Women's Wild Oats Part 10

I have said so much about this restlessness of women that I do not want to labor the question, rather I wish to consider what to me seem the results as they are finding expression in the relations of women and men. It is, of course, a subject much too difficult to allow arbitrary judgments, all I can do is to jot down a few remarks, rough notes, as it were, on what I have seen and thought.

And first, I would ask the reader to remember those many s.e.x-conventions that in the past have gathered around women's lives. I need not enumerate them, they are known to you all, but what I want to emphasize is that, though so many of them have been removed their influence persists. Always the customs and beliefs of a past social life live on beneath the surface of society; in a thousand ways we do not recognize, they press upon the individual soul. We cannot without strong effort escape from the chains of our inheritance. In the nations of the West, where the bridegroom's joy with his bride is never spoken of except as a subject fit for jests, where celibacy has been extolled and marriage treated as "a remedy for sin," where barrenness instead of being regarded as the greatest possible evil is artificially produced, where the natural joys of the body--the s.e.x-joys and the joy of wine and food have been confused with disgraceful things--it is there that a perpetual conflict lurks at the very heart of life; hidden it becomes more active for evil.

Always times of upheaval and change afford opportunities for escape in violent expression, and while we bewail the disorder and confusion, the many s.e.xual crimes that are overwhelming us, we ought to take warning at our folly in having set up for ourselves the new fas.h.i.+onable G.o.d of "escape from s.e.x."

Women are the worst sinners. At every opportunity the women of my generation have been insisting on "the monstrous exaggerations of the claims of s.e.x," breaking away violently from the older obsessing preoccupation with their position as women, but only to take up new evasions--fresh miserable attempts at escape. What began as a war of ideals became before long a chaos. It has had the effect not at all of minimizing the power of s.e.x, but just as far as the deeper needs and instincts have been denied, has there been a deliberate turning on the part of the young to the reliefs of s.e.x-excitements. The servitude of s.e.x is one of the essential riddles of life. Personally I do not feel there is any simple solution. The conflict, broadly speaking, lies in this: our s.e.x needs have changed very little through the ages, now we are faced with the task of adapting them to the society in which we find ourselves placed, of conforming with the rules laid down, accepting all the pressing claims of civilized life, conditions, not clearly thought out and established to help us and make moral conduct easier, but dependent much more on property, social rank, and ignorance,--all combining to make any kind of healthy s.e.x expression more difficult, which explains our duplicity and so often prevents the acceptance in practice of the code of conduct upheld by most of us as right. I think it is a particularly intolerable state of affairs. It is not pleasant to find oneself out as a moral hypocrite.

The primitive savage within us all always will make any kind of excuse to break out in its own primitive savage way. We are just too civilized to face this, and, I think, there can be little doubt that our conduct has been hindered by many of the modern intellectual suppressions. The convention that pa.s.sions and emotions are absent, when in reality they are present, to-day has broken down as, indeed, it always must break down everywhere, leading in thousands of cases individual young women and men to disaster, making us all more furtive, more pitiful slaves of the force whose power we are not yet sufficiently brave to acknowledge.

Much of our civilization has revealed itself as a monstrous sham, more dangerously indecent because of its pretense at decency. It is something like those poisoned tropical forests, fever-infested, which were in the land of my birth, beautiful outwardly, with great vivid flowers, high palms, towering trees of fern, all garlanded with creepers and lovely wild growth,--glades of fair shadow inviting to rest, yet poisonous so that to sleep there was death.

II

We have yet to find our way in s.e.xual things. The revealing knowledge that Freud and his followers have given to the world shows us something of our groping darkness; there is much we have to relearn, to accept many things in ourselves and others that we have denied. We must give up our cherished pretense of the s.e.xual life being easy and innocent, we must open doors into the secret defenses we have set around ourselves.

None of us know much, but at least we must begin to tell the truth about the little we do know.

Now, this self-honesty may sound a simple thing. It is not. Few of us even know how hard it will be. It will call for the greatest possible courage to tear away the new, as well as the old, bandages with which we have blinkered our eyes, walking in shadow so complete that some of us have lost the very power of sight, like the strange fishes that live in the gloom of the Kentucky caves. Honesty will demand a real conversion, a change in our att.i.tude to ourselves and to one another. We shall have, indeed, to rea.s.sure ourselves of the sincerity of our intentions, to begin as the first necessary step to accept ourselves as we are and to give up what we desire to pretend we are, to learn to be truthful to ourselves about ourselves.

