Taboo and Genetics Part 12

10. Politics.

11. Religion.

It will be noted that most of these taboo objects are obviously those which the concept of the Model Woman has ruled out of the life of the feminine half of the world.

As might well be expected, it is in the marriage ceremony and the customs of the family inst.i.tution that the most direct continuation of taboo may be found. The early ceremonials connected with marriage, as Mr Crawley has shown, counteracted to some extent man's ancient fear of woman as the embodiment of a weakness which would emasculate him.

Marriage acted as a bridge, by which the breach of taboo was expiated, condoned, and socially countenanced. Modern convention in many forms perpetuates this concept. Marriage, a conventionalized breach of taboo, is the beginning of a new family. In all its forms, social, religious, or legal, it is an accepted exception to the social injunctions which keep men and women apart under other circ.u.mstances.

The new family as a part of the social order comes into existence through the social recognition of a relations.h.i.+p which is considered especially dangerous and can only be recognized by the performance of elaborate rites and ceremonies. It is taboo for men and women to have contact with each other. Contact may occur only under ceremonial conditions, guarded in turn by taboo, and therefore socially recognized.

The girl whose life from p.u.b.erty on has been carefully guarded by taboos, pa.s.ses through the gateway of ceremonial into a new life, which is quite as carefully guarded. These restrictions and elaborate rituals which surround marriage and family life may appropriately be termed inst.i.tutional taboos. They include the property and division of labour taboos in the survival forms already mentioned, as well as other religious and social restrictions and prohibitions.

The foundations of family life go far back of the changes of recent centuries. The family has its source in the mating instinct, but this instinct is combined with other individual instincts and social relations.h.i.+ps which become highly elaborated in the course of social evolution. The household becomes a complex economic inst.i.tution. While the processes of change may have touched the surface of these relations, the family itself has remained to the present an inst.i.tution established through the social sanctions of communities more primitive than our own. The new family begins with the ceremonial breach of taboo,--the taboo which enjoins the shunning of woman as a being both sacred and unclean. Once married, the woman falls under the property taboo, and is as restricted as ever she was before marriage, although perhaps in slightly different ways. In ancient Rome, the wife was not mistress of the hearth. She did not represent the ancestral G.o.ds, the lares and penates, since she was not descended from them. In death as in life she counted only as a part of her husband. Greek, Roman and Hindu law, all derived from ancestor wors.h.i.+p, agreed in considering the wife a minor.[5]

These practices are of the greatest significance in a consideration of the modern inst.i.tutional taboos which surround the family. Students agree that our own mores are in large part derived from those of the lowest cla.s.s of freedmen in Rome at the time when Christianity took over the control which had fallen from the hands of the Roman emperors. These mores were inherited by the Bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages, and were pa.s.sed on by them as they acquired economic supremacy. Thus these practices have come down to us unchanged in spirit even if somewhat modified in form, to fit the changed environment of our times.

The standardization of the family with its foundations embedded in a series of inst.i.tutional taboos, added its weight to the formulation of the Model Woman type referred to at the close of the preceding chapter.

The model wife appears in the earliest literature. In _The Trojan Women_, Hecuba tells how she behaved in wedlock. She stayed at home and did not gossip. She was modest and silent before her husband. The patient Penelope was another ideal wife. To her, her son Telemachus says:

"Your widowed hours apart, with female toil, And various labours of the loom, beguile, There rule, from palace cares remote and free, That care to man belongs, and most to me."

The wifely type of the Hebrews is set forth in Proverbs x.x.xi, 10-31. Her virtues consisted in rising while it was yet night, and not eating the bread of idleness. In her relation to her husband, she must never surprise him by unusual conduct, and must see that he was well fed.

The Romans, Hindus, and Mohammedans demanded similar virtues in their wives and mothers. The wives of the medieval period were to remain little girls, most admired for their pa.s.sive obedience. Gautier puts into the mouth of a dutiful wife of the Age of Chivalry the following soliloquy:

"I will love no one but my husband. Even if he loves me no longer, I will love him always. I will be humble and as a servitor. I will call him my sire, or my baron, or domine..."[6]

The modern feminine ideal combines the traits demanded by the wors.h.i.+p of the madonna and the virtues imposed by the inst.i.tutional taboos which surround the family. She is the virgin pure and undefiled before marriage. She is the protecting mother and the obedient, faithful wife afterward. In spite of various disrupting influences which are tending to break down this concept, and which will presently be discussed, this is still the ideal which governs the life of womankind. The average mother educates her daughter to conform to this ideal woman type which is the synthesized product of ages of taboo and religious mysticism.

