CHAPTER X
MONOGAMOUS MARRIAGE AND WOMAN: A CONTINUATION OF THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, WITH SOME REMARKS ON THE CHARACTER OF WOMAN

I trust from what I have said already on marriage in the previous chapter that two things have been made plain: on the one side, my own strong faith in monogamous marriage as the most practical and happiest form of association for the great majority of women and men; and my further opinion that sexual relationships must be regulated by law. I am, however, deeply conscious of the ignominious conditions of many marriages, and thus, on the other side, I am forced to the opinion that for the whole of sexual conduct there cannot safely be one only rule. I know well there will always be exceptions: men and also women who are unfitted for faithful mating. It is this fact we do not face that makes the problem so difficult to solve at all and to solve completely impossible.

Regarding companionship as essential in any true union, the reform most likely to produce a balance of good in marriage is such an alteration in the basis of marriage and increased spirituality in the way of conceiving it as will make incompatibility of temperament, resulting in inability to maintain companionship, justify honourable divorce. To consider sexual infidelity as the only valid ground for divorce is to take a limited and wrong view of marriage. Spiritual unfaithfulness may be a far greater sin, and one bringing much deeper unhappiness in marriage, than sexual unfaithfulness.

It may seem that this view is a contradiction of what I have said of the enduring character of marriage. I do not think so. No marriage that should be maintained will ever be broken by making divorce easy. It will add nothing to the sanctity of marriage to force those who are really unmated to remain mated by law. One marvels at the folly of such a view. I want people to enter into marriage and to remain in it, because they want to be there, not because they are forced.[79]

For I do believe that the great majority of women and men do really desire to live faithfully with one mate. Divided allegiance is possible only where love is of a slight character. If it is absorbing it cannot be diffuse, and the more diffuse it is the less the partners in such a union will be able to give or take from one another. It is impossible to be lovers and partners in the fullest and most human sense in several unions.

The real controlling power in marriage is our desire, though our acts may be, and usually are, directed as well by habit and tradition—a sort of conscience and feeling for the judgment of others. And divorce can never be easy while it at all hurts us to hurt one another.

I must, however, reaffirm my opinion that sexual relationships, whether within marriage or outside of it, whether legal or free, can never safely be unregulated, and will always be a difficult experiment. And experience has forced on me the knowledge that the most passionate union is often the one most likely to end in disaster. For Buckle is not far from right when he says we accumulate knowledge, but do not progress in morals, which depend on the unaltered heart of man.

Some characters are manifestly and essentially unfaithful, self-seeking, and regardless of the happiness of others in love and in all the affairs of life. Others again act unfaithfully through weakness or haste, or through the misfortune of circumstances. The mistake with many of these people is that they ever bind themselves in permanent unions. We should not condemn or deal harshly with them, for by so doing we drive them to undertake obligations which they do not, because they cannot, fulfil. In my opinion, it is foolishness to pretend that for the whole of sexual conduct there can ever be one fixed rule. We shall have more morality, not less, if we accept this.

It is for this reason that I am altogether persuaded of the need of much greater facilities of divorce than exist at present: divorce on the ground of mutual consent, and based on inability through any cause to maintain true partnership in marriage.

There are some men and also women unsuited for marriage and quite undesirable as life-partners; they are not, however, undesirable because of the legal bond, but because of certain qualities which as individuals they possess. And this wider facility of divorce would do very much to lessen individual hardships, and moreover it would cleanse, in a way not sufficiently recognised, the immorality which is present in many unions. Marriage, with its fixed duties and the restrictions it does impose, in particular, upon the woman, will always appear to some a bondage from which they will seek the quickest way of escape. If no honourable way is allowed to them, they will take a dishonourable course. This may be deplored, it cannot (at any rate under existing conditions of character and public opinion) be helped, and nothing but evil can follow by pretending it is not so.

Thus we find that the difficulty of divorce is the strongest factor that brings disgrace and immorality into marriage.

This matter of honourable divorce is, however, one only of the almost countless questions in the tangle of considerations involved in the difficult matter of any attempt to change sexual conduct. More important, perhaps, is the great disproportion between the two sexes in a country that calls itself and tries to be monogamous. In our society, where so many conditions and causes have corresponded to make marriage more and more difficult, there are a very large number of women and also some men, and will be for a long time, who, from necessity rather than from choice, have to seek to satisfy their sex needs and to find love in the best way that they can. I do not see that we can or ought to condemn without fuller knowledge than as a rule we can have, these breaches of the prohibitions and laws of marriage: I am very certain that no good can be gained by branding those who commit them as sinners. Rather the conditions that give rise to such conduct must be openly faced and wherever possible dealt with. War, acting as it must inevitably do in increasing these evils and making marriage more difficult for many women, perhaps will bring us to do this. Changes in our laws may be forced upon our acceptance. We shall have to be more careful to protect life and to prevent waste of the powers of life. We cannot, therefore, I think, go on, in this question of the sex needs that are not satisfied in marriage, with the old game of pretence, that no irregular conduct need be considered as long as it can be hidden, or at least not publicly acknowledged.

But of sexual relationships outside of marriage I shall speak in a separate chapter.[80] The question is too urgent to be dealt with hastily. I shall state what seems to me can be done to regulate these unlegalised unions so as to free them, as far as this is possible, from the secrecy and shamefulness which acts, I am certain, as the strongest factor in the distress and evil which they do almost inevitably bring, both to the individuals who enter into them and to the society which tolerates, but does nothing to protect, them.

In the past, we have failed sufficiently to recognise the immorality which is present in many marriages. Monogamy has in reality never been attained either by ancient civilisations or in the modern world. Thus, while accepting monogamy, we tolerate extra conjugal relationships, which can be regarded only as a hidden polygamy, and, indeed, from one practical point of view, it is even worse in its results than a well-understood and regulated polygamy, as these fugitive unions, being unrecognised, carry with them no obligations. And the action of this double standard of sexual morality, with its concealed element of lying hypocrisy, has brought, and rightly brought, into discredit legal monogamous marriage; it has led on the one side to the setting up of an ideal of marriage conduct which, as many in fact actually do not follow it, tends to become an outward form, and this on the other side leads to a concealed laxity in practice, which results only too frequently in irresponsible unions, hidden diseases and blasted motherhood, the most terrible of the evils in our disordered sexual life of to-day. Facts of daily observation may not be shuffled out of observation by any hypocrisy. They must be faced and dealt with.

