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d. Otherwise his strength as a warrior goes from him and he will surely be killed."

Whatever be the basis of sexual division of labour among different tribes, and whatever minor differences there be in the relative position of the sexes, one thing is certain, and it is all we are at present concerned with, namely: in what Dr. Lowie has called "that planless hodge-podge, that thing of shreds and patches called civilization," woman almost invariably occupies a more or less inferior position. Dr. Lowie himself is careful to warn his readers against the popular assumption that the position of primitive woman is always abject, and that the status of woman offers a sure index of cultural advancement; nevertheless he says that "It is true that in by far the majority of both primitive and more complex cultures woman enjoys, if we apply our most advanced ethical standards, a less desirable position than man."

So much for the cause of woman's subjection and exploitation. It has had powerful abetment in superstitious notions concerning sex, such as the primitive horror of menstruation. "Even educated Indians," says Dr. Lowie, "have been known to remain under the sway of this sentiment, and its influence in moulding savage conceptions of the female sex as a whole should not be underrated. The monthly seclusion of women has been accepted as a proof of their degradation in primitive communities, but it is far more likely that the causal sequence is to be reversed and that her exclusion from certain spheres of activity and consequently lesser freedom is the consequence of the awe inspired by the phenomena of periodicity."

It is evident that this superstition has operated powerfully to segregate women into a special class, excluded from full and equal participation in the life of the community. It is also reasonable to assume that it has stimulated the growth of many other superstitions that have hedged them about from time immemorial. It is probably, for example, closely connected with the Chinese association of evil with the female principle of the Universe, and with the Hebrew notion that sorrow entered the world through the sin of a woman. No doubt it may be connected with the mediaeval tendency to regard woman as a mysterious and supernatural being, either angelic or demoniac. The conception of sibyls and witches is derived from it; and likewise the notion which shows an interesting persistence even now, that a good woman is somewhat nearer the angels than a good man, and a bad woman much more satanic than a bad man. Once the idea is established that woman is a being extra-human, minds prepossessed by this superstition may see her as either subhuman or superhuman; or these two notions may coexist, as in Christian society.

The notion that there is always a savour of sin in the indulgence of sexual appetite, even when exercised under due and formal regulation, has also had a profound effect on the status of women. This notion is to be found in both primitive and civilized communities; and since to each sex the other sex represents the means of gratifying sexual desire, the other sex naturally comes, where such a notion obtains, to represent temptation and sin. But where one sex is dominant and tends to regard itself as the sum of humanity, the other sex is forced to bear alone the burden of responsibility for the evil that sex represents; and it is therefore hedged about by the dominant sex with all sorts of restrictions intended to reduce its opportunities to be tempting, and thus to minimize its harmfulness.

It seems a fair assumption that the association of sin with sex-desire may have arisen from the antagonism between individual inclination and the domination of the group. Among peoples where the clan or the family is the final category, marriage is far from being exclusively a matter of individual interest and preference; indeed the individuals concerned may have little or nothing to say about it. The marriage is arranged by their elders, and the principals may not even see one another before their wedding day. Marriage under these conditions is a contract between families, an arrangement for founding a new economic unit and for perpetuating the tribe, as royal marriages are purely dynastic arrangements in behalf of a political order. Sexual preference can have little place in such a scheme; nothing, indeed, is more inimical to it. Love becomes an interloping passion, threatening the purely utilitarian basis upon which sex has been placed; and as such it must be discountenanced, and young men and women carefully segregated in order that this inconvenient sentiment may have no chance to spring up unauthorized between them.

In the Christian world this association of sin with the sexual appetite has prevailed since the days of St. Paul. Sexual desire has been regarded as a base instinct, and its gratification under any circumstances as a kind of moral concession; therefore woman, as the instrument of sexual satisfaction in the dominant male, must be repressed and regulated accordingly, and to this end she was always to be under obedience to some man, either her husband or a male relative. "Nothing disgraceful," says Clement of Alexandria, "is proper for man, who is endowed with reason; much less for woman, to whom it brings shame even to reflect of what nature she is." Repression has combined with the proprietary idea to make chastity a woman's principal if not her only virtue, and unchastity a sin to be punished with a severity that, in another view, seems irrational and disproportionate, by permanent social ostracism, for example, as in most modern communities, or, as in Egypt and mediaeval Europe, by violent death. An extraordinary inconsistency appears in the fact that since Christian thought has chiefly connected morality with chastity, woman came to be regarded as the repository of morality, and as such to be considered on a higher moral plane than man. But it was really her economic and social inferiority that made her the repository of morality. She must embody the ideal of sexual restraint that her husband often found it inconvenient or onerous to attain for himself; and any unfaithfulness to this ideal on her part inflicted upon him a mysterious injury called "dishonour." He might indulge his own polygamous leanings with impunity, but his failure to make effective his sexual monopoly of his wife made him liable to contempt and ridicule. So strongly does this notion persist that one may find anthropologists, usually the most objective among our men of science, gauging the morality of a primitive people by the chastity of its women.