Home training and social pressure unite to force woman into the mould wrought out in the ages when she has been the object of superst.i.tious fear to man and also a part of his property to utilize as he willed.

Being thus the product of wholly irrational forces, it is little wonder that only in recent years has she had any opportunity to show what she in her inmost soul desired, and what capabilities were latent within her personality.

In sharp contrast to the woman who conforms to the standards thus created for her, is the prost.i.tute, who is the product of forces as ancient as those which have shaped the family inst.i.tution. In the struggle between man's instinctive needs and his mystical ideal of womanhood, there has come about a division of women into two cla.s.ses--the good and the bad. It is a demarcation as sharp as that involved in the primitive taboos which set women apart as sacred or unclean. In building up the Madonna concept and requiring the women of his family to approximate this mother-G.o.ddess ideal, man made them into beings too spiritual to satisfy his earthly needs. The wife and mother must be pure, as he conceived purity, else she could not be respected.

The religious forces which had set up the wors.h.i.+p of maternity had condemned the s.e.x relations.h.i.+p and caused a dissociation of two elements of human nature which normally are in complete and intimate harmony. One result of this divorce of two biologically concomitant functions was the inst.i.tution of prost.i.tution.

Prost.i.tution is designed to furnish and regulate a supply of women outside the mores of the family whose s.e.x shall be for sale, not for purposes of procreation but for purposes of indulgence. In the ancient world, temple prost.i.tution was common, the proceeds going to the G.o.d or G.o.ddess; but the sense of pollution in the s.e.x relation which came to be so potent an element in the control of family life drove the prost.i.tute from the sanctuary to the stews and the brothel, where she lives to-day.

She has become the woman shunned, while the wife and mother who is the centre of the family with its inst.i.tutional taboos is the sacred woman, loved and revered by men who condemn the prost.i.tute for the very act for which they seek her company. Such is the irrational situation which has come to us as a heritage from the past.

Among the chief causes which have impelled women into prost.i.tution rather than into family life are the following: (1) Slavery; (2) poverty; (3) inclination. These causes have been expanded and re-grouped by specialists, but the only addition which the writer sees as necessary in consequence of the study of taboo is the fact that the way of the woman transgressor is peculiarly hard because of the s.e.x taboo, the ignorance and narrowness of good women, and the economic limitations of all women. Ignorance of the results of entrance into a life which usually means abandonment of hope may be a contributing cause. Boredom with the narrowness of family life and desire for adventure are also influences.

That s.e.x desire leads directly to the life of the prost.i.tute is unlikely. The strongly s.e.xed cla.s.s comes into prost.i.tution by the war of irregular relations.h.i.+ps with men to whom they have been attached, and who have abandoned them or sold them out. Many authorities agree on the frigidity of the prost.i.tute. It is her protection from physical and emotional exhaustion. This becomes evident when it is learned that these women will receive thirty men a day, sometimes more. A certain original lack of sensitiveness may be a.s.sumed, especially since the investigations of prost.i.tutes have shown a large proportion, perhaps one-third, who are mentally inferior. It is an interesting fact that those who are sensitive to their social isolation defend themselves by dwelling on their social necessity. Either intuitively or by a trade tradition, the prost.i.tute feels that "she remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, blasted for the sins of the people." A beautiful young prost.i.tute who had been expelled from a high grade house after the exposures of the Lexow Investigation, once said to the writer: "It would never do for good women to know what beasts men are. We girls have got to pay."

The lady, dwelling on her pedestal of isolation, from which she commands the veneration of the chivalrous gentleman and the adoration of the poet, is the product of a leisure a.s.sured by property. At the end of the social scale is the girl who wants to be a lady, who doesn't want to work, and who, like the lady, has nothing to sell but herself. The life of the prost.i.tute is the nearest approach for the poor girl to the life of a lady with its leisure, its fine clothes, and its excitement. So long as we have a s.e.x ethics into which are incorporated the taboo concepts, the lady cannot exist without the prost.i.tute. The restrictions which surround the lady guard her from the pa.s.sions of men. The prost.i.tute has been developed to satisfy masculine needs which it is not permitted the lady to know exist.

But in addition to the married woman who has fulfilled the destiny for which she has been prepared and the prost.i.tute who is regarded as a social leper, there is a large and increasing number of unmarried women who fall into neither of these cla.s.ses. For a long time these unfortunates were forced to take refuge in the homes of their luckier sisters who had fulfilled their mission in life by marrying, or to adopt the life of the religieuse. Economic changes have brought an alteration in their status, however, and the work of the unattached woman is bringing her a respect in the modern industrial world that the "old maid" of the past could never hope to receive.