The question becomes clearer, if we consider that some people, men as well as women, have a great desire for children; or possibly as the desire is not always consciously recognised, it would be truer to say that with them the sexual impulse is more deeply rooted. I mean, though it is very difficult in words to express this, that erotic desire is less personally overmastering, that they are in truer relation with the race—one link in the long chain of the generations. This being so, the getting of a child is the ultimate, though rarely, I think, the conscious, satisfaction of sex; while for others—and this is true of some women quite as much as it is true of many men—sexual relations are in themselves the final gratification of love. Children may come, but they are born because of the operation of this strictly personal impulse or need of the parents.

It is, I think, very necessary to distinguish between sex-passion and the desire for a child; they are not the same, though, of course, the one impulse may be, and is as a rule, involved in the other. We need more clear thinking and frank speaking on the two elements in the reproductive act. This is a human problem, one that belongs to mankind alone; moreover, it has greatly increased among civilised races, and is likely to become more, and not less, difficult with the advance of time. Animals have sex-passion, which is neither love as we feel it nor lust; with them, as also in some degree with most primitive peoples, this passion is seasonal, not always active, and is more or less closely connected with the obtaining of offspring. Far different and much more complicated are the conditions of love among us to-day. Men and women have a continuous desire for love, with sex-passion as its outward expression and children for its efflorescence. They also have lust, which is a comparatively new expression,[81] at least, that is my opinion as to what is true of the majority among us. I do not use the word “lust” here in any sense of contempt, but to express strong and conscious sex-passion, seeking its own satisfaction without connection with any possible result in a child. Then at a much lower level there is lust-desire without love, or clothed merely in a rootless ephemeral mimicry of passion—a libertinage having no law but curiosity in self-indulgence. And all passion is a very different thing from the serene considerations which, according to the Prayer Book, cause men and women to marry.

Now, it is because of what sex-passion has come to be among us—its variety in desire and in result—that we are far more remote than pre-human and primitive parents from having marriage and parenthood settled so as to meet the desires and sex-needs of every one, as would be easily possible if the reproductive act could be regarded as being solely, or even chiefly, connected with the birth of children.

I do not know if I have made my meaning perfectly clear, but what I wish to insist upon is this: It is necessary in all questions and judgments connected with marriage to consider the presence or absence in the partners of the wish to produce and possess a child. I propose to deal briefly with this question in relation to the character of women.

It is commonly asserted that the normal woman desires to be a mother. Now, this may be true, but what is forgotten is that all women are not normal, and thus there are many who not only have no desire to become mothers, but exceedingly dislike the idea of bearing children. You may say this is an unnatural condition; but such a use of the word “unnatural” is surely wrong; nothing is “natural” to the man or woman save what they have evolved, and by that I mean what they have come to desire to be; and my contention is that we have evolved a type of woman unsuited for motherhood because she does not desire it, and for such a woman it is “unnatural” to be a mother. Of course this turning away from motherhood is in numerous cases the result of wrong education, and is dependent on the weakened constitutions and shaken nerves of women, which forces them to fear the pains of child-birth, as well as inducing an increasing dislike to the restrictions and duties that the care of children will entail. These causes are strong to-day; doubtless they hold back many women from becoming mothers, but I do not think that they take us very far to the deeper hidden causes which are also present among us, nor can they be regarded as essential factors in deciding the question as to which women should be mothers. There is something acting much more strongly, a cause which must be sought in the character of woman herself, and one which, unlike those dependent on outside conditions, cannot, I think, be altered. You see, I regard the true instinct for motherhood as a quality directing all expression, something deep-seated in the nature, and therefore a quality that cannot be added to a character if the woman does not possess it.

And because I believe this, I regard any effort to force maternity, even as an ideal, upon all women as a great wrong. We do not expect all men to desire to be fathers, we must cease to expect all women to desire to become mothers. For by so doing we cause more evil than we know. And the hurt is not borne by the mother alone. The child born against the will of its mother must tend also to be without will; too weak to bear well the stress and struggle of life. This is no fanciful statement. I believe it can be proved by any one, with sufficient knowledge, who takes the trouble to investigate the facts. The child who is born through the physical mastery of the father and the physical subserviency of its mother, and against her desire, does pay the penalty in a heritage which lacks stability and harmony in character.

One of the many hypocrisies of our society to-day is the condemnation, still maintained by many who do not understand, of the use of the many safe artificial preventatives to conception. The mother must be given more control over the birth of her children. Personally I have not a strong feeling against the procuring of abortion, but perhaps the forbidding of it is necessary as a fence around the reverence for human life; but the prevention of birth is a different matter. And certainly each woman must be free to make her own choice as to whether she bears children or does not bear them; no man, and still more no social or moral compulsion, may safely decide this matter for her; she must give life gladly to be able to give it well.

Nor must we look with disfavour on those women who desire to avoid motherhood and its duties, or regard them as “unnatural”—this word, as I have just said, is used far too carelessly. It were well to remember that the parental instinct is not fixed and is dependent on causes that very few of us understand, that it is not present in all women any more than the fighting instinct is present in all men.