We have seen that the Christian philosophy looked upon woman as man's creature and his chief temptation, and that Christian society took good care to keep her in that position. In doing so, it made her the enemy of man's better self in a way that apparently was not foreseen by St. Paul, whose concern with the temptations of the flesh seems to have been a matter of more passionate conviction than his concern with those of the spirit. Woman's subordinate position; her enforced ignorance; the narrowness of the interests that were allowed her; the exaggerated regard for the opinion of other people that was bound to be developed in a creature whose whole life depended on her reputation--these conditions were calculated to evolve the sort of being which is hardly able to give clear recognition either to her own spiritual interest or to that of other people. Such a being would be the enemy of man's spiritual interest primarily through sheer inability to understand it. Public opinion was the arbiter of her own destiny; how could she be expected to conceive of any other or higher for man? Her whole life must be lived for appearances; how could she help man to live for actualities, and to make the sacrifice of appearances that such an ideal might entail? The only renunciation of the world that figured in her life was that which led to the convent; of that renunciation which involves being in the world but not of it--that steady repudiation of its standards which clears the way to spiritual freedom--of such a renunciation she would almost certainly be unable even to dream. The inevitable result of this enforced narrowness was well stated by John Stuart Mill in the essay which remains the classic of feminist literature; he pointed out that in a world where women are almost exclusively occupied with material interests, where their standard of appraisal is the opinion of other people, their ambition will naturally connect itself with material things, with wealth and prestige, no matter how inimical such an ambition may be to the spiritual interests of the men upon whom they depend. That there have been distinguished exceptions to this rule does credit to the strength of character which has enabled an individual now and then to attain something like spiritual maturity in spite of a disabling and retarding environment.

The effects of repression and seclusion on the character of woman have given rise, and an appearance of reason, to a host of other superstitions about her nature; notions which have been expressed in terms by many writers and have coloured the thought of many others. To offer a petty but interesting example, one of the most widely prevalent and most easily disproved of these is the belief that women are by nature more given to self-decoration than men. Certainly the practice in civilized society at present seems to bear out this notion. But when we turn to primitive communities we find, on the contrary, that the men are likely to be vainer of finery and more given to it than the women. The reason is simple: decoration of the person arises from the desire to enhance sex-attraction; and it is most industriously practised by that sex among whose members there is the keener competition for favour with members of the opposite sex. In European civilization marriage has been practically the only economic occupation open to women; but monogamous marriage, accompanied by an excess of females and an increasing proportion of celibacy among males, has made it impossible for every woman to get a husband; therefore the rivalry among them has been keen, and their interest in self-decoration has been largely professional. "If in countries with European civilization," says Westermarck, "women nevertheless are more particular about their appearance and more addicted to self-decoration than the other sex, the reason for it may be sought for in the greater difficulty they have in getting married. But there is seldom any such difficulty in the savage world. Here it is, on the contrary, the man who runs the risk of being obliged to lead a single life."

M. Vaerting, on this subject, takes the view that "the inclination to bright and ornamental clothing is dependent not upon sex, but upon the power-relation of the sexes. The subordinate sex, whether male or female, seeks ornament." But it would seem, in view of the accepted theory that self-decoration originates in the desire to enhance sex-attraction, that Westermarck's is the more reasonable explanation; moreover it covers certain cases in primitive life where the women, although their position is abject, nevertheless go plainly clad while the men are given to elaborate decoration of their persons.

In spite of all the evidence which anthropology arrays against it, however, the notion persists that woman is by nature more addicted to self-decoration than man; and there are not wanting advocates of her subjection, among them many women, who maintain that it shows the essential immaturity of her mind!

The notion that women are by nature mentally inferior to men, is primarily due to the fact that their enforced ignorance made them appear inferior. This is one of the strongest superstitions concerning women, as it is also one of the oldest. It has been much weakened by modern experience, but it has by no means disappeared. Indeed, it has stood in the way of dispassionate scientific study of the relative mental capacity of the sexes. Havelock Ellis, in his "Man and Woman," says that "the history of opinion regarding cerebral sexual difference forms a painful page in scientific annals. It is full of prejudices, assumptions, fallacies, over-hasty generalizations. The unscientific have a predilection for this subject; and men of science seem to have lost the scientific spirit when they approached the study of its seat.... It is only of recent years that a comparatively calm and disinterested study of the brain has become in any degree common; and even today the fairly well ascertained facts concerning sexual differences may be easily summed up." He then proceeds to show that those differences are few. It might be remarked here that such actual differences as appear are differences between man and woman as they now are, and can not be taken as final. If brain-mass, for example, depends to some extent on physical size and strength, the mass of woman's brain should tend to increase as she abandons her unnatural seclusion, engages in exacting occupations and indulges in vigorous physical exercise. Already there has been an astonishing change in the female figure. An interesting indication of this is a recent dispatch from Germany stating that according to the shoe-manufacturers of that country the average German woman of today wears a shoe two sizes larger than the woman of a century ago. If woman's body tends thus to enlarge with proper use, so in all likelihood will her brain.

