marriage bond and the stern insistence on wifely fidelity—all these conditions of developing civilisation, while still leaving courtship possible, diminished its significance and even abolished its necessity. Moreover, on the basis of the social, economic, and legal developments thus established, new moral, spiritual, and religious forces were slowly generated, which worked on these rules of merely exterior order, and interiorised them, thus giving them power over the souls as well as over the bodies of women.
The result was that, directly and indirectly, the legal, economic, and erotic rights of women were all diminished. It is with the erotic rights only that we are here concerned.
No doubt in its erotic aspects, as well as in its legal and economic aspects, the social order thus established was described, and in good faith, as beneficial to women, and even as maintained in their interests. Monogamy and the home, it was claimed, alike existed for the benefit and protection of women. It was not so often explained that they greatly benefited and protected men, with, moreover, this additional advantage that while women were absolutely confined to the home, men were free to exercise their activities outside the home, even, with tacit general consent, on the erotic side.
Whatever the real benefits, and there is no occasion for questioning them, of the sexual order thus established, it becomes clear that in certain important respects it had an unnatural and repressive influence on the erotic aspect of woman's sexual life. It fostered the reproductive side of woman's sexual life, but it rendered difficult for her the satisfaction of the instinct for that courtship which is the natural preliminary of reproductive activity, an instinct even more highly developed in the female than in the male, and the more insistent because in the order of Nature the burden of maternity is preceded by the reward of pleasure. But the marriage order which had become established led to the indirect result of banning pleasure in women, or at all events in wives. It was regarded as too dangerous, and even as degrading. The women who wanted pleasure were not considered fit for the home, but more suited to be devoted to an exclusive "life of pleasure," which soon turned out to be not their own pleasure but men's. A "life of pleasure," in that sense or in any other sense, was not what more than a small minority of women ever desired. The desire of women for courtship is not a thing by itself, and was not implanted for gratification by itself. It is naturally intertwined—and to a much greater degree than the corresponding desire in men—with her deepest personal, family, and social instincts, so that if these are desecrated and lost its charm soon fades.
The practices and the ideals of this established morality were both due to men, and both were so thoroughly fashioned that they subjugated alike the actions and the feelings of women. There is no sphere which we regard as so peculiarly women's sphere as that of love. Yet there is no sphere which in civilisation women have so far had so small a part in regulating. Their deepest impulses—their modesty, their maternity, their devotion, their emotional receptivity—were used, with no conscious and deliberate Machiavellism, against themselves, to mould a moral world for their habitation which they would not themselves have moulded. It is not of modern creation, nor by any means due, as some have supposed, to the asceticism of Christianity, however much Christianity may have reinforced it. Indeed one may say that in course of time Christianity had an influence in weakening it, for Christianity discovered a new reservoir of tender emotion, and such emotion may be transferred, and, as a matter of fact, was transferred, from its first religious channel into erotic channels which were thereby deepened and extended, and without reference to any design of Christianity. For the ends we achieve are often by no means those which we set out to accomplish. In ancient classic days this moral order was even more severely established than in the Middle Ages. Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, declared that "marriage is a devout and religious relationship, the pleasures derived from it should be restrained and serious, mixed with some severity." But in this matter he was not merely expressing the Christian standpoint but even more that of paganism, and he thoroughly agreed with the old Greek moralist that a man should approach his wife "prudently and severely" for fear of inciting her to lasciviousness; he thought that marriage was best arranged by a third party, and was inclined to think, with the ancients, that women are not fitted to make friends of. Montaigne has elsewhere spoken with insight of women's instinctive knowledge of the art and discipline of love and has pointed out how men have imposed their own ideals and rules of action on women from whom they have demanded opposite and contradictory virtues; yet, we see, he approves of this state of things and never suggests that women have any right to opinions of their own or feelings of their own when the sacred institution of marriage is in question.
Montaigne represents the more exalted aspects of the Pagan-Christian conception of morality in marriage which still largely prevails. But that conception lent itself to deductions, frankly accepted even by Montaigne himself, which were by no means exalted. "I find," said Montaigne, "that Venus, after all, is nothing more than the pleasure of discharging our vessels, just as nature renders pleasurable the discharges from other parts." Sir Thomas More among Catholics, and Luther among Protestants, said exactly the same thing in other and even clearer words, while untold millions of husbands in Christendom down to to-day, whether or not they have had the wit to put their theory into a phrase, have regularly put it into practice, at all events within the consecrated pale of marriage, and treated their wives, "severely and prudently," as convenient utensils for the reception of a natural excretion.