A vast amount of stupid confusion arises from our failing to accept the wide diversity in women’s temperaments and characters in relation to this question of motherhood. Between the more usual type of woman, whose deepest desire and strongest instincts are fixed in motherhood, and the woman at the other extreme to whom even the thought of maternity is a terror, there are a wide range of intermediate types—women able to love and even in some respects markedly feminine, but with weak maternal feeling. Such diversity in the family qualities has always existed. We have seen in our past study of the family that the maternal instincts may be overlaid and even destroyed, being replaced by others more clearly masculine. Examples of this are found in the insect world, and striking examples among fishes and reptiles, where the father is the true parent and undertakes all duties connected with the young. The case of the phalaropes furnished us with a further remarkable instance of this reversal in the characters of the two sexes. Things are not quite as dramatic, perhaps, in the human world, but they are more fateful, more significant. And such changes in the expression of the emotions, dependent as they would seem to be on changes in the sexual character, can be effected, for every individual of one sex has in him or her the qualities of the other sex in a less degree; and any special circumstance or alteration in the conditions of life which acts on an individual or group of individuals in an opposite direction from the ordinary, may succeed in modifying and, in some cases, transforming the deep impulses of sex.[82]

I do not wish to follow this question here. It is, however, widely evident that in the society we have evolved to-day there are many women in whom, what I may perhaps call, an atrophy of the maternal instincts has taken place. This may be regretted, it cannot wisely be blamed, for it forms no solution of the problem thus to mark down for blame. There is one way, and one way only, as far as I can see, whereby this great evil that has happened and still is taking place might be stayed. The maternal women, the mother type, should be the only women to be mothers; which is, of course, the same thing as saying that every child should be born of passionate desire.

But this is not so simple in practice as at first sight it seems; it carries with it first the demand that women must be given the knowledge and means to prevent the conception of every undesired child; and second, and even more important, that all girls should be educated to understand something at least of their sexual nature so that they may know their own need and strongest instincts; then, does their desire turn towards motherhood, they will be better able to choose as the father of their children men who desire to be fathers as they desire to be mothers, so that together they may decide the number of children they will bring into the world and under what conditions. That is the only kind of motherhood that will endure.

I am prepared for an objection here. I shall be told that a woman, much less a girl, does not know whether she wants a child until she bears one; that it is then her maternal instinct will develop. I do not believe it. I find this is the opinion of men and of women who have failed to think straight; both judge in these matters too arbitrarily and with too little understanding. They forget how difficult it has been, and still is, for any one of my sex to be at all sexually truthful. Considering the folly of the education we give to girls, there is little reliance to be placed on what any woman says about sex. What we need most of all is the liberation of women’s instincts through education in consciousness. Perhaps, then, we shall cease to expect the impossible, by which I mean we shall not hope to make good mothers of the girls who have no deep instinct to love children. I know, of course, that the girl who before marriage does not love children, may, and as a rule will, love her own child: but I am certain that in nine cases out of every ten she will do so in the wrong way; the child will be cherished only as a possession of herself, an extension of her own egoism, which is very far indeed from what I hold as the self-giving character of the mother-woman. Here is one reason why good motherhood is so rare.

One source of great error arises because of the hypocrisy that society still forces upon women in all questions of sex, and in particular on this matter of their wanting, or not wanting, to be mothers. You see, the desire for a child is allowed to them, but it is not yet allowed to them to desire love without the child. We are a strange people. And this belief, instilled into us by puritanism and a religion which denies simple human needs, that sex enjoyment is immoral without the purpose of procreation, has been a most degrading influence. It has done great harm. It has poisoned the lives of thousands of women and men; but the greatest of the evils it has wrought is that, under its influence, countless children have been born, both in marriage and outside of it, against the will of their mothers. Until it is openly recognised that women are not alike in their sexual natures any more than they are alike in their outward appearance, that they cannot all be classed together as the mother-sex, this evil cannot be changed; the old hypocrisy will continue and children will verily be born in sin, for they will be born without the mother’s desire, and for this the race must pay the penalty.

We have, I am sure, to face the fact of the general occurrence among us of women of the siren type; they are the exact opposite to the mother type. With them the “pleasure factor”[83] in the sexual act is the aim and end of love: this results, as it seems to me, in an intensified egoism, which has far-reaching effects first in the woman’s attitude to the man, as later in her attitude to her children. The siren woman is the property of all men, or rather it would be much nearer to the truth to say that all men are her property. I do not think such a woman can ever remain satisfied with one mate, though circumstances may hold her apparently faithful to her marriage vows. She is quite unsuited for monogamous marriage, unless, indeed, she finds a man of a similar type whom she has perpetually to reconquer. Even then there must be variety in each conquest to provide the excitement necessary with both to stimulate love. Such a woman, as, of course, also the man, is always unsuited for the selfless sacrifices of parenthood. She is the natural prostitute, who absorbs everything in sex for her own desire.

The case is quite different with the mother type, and her relation to the man is not the same; true, she also seeks and uses the man, the difference is not here. Woman is better equipped for the sex-battle than is man. There is nothing wrong in this. I hold that a woman should be able to take the man she loves as her right; she does take him now, but in ways that too often should make both herself and him ashamed. The mother-woman exercises her right of choice as the representative of Nature. She is the fount of the race, she seeks the man as her helper and because he will give life to the child she desires. Such a woman is not always faithful in marriage, but she wishes to be so, and she will be faithful in actual fact, if she is fortunate and finds in her lover the fitting father she seeks unconsciously for her children.

Of course, this is a purely arbitrary classification; the two types of character mingle in most women. There are traces of the siren in every woman, and no woman—though I am less certain here—is entirely devoid of the maternal instinct.

It is very difficult to know the truth. But it seems to me that, when from any cause the pleasure factor in sex becomes secretly over-accentuated, as it may so easily do under conditions where full sex expression is denied to many women, the normal sexual impulses are in some cases weakened or even atrophied through disuse, while in others satisfaction is gained in secret erotic practice, and by so doing the character and these deep impulses receive a twist in an unhealthy direction, leading or at least tending to an inflaming of the egoistical desires, which, if long continued, will increase to crowd out, like an overgrowth of some poisonous weed, the more tender plant of the parental instinct. While certainly not presuming to speak with authority on so difficult a subject, I think that the suggestion I have made may possibly afford an explanation of the poverty of the mother instinct in some women compared with its richness in other women. I plead for a patient recognition of the fact that in all these deep matters relating to sex we are still very ignorant.

Let me now give an example that quite recently came under my notice, of a woman who, though a mother, was without any glimmering flicker of maternal feeling. It seems to me to be worth recording as being the most striking case I have met of the siren type of woman, who, if I am right, is occupying a wrong place in any monogamous marriage. Facts speak more forcibly than any mere statements.