Nor will there be any reason to agree with the numerous adherents of the idea that women are naturally incapable of great creative work in any field until they shall have failed, after generations and even centuries of complete freedom, to produce great creative work. This notion represents the last stand of a priori judgment concerning female intelligence. It is based on the theory, at present much in fashion, that men are more variable than women, and that both idiocy and genius are thus much more frequent in the male sex, while the intelligence of women tends to keep to the safe ground of mediocrity. The implications of this theory manifestly are that genius of the highest order can not be expected to appear in a woman. Since all cats are grey in the dark, according to the proverb, nothing worth saying can be said against this theory or for it. The data which underly it are simply incompetent and immaterial to any conclusion, one way or the other. They represent only a projection of men and women as they now are, and therefore can not be taken as a basis for speculation concerning men and women as they may become. To say, for instance, that because there has never been, to our knowledge, any woman, with the possible exception of Sappho, who showed the highest order of genius in the arts it is probable that there never can or will be, is much the same as to say that because there has never been a woman President of the United States no woman ever can or will be President. Let it be freely admitted that women have had opportunities in the creative field, and have fallen short of supremacy. What of it? One must yet perceive that the woman who has had those opportunities has been the product of a civilization constitutionally inimical to her use of them, and one may not assume that she has entirely escaped the effects of the continuous repression and discouragement exercised upon her by her social, domestic and political environment. When the power and purchase of this influence are fully taken into account, one would say it is not half so remarkable that women have missed supreme greatness in the arts as that they have been able to achieve anything at all. For in the arts, more than anywhere else, spiritual freedom is essential to great achievement; and spiritual freedom means a great deal more than the mere absence of formal restraint upon the processes of writing books or painting pictures. It is this important distinction that writers like Dr. Ellis and Dr. Hall, for example, have overlooked or ignored. They have simply failed to take into account the effect of a generally debilitating environment on the activities of the human spirit.

It can not be gainsaid that the east wind of indifference which has chilled the fire of many a masculine artist who found himself part of an age indifferent to his order of talent, has always blown its coldest upon the woman who essayed creative work. The woman who undertakes to achieve artistic or intellectual distinction in a world dominated by men, finds herself opposed by many disabling influences. In an earlier day she had to endure being thought unwomanly, freakish, or wicked because she dared venture outside the limited sphere of sexuality that had been assigned to her. Now her presence in the field of spiritual endeavour is taken quietly; but she is constantly meeting with the tacit assumption, which finds expression in a thousand subtle ways, that her work must be inferior on account of her sex. Again, the idea that marriage and reproduction constitute an exclusive calling and are really the natural and proper calling for every woman, still has general currency; and the very fact that a vast majority of women tacitly acquiesce in this idea, constitutes a strong pull upon the individual towards the orthodox and expected. Human beings are always powerfully drawn to be like their fellows; to be different requires a somewhat uncommon independence of spirit and toughness of fibre, and the fewer the individuals who attempt it, the more independence and tenacity it requires. "The fewer there be who follow the way to heaven," says the author of the Imitation, "the harder that way is to find."

The position of woman in creative work the world over is analogous to that of the man in America who ventures into the arts: he will be tolerated; he may even be respected; but he will not find in his environment the interest and encouragement that will help to develop his talents and spur him to his best efforts. He may get sympathy and encouragement from individuals; but his environment as a whole will not yield what Sylvia Kopald has well termed the "tolerant expectancy" which nourishes and develops genius. In American civilization the prevailing ideal for men is business--material success; and our people retain, as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed out, the suspicious dislike and disregard which the pioneer community displays towards the individual whose governing ideals take a different line of development from those of his fellows. The artist, therefore, is likely to be looked upon as a queer being who loses something of his manhood by taking up purely cultural pursuits, unless and until, indeed, he happens to make money by it. Yet one never hears the intimation that because no Shakespeare or Raphael has ever yet appeared in this country, none ever will. Very well--imagine instead the prevailing ideal to be domesticity, and you perceive at once the invidious position of the woman artist in an exclusively or dominantly masculine civilization.

I have mentioned the repression of natural impulse inculcated upon women by their upbringing. This will probably not disappear entirely until the prevailing ideal in bringing up girls shall be to help them to become fully human beings, rather than to make them marriageable; for humanity and market-value have really little in common. For centuries the minds and bodies of women have been moulded to suit the more or less casual taste of men. This was the condition of their profession, which was to please men. Woman, in a word, got her living by her sex; her artificially-induced deformities and imbecilities had an economic value: they helped to get her married. It would be impossible to imagine a more profoundly corrupting influence than the dual ideal of sexuality and chastity that has been held up before womankind. "We train them up," says Montaigne, "from their infancy to the traffic of love." Yet men would have them, he says, "in full health, vigorous, in good keeping, high-fed and chaste together; that is to say, both hot and cold." The utter levity of this traditional attitude makes it fair to say that woman is man's worst failure. I know of no stronger argument for the social philosophy of the anarchist; for there is no more striking proof of the incapacity of human beings to be their brothers' keepers than man's failure, through sheer levity, over thousands of years to govern woman either for his good or her own.

Since any discussion of woman's place in society must necessarily be to some extent a study in superstition, one can not really have done with superstition until one is done with the subject. It has seemed to warrant some special attention at the outset of this work not only because the past and present status of womankind can not be explained without reference to it, but because the future of womankind will in large measure depend upon the expeditiousness with which it and those prepossessions which spring from it, are laid aside. The sum of these superstitions and prepossessions may be expressed in the generalization that woman is primarily a function; and wherever any remote approach to this generalization may be discerned in a discussion of her status or her rights--as it may at once be discerned, for instance, in the sentimental side of the work of feminists as staunch as Ellen Key and Olive Schreiner--at just that point the abdication of the scientific spirit in favour of superstition may be suspected.