Better to know ourselves as sinners, than to be virtuous in falsehood.

We must grow up emotionally; want things to seem what they are, not what we want them to be. Afterwards we can perhaps go on to help others.

III

There is a further danger to which I must refer, for it is one that, in my opinion, is very active for disaster. I find a tendency among most grown-ups, especially among teachers and advanced parents, who ought to know better, to place too firm a reliance on moral teaching and s.e.xual enlightenment as a means of saving our daughters and our sons from making the same mistakes in their lives that we ourselves have made.

Like those drowning in deep waters where they cannot swim, we have clutched at any plank of hope. You see, so many of the old planks--religion, social barriers, chaperons, home restrictions, and so many more, on which our parents used to rely, have failed us, broken in our hands by the vigorous destroying of the young generation, and, therefore we have clutched with frantic fingers at this new fair-looking life raft, in pursuit of the one aim to protect our children. Myself, I have done this. It is with uttermost sadness I have to acknowledge now that I do not believe we can help the young very far or deeply by all our teaching. Not only do they want their own experience, not ours, but it is right for them to have it. The urge of adolescence carries them away out of our detaining hands.

But that is not to say we are to push them into dangers. I believe we make the way too hard for the young with much of our nonsense about liberty and not interfering. You know what happens in a garden where the gardener does interfere with his hoe? I have been forced back, often reluctantly, into accepting the necessity of boundaries. I want right conduct to be defined, and defined widely with possible paths, so that the young may have a chance of finding their way.

We have, I am sure, to set up new conventions, establish fresh sanctions and accept prohibitions, to rebuild our broken ramparts and render safe and pleasant the city within. Do we fail to do this, we leave the young to stumble among the ruins we have made. And do not let us be hypocrites and profess surprise when they fall. The knowledge we are forcing on them, often against their desire, will not save them. With all our efforts we can but teach them intellectually; a form of knowledge, which shatters like thin gla.s.s, with a very slight blow, when it comes in contact with the emotions. Thus I am driven back to the truth, established already in an earlier essay, that the one sure way to deliver the young from evil is to lessen their temptations.

You see hidden sin is always more attractive than open sin; for one thing, it is easier to begin, and the beginning of sin is usually drifting; secrecy also supplies adventure, and the excitement that is desired by the young so pa.s.sionately in the dullness of life.

IV

There never was an age when so many diverse types of young women flourished, sometimes they are rather puzzling to the middle-aged observer.[200:1] With so many of them there is a kind of forced levity, a self-consciousness that prevents them from being either simple or serious. All the clever ones seem to think that by talking in generalizations, you can avert the plain issues of life. Their conversation is full of meaningless remarks, such as "the bondage of s.e.x," "the superst.i.tion of chast.i.ty," "freedom in the marriage bond,"

"the sacrifice of women," "stifling convention," and so on, which they go on repeating because that is the terminology of their set. They have no conception of realities at all, only of abstract situations.

Impossible to tell what are their pseudo-emotions; a sort of sterile intellectualism, shown in their s.h.i.+rking of s.e.x responsibility. They wish to ignore the real difficulty of marriage; they accept love, but only with conditions. The one thing they face practically is work, and the two activities don't conflict in their estimates, because their minds are too choked with conceptions to admit facts. They are faithful to their training by G. Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, in thinking that by stating a situation and arguing about it, you can s.h.i.+rk the need of dealing with it.

Some women want to wipe the s.e.x-side of life out. They cannot. They preach that work and human experience (whatever that may mean) will weaken s.e.x-desire. It does not. Desires may be inhibited, not destroyed, corrupting in quietness they wait opportunity to revive, insistent, clamoring.

Other young women try deliberately to keep love light. Shrewd enough to understand the heavy claims of serious pa.s.sion, they prefer affairs of the senses only; episodes that are a secret detachable part of their lives. They want love as an experience, and to provide the always desired excitement, but they want as well to remain free to take up other aspects of life. And while condescending to fascinate men while deliberately seeking attention, they still hold themselves in hand; intending to exploit life to the uttermost, they find s.e.x amusing, but they fight always against its being a vocation.

There is, of course, a reason for this. The young are more reckless and lawless, they do more and go further than the last generation, and this is but an outward expression of disorder within, in my opinion, to be traced back to the pa.s.sionate need felt by the young for love. So that whenever this love-desire is unsatisfied, or falsely satisfied, the dynamic need causes a kind of ferment, which sours love so that it becomes _desire to be considered_. If a woman is not important to others, she becomes important to herself, and this unconscious self-glorification is so devouring, so little based on anything that can possibly satisfy the need that is its cause, that it creates a hunger that can never be appeased, so constant are its demands for nourishment. It is difficult to say how far this insatiable egomania will take our young women. Some men are also empoisoned with it.