In a boarding-house at which I was staying there was a young and beautiful mother. She had borne seven children, of whom the two youngest were with her, a boy of about five and a baby a year old. She had with her also a young niece of about seven years of age. They were healthy and, I should judge, charming children. The mother apparently had no love for them whatever. It was a most extraordinary case. Physically this woman was fitted to bear children, but she was clearly without any capacity for caring for them. She reminded me of the phalarope mothers, who seek love adventures and leave the charge of their children to the fathers. In this case the father was not present: the guardian of the baby was the niece. I never saw a more patient worker than this tiny child. I do not know whether it was fear held her to her task. She did not play: all day she tended, and worked, and watched. Sometimes she was assisted by the tiny boy, her cousin.

Here is one out of many conversations that I chanced to overhear.

Harry, the boy, called to his cousin—

“Susie, I have washed baby’s napkins, what shall I do now?”

She answered, “Begin to get the food ready; I will come in a minute to boil the milk.”

This is no exaggeration, I state exactly what I heard.

Now, it is no use shrieking out that this woman’s conduct is unnatural and a libel on motherhood. If the maternal instinct was a fixed instinct and bore good fruit only, this might be done. The objection to the wrong kind of women being mothers is precisely that it inevitably produces some such results. This woman simply followed the promptings of her own desires: the difference was that she did it much more frankly than is usual. She employed the days in playing croquet and tennis and in flirting with any available male. I do not think she knew she was not a good mother. At intervals, when she remembered, she scolded the children; but when she forgot them, which was frequently, she left them alone.

Often I talked with her, as she interested me very strongly. I wished that I could have known her early history, and especially some details of her sexual life. I could but guess, still I do not think I was mistaken. She told me quite frankly that she did not like children, though she added (clearly, though quite unconsciously, speaking conventionally), “Of course, I love my own children.” Then (lapsing again into truth) she went on bewailing the length of the school holidays (the little boy and the girl were both at boarding-school) and her present position of being without a nurse to look after the baby. On the occasion of another conversation she told me that she did not care for men. I answered, “Probably not, but you like them to care for you.” She laughed and seemed pleased, and asked me how I knew this.

Now, this woman was to me a most interesting study. A friend who was staying with me at the time blamed her very severely. I think this was unfair. What was clear to me was that life was demanding from this woman what she could not give. She was strongly sensual without being passionate; she was probably philoprogenitive or she would not have had so many children; but she was not at all maternal, and was quite unfitted to be entrusted with any child. She was not immoral—at least, I think not; probably she was faithful in the usual meaning to her husband. In her world the price was too high to make unfaithfulness worth while; but she was wholly non-moral. Such a woman should not marry; she should never be a mother. I would go even further and say her place was the place of the prostitute. This judgment may seem hard. Yet I know of no other remedy. You cannot alter these things by pretending they are not there. And the expression of sex is always a question of refinement and of character.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XI
SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE

CHAPTER XI
SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE

I find this sentence written in an old notebook, one that for a long time I have not been using. I took the book up by chance, when my eyes lighted on this saying; at once I decided to place it at the beginning of this chapter on sexual relationships outside of marriage. I want to make it clear at the very start that it is far indeed from my purpose to make easy the way of irregular unions or at all to loosen the responsibilities that ought to bind men and women.

The difficulties of writing upon all questions of sexual conduct are very real. Almost always one is suspected of advocating license and of disbelief in marriage, so commonplace is it to misunderstand, so easy to misrepresent. For not only is there prejudice to encounter, which on no question is so obstinate as it is on this one that we are now considering of unregulated love, but we have to deal with so many different problems, taking account of many opposed facts, where threads are crossed and entangled and at best can be patched only roughly together. I plead for a patient recognition of the real seriousness of this problem, which, I am certain, will have to be faced in the near future if our sexual life and marriage are to be freed from secret disgrace that is unbearable.

We have found in the two previous chapters what all of us must know from our own experience of life, that some women and men are by their temperament unsuited for monogamous marriage and the duties of parenthood. Often, I would even say as a rule, these individuals are strongly sexual. They will not, because with the character they have, they cannot, live for any long period celibate. They will marry to gain permanent sexual relief or they will buy temporary relief from prostitutes, unless they are able to seek satisfaction in an irregular union.

Now I affirm it as my conviction that the first and second of these courses are likely to lead to greater misery and sin than the third course; and of the three, the first, in my opinion, is the worst. I have no doubt at all on this matter. No one, who is not blind to the facts of life, can close their eyes to the evil and suffering that a coercive monogamy forces upon those people who are unfitted and do not desire to fulfil the obligations and duties of living faithfully with one partner. And I would ask all those who stand in fear of any change or reform in our marriage laws or of any open toleration of wider opportunities for sexual friendships to consider this fact: the discredit which has fallen upon monogamous marriage arises largely from the demoralising lives lived under its cover by those unsuited for enduring mating.

Our moral code is, however, much less ruled by law than by custom and the united will of the community. It is for this reason that I want to force men, and even more women, to think practically on these matters. My own opinion is firm. Apart from the fact that the disproportion in the number of the sexes in this country makes marriage impossible for all and condemns great numbers of women to sterile celibacy (a question I have dealt with elsewhere[84]), I am persuaded of the need for much wider facilities for honourable partnerships outside of permanent marriage; such unions are, I am sure, necessary in order to harmonise our sexual life and meet the desires of a large, and I believe increasing, number of women and men, whose exceptional needs our existing institutions and customs ignore or crush.

Let us view these questions in the light of their results. Most of us fail to meet the facts. We never realise the evil of this hypocrisy—love everywhere carried on secretly, that is acting always as a disturbing force in our sexual life—it is a worm that gnaws unceasingly at the roots of marriage and destroys too often the most beautiful blossoms of love.

One great source of difficulty arises from the want of frankness in our thoughts. Especially is this the case with women, who throughout their lives have had the great fundamental facts of life clothed in euphemisms, until it seems as if they have succeeded, by the help of many fictitious aids, in concealing the natural outward signs of the existence of sex. And largely from these concealments our every idea of sex has become tainted with sentiment and vulgarity. We can hardly speak of the subject even to our children without an apology.