FOOTNOTES:

Among the Chinese, for example, the woman never goes near the kitchen.

According to news-reports on the day that this is written, Judge McIntyre of New York, sentencing a young woman in a criminal case, said: "When a woman is bad she is vicious and worse than a man, many, many times over."

It finds grotesque expression now and then. I remember seeing in a San Francisco newspaper a few years ago this headline: "Accused of having immoral relations with a woman other than his wife."

In the State of Maryland, if the wife be found to have been unchaste before marriage, the husband is entitled to a divorce; but premarital unchastity on the part of the husband gives the wife no corresponding ground.

As the only woman member of an editorial staff during a period of four years, I had ample opportunity for experience of this attitude. It was openly expressed only twice, both times, oddly enough, by women; but so universal was the unconscious assumption of inferiority that I may say without great exaggeration that it was only among my colleagues that I did not meet with it.

This was written, needless to say, before the casual taste of men set the fashion for women to be mincing and sickly.

Elie Faure.

INSTITUTIONAL MARRIAGE AND ITS ECONOMIC ASPECTS

Marriage, by a strictly technical definition, is a natural habit; that is to say, it is a relationship proceeding out of the common instinct of male and female to mate, and to remain together until after the birth of one or more children. Organized society, on the other hand, always makes it a civil institution, and sometimes a religious institution. So long as man remained in the natural state, roaming about in search of his food as do the apes today, it may be supposed that marriage was based on personal preference and involved only the selective disposition of the individual man and woman and their common concern for the safety of their offspring. But as advancing civilization enabled mankind more easily to obtain and augment its food-supply, and consequently to secure greater safety and also to satisfy its gregarious instinct by living in numerous communities, the habit of marriage underwent a process of sanction and regulation by the group, and was thus transformed into a civil institution. While society remains ethnical, the family exercises supervision over the sexual relations of its members, but always subject to the approval or disapproval of the larger group--the tribe or clan. When the political State emerges, this function continues to be exercised by the family, but it is subject to sanction by the State and is gradually absorbed by it. Yet even where the State has usurped almost all the prerogatives of the family, custom continues to give powerful sanction to interference in marriage both by relatives and by the community.

Where the tribal religion takes on the form of ancestor-worship, or where much importance is attached to burial-rites, marriage and reproduction take on a religious significance. "As the dead," says Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, "are dependent on the living for the performance of their funeral rites and sacrificial observances, marriage itself as well as marriage according to prescribed conditions, child-begetting and bearing, become religious duties. Marriage ceremonial not infrequently takes on a religious character. Infanticide, abortion, celibacy other than celibacy of a sacerdotal character, and adultery, become sins. The punishment of the adulteress is particularly severe, although in some cases her value as property may guarantee her against punishment by death."

Thus there may be, and in most civilized societies there is, a fourfold interference in marriage: interference by the family, by the community, by the State, and by the Church. An old Russian song had it that marriages were contracted

--with not a word about the two persons immediately concerned. Nor is this strange, for marriage is not generally conceived of among either primitive or highly civilized peoples as a personal relationship. It is an economic arrangement, an alliance between families, a means for getting children. To allow so unruly a passion as love to figure in the selection of a mate, is an irregularity which may under certain circumstances be tolerated, but one which is nevertheless likely to be regarded with extreme disapproval. As individualism makes progress against group-tyranny, the preliminaries and the actual contracting of marriage become less the affair of God, the State, the family and the community, and more the affair of the two people chiefly interested; but once contracted, the marriage can hardly be said, even in the most civilized community, to be free of considerable regulation by these four influences. The time which Spencer foresaw, when "the union by affection will be held of primary moment and the union by law as of secondary moment," has by no means arrived. If the married couple be Roman Catholics, for example, they may not free themselves from an unhappy marriage without paying the penalty of excommunication; and if they live in a State dominated by the Catholic Church, they may be legally estopped from freeing themselves at all. Nor may they, save by continence, limit the number of their offspring without risking the same penalty. If they are Episcopalians or Lutherans they may divorce only on the ground of adultery, and the guilty party is forbidden to remarry. In communities where the influence of other Protestant sects predominates, and where, therefore, divorce and remarriage are not formally forbidden by the Church, the pressure of public opinion may yet operate to prevent them. The State not only prescribes the form that marriage shall take, but it may also either prohibit divorce--as in South Carolina, for example--or forbid it save in accordance with such regulations as it sees fit to make; and these regulations are not only of a kind that make divorce prohibitive to the poor, but they are often so humiliating as to constitute an effective barrier to the dissolution of unhappy unions. The State of New York offers an excellent illustration. Adultery is the only ground upon which divorce is allowed, and even then it may be refused if the action is taken by mutual consent. The couple who wish to be divorced must therefore, if there be no legal cause, go through the demoralizing business of making a case, which means that one or the other must provide at least the appearance of "misconduct"; and even then they are in danger of being found in collusion. But suppose one party to be giving legal ground; then the other party, in order to get proof, is obliged to resort to the lowest kind of espionage. Such disreputable methods, however much they be in keeping with the nature and practices of the State, are hardly becoming to civilized society, and civilized persons are indisposed towards them. Their general effect is therefore to discourage application for divorce in New York and encourage it elsewhere.