Both these types are modern; opposed to them is another type of young woman, more feminine, easier to explain, but also thwarted, restlessly demanding an outlet. These women do not want to furl their s.e.x, they seek lovers to whom they may surrender themselves, but they suffer from a formless discontent that rots into every love and prevents them finding satisfaction. Eternally they are unsatisfied, without knowing why.

It is another modern disease and has little connection with flirting and lightness of character, though often the two are confused. Too restless to be faithful, born spiritual adventurers, these wors.h.i.+pers of emotionalism set up elaborate pretenses of pure friends.h.i.+ps, ignoring the hot glow within: they love romantically, but rarely are strong enough to obey their inclinations. Such women are out on an eternal quest, and every now and again, they believe they have found what they are seeking. Then they discover they have not found it, so their search is taken up anew; while often the social scheme drives them into dangerous corners, forces them to turn from their quest or to use mean weapons of deceit, does not give them a chance.

These romantic seekers of love, suffering continual frustration from the evaporation of emotional interest that defies their own needs; the many types of efficient workers, alert, hard, self-satisfied, not wholly cynical, yet with a touch of something that borders on cynicism, submitting almost with a secret repugnance to the mysterious but supreme bond which holds the s.e.xes miserably together; and the prost.i.tute woman of all kinds, out to seize every advantage from men, ruthless, living upon s.e.x--these are, it seems to me, the three main types of women resulting in our so-called civilization of to-day, from our repressions and falsehoods, our indefinite wills, from our confused ideals and failure in living; and it is hard to say which is the most harmful, which is the most wronged, which is the most unhappy, the furthest removed from the type that is eternal--the ideal woman, satisfied and glad, whom a happier future may again permit to live.

V

It was Mr. Wells who said in one of his novels, "suppose the liberation of women simply means the liberation of mischief." "Suppose she _is_ wicked as a s.e.x, suppose she _will_ trade on her power of exciting imaginative men."

Something very like this has been happening in the world to-day.

We are all to pieces morally. The consciences of many people are their neighbor's opinions, and the removal of so many young girls and men from their home surroundings, their relations and old friends, has greatly slackened the watchful safe-guarding of morals, so that any slightest infringement has not been at once observed and quickly punished. The important barriers of difference in cla.s.s, in social positions, and in race have also broken through. Conditions in the five war-years and most of the arrangements of society have discouraged morality very heavily, and the wise thing for us to do in the matter is not to grow eloquent about sin, but at once to do intelligent things to make right conduct easier.

An organized freedom and independence for women has certainly had startling moral results. The reasons are obvious enough. It is a necessary consequence of our modern insistence on individual values; the harping of one generation on freedom, which has caused our young women, in many directions, to carry their ideas of freedom far beyond the accepted conventions of our ordinary civilized human a.s.sociation. It has been shown as manifestly true that for all ordinary young women that intimate a.s.sociation with men, fellows.h.i.+p in the workshops and factories and in play, turns them with extreme readiness to love-making. Now, I am very far from wis.h.i.+ng to blame women; rather am I glad that what I have a.s.serted, for so long and against so much opposition, about the elementary power of s.e.x in women, has been vindicated by themselves.

Life for women so often has been wrong and discordant, and the wretchedness has been greatly increased by the way we have left, in the immediate past, the force of s.e.x unregulated and unrecognized, thereby causing much of the modern companions.h.i.+p of women with men, of girls with boys, to be really a monstrous sham, maintained and made exciting by false situations that often have closed around the two like a trap.

There are, and always have been, far more women and girls than we like to acknowledge who are by their inclinations s.e.xually promiscuous. It is just conventional rot to talk of s.e.x impulse being weaker and quite different in women from men; of constancy as the special virtue of women. Sometimes it is, but oftener it is not. It depends on the type of woman. A great and possibly increasing number of girls to-day regard love affairs in very much the same way as they are regarded by the average sensual man, as enjoyable and exciting incidents of which they are ashamed only when they are talked about and blamed. Such girls very rarely give trouble to men or make scenes, they don't care enough; that, I think, is why they always find lovers. It is also why it is easy for them to have secret relations. With no s.e.x-conscience, such girls, even when quite young, exhibit a logic and a frankness that sometimes is rather startling. They seem to have no modesty, though many of them are prudes; they have no consciousness of responsibility; they feel no kind of shame. Such libidinous temperaments have been common at all times and in all societies, if in stricter periods so many women did not follow their inclinations with the openness now so frequent, it was simply out of fear; possibly they took more careful precautions against discovery.