The actions and emotions of life undraped with lies seem to most of us anathema; we, who have so veneered our lives that we know no longer of what wood they are made; we, who for generations have been so covered with shameful concealments, deceiving even ourselves, and are impervious to the claims of that ill-bred creature—Life.

And how deep we have wandered into sin in seeking to escape from it!

Need we put up with this? Must we turn our eyes away for ever from things as they are—stifle our desires in fear of what we shall do?

The sex-needs almost always are dealt with as though they stood apart and lay out of line with any other need or faculty of our bodies. This is, in part, due to the secrecy which has kept sex as something mysterious. We have most of us been trained from our childhood into indecent secretiveness. But there is as well a deeper reason, and it will be a long time before we can change it. Sex is so powerful in most of us, and, when from any cause awakened into consciousness, occupies really so large a part of our attention, that we are afraid of ourselves, and this reacts in fear of any open acknowledgment even in our thoughts of our own sex-needs. Still less can we grant the sex-needs of others, perhaps stronger and different from our own need.

It is necessary to face very frankly this tremendous force of the sex-passion, for the most part veiled in discussion. Many women and some men do not realise at all the immense complications of sex, or understand the claims that passion makes on many natures. Almost necessarily in any inquiry into these questions of sexual conduct one’s opinions are biased by temperament and personal experience. We are dealing with forces in which the individual element cannot be set aside. It is foolishness always to preach continence. Sexual abstinence is possible without great effort for some people, it is not possible for all. I am certain we have to recognize this fact, and to allow for its action. It is not what we want people to do, but what they will do, that we are considering.

If we look at the matter practically, it is of course necessary to remember that this question of the possibility of, as well as the advantage to be derived from, sexual abstinence is an entirely different one, as it relates to the time before, or after, the first experience of love. The sex desires are strong when roused, but when not definitely aroused, the ideal of chastity asserts itself, and for long periods these desires may not greatly occupy the conscious imagination. It is clear that the physical problem cannot be, and ought not to be, considered apart from the will. Great good in some cases may be done by establishing control over thought.

It is, however, idle to count on a course of thought and action being taken by the rough majority among us which so much of our civilisation and daily environment makes difficult and indeed impossible. A race of young men and women surrounded with shameful concealments and bred to a blind acceptance of wrong sexual conditions, accustomed to an atmosphere of sniggering and suggestiveness in connection with the central facts of love and life—such a race cannot have, much less practise, an ideal of true chastity.

These wrong and vulgar conditions without doubt have acted more strongly against men than against women. And I would note in passing, that here, as I believe, we find one explanation of the greater continence among unmarried women than among unmarried men. It is not because satisfaction for the sex-needs is more necessary for the health and well-being of men than it is for the health and well-being of women—a statement I do not believe; nor is it proved that this absence of conscious sex-desires necessarily implies the absence of unconscious sex-action; all that can be claimed is that the sexual impulses have been diverted into different expressions, and the explanation of such diversion is to be sought in the boy’s and young man’s education and life, which forces sex so much more strongly into the conscious thought and attention.

We are dealing with a question very difficult to solve. On this assumption that the sex-needs of the man are more imperative than the sex-needs of the woman, much that is false has been accepted as true; there are many who have advocated a “duplex sexual morality,” and while demanding from the woman complete sexual abstinence until she marries, regard this as impossible in the case of men. Such a separation as this between the sex-needs of man and the sex-needs of woman is, in my opinion, a very grave error. Celibacy is unnatural and harmful in man, it is at least equally unnatural and harmful in woman.

Now, it is on this question of the sex-needs of women that I find myself, as I have suggested already, in such direct opposition to the great majority of women, numbers of whom do not, will not, admit to a consciousness of any kind of sexual need. I believe they are quite honest, but I know they are mistaken.

The doctrine of chastity being the natural and special virtue of women is entirely false. Complete abstinence from love cannot be borne by women through a long period of years without producing serious results on the body and the mind. And these results are by no means clearly dependent on a conscious knowledge of unsatisfied sex. The evil may be pronounced even when the woman herself has not the slightest knowledge of her real needs. In many women the penalty is paid in an unceasing and wearying restlessness of mind and body. We have also to face the fact that prolonged and enforced abstinence may act to cultivate a morbid obsession with sexual things. I believe that the celibate often is less chaste than the normally sexual individual. This may seem to be a wanton charge to some, but I am not speaking without due consideration.

I know well that some among my readers, and in particular women, will say that I am wrong, many will accuse me of exaggerating and complain that I see sex in everything; the few only will know that I am right. I would, however, refer all those who doubt to the researches of Freud and his followers, which have proved in the most conclusive way that the manifestations of sex may be concealed in numberless guises. Without some understanding of the “Unconscious” it is useless to attempt to deal with these questions. We need to realise that the fact of an individual, or group of individuals, being unconscious of the presence of sex does not prove that sex is not acting strongly and often harmfully within them. Nay, we may go further and say that could it be proved that desire was absent and no sex difficulties of any kind be discovered, this is no reason why we should necessarily be too satisfied. If no kind of action is apparent, it is very probable that some deep evil is at work, which hinders sex from a more healthy and open expression.

I am haunted by the fear that the careless reader will think I am writing against chastity. This is not so. I would affirm again, with all the power that I have, that compulsory sexual abstinence may not be confused with voluntary chastity. We must be very clear in our thought about this. We can never establish an ideal of true chastity until we have rooted out from our social life all the unnatural and empty forms of chastity. The long waiting for marriage which economic and other causes have forced upon us, more and more increases the difficulties of maintaining any true chastity. It is a great evil which almost always wastes the energies of life.

There are very many women (as also these are men) who are moral, because they are too great cowards to be immoral. The reasons for chastity must in many cases be sought in the poverty of experience and the difficulty of obtaining love, in the hard binding of circumstances, and, even more often, in the terror of being found out. Respectability is the strong moral safeguard of woman. The conception of faithfulness to one mate (the true chastity) is as strong in many men as it is in any woman, a fact to which I gladly bear witness, from my knowledge of the men I have known. It is too commonly taken for granted that sex-passion is less refined in men and different from sex-passion in women. I am sure in many cases it is not true. I am not going to discuss the question further, as it is one that cannot easily be proved.