It is significant of the unspiritual estimate generally put upon marriage, that incompatibility is rarely allowed as a legal ground of divorce. Violation of the sexual monopoly that marriage implies; pre-nuptial unchastity on the part of the woman; impotence; cruelty; desertion; failure of support; insanity; all of these or some of them are the grounds generally recognized where divorce is allowed at all. This is to say that society demands a specific grievance of one party against the other, a grievance having physical or economic consequences, as a prerequisite to freedom from the marriage-bond. The fact that marriage may be a failure spiritually is seldom taken into account. Yet there is no difficulty about which less can be done. Infidelity may be forgiven and in time forgotten; the deserter may return; the delinquent may be persuaded to support his family; the insane person may recover; even impotence may be cured. But if two people are out of spiritual correspondence, if they are not at ease in one another's society, there is nothing to be done about it. "Anything," says Turgenev, "may be smoothed over, memories of even the most tragic domestic incidents gradually lose their strength and bitterness; but if once a sense of being ill at ease installs itself between two closely united persons, it can never be dislodged." Modern society is slowly, very slowly, coming into the wisdom which prompted this observation. The gradual liberalization of the divorce-laws which our moralists regard as a symptom of modern disrespect for the sacredness of marriage, is in fact a symptom of a directly opposite tendency--the tendency to place marriage on a higher spiritual plane than it has hitherto occupied.

The State assumes the right either to allow artificial limitation of offspring or to make it a crime; and it exercises this assumption according to its need for citizens or the complexion of its religious establishment. It also fixes the relative status and rights of the two parties. In several American States, for instance, a married woman is incompetent to make contracts or to fix her legal residence. The Virginia law recognizes the primary right of the father to the custody of the child, yet it makes the mother criminally liable for the support of children. On the other hand, the husband is everywhere required by law to support his wife. Such laws, of course, like most laws, are felt only when the individual comes into conflict with them. The State does not interfere in many cases where married couples subvert its regulations--for example, the law which entitles the husband to his wife's services in the home and permits him to control her right to work outside the home, does not become binding save in cases where the husband sees fit to invoke it. As a rule the State forbids fornication and adultery. In case of separation and divorce, if the parties disagree concerning financial arrangements or the custody of children, it exercises the right to arbitrate these matters.

The sanctions of interference by the family, save in the contracting of marriage by minors, are at present those of custom, affection, and economic power. When two persons have decided to marry, for instance, it remains quite generally customary for the man to go through the formality of asking the woman's nearest male relation for her hand. This is of course a survival from the period when a woman's male guardian had actual power to prevent her marrying without his consent. The influence of affection is too obvious to require illustration; it is the subtlest and most powerful sanction of family interference. Economic power is perhaps most commonly used to prevent or compel the contracting of marriage. It may make itself felt, where parents or other relatives are well-to-do, in threats of disinheritance if prospective heirs undertake to make marriages which are displeasing to them. A striking instance of the use of this power is the will of the late Jay Gould, which required each of his children to obtain consent of the others before marrying. It is not uncommon for legators to stipulate that legatees shall or shall not marry before a certain age under penalty of losing their inheritance.

These influences do not always, of course, take the same direction. At present, for example, artificial limitation of offspring receives irregular but effective community-sanction in face of opposition by Church and State. Or again, public opinion almost universally condemns the idea that a father may, by his will, remove his children from the custody of their mother, although the State, as in Maryland and Delaware, may sanction such an act. But, however much they may check one another, these influences are all constantly operating to restrict and regulate marriage away from its original intention as a purely personal relationship, and to keep it in the groove of economic and social institutionalism. The reasons for this are to be found in the vestigiary fear of sex, love of power, love of the habitual, religious superstition, and above all in the notion that the major interests of the group are essentially opposed to those of the individual and are more important than his. A combination of two of these motives has recently come under my own observation in the case of a young woman whose parents can not forgive her for having divorced a man whom she did not love and married a man whom she did. They were accustomed to their first son-in-law, and resent the necessity of adjusting themselves to the idea of having a new one. Moreover, they feel that their daughter should have spared them the "disgrace" of a divorce. The fact that she was unhappy in her first marriage and is happy in her second seems to have little weight with them. They did their best to prevent her second marriage and are at present exerting every effort to make it unsuccessful. It is needless to emphasize the fact that this order of interference can not be expected to disappear while the notion persists that the actions of one adult member of a family or group can possibly reflect credit or discredit upon all the other members.