Although at first often looked upon askance, the working woman by the sheer force of her labours has finally won for herself a recognized place in society. This was the first influence that worked against the old taboos, and made possible the tentative gropings toward a new standardization of women. The sheer weight of the number of unattached women in present day life has made such a move a necessity. In England, at the outbreak of the war, there were 1,200,000 more women than men. It is estimated that at the end of the war at least 25% of English women are doomed to celibacy and childlessness. In Germany, the industrial census of 1907 showed that only 9-1/2 millions of women were married, or about one-half the total number over eighteen years of age. In the United States, married women const.i.tute less than 60% of the women fifteen years of age and over.

The impossibility of a social system based on the old s.e.x taboos under the new conditions is obvious. There must be a revaluation of woman on the basis of her mental and economic capacity instead of on the manner in which she fits into a system of inst.i.tutional taboos. But the old concepts are still with us, and have shaped the early lives of working women as well as the lives of those who have fitted into the old grooves. Tenacious survivals surround them both, and are responsible for many of the difficulties of mental and moral adjustment which make the woman question a puzzle to both conservative and radical thinkers on the subject.

BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR CHAPTER III

1. Davis, Michael M. Psychological Interpretations of Society. 260 pp.

Columbia University. Longmans. Green & Co. N.Y., 1909.

2. Webster, Hutton. Primitive Secret Societies. 227 pp. Macmillan. N.Y., 1908.

3. Blanchard, Phyllis. The Adolescent Girl. 243 pp. Kegan Paul & Co., London, 1921.

---- Peters, Iva L. A Questionnaire Study of Some of the Effects of Social Restrictions on the American Girl. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1916, Vol. XXIII, pp. 550-569.

4. Report of the U.S. Children's Bureau, 1917.

5. Fowler, W. Warde. The Religious Experience of the Roman People. 504 pp. Macmillan. London, 1911.

---- Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis. The Ancient City. Trans. from the latest French edition by Willard Small. 10th ed. Lee and Shepard.

Boston, 1901. 529 pp.

6. Gautier, Emile Theodore Leon. La Chevalerie. 850 pp. C. Delagrave.

Paris, 1890.

CHAPTER IV

DYSGENIC INFLUENCES OF THE INSt.i.tUTIONAL TABOO

Taboo survivals act dysgenically within the family under present conditions; Conventional education of girls a dysgenic influence; Prost.i.tution and the family; Influence of ancient standards of "good"

and "bad." The illegitimate child; Effect of fear, anger, etc., on posterity; The att.i.tude of economically independent women toward marriage.

It is evident that in the working of old taboos as they have been preserved in our social inst.i.tutions there are certain dysgenic influences which may well be briefly enumerated. For surely the test of the family inst.i.tution is the way in which it fosters the production and development of the coming generation. The studies made by the Galton Laboratory in England and by the Children's Bureau in Was.h.i.+ngton combine with our modern knowledge of heredity to show that it is possible to cut down the potential heritage of children by bad matrimonial choices. If we are to reach a solution of these population problems, we must learn to approach the problem of the s.e.x relation without that sense of uncleanness which has led so many generations to regard marriage as giving respectability to an otherwise wicked inclination. The task of devising a sane approach is only just begun. But the menace of prost.i.tution and of the social diseases has become so great that society is compelled from an instinct of sheer self-preservation to drag into the open some of the iniquities which have hitherto existed under cover.

In the first place, the education of girls, which has been almost entirely determined by the standardized concepts of the ideal woman, has left them totally unprepared for wifehood and motherhood, the very calling which those ideals demand that they shall follow. The whole education of the girl aims at the concealment of the physiological nature of men and women. She enters marriage unprepared for the realities of conjugal life, and hence incapable of understanding either herself or her husband. When pregnancy comes to such a wife, the old seclusion taboos fall upon her like a categorical imperative. She is overwhelmed with embarra.s.sment at a normal and natural biological process which can hardly be cla.s.sified as "romantic." Such an att.i.tude is neither conducive to the eugenic choice of a male nor to the proper care of the child either before or after its birth.

A second dysgenic influence which results from the taboo system of s.e.xual ethics is the inst.i.tution of prost.i.tution, the great agency for the spread of venereal disease through the homes of the community, and which takes such heavy toll from the next generation in lowered vitality and defective organization.

The 1911 report of the Committee on the Social Evil in Baltimore showed that at the time there was in that city one prost.i.tute to every 500 inhabitants. As is the case everywhere, such statistics cover only prost.i.tutes who have been detected. Hospital and clinic reports for Baltimore gave 9,450 acute cases of venereal disease in 1906 as compared with 575 cases of measles, 1,172 cases of diphtheria, 577 of scarlet fever, 175 of chickenpox, 58 of smallpox and 733 cases of tuberculosis.