It is, however, very necessary to break down the idea that for the impulses of sex, with their immense complications and differences, there is one general rule either for men or for women. In every case the element of personal idiosyncrasy must be taken into account, and, for this reason, the difficulties of these questions are enormously complex. Nor is it possible, I am sure, to make any arbitrary judgments. To me the man or woman who is able to live a celibate life is not necessarily better than the man or woman who is not. I may prefer one type, I may dislike the other, but this also is a matter of my personal idiosyncrasy. We cannot safely class those who differ from ourselves as wrong, and set them down as fit only for suppression and restraint. We have to put aside those shrieks of blame that are possible only to the ignorant.

It is all very well to preach the ideal of complete sexual abstinence until marriage, but there are the clear, hard conditions of contemporary circumstances for all but the really rich, who can marry when they want to do so without other consideration, and the very poor who marry young because they have nothing at all to consider. We have to face the presence amongst us to-day of an amount of suffering through enforced celibacy which is acting in many directions in degrading our sexual lives. Any number of these sufferers, both the unmarried and the married who are ill-mated, are everywhere amongst us. I need not say more to prove this: the facts face us all, unless, indeed, we are too ignorant and too prejudiced to know what is happening.

Many new lessons will have to be learnt. I would suggest as a first step towards honesty and health, that we ought to claim an open declaration of the existence of any form of sexual relationship between a woman and a man. We shall, I believe, do this, if not now, then later, because we are finding out the evils that must ensue, both to the individuals concerned and to the society of which they are members, by forcing men and women into the dark, immoral way of concealments.

It is ridiculous to say, as many do, that sexual relationships between two people affect no one but themselves, unless a child is born. The partners in even the strongest and purest mutual passion have no right to say to society, “This is our business and none of yours.” The consequences may be so grave and wide for society that the deed can never be confined to the interests of the pair concerned. And the sexual partnership that is kept secret will work anti-socially just in the same way as any other secret partnership. Opportunity will be given to those who desire to sin and escape the responsibilities of the partnership, while other men and women, who wish to and would act honourably, find the way so difficult that in nine cases out of ten they fail in their endeavors. Many unions that now are shameful would not be shameful if the parties had not been driven into concealments, which cannot fail to act in a way that is immoral.

We must see things a little more as they are. We must accept ourselves as we are. We must do more than this, we must accept others as they are, and cease from blaming them when we find them different from ourselves. We must give up being hypocrites. To force every one to accept the one form of union is not the wisest way to deal with the matter. We must understand what is the result of our doing this. It does not prevent people from acting wrongly. Anything may be done, any sexual partnership be undertaken, however shameful, as long as it is hidden. We shall have more morality, not less, by an open recognition of honourable sexual friendships entered into outside the permanent binding of monogamous marriage.

I do not think we need fear to do this. My own faith in monogamous marriage, as the most practical, the best, and the happiest form of union for the great majority of people, is so strongly rooted that I do not wish, because I hold it as unnecessary, to force any one either to enter into or to stay within its bonds. I want them to do this because they themselves want to be bound. We get further and further away from real monogamy by allowing no other form of honourable partnerships.

Under present economic conditions and the pressure of social opinion, the penalties that the woman has had to pay for any sexual relationship outside of marriage are very heavy. This is manifest. Indeed, when we see the difficulties faced in these unions, that so many women do take the risks is another proof, if one were needed, of the elemental strength of the sex-passion in women. But mark this: it is only the woman whose social conscience is unawakened, or the few women strong enough and able to ignore the censure of their friends, who can enter into these irregular relationships—except in a hateful secrecy. And this has acted, as I believe, harmfully in a way not usually recognised, in so far as it has driven into marriage many who would have been better not to marry.

At present our monogamous marriage is buttressed with prostitution and maintained with the help of countless secret extra conjugal relationships, which thus makes our moral attitude one of intolerable deception. To this question I shall presently return.

Under existing social conditions the opportunities for sexual relationships to meet the needs of those women and men unable, or not desiring, to marry must, in almost all cases, entail the sacrifice of the woman. It is an unsocial, because an ostracised union. Our efforts at reform have so far been not only ineffective, but absurd. It is no use shirking it, if some change cannot be made, then we must accept prostitution and wild-love as well as the degradation of all the more honourable partnerships entered into outside of marriage.

I believe that many of these problems of our sexual life must remain unsolved; some of them, perhaps, are unsolvable, but certain of the evils are preventable. And first note this: there is one rule that is able and ought to guide us. I have asserted elsewhere,[85] what again I would affirm here: it is an essential fact of sexual morality, as I conceive it, that in any relation between the two sexes—I care not whether the association be legal or illegal—the position of the woman as the mother must be made secure. The immoral union is the union which results in bad and irresponsible parenthood.

It is because I believe this, that I wish to see saner, more practical, and more moral relations made possible between those women and men who live together but do not marry.

But before I attempt the difficult task of suggesting what seems to me the way in which better conditions could be established, it will be necessary to note briefly a few facts concerning changes actually taking place in the position of women, which it seems to me must be certain to affect profoundly the conditions of marriage and the problem we are considering.

The quite new importance as workers which women have now obtained will react inevitably on the relations between the sexes. In every sort of occupation, in clerking, shop-assisting, railway work, motor driving and conducting, police work, in labour on the land and in many more unusual capacities, they are being found efficient beyond precedent. And in the munition factories, in the handling of heavy and intricate machinery, their adaptability and inventiveness, as well as their steadfastness and enthusiasm, have surprised all those who are without knowledge of the bewildering resourcefulness of the feminine character. All the disengaged energy of women has been employed. They have gained a strong position in the economic world. This is evident, but what is not realised are the forces working beneath.

What is going to be the permanent result? Will all this energy evaporate after the war, will it be reabsorbed in the home and work directly connected therewith, or will this great force of women’s work be still used in industrial and other employments? It is not easy to give a certain answer.

Leaving aside the question whether such work if permanently continued will be good or bad for women, a matter on which already I have expressed my opinion strongly,[86] I want to consider how these fresh and advantageous labour conditions have affected, and will, I think, go on affecting, women’s own desires. The question is whether this change that war conditions have brought is one which the desires of women cause them to welcome, or whether it is an arrangement that has arisen out of necessity to which they are essentially antagonistic.