The reason why marriage is "an incomparable protection to society" lies in the fact that the continuance of the power of the exploiting State depends upon the relative helplessness of its exploited subjects; and nothing renders the subject more helpless against the dominance of the State than marriage. For monopoly, under the protection of the State, has rendered the support of a family extremely difficult, by closing free access of labour to natural resources and thus enabling the constant maintenance of a labour-surplus. Where there is little or no land not legally occupied, access to the soil is impossible save on terms that render it, if not downright prohibitive, at least unprofitable. The breadwinner who has neither land nor capital is thus forced to take his chance in a labour-market overcrowded by applicants for work who are in exactly his position: they are shut out from opportunity to work for themselves, and obliged to accept such employment as they can get at a wage determined not by their capacity to produce, but by the number of their competitors. Not only is the wage-earner thus obliged to content himself with a small share of what his labour produces; he is forced to pay out of that share further tribute to monopoly in most of the things he buys. For shelter, for the products of the soil and mines, he pays tribute to the monopolist of land and natural resources; for industrial products, in most countries, he pays to the monopoly created by high tariffs. Or he may have to pay to both, as in the case of the purchaser of steel products.

Thus the economic conditions brought about by the State operate to make marriage the State's strongest bulwark; and those who believe that the preservation of the State, or of a particular form of it, is a sacred duty--their number among its victims is legion--are quite logical in taking alarm at the increasing unwillingness of men and women to marry, or if they do marry, to have children. They are logical not only because marriage and children make for endurance of established abuses, but because, as I have already remarked, it is important for the State to have as many subjects as possible, to keep up a labour-surplus at home and to fight for the interests of its privileged class abroad; that is, so long as industry is able to meet the exactions of monopoly and still pay interest and wages. Where monopoly has reduced interest and wages to the vanishing-point, the State can no longer be said to be a going concern; its breakdown is then only a matter of time. This point has been reached in England, and hence the condition of which I have spoken: a numerous population is no longer desirable, for as unemployed they are a burden on the State and a menace to its existence. But as long as the State is a going concern, the Spartan rule is that best suited to its interests: obligatory marriage, and unlimited reproduction.

In modern civilization, however, in spite of the enormous power of the State, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to enforce this rule. The State, with all its power, can not force its subjects to obey any law which they do not really want to obey--or perhaps I should say, which they want not to obey; and the growth of individualism has created a general distaste for any effort on the part of government to meddle directly in the affairs of citizens. Attempts to do so are likely to bring humiliation on the Government through its inability to enforce them, and to generate in the population a salutary disrespect for law; as the attempt to enforce the fourteenth and eighteenth Amendments has done in this country. With the decline of the patriarchal system, the contracting of marriage if not the status of marriage, is coming to be regarded as the exclusive concern of the individual. Many who would not for a moment tolerate compulsory marriage will tolerate a humiliating regulation of marriage; they will allow the State to make of marriage a life-long bondage, but they reserve the right to refuse to enter into bondage. The State may penalize celibacy by levying a special tax on unmarried persons; but it can no longer force people to abandon it.

Indeed, one may say without overmuch exaggeration that at present the preservation of marriage as an institution is almost solely due to its tenacity as an instinctive habit. For while marriage is the strongest bulwark of the State, the economic order for the sake of which the State exists tends nevertheless to discourage marriage because it progressively concentrates wealth in a few hands, and thus deprives the great mass of people of adequate means to rear and educate families. This condition is largely responsible for the fact that celibacy, illegitimacy and prostitution are on the increase in every civilized country; and that the average age at which marriage takes place tends steadily to become higher, as it takes longer to get into an economic position which makes possible the support of a family. In this connexion, Katharine Anthony's statement that factory-girls and heiresses are the country's youngest brides is significant. Neither the heiress nor the factory-girl has anything to gain by waiting: the heiress already has economic security and the factory-girl never will have it, for she and her husband--if she marries in her own class--will always be pretty much at the mercy of conditions in the labour-market. It should also be remarked that among the great middle class the standard of education for both sexes, but more particularly for women, is higher than among the very rich and the very poor; and this tends to advance the average age for marriage.

It tends as well to make children a heavy burden on the parents. Among primitive peoples, where difficulty in supporting a family is virtually unknown, where adjustment to the environment offers no complexities and childhood is therefore not so prolonged, and where, moreover, children through their labour become an economic asset, they are desirable. But in a civilized society where the parental sense of responsibility has developed to the point where the child is reared for its own sake, where adaptation to the environment is a complex and lengthy process involving expensive education and prolonged dependence of the child upon the parents, and where the difficulty of getting a start in life tends also to lengthen the period of dependence; in such a society it is natural that the parental sense of responsibility should find expression in an artificial limitation of offspring to the number that the circumstances of the parents will enable them to educate properly. There is a further step that this feeling can suggest in these days of excessive economic exploitation and ruinous wars; that is, refusal to reproduce at all: and this step an increasing number of married people are taking, to the great distress of self-appointed guardians of our customs and morals.