Obviously, in this view of marriage, sexual activity was regarded as an exclusively masculine function, in the exercise of which women had merely a passive part to play. Any active participation on her side thus seemed unnecessary, and even unbefitting, finally, though only in comparatively modern times, disgusting and actually degrading. Thus Acton, who was regarded half a century ago as the chief English authority on sexual matters, declared that, "happily for society," the supposition that women possess sexual feelings could be put aside as "a vile aspersion," while another medical authority of the same period stated in regard to the most simple physical sign of healthy sexual emotion that it "only happens in lascivious women." This final triumph of the masculine ideals and rule of life was, however, only achieved slowly. It was the culmination of an elaborate process of training. At the outset men had found it impossible to speak too strongly of the "wantonness" of women. This attitude was pronounced among the ancient Greeks and prominent in their dramatists. Christianity again, which ended by making women into the chief pillars of the Church, began by regarding them as the "Gate of Hell." Again, later, when in the Middle Ages this masculine moral order approached the task of subjugating the barbarians of Northern Europe, men were horrified at the licentiousness of those northern women at whose coldness they are now shocked.
That, indeed, was, as Montaigne had seen, the central core of conflict in the rule of life imposed by men on woman. Men were perpetually striving, by ways the most methodical, the most subtle, the most far-reaching, to achieve a result in women, which, when achieved, men themselves viewed with dismay. They may be said to be moved in this sphere by two passions, the passion for virtue and the passion for vice. But it so happens that both these streams of passion have to be directed at the same fascinating object: Woman. No doubt nothing is more admirable than the skill with which women have acquired the duplicity necessary to play the two contradictory parts thus imposed upon them. But in that requirement the play of their natural reactions tended to become paralysed, and the delicate mechanism of their instincts often disturbed. They were forbidden, except in a few carefully etiquetted forms, the free play of courtship, without which they could not perform their part in the erotic life with full satisfaction either to themselves or their partners. They were reduced to an artificial simulation of coldness or of warmth, according to the particular stage of the dominating masculine ideal of woman which their partner chanced to have reached. But that is an attitude equally unsatisfactory to themselves and to their lovers, even when the latter have not sufficient insight to see through its unreality. It is an attitude so unnatural and artificial that it inevitably tends to produce a real coldness which nothing can disguise. It is true that women whose instincts are not perverted at the roots do not desire to be cold. Far from it. But to dispel that coldness the right atmosphere is needed, and the insight and skill of the right man. In the erotic sphere a woman asks nothing better of a man than to be lifted above her coldness, to the higher plane where there is reciprocal interest and mutual joy in the act of love. Therein her silent demand is one with Nature's. For the biological order of the world involves those claims which, in the human range, are the erotic rights of women.
The social claims of women, their economic claims, their political claims, have long been before the world. Women themselves have actively asserted them, and they are all in process of realisation. The erotic claims of women, which are at least as fundamental, are not publicly voiced, and women themselves would be the last to assert them. It is easy to understand why that should be so. The natural and acquired qualities of women, even the qualities developed in the art of courtship, have all been utilised in building up the masculine ideal of sexual morality; it is on feminine characteristics that this masculine ideal has been based, so that women have been helpless to protest against it. Moreover, even if that were not so, to formulate such rights is to raise the question whether there so much as exists anything that can be called "erotic rights." The right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way as one claims the right to put a voting paper in a ballot box. A human being's erotic aptitudes can only be developed where the right atmosphere for them exists, and where the attitudes of both persons concerned are in harmonious sympathy. That is why the erotic rights of women have been the last of all to be attained.
Yet to-day we see a change here. The change required is, it has been said, a change of attitude and a resultant change in the atmosphere in which the sexual impulses are manifested. It involves no necessary change in the external order of our marriage system, for, as has already been pointed out, it was a coincident and not designed part of that order. Various recent lines of tendency have converged to produce this change of attitude and of atmosphere. In part the men of to-day are far more ready than the men of former days to look upon women as their comrades in the every day work of the world, instead of as beings who were ideally on a level above themselves and practically on a level considerably below themselves. In part there is the growing recognition that women have conquered many elementary human rights of which before they were deprived, and are more and more taking the position of citizens, with the same kinds of duties, privileges, and responsibilities as men. In part, also, it may be added, there is a growing diffusion among educated people of a knowledge of the primary facts of life in the two sexes, slowly dissipating and dissolving many foolish and often mischievous superstitions. The result is that, as many competent observers have noted, the young men of to-day show a new attitude towards women and towards marriage, an attitude of simplicity and frankness, a desire for mutual confidence, a readiness to discuss difficulties, an appeal to understand and to be understood. Such an attitude, which had hitherto been hard to attain, at once creates the atmosphere in which alone the free spontaneous erotic activities of women can breathe and live.