What, in my opinion, makes the present situation dangerous is, that long before the war women were forcing an entrance into the world of labour, and struggling in competition with men to gain the positions which now are being thrust upon them. And I do not believe that in the mass to-day they are doing their work temporarily and to replace men for the period of the war, but rather they are aiming to establish their own economic emancipation. Probably of the million women[87] who have plunged into new work in connection with the war, the great majority are much better off economically than ever they were in times of peace. War has brought more of gain than of sacrifice. The new thing is the opportunity that has come. Individually women were adventurous before the war; they have now become adventurous as a class. War has but accentuated and made obvious the change that for long had been taking place in the desires of women. This turning away from themselves, from their own lives and duties, to the world and employments and duties of men, is a thing that was going on before the war, slowly and against much prejudice, but what matters is that it was going on.

I shall make no attempt to deal with the serious economic results that are likely to occur should women, when the war is ended, struggle to compete with men in the labour market. The disasters that would follow such action are sufficiently plain. One result would certainly be a clash of sex, unavoidable in a work-struggle for the upper hand between women and men. The great temptation to women then will be to keep their positions by accepting lower wages than the men can take. No one can know whether they will do this.

There can be no question that the situation will be difficult. For the return of women to the home and what hitherto has been considered exclusively feminine work is going to mean much more than a change of occupation; it will be going back to the insistent duties of the narrowed woman’s sphere with new ideas and a fresh command of life. It is useless pretending that this can be easy. For one thing, the great uplift in women’s wages has given girls as well as women an independence, with a quite strange joy as spenders which they have not known before.

And this new power in industry has been associated also with many women with a new power in the home. The withdrawal to the war of the men of the family has left women with an opportunity to spend incomes over which hitherto they had no direct control. So that sometimes one wonders whether men will be allowed to re-enter their homes, if they come back, on the same terms as before they held. Will women again accept with contentment a position of economic dependence? This cannot fail, I think, to act directly on the conditions of marriage. The question would seem to be this: Will women come back to the home believing the home to be the central interest of their lives? Will they feel that motherhood, with the care of the little child and all the duties it should entail, is the ultimate joy, for the denial of which no personal freedom or success in work can compensate?

It is one of the unhappy features of our present condition of necessity for women to carry on the work of this country that the most deep and far-reaching issues are being decided in haste, and in many cases by young girls who have never been taught by any wise training to realise their own nature as women, or to understand their sexual needs with their immense restricting power. And my fear is that the things which matter most to life will be lost. I feel that almost everything in the future depends on the inner attitude of the thousands and thousands of girls and young women who to-day have gone out of the home. I wish I had the gift to make them feel the far-acting importance of their personal attitude. The root of all action is the will or desire. Yes, that is the danger. Our desires are the greatest realities that we have, and we should look closely to the direction towards which they are turned. Nothing but the strongest desire on the part of women will save the home. Many forces will be acting to make permanent conditions that cannot fail to act adversely to any right ideal of home life. My hope is that women in the mass will understand in time and resist these forces. Yet, I do not know, and sometimes my fear is more active than my hope.

At least, it is evident that in the immediate future the home is not going to be re-established without effort. Women will have to make great sacrifice to surrender in every direction the new power of controlling and spending money which now they are enjoying. And for this reason, even if for no other, many women almost certainly will seek to hold their places in the labour world and keep on working for themselves. Therefore, it is, I think, safe to expect that to some limited extent the present extension of women’s employment outside the home will be permanent when peace is established.

Certainly it is unnecessary for me to say, after what I have written in the earlier chapters of my book, how exceedingly I regret the permanence of conditions that can seem good only in an industrial society. In my opinion the working of women will be the greatest of the many disasters that are likely to follow and remain from the war. I wish I had the power to prevent it. I do not, however, see any way in which this can be done. For one thing, if the desires of women are being set in a direction away from the home, this, as I have just said, must count as the strongest factor of all. What women want to do is what they are likely in the end to do.

So many women have been for long, and still are, suffering from the delusion that conditions which industrialism, with all its failures in the art of life, first established, and which war now has made necessary, are an advantage to be maintained after the need of war has made them unnecessary. This is the great mistake. I would emphasise again what I have shown in an earlier chapter,[88] that conditions which act against the home and marriage (always dependent on the individual home) are sure proof of social instability. Such conditions are centuries old; all this flood of change is bringing nothing that is new. In all periods of unsettled life the individual home and the family have been threatened. The primitive form of marriage, the maternal form, where the husband visited the wife in her own home, is very near to the most modern suggestions for the readjustment of marriage. And the heavy working of women is a further sign of disturbance and of primitive conditions of life. It is a step backward, not a step forward. Few women, however, realise that this is so. Perhaps this explains why so many among them are talking and behaving to-day as if no more babies were desired to be born.

How far this will be carried I do not profess to say. Women will have a fresh power to refuse the position of wife and mother; thus it seems likely that there may be an increased option against marriage in its true and binding form. And closely connected with the independent position of women will be the great shortage, for the next decade, of marriageable men, due to the killing and disablements of war. It will be a world in which the proportion of women will be very high. And although it would be folly to estimate precisely how this great numerical strength of one sex will act, whether it will strengthen women’s position, or, as it equally well may, will lessen their importance in a society crowded with unwanted women, it is plain that it must directly affect the sexual relationships. Women, accustomed when young to control their own lives and able to be self-supporting, will not only find it much more difficult to marry, but they will be in a position to get along economically without marriage. To every married woman there are likely to be three or four unmarried ones.[89] It will also probably be a period of poverty. The economic stress which war causes will almost necessarily continue in the years when we shall all be compelled to meet the huge task of national recovery that peace must bring. It is possible that for some years it will be more difficult to maintain a family than it has ever been before. This will be a third factor acting against marriage, and tending to maintain as permanent the class of energetic, not strongly maternal and undomesticated women workers.[90]

In different directions also causes very much the same may possibly be acting to the same end. The desires of men as well as the desires of women may be affected, and be turned from marriage and the duties of the family and the home. Many men will not come back out of the hell of war the same men that entered it. It may not be easy to plan life on the old rules, the safe customs of civilisation may well count for less. Some men will not want to return to the posts kept open for them by women; to sell tablecloths to fussy women, or to spend dull days in offices adding columns of figures and addressing envelopes, may not appear “a man’s job” to men who have met the stark facts of death and life. I doubt the zeal of the response of all these men to the binding ties of family life. And in this way, it may be, that many fathers will be cut off from the family and turned away from desiring the sacrifice and duties that children entail, which cannot fail to act as a further force in modifying marriage.