Failure to perceive the decisive importance of the connexion between the economic condition of the parents and the proper equipment of children for making their way in life often leads to absurd contradictions; as for example in that staunch friend of childhood, the late Ellen Key. No one is more insistent than this writer upon the importance of rearing the child for its own good; yet she gravely declares that "from the point of view of the nation, always from that of the children, and most frequently from that of the parents, the normal condition must be, that the number of children shall not fall short of three or four." Miss Key's primary failure is one that must be judged with great severity because it is both fundamental and typical--it pervades and vitiates the whole body of feminist literature. It is a failure in intellectual seriousness. Miss Key is fully aware of a persistent economic dislocation bearing on her thesis--"At present there is a shortage of labour for those willing to work, of food for the hungry, of educational advantages for those thirsting for knowledge, of nursing for the sick, of care for the children. The circumstances of the majority are now such as to produce, directly or indirectly, crime, drunkenness, insanity, consumption, or sexual diseases in large sections of the population." Again, "The struggle for daily bread, the cares of livelihood ... are now the stamp of public as well as private life.... Married people have no time to cultivate their feelings for one another.... Through the cares of livelihood parents have no time to live with their children, to study them in order to be able really to educate them." One must suspect a peculiar incapacity for logic in the writer who recognizes such conditions and still recommends three or four children as being the minimum number that people should have who wish to do their duty by their country, their children and themselves. Miss Key has been content to shirk inquiry into the fundamental cause of these conditions, and hence the means she recommends for their cure are silly and feeble. An international universal organization which is to regulate all competition and all co-operation; trade-unionism, the abolition of inheritances; the exercise of "collective motherliness" in public affairs; these are some of the means she offers for the regeneration of society. Probably never since the remark attributed to Marie Antoinette that if the starving populace could not get bread they should eat cake, has ineptitude gone further. If Miss Key's call to duty were brought to the attention of the well-to-do married couple of the city of New York whose means are sufficient to permit them to occupy an apartment of, let us say, two or three or four rooms, often without kitchen, they might agree with her in principle; but they would probably not attempt to bring up three or four children in such straitened surroundings and to educate them over a long span of years, for a very doubtful future. If this example seem special and far-fetched, I would remind my readers that over fifty per cent of people in this country are urban dwellers, and that the vast majority of them are worse off for dwelling space, not better, than the hypothetical couple I have cited.

It is, of course, among those who are worse off that children are most numerous. Ignorance and religious scruples--for the Church is strongest among the ignorant because of their ignorance--combine to produce large families among the class that can least afford them. For civilization, although it denies these people most things, grants them too great a fecundity. Among primitive peoples fecundity is decreased by various causes, such as excessively hard work, childbearing at a too early age, and prolonged lactation during which continence is often the rule. The average number of children borne by a savage does not often exceed five or six, whereas the civilized woman may bear eighteen or twenty, and it is not at all exceptional for the woman of our slums to bear ten or twelve. Among west-side women of New York whom Katherine Anthony questioned concerning frequency of pregnancies, one reported fifteen in nineteen years, another ten in twelve years, and another six in nine years. Obviously, then, when eugenists and moralists deplore what they term the modern tendency to race-suicide, they refer to the educated classes. The moralist argues from prepossession and may be dismissed from consideration; but the eugenist has scientific pretensions which are not without a certain degree of validity and can therefore not be lightly passed over. So long as he argues for improvement in the quality of the race through the substitution of intelligence for blind instinct in propagation, he is on solid ground: no one unprepossessed by the sentimentalism which regards legitimate children, however untoward be the circumstances of their birth and breeding, as a direct visitation from God, can deny that voluntary and intelligent attention to the quality of offspring offers better prospects for civilization than hit-or-miss quantity-production. The eugenist deplores the fact that at present this exercise of intelligence is confined to the comparatively small class of the educated and well-to-do, and that therefore the birth-rate among that class is all too small to offset the unchecked propagation of the ignorant and unfit. This is unfortunately true; and it suggests the obvious question: Why is there in every modern State so large a class of ignorant and unfit persons as to constitute a menace to the vitality of that State? If it is solely because the unfit are allowed to propagate unchecked, then those eugenists who advocate the sterilization of paupers and imbeciles and the encouragement of propagation among the intelligent classes by an elaborate system of State subsidy, may be listened to with respect if not with perfect faith in the practicability of their proposals. But how about that large mass of the physically and mentally normal who live at the subsistence-level, and whose progeny, if economic pressure tighten a little, are likely to be forced down into the class of underfed beings, dulled and brutalized by poverty, from whose ranks our paupers, imbeciles and criminals are largely recruited? To ignore the existence of this perennial source of unfitness is levity. To recognize it, and to assume that it results from over-propagation is to assume at the same time that the earth's population is too numerous for comfortable subsistence on the amount of cultivable land in existence. If this disproportion be real, the only hope lies in persuading this class to limit its offspring voluntarily to the number that the earth's surface will comfortably support. If it be only an apparent disproportion due to an artificial shortage of land created by monopoly, then the eugenist's program amounts simply to a recommendation that the population be somehow restricted to the number that can get subsistence on the terms of the monopolist. Henry George has conclusively disproved the validity of the Malthusian theory which underlies the assumption of over-population, while Oppenheimer's figures show that if land were freely available for use, the earth's present population might easily be supported on one-third of its arable surface. Here, really, is the most convincing answer to the standard arguments for birth-control; yet so far as I know, the opponents of birth-control have never done much with it, whether out of ignorance or because of the profound economic readjustments that it implies. The eugenist, too, generally displays a constitutional aversion to attacking the problem of unfitness at the right end--which is, to inquire, first of all, why it exists. Hence the ineptitude of his proposals for social betterment: they would involve much unwieldy governmental machinery and considerably more intelligence than any State has ever displayed in dealing with social questions; and they would attack only the results of our social ills, leaving the causes freely operative.