This consummation, we have seen, may be regarded as the attainment of certain rights, the corollary of other rights in the social field which women are slowly achieving as human beings on the same human level as men. It opens to women, on whom is always laid the chief burden of sex, the right to the joy and exaltation of sex, to the uplifting of the soul which, when the right conditions are fulfilled, is the outcome of the intimate approach and union of two human beings. Yet while we may find convenient so to formulate it, we need to remember that that is only a fashion of speech, for there are no rights in Nature. If we take a broader sweep, what we may choose to call an erotic right is simply the perfect poise of the conflicting forces of life, the rhythmic harmony in which generation is achieved with the highest degree of perfection compatible with the make of the world. It is our part to transform Nature's large conception into our own smaller organic mould, not otherwise than the plants, to whom we are far back akin, who dig their flexible roots deep into the moist and fruitful earth, and so are able to lift up glorious heads toward the sky.
When we hear the sexual functions spoken of we commonly understand the performance of an act which normally tends to the propagation of the race. When we see the question of sexual abstinence discussed, when the desirability of sexual gratification is asserted or denied, when the idea arises of the erotic rights and needs of woman, it is always the same act with its physical results that is chiefly in mind. Such a conception is quite adequate for practical working purposes in the social world. It enables us to deal with all our established human institutions in the sphere of sex, as the arbitrary assumptions of Euclid enable us to traverse the field of elementary geometry. But beyond these useful purposes it is inadequate and even inexact. The functions of sex on the psychic and erotic side are of far greater extension than any act of procreation, they may even exclude it altogether, and when we are concerned with the welfare of the individual human being we must enlarge our outlook and deepen our insight.
There are, we know, two main functions in the sexual relationship, or what in the biological sense we term "marriage," among civilised human beings, the primary physiological function of begetting and bearing offspring and the secondary spiritual function of furthering the higher mental and emotional processes. These are the main functions of the sexual impulse, and in order to understand any further object of the sexual relationship—or even in order to understand all that is involved in the secondary object of marriage—we must go beyond conscious motives and consider the nature of the sexual impulse, physical and psychic, as rooted in the human organism.
The human organism, as we know, is a machine on which excitations from without, streaming through the nerves and brain, effect internal work, and, notably, stimulate the glandular system. In recent years the glandular system, and especially that of the ductless glands, has taken on an altogether new significance. These ductless glands, as we know, liberate into the blood what are termed "hormones," or chemical messengers, which have a complex but precise action in exciting and developing all those physical and psychic activities which make up a full life alike on the general side and the reproductive side, so that their balanced functions are essential to wholesome and complete existence. In a rudimentary form these functions may be traced back to our earliest ancestors who possessed brains. In those times the predominant sense for arousing the internal mental and emotional faculties was that of smell, the other senses being gradually evolved subsequently, and it is significant that the pituitary, one of the chief ductless glands active in ourselves to-day, was developed out of the nervous centre for smell in conjunction with the membrane of the mouth. The energies of the whole organism were set in action through stimuli arising from the outside world by way of the sense of smell. In process of time the mechanism has become immensely elaborated, yet its healthy activity is ultimately dependent on a rich and varied action and reaction with the external world. It is becoming recognised that the tendency to pluri-glandular insufficiency, with its resulting lack of organic harmony and equilibrium, can be counteracted by the physical and psychic stimuli of intimate contacts with the external world. In this action and reaction, moreover, we cannot distinguish between sexual ends and general ends. The activities of the ductless glands and their hormones equally serve both ends in ways that cannot be distinguished. "The individual metabolism," as a distinguished authority in this field has expressed it, "is the reproductive metabolism."[18] Thus the establishment of our complete activities as human beings in the world is aided by, if not indeed ultimately dependent upon, a perpetual and many-sided play with our environment.