If we try to take an entirely practical view of the position, certain grave facts must, I think, become evident. For side by side with these forces acting against marriage, and the parental sacrifice necessary to maintain the ideal of the family, must be placed the nation’s increased need for children—in particular for male children. The repair of the war drain on the world’s manhood must fall heaviest on women. It is woman who has borne and bred and loved each life that has been lost by war. It is she who will have to make good the waste. This is her bill of compulsory service.

Never will child life have been so precious as it will be after this World War. Already in this country we are beginning to recognise this need. Excellent work for the restriction of infant mortality and the protection of child life is beginning to be undertaken, and these questions are receiving a practical recognition which they never gained in the days of peace. But much more drastic action than has as yet been considered will be needed. It is certainly not inconceivable that this need for children may lead to changes both in our public and private attitudes to many sexual questions. I am hopeful that it may force us to face squarely many problems that hitherto we have turned from in fear.

Speculations on all matters connected with marriage and the relations between the sexes are so hazardous that they are likely to be wrong. I do, however, think that, having regard to the direction in which so many forces are acting, the position in regard to the special problem we are considering has become clearer. Monogamous marriage and the home based upon maternity and offspring has got to be saved. And in my opinion this will be done most surely by a frank acceptance, under the almost certain conditions of the future, of more than one form of sexual association.

This proposal is not made lightly. I am not advocating such a course as being in itself desirable or undesirable. I am attempting merely to estimate the drift and tendency of the times, considering those forces that were beginning to act before the war and, as I think, must continue, even with greater power, after the war. I suggest, therefore, the one course that seems to me can in any practical way help us to be more moral. All the facts that we have found work out to force us to the realisation that an increasing number of women will not be able, and probably will not desire, even if they marry, to bear children. Now, I do not believe in changing the ideal of marriage so that its duties no longer bind women to their children and to the home. I think it better to make provision for other partnerships, to meet the sex-needs (for we can cause nothing but evil by failing to meet them) of the women and men who are not able or do not desire to enter the holy bonds of marriage and undertake together the duties and sacrifice inevitable to the founding and maintenance of a family.

I know the whole question is a very difficult one. Let me try to make my position somewhat clearer.

I am in one way in agreement with Roman Catholic Christianity (I use the phrase to make my meaning plain, and ask indulgence if to any one it seems in itself indefensible). The Roman Catholic Church admits the need of two standards of sexual conduct—some women and men are fitted for a religious life and should bind themselves to celibacy; others need to marry, and to them marriage is permitted. The difference between my view and the one just expressed is that, whereas it is usual to suppose the morals of the celibate monk or nun superior to those of the married man or woman, I should hold the opposite opinion; it is the highest types of men and women who would seek to marry and be best and happiest if living together as faithful man and wife, as devoted father and mother. I do, however, hold that there are others—women as well as men—without the gifts that make for successful parenthood or happy permanent marriage. I would recognise the divergence of these two roughly defined classes and let those who cannot marry be openly permitted to live together in temporary childless unions, destined, I hope, to show to the world the inferiority of every type of ideal of the sex relationships other than the monogamous union, which fulfils the completion of the woman and the man in the child created by their love. And further, these sterile unions would, by their childlessness, act to remove for ever from the world those unsuited to be parents. It is this last result that matters most. As long as we force those unsuited for faithful mating into marriage and hold them bound against their desire, children will be born who must pay the penalty in weakness of character of their parents’ sins against love.

I believe if there were some open recognition of honourable partnerships outside of marriage, not necessarily permanent, with proper provision for the future, guarding the woman, who, in my opinion, should be in all cases protected, a provision not dependent on the generosity of the man and made after the love which sanctioned the union has waned, but decided upon by the man and the woman in the form of a contract before the relationship was entered upon, then there would be many women ready to undertake such unions gladly; there would be women as well as men who, I believe, would prefer them to monogamous marriage that binds them permanently to one partner for life. In this way many marriages would be prevented that inevitably come to disaster. And this would leave greater chances of marriage and child-bearing for other and more suitable types.

It is also possible that such friendship-contracts might, under present disastrous conditions, be made by those who are unsuitably mated and yet are unable, or do not wish, to sever the bond between them, with some other partner they could love. Such contracts would open up possibilities of honourable partnerships to many who must otherwise suffer from enforced sexual abstinence or be driven into shameful and secret unions.

By this means a solution might be found for conditions of dishonour in our midst that we all know to be there—dishonour that, as far as I am able to see, is likely to be increased, and not lessened, in the near future by the conditions left by war. Moreover, prostitution, and also the diseases so closely connected with prostitution, would be greatly lessened, though I do not think that sexual sins would cease. There will always be for a very long time men and women who will be attracted to wild-love. This we have to recognise. Men would not, however, be driven to buy sexual relief.[91]

We have got, I am certain, to recognise that our form of permanent marriage—the monogamous union—cannot meet the sex-needs of all people. To assert that it can do this is to close our eyes to the facts we all know to exist. The extending of the opportunities of honourable love must be faced before we can hope for more moral conditions in marriage. I must affirm again how necessary, in my opinion, is some kind of fixed public recognition for every form of sexual relationship between a man and a woman, so that there may be some accepted standard of conduct for the partners entering into them.

May not something be done now, when we are being forced to consider these questions, to make some such recognition possible? Partnerships other than marriage have had a place as a recognised and guarded institution in many older and more primitive societies, and it may be, as I have tried to show, that the conditions brought upon us after the World War may act in forcing upon us a similar acceptance.