This sort of thing, of course, is not the invariable rule. There are many middle-class women who give their families untiring service, and an increasing number who, either from choice or necessity, engage in gainful occupations outside their homes. Of this country's eight and one half million women breadwinners, two million are married; and it may be assumed that a fair percentage of these are of the middle class. The great majority, however, are of the labouring class; and upon these, economic injustice weighs most heavily. It is these women who bear most children; and it is they who, when their husbands are unable or unwilling to meet the growing expenses of the family, assume the double burden of "woman's work" in the home and whatever they can get to do outside that will enable them to earn a few dollars a week, in order to "keep the family together." Miss Katharine Anthony, in her book, "Mothers Who Must Earn," gives a striking picture of the unskilled married women workers of west-side New York, victims of a crowded labour-market, who take the hardest jobs at the lowest pay, in order that they may give some few poor advantages to the children they have brought into the world unwillingly, knowing that they could not afford them. "The same mother," says Miss Anthony, "who resents the coming of children and resigns them so apathetically to death, will toil fourteen hours a day and seven days a week to keep up a home for the young lives in her charge."

Such testimony, and testimony of a similar kind from governmental investigators, somehow makes the general run of social criticism appear frivolous and superficial. The married wage-earner, worn with excessive childbearing, who still finds strength to work long hours in laundry or factory during the day and do her housework at night, hardly fits into the picture of selfish, emancipated women, wilfully deserting their proper sphere of domesticity either to seek pleasure or to maintain their economic independence. Indeed, the idea of economic independence is quite at variance with her notions of respectability. "Not to work," says Miss Anthony, "is a mark of the middle-class married woman, and the ambitious west-side family covets that mark. Hence comes the attempt to conceal the mother's employment, if she has one, which is one of the little snobberies of the poor." The sole object of these women's toil is to preserve the home, chief prop of a social order which bears upon it with crushing weight; and their adherence to a social philosophy which regards the preservation of the home as peculiarly the business of women is evident in the fact that they contribute the whole of their meagre earnings to its upkeep, whereas their husbands are likely to contribute only as much of their own earnings as they see fit.

It goes without saying that the conditions I have cited have a profound effect on the psychology of parents, and therefore on the lives of children. The rearing of children, if justice is to be done them, is one of the most exacting tasks that can be undertaken. The adjustment that is required to fit parents to the personalities of their children and children to those of their parents and of one another, is in itself a most delicate and difficult process, and one upon which the nature of the child's adjustment to the larger world greatly depends. Such a process naturally involves friction, and therefore, if it is to be successful, calls for no little tact and patience in the parents; and cramped quarters, sordid poverty, and exhausting labour are hardly conducive to the possession of either of these qualities. Children of the middle class, it is remarked often enough, hardly know their harassed, overworked fathers; but children of the labouring class are likely to know neither of their parents, or to know them only as fretful, quarrelsome people, brutalized by overwork. "The strain of bringing up a family on the average workingman's wage," says Miss Anthony, "reduced as this is likely to be by unemployment, sickness, or drink, constitutes, indeed, the dark age of the tenement mother's life. It is not strange that the good will existing between husband and wife often gives way beneath it. 'I tell my husband,' said Mrs. Gurney, 'it's not right for us to be quarreling all the time before the children. But it seems like we can't help it. He's so worried all the time and I'm so tired. If we were easy in our minds we wouldn't do it.'"

Nor do the children of these people have anything much better to look forward to than such a lot as that of their parents, for poverty drives them too into the labour-market as soon as they are old enough to earn, to the profound distress of reformers who refuse to face the basic question of child-labour, namely: whether it is better for human beings, even if they be children, to work for their living or to starve. This applies not only to the children of our industrial labouring classes, but to those of the agricultural labourer and the tenant-farmer, who pay the same penalty for the exploitation of their parents. There is no little irony in the fact that our growing consciousness of the right of children to be well born and well reared proceeds hand in hand with an economic injustice which renders it impossible to secure that right for all children.

If responsibility for the upbringing of children is to continue to be vested in the family, then the rights of children will be secured only when parents are able to make a living for their families with so little difficulty that they may give their best thought and energy to the child's development and the problem of helping it to adjust itself to the complexities of the modern environment. Such a condition is not utopian, but quite possible of attainment, as I shall show later. But for the present, and for some time to come, marriage and parenthood will continue to make men and women virtual slaves of the economic order which they help to perpetuate. Small wonder that the women of whom Miss Anthony writes are thoroughly disillusioned concerning "marriage life," and would avoid it if they "had it to do over." Marriage as an institution has little to offer these people save toil and suffering; it is, as I have remarked, its tenacity as an instinctive habit that makes them its victims. And if it were not for the responsibilities that marriage entails, responsibilities which make people fearful of the economic uncertainty involved in revolutionary change, the economic order that makes marriage "an instrument of torture" and thwarts the development of children, would not last overnight.

FOOTNOTES:

Westermarck defines it as "a more or less durable connexion between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till after the birth of the offspring."

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