Statistics on the health of young men shown by the physical examinations of the various draft boards throughout the country give us a more complete estimate of the prevalence of venereal disease among the prospective fathers of the next generation than any other figures for the United States. In an article in the _New York Medical Journal_ for February 2, 1918, Dr. Isaac W. Brewer of the Medical Reserve Corps presents tables showing the percentage of rejections for various disabilities among the applicants for enlistment in the regular army from January 1, 1912, to December 31, 1915. Among 153,705 white and 11,092 coloured applicants, the rejection rate per 1,000 for venereal disease was 196.7 for whites and 279.9 for coloured as against 91.3 for whites and 75.0 for coloured for heart difficulties, next on the list.

In foreshadowing the results under the draft, Dr. Brewer says: "Venereal disease is the greatest cause for rejection, and reports from the cantonments where the National Army has a.s.sembled indicate that a large number of the men had these diseases when they arrived at the camp. It is probably true that venereal diseases cause the greatest amount of sickness in our country."

Statistics available for conditions among the American Expeditionary Forces must be treated with great caution. Detection of these diseases at certain stages is extremely difficult. Because of the courtesy extended to our men by our allies, cases were treated in French and English hospitals of which no record is available. But it is fairly safe to say that there was no such prevalence of disease as was shown by the Exner Report to have existed on the Mexican Border. It may even be predicted that the education in hygienic measures which the men received may in time affect favourably the health of the male population and through them their wives and children. But all who came in contact with this problem in the army know that it is a long way to the understanding of the difficulties involved before we approach a solution. We do know, on the basis of the work, of Neisser, Lesser, Forel, Flexner and others, that regulation and supervision seem to increase the incidence of disease. Among the reasons for this are: (1) difficulties of diagnosis; (2) difficulties attendant on the apprehension and examination of prost.i.tutes; (3) the infrequency of examination as compared with the number of clients of these women; and perhaps as important as any of these reasons is the false sense of security involved.

The model woman of the past has known very little of the prost.i.tute and venereal disease. It is often stated that her moral safety has been maintained at the expense of her fallen and unclean sister. But such statements are not limited as they should be by the qualification that her moral safety obtained in such a fas.h.i.+on is often at the expense of her physical safety. If the a.s.sumption has a basis in fact that there is a relation between prost.i.tution and monogamic marriage, the complexity of the problem becomes evident. It is further complicated by the postponement of marriage from economic reasons, hesitation at the a.s.sumption of family responsibilities at a time of life when ambition as well as pa.s.sion is strong, when the physiological functions are stimulated by city life and there is constant opportunity for relief of repression for a price. It is here that the demarcation between the man's and the woman's world shows most clearly. It may well be that the only solution of this problem is through the admission of a new factor--the "good" woman whom taboo has kept in ignorance of a problem that is her own. If it be true that the only solution for the double standard whose evils show most plainly here is a new single standard which has not yet been found, then it is high time that we find what that standard is to be, for the sake of the future.

The third dysgenic influence which works under cover of the inst.i.tutional taboo is akin to the first in its ancient standards of "good" and "bad." We are only recently getting any standards for a good mother except a man's choice and a wedding ring. Men's ideals of attractiveness greatly complicate the eugenic situation. A good matchmaker, with social backing and money, can make a moron more attractive than a pus.h.i.+ng, energetic girl with plenty of initiative, whose contribution to her children would be equal or superior to that of her mate. A timid, gentle, pretty moron, with the attainment of a girl of twelve years, will make an excellent match, and bring into the world children who give us one of the reasons why it is "three generations from s.h.i.+rt-sleeves to s.h.i.+rt-sleeves." For such a girl, the slave to convention, exactly fits the feminine ideal which man has built up for himself. And she will be a good wife and mother in the conventional sense all her life. This following of an ideal feminine type conceived in irrational processes in former days inclines men to marry women with inferior genetic possibilities because they meet the more insistent surface requirements. The heritage of our children is thus cut down, and many a potential mother of great men remains unwed.

The same survival of ancient s.e.x taboos is seen in the att.i.tude toward the illegitimate child. The marriage ceremony is by its origin and by the forms of its perpetuation the only sanction for the breaking of the taboo on contact between men and women. The illegitimate child, the visible symbol of the sin of its parents, is the one on whom most heavily falls the burden of the crime. Society has for the most part been utterly indifferent to the eugenic value of the child and has concerned itself chiefly with the manner of its birth. Only the situation arising out of the war and the need of the nations for men has been able to partially remedy this situation.