There are as well as these wantons, girls of a different type, who are more contradictory and difficult because of a less simple s.e.xuality, but who are equally, even if not more, harmfully destructive in the utter misery they often create. This is the type of girl who ripens to a premature and too emotional s.e.xuality, and who, though still keeping herself physically intact, is spiritually corrupt. The spiritual masochism of a woman may lead to depths of cruelty rarely understood.[208:1]

Many other n.o.bler types of women have been playing with vice. Many wild impulses have found strange expressions. Women have been very like children playing at desperate rebels, who take up weapons to use far more deadly than they knew. All this playing with love is detestable, all of it. It shows a shameful s.h.i.+rking of responsibility. Women are the custodians of manners in love, and very many, who have not dreamt of the results of their slackenings, have been urging on the young to a riotous festival, extravagant and disquieting.

It must, I think, be acknowledged that a vast impatience on the part of women has made conduct less decent and less responsible. Lovers are more reckless, even sometimes more consciously and vulgarly vicious. Women of profound and steadfast emotional nature are rare. The great majority now, perhaps, are not entirely light-minded, but they are less serious, more noisily determined to do what they want, and get what they can both out of men and out of life.

And the great fact that stands out from all this--the great need for our private personal good as well as the public good--is the need of the young for guidance and regulation, the necessity for refixing of moral standards in s.e.xual conduct, of formulating a code of good manners, to meet the present needs. Nothing else, in my opinion, can avert even greater disasters of license in the future, than those conditions we are now facing.

VI

New wine is being put into old bottles and the wine of life is being poured out and wasted. The old convention that irregular love is excusable in the case of the man, but always to be punished in the case of the woman will never again be accepted, at least not by women. It is not women's ideas so much that are confused as their emotions, and wills. Their impulses are not focused to any ideal. They are driven hither and thither. That is the essential failure to-day. The irregular unions, now so common, are but the more intimate aspect of a general att.i.tude toward life. Many women who have entered them, have done so rather in a mood of protesting refractoriness than from any serviceable desire; already they find themselves left after transitory pa.s.sionate friends.h.i.+ps in difficult situations in which there is as yet no certain tradition of behavior. And in this way, there is left open an inviting door to those who are weak, as well as to those who are corrupt, to behave irresponsibly and commit every kind of uncleanness.

Where is this wild love going to end?

These dissatisfied women of strong s.e.xuality, and women of the other types I have noted, must either marry or must continue lawless careers of unregulated promiscuity, each one acting according to her own fancy, curbed only by the will of her lover or lovers, and the circ.u.mstances in which she is placed: there is at present no third course.

Now, the moralist, who does not face facts, would have them all marry.

Certainly this is an easy way to settle the matter, but is it wise? is it even right? Moreover, even if this were possible and there was no surplus of women, would this solution be acceptable to these women? I am doubtful if it would. _Many of them who want a lover do not want a husband_, they make a surprisingly clear distinction between the two.

There is, as I have before said, a hardly-yet-realized change in woman's att.i.tude: they are beginning to take the ordinary man's view of these affairs,--to regard them as important and providing interest and pleasure, but not to be exaggerated into tragedies. They deliberately want to keep love light and dread the bondage of any deep emotions.

Now, such an att.i.tude is not good for marriage, and, indeed, there can be no manner of use in forcing into the marriage bonds those who are unwilling to accept its duties of permanent devotion. Some other way, more practical and more helpful, must be found. We shall have, I am convinced, to broaden our views on this question of pa.s.sionate friends.h.i.+ps between women and men, to reconsider the whole position of s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps apart from marriage, in order to decide what may be permitted, to regulate conduct and fasten responsibility, to open up in the future new ways of virtue. And in attempting, thus, to face squarely the difficult situations before us, I can find only one clear simple and honest way to act.

VII

We come, then, to this: how can the way be made plainer for those women and also men who are unsuited for marriage and do not wish to devote their lives to its duties?

I believe that if there were some open recognition of honorable partners.h.i.+ps 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 registered contract before the relations.h.i.+p was entered upon, then there would everywhere be women ready to undertake such unions gladly, there would, indeed, be many women, as well as men, who, for the reasons I have shown, would prefer them to marriage.